Shoving hard against the door to shut it-there was about 400 pounds of FBI agents lying on the other side-he managed to push it far enough to slip the security lock. Then he let the door swing in, jumped over the bodies, and ran back to the stairwell. Before entering it, he took a last look back to make sure no one else was in the hall.
It was empty, save for the dead men.
He turned and was gone, relieved to have gotten out with the goods. What had happened shouldn’t affect anything: the FBI wouldn’t find anything in the room, and the dead men would only confirm what they already suspected, that the room was somehow involved in today’s attack.
And since the man who had rented it was clean-and dead-that wouldn’t tell them a damn thing.
CHAPTER 14
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The world’s finance funneled into Manhattan, and Manhattan funneled that into a few square blocks of Lower Manhattan. Within a few blocks of one another were the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and a headquarters of every major financial institution on earth.
Lower Manhattan was also rife with skyscraper apartments, home to many of the financiers and attorneys who serviced those institutions. Residents didn’t need a car; they could walk to work. The beach and amusement park on Brooklyn’s Coney Island were an endurable subway ride away. The proximity to a great park, Battery Park, to a beautifully landscaped esplanade that ran up much of the west side of the island, to world-class restaurants, to the Statue of Liberty, to a major airport-Newark Liberty, just fifteen minutes across the Hudson River-and to the rising colossus of the new World Trade Center site also made this one of the most desirable places to live in the city.
None of which was known to Yasmin Rassin, or mattered.
After crossing an old iron bridge, the car moved through the thin nighttime traffic among the zigzagging canyons. The buildings flashed by, some of them stone titans, others spindly giants of glass, all of them lit with squares of light, window after window, stack after stack. The woman had been in cities before-London, Istanbul, Shanghai, Sydney, and others-but none of them had created the same strong impression of a place that could have been designed by an assassin or a sociopath. So many people, so many dark streets, so many vantage points. It was a miracle civilization existed in this place, let alone thrived. Money clearly was a root of evil, but not the murderous kind. It was a shield against evil.
Two men sat on either side of Yasmin. En route, they had changed into street clothes. They resembled nothing so much as young businessmen. It concerned her more than a little that her escorts had not sought to blindfold or handcuff her. They were letting her know where she was going, which meant one of two things. First, they expected her to be entirely cooperative. And second, they did not anticipate her leaving. These men had been in the room with the American woman at the airport. They knew about her daughter. Perhaps they also knew that was all the leverage they needed.
Though she saw her only two or three times a year, Kamilah was the center of her life. She was the product of a situation Yasmin had created for herself twelve years earlier. She was Cara Sumaida’ie then. An orphan, a young “pleasure girl” for the Syrian police, she had given herself to those men in their barracks-or in a lavatory or an alley or an automobile, wherever they happened to be. In exchange, they had shown her how to use firearms because she was oh, so afraid for her security in the poor neighborhood in Damascus where she lived, a ghetto overrun with Iraqis and Pakistanis looking to escape war and sectarian violence in what was then a relatively peaceful nation. That was how she had come there, with an uncle. He was an automobile mechanic; she was barely able to read. When he was killed in a robbery-only his tools were stolen-she was left alone.
She was twelve when he died. Two years of poverty, of begging, of digging through trash for food, of being threatened by police, drove her to their embrace. It wasn’t that she felt safe with these men; to the contrary, they did not understand rules or boundaries. More often than not she left with fresh bruises, sore and bleeding, her back raked raw by whatever she had been lying on. But at least she could eat and she was able to sleep in something other than a doorway or a cart.
And something more, something that came to dominate her thoughts, her actions. Their weapons. Not just the guns, but the batons, the knives, the garrotes.
These men were feared because they had the power of life and death, liberty and captivity. People were not frightened of them, because the police patrolled in packs. These groups were like the sea, usually calm, usually motorized, moving through a place and leaving. It was the individual, the rogue, the angry breakaway, the religious fanatic who civilians avoided. Yasmin envied that power. Not because she yearned to dominate others, but because she wanted to control her own life, her own safe zone.
She spent all her unrestricted time learning everything she could about weapons and tactics. She learned the basics of shooting. She was a natural marksman with a supernaturally steady hand. She helped some of her mentors win bets that she could knock a bottle from a wall or pick off a bird in flight. She also learned how to stab and strangle. The police thought it was cute, adorable, to see her choke a rubber dummy or stab a bale of hay tied in the shape of a man. She retained her ability to please, and to convey enthusiasm she did not feel, just so she could stay among them. When they were not instructing her, she was watching them train, even as she lay on her back with the sergeant in his office, moaning and looking out the window at the compound.
She was all alone. Except for one ally. A former Israeli Defense agent, Abrahem Bar. Bar was not an exceptional man: he stood several inches under six feet; had thick, dark hair with a low hairline, a rough face with a matching beard, and thick chapped lips; and his skin was gritty and tanned from spending years in isolated combat zones. He was merely a good man who had been trained well by his country. Perhaps too well.
Disagreeing with orders he’d been given to remove the presence of peaceful civilian demonstrators near his post near Kiryat Shmona, Bar had gone AWOL from the IDF and had met Cara while he was hiding out in the slums of Damascus, waiting for the heat from his desertion to die down. In spite of her past experiences, Cara was remarkably genial at the time, her hair was much longer, she kept it combed and delicate for her many mature handlers, and her body had only recently developed into womanhood. Bar had propositioned the then nearly sixteen-year-old girl, and when she met with him for what she thought would be intercourse, the multilingual, twenty-eight-year-old Israeli explained that he intended only to take Cara under his wing, to help her along what, in his eyes, seemed to be a serrated road she was traveling down.
Listening to her lurid stories of abuse, rape, and torture and disgusted by the treatment she was receiving, but unable to help her financially or even afford her a safe place to stay, Bar helped her to train harder, to find her self-worth, to fight for herself. To fight back.
In the early mornings, before the sun broke over the horizon, the pair would trot alongside each other for miles into the desert, where Bar would work with Cara to perfect her long-range shooting ability. She learned to recognize her surrounding conditions and adjust accordingly-something as slight as the direction and intensity that a target’s hair was blowing started to give her killer insight. She learned to be a one-woman militia, a sniper without need of a spotter, a captain without the assistance of soldiers, a killer without use of her conscience. Some mornings consisted of simply skull dragging for hours in the desert heat. Moving slowly, undetected, dragging her stomach, legs, and face in the dirt and sand to get close enough to her target, a true test of her will. On more than one occasion Bar would spot Cara moving too quickly, or moving at all, and would send her back to the starting point. Although she sometimes thought he was being cruel, this proved to be an invaluable technique.