The Ninth Step (12 page)

Jack had been stunned by 9/11 of course, but he had never really believed that Islamist terrorists might explode a nuclear weapon in New York. There were simply too many innocent Muslims living here who would be killed too. But a dirty bomb—a bomb made with conventional explosives, with radioactive isotopes added so they would be dispersed in the blast—was another thing. It would have a limited explosive impact, so it could be targeted much more specifically, and the initial release of radiation might only kill a few hundred or thousand people. Still, the psychological impact on the entire country would be hard to even imagine.

“So why do you think this Hasni guy killed Brasciak?” Richie said.

Jack sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t exactly sound like a smart thing for a terrorist to do, killing one person out in broad daylight. With such a stupid weapon, no less.”

“This is really eating me up,” Richie said. “Charlson says our guy’s a car-service driver, so he would be in that database I was looking at. I don’t know what happened. I guess I just missed him.”

“Don’t worry about it. There must have been, what, forty or fifty thousand licenses in there? Anybody could’ve missed one face. Think about when we show people mug shots: their eyes glaze over after the tenth one.”

Soon they were zooming down Broadway toward Chambers Street. As they came up the ramp onto the Brooklyn Bridge, both men fell silent. An NYPD squad car with flashing lights was permanently parked at the base of the bridge, a rather weak effort to discourage terrorist activity there. Maybe it made the general public feel better. As Jack drove across the span, the water of New York Harbor sparkled in the sun. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. He knew that if he glanced right, he would see the skyline of lower Manhattan also shining in the sun—with a big gaping hole where the towers had once stood.

“Hey,” Richie piped up. “I know what we should do. Let’s just send this Hasni guy a letter.” He told a story about an NYPD sting operation in which they’d scooped up a number of mooks with outstanding warrants by sending them notices to come in and pick up unclaimed tax refunds. Ah, the criminal mind … Under other circumstances, Jack might have gotten more enjoyment out of the tale.

“Where ya goin?” Richie asked a while later, in Brooklyn. “The car service is on Coney Island Ave.”

Jack turned off Church Avenue onto a small side street. “I know. I just wanna see where our guy lives.”

Richie frowned. “Charlson said we should stay away. They’ve got the place covered.”

“Don’t worry—I’m just gonna breeze right past.”

And so he did. Nadim Hasni’s block was nothing special: just a line of modest little aluminum-sided row houses. Jack spotted some neighbors as he drove along: a trio of tiny Mexican kids vying to heave a basketball toward a homemade hoop, a couple of women in Arab headdresses. There was a big plate-glass window in the middle of the block—a Laundromat, Jack saw as he cruised by. He peered for house numbers above the concrete stoops.
There.
The one with the sign for the doctor’s office on the lawn. He grimaced.
Adolescent Gynecology?
What the hell was that?

“That must be the surveillance vehicle,” Richie said, nodding at a shiny black van with tinted windows parked a few yards down.

Jack kept on driving and turned left at the next corner. With satisfaction, he noted a traffic light two blocks away: Coney Island Avenue. His theory about their suspect living close to the deli had been right on the money.

A
T THAT MOMENT, THOUGH,
Nadim Hasni was nine miles away, in Jackson Heights, Queens, walking out of a subway station into a burst of sound.

Overhead, above the rusty green metal trestles of the elevated 7 line, a train made a rackety thunder as it left the station. On Roosevelt Avenue, in front of Nadim, cars honked as they navigated a complicated and very busy intersection. The sidewalks were packed, the passersby speaking an amazing babble of different languages. He heard Urdu, Hindi, Pashto, Punjabi, and several unfamiliar tongues. The faces were mostly brown: Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but also Mexicans and Tibetans and Ecuadorans, with an occasional pale Russian mixed in.

As he hurried across the busy avenue and reached the far side, a happy memory came to Nadim. He and his wife had come here on weekend expeditions from Brooklyn, bringing their excited young daughter, and they had walked on both sides of her, holding Enny’s hands and swinging her up and over the sidewalk, on their way onto Seventy-fourth Street, into the heart of what tourists called Little India, though it was actually a shopping destination for people from all over the subcontinent.

While his neighborhood back in Brooklyn had been decimated after 9/11, here things still bustled with the energy of a bazaar in Karachi or New Delhi. Nadim remembered his shock when he had first seen this place: Pakistanis shopping next to Indians, Muslims eating in restaurants right next to Hindus. Back home, they fought bitterly, clashing over religion and borders, but when they came to New York, they discovered that what they had in common was more important than how they differed: here they were all minorities, brown people in a white country, all
Desis
, children of the South Asian diaspora.

Every weekend they thronged these few blocks, which were like a carnival bursting with tastes and smells and sounds from home. Nadim remembered how Enny used to practically shake with the excitement of it all. They would take in a Bollywood movie at the Eagle theater, then gorge themselves on the grand Indian buffet at the Jackson Diner, then stroll along the strip to window-shop. The drabness of the low brick buildings was concealed under an intense mosaic of bright signs and colors: the brilliant magenta, purple, and yellow fabrics of the sari shops; the gleaming gold necklaces in the jewelry stores; the rows of fruit and vegetables outside the Patel Brothers supermarket, where you could buy a twenty-pound bag of basmati rice or chapati flour. The street was also a riot of sounds: a boisterous Bollywood soundtrack blaring from the front of a DVD shop; some Indian hip hop thumping from the window of a passing car; the fantastic, lopsided rhythms of
Bhangra
romping out of the doorway of a CD store. Nadim’s little family would inhale the street as well: the warm sugary smell of roasting nuts, the aroma of frying samosas, the familiar blends of masala spices. At the end of the day, they would cap off their adventure with one last stop: a visit to Kabir’s Bakery, where Enny would get to pick a sample from the prodigious array of dense, milky sweets, and Nadim would always get a helping of
rasmalai
, the dessert that always transported him back to his childhood, to the safety of his grandmother’s kitchen.

Enny had loved this place, loved it all. Nadim had too, and today he had hoped for a brief distraction from all his troubles here, but he could not find it. His nerves were stretched too tight. To make matters worse, he had to keep a constant eye out so he wouldn’t run into his ex-wife, who lived just a few blocks away. He lit a cigarette and took several deep drags, but today the smoke just seemed to make him more jittery.

He saw loving couples and happy families, with their hopes of bright futures. Once he had been part of this world, an adventurer in this rich fresh land, a member of this great shared family. Now the passersby seemed alien to him, misguided, lured by golden baubles and sugary sweets. By a false, cruel dream. What future could he make for himself here?

The street had turned into a tense gauntlet, and he needed to escape. He was almost at the end of the block when two big speakers outside a CD shop blared on: pounding drums, shouted chants, skirling pipes. Nadim froze in the middle of the busy sidewalk, caught in an internal whirlwind, his mind torn open by jarring white light, by screaming, by jagged blasts of sound.

He stood there, unaware of his surroundings, until he felt cool drops on his face. He looked up: an April shower.

The passing streams of shoppers ran under awnings for shelter.

Nadim, unstuck, moved on.

AARIF’S APARTMENT WAS SO
sparse that it was a wonder he even owned four chairs for the gang to sit on.

Nadim was grateful for the quiet and the calm, up here near the top of this ugly brick building, two blocks from Seventy-fourth Street. While his host made tea in his kitchen nook and they waited for the others to arrive, Nadim had a smoke while he padded about the little studio checking out photographs of Aarif’s extended family, in Rawalpindi. This was one reason for his comrade’s spartan life here in New York: he sent a lot of his earnings back home. Most of the rest went toward the realization of their plan.

Nadim looked back to make sure that Aarif was out of sight, then edged over to the front window. Down below, Thirty-seventh Avenue held a fair amount of pedestrian traffic, but he saw few white faces, and none looking up at the building, none who seemed like undercover police. He still felt shaken, but the hard knot of tension that had pressed against the bottom of his breastbone for the past four days eased a bit. It was starting to seem possible that he might actually walk away from the incident in the deli unscathed, that he might even be able to return to his apartment and his normal life.
And
, of course, to continue working toward the plan.

He spotted Husain and Malik hurrying down the sidewalk in the light spring rain, the former young and bookish, the latter handsome and stylish with his sporty sweatshirt and gelled pompadour.

Aarif—gaunt, stern-faced, always a bit sour—came out of the kitchen with a tea tray. He wore drab brown and beige clothes; though he was not yet thirty, he managed to convey the tired authority of a village elder, and had become the de facto leader of their little group. He set the tea down on a side table, then began to unroll the
sajadas
and spread them on the floor, pointing east toward Mecca.

As soon as the others arrived upstairs, they had a quick cup of tea, then made
wud’u
, the ritual ablutions, then knelt down for the
Asr
, the late afternoon prayer, as the sound of the
adhan
wafted in through the window from a
masjid
down the block. As always these days, Nadim felt like a bit of a fraud as he went through the motions, but they were so deeply ingrained in him that he could have performed them in his sleep. Halfway through the second
raka’ah
, he snuck a peek at Malik, whose eyes looked glazed; Nadim sensed that he wasn’t the only one who was putting less than his whole heart into the ritual. He felt a twinge of guilt again: he had spent the past couple of nights on Malik’s couch. The last thing he wanted was to get anyone else in trouble, but he and Malik didn’t work at the same place and they lived in different boroughs. He hoped that there would be no way to tie the two of them together in case the incident in the deli caught up with him. One thing he had learned recently: everybody on the planet had to have somewhere to sleep every night, and you didn’t want that to be a park bench or a cardboard box out on the street, not if you could help it.

When they were done, they rolled up the
sajadas
, stowed them away, and got down to business.

“I have great news,” said Husain, in Urdu. “Since last we met, I went home for a week. And I talked to my uncle, the one with the factory in Peshawar. He says he will come in for half a
crore
.”

Nadim and the others whistled. That was over sixty thousand dollars!

“I hope you have not discussed this on the phone or by e-mail,” Aarif said. The others turned to him.

“Why not?”

“Didn’t you hear about Tajmmul?”

“What happened?”

“He was taken away. The CIA was tapping his calls back home. This is how it works: they hear you talking about any kind of big money transfer, and
kudha hafiz
!”
Good-bye
.

Husain’s face fell. “I e-mailed my uncle to say thank you last night.”

Aarif scowled. “Let’s hope you’re still around for our next meeting,
yaar
. Let’s hope we all are. Just use better sense in the future, all right?” He turned to Malik. “How about you?”

Malik reached inside his jacket and handed over a thick envelope. Nadim knew that it would be full of cash.

And then it was his turn.

“And you?”

His heart rate jumped. “I … I am continuing to save. I should have my portion ready … soon. Very soon.” He didn’t mention the fact that he had not gone to work for the past three nights, that Rafik-kahn would surely not take him back. But that was okay. There were hundreds of car service and taxi companies out there, and drivers came and went. He would find new work just as soon as it was safe.

Aarif scowled, but then he turned to the others. “No matter. Husain’s uncle’s share puts us very close to what we need. I think we’re ready to move forward.”

I
T WASN’T EVERY DAY
that a veteran New York detective like Jack Leightner saw something he’d never seen before.

Nadim Hasni’s former father-in-law sat at one end of the dining room table. The old man had a face like burnished, cracked teak, with piercing blue eyes. He paid Jack and Richie Powker absolutely no mind. He picked a cigarette out of a pack in front of him, made a fist, tucked the filter between his middle and ring fingers so that the cig projected up like a little chimney, fired it up, and then inhaled through one end of his chambered fist. Was this some Middle Eastern custom, or just a personal invention? Jack had no idea.

After their drive-by of Hasni’s residence, on the way back to the Seven-oh house, the two detectives had stopped off to interview the man’s employer at a Pakistani car service on Coney Island Avenue. The owner, a heavy, ill-tempered man, offered little useful information. He told them that Hasni had not come to work for the past few nights. They tried questioning him about Nadim’s habits, friends, etc., but the man waved a hand in dismissal. “I have many drivers. Their life when they are not at work? Not my problem. I don’t need this bullshit. If you see Nadim, tell him: don’t come back.”