Vladimir met him in the basement at the elevator and escorted him through the dark storage area to a flight of concrete steps, which they both ascended.
Vladimir pushed on a metal door that opened to an alleyway between the buildings, filled with trash cans and plastic garbage bags, two of which, he understood, contained the corpses of the bodyguards.
Vladimir said to him, "God has blessed you, my friend."
"And you."
Khalil pulled his hand out of his pocket, and Vladimir thought he was extending his hand in friendship, but as he reached for Khalil's hand, he saw that the hand was wrapped in a bloodstained table napkin, and he hesitated.
Khalil fired a single bullet into Vladimir's forehead.
The man fell back into a pile of garbage bags, and Khalil tossed the smoking cloth on his face, pocketed the gun, then threw garbage-filled bags over him to cover his body.
Khalil walked up the alleyway to an iron gate, which he unbolted and exited onto the sidewalk of Brightwater Court.
There were a number of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and he glanced at the front entrance of Svetlana and saw that people were streaming out the doors. Some women and children were crying and some men were shouting excitedly.
Khalil moved through the crowd and saw his taxicab, which was now surrounded by people, one of whom was trying to get in the vehicle, but the driver had locked the doors.
Khalil did not regret throwing Boris through the window, but his act of self-indulgence had now created a small problem.
Khalil pushed through the crowd, banged on the driver's window, and shouted, "Rasheed!"
The driver unlocked the doors as Khalil pushed aside the man holding the rear door handle. Khalil opened the door and jumped in the rear, pulling the door shut as Rasheed moved away from the curb.
The taxi gathered speed as it moved into the traffic of the avenue.
Rasheed asked in Arabic, "What has happened there?"
Khalil replied, "A fire." He looked at his watch and said to Rasheed, "The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Hurry, but do not speed."
Asad Khalil sat back and looked out the window. He said to himself, "And now for Mr. Corey."
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Rasheed drove his taxi through the long Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and exited in Manhattan at West Street, near the site of the World Trade Center.
Asad Khalil made a cell phone call, spoke for a few seconds, then hung up and said to Rasheed, "Rector Street."
Rasheed continued on for a minute, then turned into the narrow one-way street. Parked on the short and quiet street, near the large Battery Parking Garage, was a tractor-trailer, and Khalil said, "Wait here."
Khalil exited the taxi and walked toward the large truck.
Painted on the side of the long trailer was CARLINO MASONRY SUPPLIES with an address and phone number in Weehawken, New Jersey. This company, Khalil was told, existed, but this was not one of their vehicles, and what was inside was not masonry supplies.
Khalil approached the tractor, and he saw the face of a man looking at him in the large sideview mirror. Khalil held up his right hand and made a fist.
The door opened, and Khalil climbed up the step and swung into the rear compartment of the big cab.
This large windowless compartment appeared to be a sleeping area, and also in this compartment was a burly man with a crew cut, dressed in jeans and a green T-shirt with the masonry company's logo on the front. In the driver's seat was another man, wearing a baseball cap, and in the right front seat was the man who had opened the door for him, who also wore a cap, jeans, and a blue team shirt that said "Mets."
These three men, Khalil understood, were European Muslims, Bosnians, and they had all fought in the war against the Christian Serbs, so they were not strangers to danger or killing. They all claimed to have lost relatives in the massacres, and they had undertaken this mission, according to Khalil's Al Qaeda contact in New York, not for the money-which Khalil knew was substantial-but as mujahideen in the holy war against the infidels.
Khalil was not so sure of their motives, and he would have preferred to be meeting Arabic speakers whom he could fully trust. But this part of his mission-the part that would end his visit here in mass destruction and death-was controlled by others, who felt that these Western-looking men were well suited for what needed to be done.
Each man introduced himself in English by his first name, and these were strange-sounding names to Asad Khalil-not good Arabic names, but names that he thought were some corruption of the Turkish language.
Khalil said to them, "You may call me Malik," using the name of his spiritual advisor in Libya-a name that meant "master," or even sometimes "angel," though these men would not know or appreciate that.
The driver, Edis, said to him, "We were stopped at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel."
Khalil did not reply nor did he want to know more-they had obviously gotten through the tunnel.
Edis continued, "The policeman asked to see my license, and it was good that I had gone to school to obtain a commercial driver's license for a vehicle of this size."
Again, Khalil did not respond.
Edis glanced back at Khalil and told him, "Two policemen made us open the doors." He paused, then said, "But all they could see were the stacked bags of cement, and they did not look further." He added, "They are lazy."
The man in the passenger seat, Tarik, corrected Edis and said, "We are good bluffers."
Khalil did not recognize that word, but he recognized their motives in telling him this-they wanted approval, or more likely more money, or perhaps another job.
Khalil had no way of knowing if they had actually been stopped, and what he did not see with his own eyes he did not believe. In fact, he trusted these three men even less now; he did not fully trust even Arabs who came to live in the West, and he felt less favorable toward these three who were Europeans and had most probably been corrupted by their Christian neighbors.
In any case, they would be dead in a few hours.
Khalil said, "Tell me what you have here."
Tarik in the passenger seat replied, "We have fertilizer." He laughed, and the other two men laughed with him. Khalil did not laugh, and the men became quiet. None of them particularly enjoyed working with the Arabs. The Arabs were almost without humor, and they did not enjoy a drink or a cigarette, as the Bosnian Muslims did, and they treated their women-all women-very badly.
Khalil asked again, "What do you have?"
Tarik replied, this time in a flat tone of voice, "Ammonium nitrate fertilizer, liquid nitromethane, diesel fuel, and Tovex Blastrite gel. It is all mixed in fifty-five-gallon drums-eighty-eight of them-and half the drums are connected to electrical blasting caps." He added, "It took us two years to amass these chemicals in this quantity without arousing suspicion."
Khalil asked, "And how do you know you have not aroused suspicion with these purchases? Or were they stolen?"
It was Edis who replied, "Everything was purchased." He said to Khalil, "All of these chemicals are legal for their intended use, and they were purchased in small quantities by others who had legitimate uses for them, and then resold to us at a criminal price." He smiled and said, "What is not legal is mixing them together."
Bojan and Tarik allowed themselves a small smile, but they did not laugh. Edis added, "Or attaching blasting caps to the mixture and blowing it up."
Even Khalil smiled, so Edis also added, "The most expensive ingredient at today's prices was the diesel fuel."
Bojan and Tarik laughed, and Edis said to Khalil, "The Arabs are going to bankrupt this country with these oil prices."