Rashad had continued to a theater under renovation. He looked around and then hurried across the street and up the steps into the building.
Khalif waited across the street, watching from a nearby doorway. Two men in hard hats loitered outside; they didn't do much more than smoke cigarettes and check out the other men, like Rashad, who arrived one at a time and in pairs. In the time since Rashad had gone into the building, seven or eight others had followed him. But the strange thing was that nobody was coming back out.
It was even stranger that Rashad had not mentioned getting a new job with a construction company. And what did renovating a theater have to do with Rashad's statements at the basketball courts? Khalif also thought the mixture of workmen outside and those entering the building was odd. Everyone looked either Middle Eastern, Asian, or black. Not a Hispanic or a white among them.
When Rashad still hadn't come out, Khalif made up his mind to go in. He didn't want to; in fact, he was scared to death without knowing why. But he couldn't abandon his friend to whoever had manipulated him into doing whatever it was that had Khalif so frightened and Rashad sounding like he was going to his death. He owed him.
When they'd been freshmen in high school, Khalif had been the one hanging out with the wrong friends, gang members who wanted to bask in his basketball glory as a status symbol. He'd started hanging out at their crib, where one night he saw some things having to do with drugs and guns that he wished he hadn't. But he was too afraid to leave. Then Rashad showed up-just walked in the door, told Khalif to "stand the fuck up and walk the fuck out of here," and when two members of the gang got in his face, stared them down until they told Rashad "get your faggot friend out of here and don't come back."
He owed him.
Khalif crossed the street, going past the loiterers and up the steps. He had just entered the door, however, when a large, dark-skinned man with an African accent stopped him. "A salaam alaikum," the man said without smiling.
"Wa alaikum salaam." Khalif's response had been automatic. He'd had no idea how he was going to get past the guard so he was surprised when the man nodded toward the interior of the theater and said, "Hurry up, you're late."
Khalif swallowed hard and walked in.
Meanwhile, Zak and Giancarlo crouched behind a car. After watching Khalif follow after his friend, Giancarlo turned to his brother. "So what do you make of that?"
Zak shrugged. "Only one way to find out."
"Oh no, you're not going to-"
"My thoughts exactly." Zak stood up and walked quickly down the sidewalk. The hard-eyed loiterers watched him approach and then start to pass in front of the theater. Halfway across, he suddenly turned and ran up the steps.
"Hey, you, boy!" one of the loiterers yelled, but Zak was already through the doors. He was smiling until he looked up and saw the large guard.
"What are you doing here?" the man demanded.
"I was looking for a bathroom," Zak said. "I've got to go really bad." He danced from foot to foot to prove his need.
"There's no bathroom here, now leave," the guard said.
"Wait!" a man yelled from behind the guard. "Grab him!"
The guard lunged for Zak, who easily dodged him and turned to run out the door. He might have made it, too, except for one of the loiterers, who had run up the steps and caught him just as he was exiting.
Zak launched himself at the surprised loiterer. He stomped on the man's foot and punched him in the groin before being grabbed by the neck from behind by the big guard.
"Get ya' hands off me," he yelled as he was dragged, kicking and punching back, into the theater, where the man who'd ordered the guard to catch him stood. He found himself facing an olive-skinned man with a pockmarked face who looked at him like a snake studying a small bird.
"Let me go," Zak said, swinging wildly at the guard, who held him at arm's length to avoid the blows. "My dad's the district attorney."
The man bent over until his face was inches from Zak's. He smiled-as unpleasant an expression as the boy had ever seen. "I know," he said. "I saw you and your brother at the basketball court."
27
The decapitation murders investigation had taken an alarming twist that began when Karp received a visit from three men, all of whom seemed to have been struck from the same mold of clean-cut, square-jawed athletic types, an impression they added to by wearing the same dark glasses and nearly identical dark suits. He recognized the oldest of them, the one with the gray crew cut, as Agent in Charge S. P. Jaxon, Espey to his friends.
"Espey, my man," Karp said, breaking from his conversation with Mrs. Milquetost in the outer office. "What brings the FBI to my neck of the judicial jungle?"
"Good to see you, too, Butch," Jaxon said. He gestured toward Karp's inner office. "Got a minute?"
"Sure," Karp said, the radar going up. Jaxon, an old friend who now headed up the FBI's New York office, was a man of few words, but he wasn't abrupt unless time was of the essence. "Mrs. Milquetost, see that we're not disturbed."
"Milquetost?" Jaxon said under his breath as he and the other two men preceded Karp into the room.
"Don't ask," Karp said just as quietly, closing the door behind them. He walked around his desk and sat down, indicating that they should do the same. "Okay, Espey, where's the fire?"
"I'm afraid that's the million dollar question," Jaxon replied.
The way he said it sent a chill down Karp's spine. Something serious is about to go down, Karp, my man, he thought.
Jaxon introduced the other two men as Kris Kluge of the CIA and Gary Albert of National Homeland Security. "We may have a very serious situation on our hands," the FBI agent said.
Karp spread his hands. "Go ahead. Whatever I can do to help."
Jaxon smiled and then gave him the rundown. "Thanks, I knew you'd say that. We've identified two of the three heads found recently in Manhattan," he said. "Two of them are on just about everybody's terrorist watch lists. Both Al Qaeda, and we expect the third was, too; he was with one of the other guys, just another one we haven't seen before."
It already didn't sound good, but Karp could tell from the way Jaxon was laying his story out that the worst was yet to come. "I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said.
Jaxon looked at him steadily for a moment with his deep-set, coffee-colored eyes, then turned to Albert. "Here it is," Albert said with a slight Texas twang. "When we X-rayed the heads at Quantico to help with the ID, the film came out overexposed. They were hot as charcoal briquettes at a barbecue."
"Radiation?" Karp asked.
"Yep. Probably would have killed them sooner than later if our friend with the knife wasn't around."
"You know it was a knife?"
"Yeah, probably a big hunting knife, judging by the length of the slash marks and the nicks on the vertebrae."
"What about the radiation?"
"Isotopes from the heads of the three stooges indicate a below-weapons-grade plutonium. They'd been around it for quite a while."
It dawned on Karp what they were driving at. "You think they brought a dirty bomb into New York City," he said.
Jaxon nodded his head. "They'll use a conventional bomb and essentially put the radioactive materials on top of it. When the real bomb blows up, the nasty stuff gets thrown into the air, sucked into lungs, sipped in water…you get the picture."
"Most of the casualties, especially at first, would probably be from the initial blast," Kluge said. "Maybe thousands of lives. But they're almost secondary to the terrorists. The real thing is to, well, cause terror. Panic the population. Destabilize the economy."
"Make us afraid," Karp finished for him. "So who killed these guys?"
Jaxon shrugged. "We don't know. The Mossad says they didn't do it-not that they'd necessarily tell us the truth, though in this case I believe them. Could even have been a splinter group that wants to get credit. But I doubt the current story that it was a bunch of redneck good old boys. The two guys we know were no slouches; they were trained, effective, cold-blooded killers. Bubba wouldn't have stood a chance."