Banquo's Ghosts (49 page)

The two men opened the cage and stood before it. The woman jangled her manacles and imperiously held forth, like a Queen Tut whose authority has been questioned:

“You have made a dangerous error,” she was saying. “And not the first time. You look down on us because our zealous students simply
held
your
diplomats? But they were just students. You are government officials, torturing diplomats with your
own hands.
”

Wallets looked mildly back at her, seemingly bored. This was all old history. She might have been five years old at the time of the U.S. Embassy takeover in the wake of Khomeini’s Revolution.

“We’re not here for a lecture.”

But she wasn’t appeased, more fanatic. “I’m telling you the truth. You only want to hear your truth.”

“
My
truth?” Wallets repeated again, through a bruised chest. It hurt to talk. He shrugged it off as if what she said had little weight with him. “Yeah,
my
truth is simple: innocent people are dying out there, and you’re responsible.”

His calculated mildness seemed to enrage her. She had waited a lifetime to spit in the eyes of the devil. “The truth is innocent children die everywhere. You kill them with your bombs and missiles. The truth is whatever happens to your country is deserved. The truth is—”

Her statement was cut off by the sound of a slap. Yossi had stepped in close and slapped her across the face. His handprint glowed along her jaw. Some of those sitting at the interrogation table recoiled at the sight, especially O’Hanlon and his agents, Smith and Wesson. For no logical reason, a manacled woman slapped on the face seemed much worse than some screaming weenies in a two-by-two window. Sentimentality, perhaps. But Bryce guffawed and said under his breath, “Bitch.”

Banquo didn’t deign to look at him but said straight ahead: “Mr. Bryce, if you can’t control yourself, you can be assigned elsewhere.” Then, to Wallets, sounding disgusted, “Keep our colleague under control in there. Let’s not waste time on theatrics.”

Yasmine’s eyes were watery with the sting, but she kept going, “
This
is your women’s rights?
This
is your human rights?
This
is your—?” But couldn’t find the words. Instead, she literally spit one word in Yossi’s direction: “
Djjal!
” flecks of saliva reaching no higher than his waist. Yossi seemed unimpressed. At a signal from Wallets, he manacled Yasmine’s hands behind her back and led her from the holding cell.

“We’re totally off the books here, right?” Wallets asked in a tone of voice that made it sound almost like a challenge. The question was
directed at those behind the room divider, this time the words coming out strong. He got a silence of assent.

“OK, then. Bring in the spine board.”

Smith and Wesson left the room and returned nearly immediately with a bright yellow emergency rescue stretcher with straps, meant to keep someone very, very still. Like after a car accident. In the end it took Wesson, Smith, Bryce, and Yossi to strap the writhing and spitting Yasmine in place. Bryce grim, now that he was this close. The two women looked both sad and ashamed. Sad for Yasmine Farouk, PhD; ashamed for themselves to be part of this. A head strap went around her skull and was tightened. Then Yossi came with a mouth clamp to pry her mouth open and keep it that way.

“What are you doing?” Yasmine suddenly demanded, sounding scared for the first time. They lifted the prostrate Yasmine on the spine board onto a pair of trestle sawhorses so the board was up off the ground, about waist high.

“Whatever we want,” Wallets said, flat and matter-of-fact. His bruised chest didn’t seem to bother him so much now. He looked down at her without pity. He wanted to try to spook her before doing anything, but he also was speaking the simple truth and wasn’t going to wait long for her to crumble. She kept trying to fight, but could only ineffectually flex her muscles, pinned down like that. When the mouth clamp pried her chops open, she started to mew, a pathetic sound.

Banquo’s voice: “Get on with it.”

“Do you want to talk?” Wallets asked, looming over her, all cold gray eyes.

Yossi flipped a latch on the mouth clamp, allowing her to move her lips. The words came out in a spitting slew: “
Djjal! Djjal!
”

“All right.” Wallets signaled to Yossi, and the latch opened again, forcing her mouth open. The mewing came back. Her eyes jerked in their sockets, straining to look from side to side. Yossi had gone behind one of the mausoleums and come back with a wet washcloth and a silver ice bucket, empty of ice but filled with water. Yasmine’s eyes darted as far as they could to the side to try to watch him, then closed. More of that terrible whispery high-pitched sound. Wallets assumed it was a prayer.

The sound seemed now like it was mingling with tears, a low barely audible mumble from the depths of her soul up to her Lord. Yossi with the ice bucket looked to Wallets.

Wallets gestured, but he didn’t move. “Go on,” he said, pointing toward Yossi like he was going to take the ice bucket himself if he didn’t begin. Carefully the Turk placed the towel over Yasmine’s open mouth and methodically tipped the ice bucket, pouring a stream of water over the towel. It quickly dampened, and began to choke her. Soon she began to drown. The sound went from cat-screeching-in-the-middle-of-the-night to a soft gurgle. A sound that rattled your insides. Her body straightened in a convulsion and then thrashed as much as it could under the constraints. Yossi hesitated and Wallets waited, looking at the second hand of his watch. Ten seconds, fifteen, then twenty.

“Take the towel off,” Wallets said. With practiced movements, Yossi took off the towel, flipped the latch loose on the mouth clamp and both men tipped the spine board on its side, letting the water run out of her. The sound of retching, coughing, spit-up filled the room. Then deep gasps. When the spine board came face-up once more, Yasmine was still gasping for breath, her eyes streaked with red and bulging toward the ceiling. She kept breathing hard and seemed to get herself under control, starting to mutter her prayer again.

Wallets nodded to the Turk. The mouth clamp froze open, and the process was methodically repeated. From behind the room divider, O’Hanlon, Smith, Wesson, and Bryce watched, transfixed. They held their breath almost as one as the stream of water poured onto the towel, as Wallets counted off the seconds on his wristwatch. Twenty seconds, twenty-five, thirty . . .

The towel came off, the spine board flipped, and the sound of retching filled the ballroom, a thread of puke stretching to the floor.

“I can’t take this,” Smith said. Wesson stared back with haunted eyes. Bryce’s face was very, very pale, and he looked as if he just wanted someone to relieve him of duty. The body on the spine board still convulsed, even right side up, the sound out of Yasmine’s throat a death rattle. The death of her resistance. They only needed to do it once more.
One more time. The third time paid for all. No more prayers. But it seemed an age.

Wallets wrung the drenched towel back into the ice bucket. Then looked at Yasmine’s face, bleached nearly white. “Talk to us,” he said.

She kept her eyes closed tight, as if she hated herself for doing it, but she began to speak, through her wheezy gasps. The loose mouth clamp rattled a little. And these are the nuggets they got from her, not much considering, but helpful, especially the last:

“That’s all the teams . . . unfortunately.”

“Yahdzi put the titanium canisters together long before Johnson’s Iran tour. That project long in the pipeline.”

“The other material. Diplomatic Pouch over twenty trips, JFK and Mexico City. Trucked north to Nogales, and some direct to delivery bay, King Prussia Mall.”

“In Brooklyn, DeGraw and Bond.”

Wallets nodded and walked behind the room divider. Banquo pensively stroked his face. Satisfied for the present. Johnson’s face had a very dark cast to it, something between resignation and reckoning. O’Hanlon was there in body, not in spirit. He’d pushed his chair back and was staring at the floor, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t look up. The terrible question—was this the payoff or just more dead ends? They’d find out soon enough.

“Are we done?” he asked no one in particular, a tone of disgust in his voice.

Not by a long shot—they still had to track the bastards down.

Outside in the real world, the great chase opened up to full throttle.

The first Workbench Boy caught napping in Queens had coughed up the location of his buddies. Two of them in a car headed to the Bronx—in a twenty-year-old Toyota Corolla with New Jersey plates, FD1357—and one of them on the subway on his way to Grand Central Station. There was some confusion as to yet another Jihadi riding the rails, but no one seemed certain as to his route or identity. Smith and Wesson got
the call to go to Grand Central, while the city’s powers-that-be bickered in the Waldorf over whether or not to shut down the subway.

When they descended two levels to the 7 Train platform coming in from Queens, there were so many cops on the platform, it felt like rush hour, but only for New York City’s Finest. Passengers arriving on the 7 Train—despite their reading materials, their iPods, and their distracted rush—noticed all the cops, and it dawned on every passenger in a flash that something was wrong. Many passengers hesitated and began to step back into the subway car. The cops had to hustle them out, “It’s all right. It’s all right; keep moving.”

Smith and Wesson prowled the platform like the caged cheetahs of the Bronx Zoo who run round and round the perimeter of their enclosure all day. They started at the front of the platform, near the exit, and walked down the platform as each train from Queens arrived, looking for the mark they knew so well from their surveillance of the safe house. When they moved through the crowd from each train, they scanned every face, then back to the front of the platform, following the departing passengers rushing toward the escalators. Next train ready to do it again. And quickly got tired of looking at the number 7 in a purple oval—denoting the train line—on every car. After the fifth train, they wondered if they were wasting their time hunting one lone Jihadi when there were cops here on lookout. Their new buds, Officers Carmine and Doleful Duane, had requested and been granted assignment with the Roll-Up Task Force.

On the arrival of the sixth train, they hadn’t bothered to walk all the way to the front, but stood in the middle, when the train’s door shuddered opened, and there he was one door away, closer to the exit. They recognized the close-cropped back of his head as instantly as if it’d been a Michael Jordan advertisement in the 1980s. The tallest and strongest of the Queens Boys. Some animal instinct made him look behind him and realize he’d been made. He started sprinting, and Smith and Wesson ran after him, dodging through the passengers who stopped to see what was going on.

He veered toward the other track, as a new Queens-bound 7 Train swooshed into the station. Wesson caught him by his right shoulder,
closest to the tracks. He had one foot now on the bright yellow rubber edge of the platform. He swung his body violently around, back toward the middle of the station, and the motion—combined with her own momentum—sent Wesson flying out over the track.

The conductor had been laying on the horn, a sustained, blaring, high-pitched wail. But it did no good now. The conductor pulled the emergency brake, the wheels screamed against the rails, but the dumb flat head of the train, like a metallic worm, barreled ahead. Wesson was thrown nearly perpendicular against the front of the steel nose, and for a moment it seemed she’d be able to grasp the metal chains across the front of the car to hang on in some miraculous fashion. But she lost her grip. Then vanished under the wheels.

Smith wanted to lunge after her partner, but not against a moving train. The moving cars brought her up short. There was only the awful cacophony of the horn and the wheels—and suddenly two shots.

The backpacker was down, felled by two risky, precision shots by Doleful Duane, down in a crouch on one knee. The train had nearly stopped now, the doors still closed. Smith could tell some passengers were screaming, others had their hands over their mouths. The cops were motioning the conductors to keep their doors closed. In the third car, one face didn’t look horrified, only very interested. He ducked out of sight, and Smith noticed strange movements in the car. She looked harder, and people were pressed against the doors and windows—and she saw the telltale wisps of the metallic floury powder. The other backpacker was in there.

“Open the doors,” she shouted, but the cops were still signaling the conductors to keep them closed. The backpacker’s head could be seen on and off moving through the car, and then he went down, three good Samaritans on top of him. Smith ran to the front of the train and pounded on the windows for the conductor to open the doors of the third car.

When he finally did, people hustled out, or just stepped out dazed, their hands up in pleading gestures, covered with the floury powder, or trying desperately to pat it off. The cops rushed in and had to pull off the good Samaritans—a burly redhead on his way to Citi Field, a skinny
Latino guy with his iPod buds still in his ears, an older, balding guy in a cheap suit—all covered in the powder and punching and kicking the backpacker, down in the fetal position.