The Ninth Step (16 page)

To his right, the contractor’s van came screeching around the corner. Nadim turned left and ran. He was soon gasping for breath—he cursed his smoking habit—and realized that he could never outrun the onrushing vehicle. Impulsively he veered again, vaulted a low fence, dodged around another aluminum-sided house, through another yard, around another house.

He felt a painful stitch in his side. There was no way he could maintain this pace. He paused, desperate, to think. At first he wanted to run toward one of the bigger avenues, where other people would be around. Surely his pursuers wouldn’t dare shoot him in public. On the other hand, strangers might block his way …

He heard shouting behind the last house and he staggered off again—and that’s when inspiration struck. He recognized this block: he had been walking Enny home from school one day when they heard a cat’s pitiful mewing. He had wanted to go on home, but Enny had tugged at his hand. “Abbu, something is wrong.” They stopped and listened more carefully. And they traced the persistent sound to the side of a nearby house: it was coming from beneath a pair of heavy metal storm doors. Nadim was never thrilled about contacting random American strangers—who knew how they would react to his brown face?—but he had walked back around to the front porch, gone up, and rung the bell. No answer. He returned to the storm doors. Hoping that he wouldn’t get mistaken for a burglar, he bent down and discovered that they were not locked, and his daughter had looked so proud of him as he lifted out the bedraggled cat.

Panting now, he scanned the surrounding homes. Which had it been? They looked identical, made of pale yellow brick. He struggled to recall. The right side of the street—the house had definitely been on the right. He ran across. The first few houses had driveways, but no storm doors at the side. He ran on.
Yes!
Halfway down the next driveway, he could see a pair of black metal storm doors outside the basement. He rushed up the asphalt, bent down, and yanked on the right one. It didn’t budge. He tried the other. Locked also. He straightened up, frantic. The house had a little window above the storm doors, and he had a flash of memory: a crystal pendant, a little angel, hanging behind the glass, sparkling in the sun. But there was no pendant here. In the distance, he heard screeching tires.

He couldn’t run back to the street, so he dashed up the driveway, careened around the rear of the house, and down into the next driveway, where he found another set of storm doors. He skidded to a stop and looked up at the window: there was the angel! He bent down and lifted up with all his strength. The heavy metal squealed and complained, but it rose as he straightened up. Some concrete steps led down into the darkness from which he had freed the cat. He ducked inside, pulled the door down after himself, then caught its full weight at the last minute so it wouldn’t slam.

He was in pitch blackness now. He sat on one of the steps, not knowing what lay below, struggling to quiet his raspy breath. He listened, every nerve straining outward. He heard a car engine revving, and shouting, and he crouched down, wincing, prepared to be discovered and yanked back up into the fading light. He had nothing to fight back with, nothing but his bare hands.

And then … the car sounds receded, and the shouting. He sat there in the dark, not daring to believe his luck. It had been brought to him, he realized, by his daughter. By Enny, his own little angel.

The darkness began to weigh on him, though. He started to tremble. Soon he was overcome by a screamingly powerful desire to lift the door, to emerge back into the air and light, but he knew it wasn’t safe. Not yet.

The seconds ticked by and he began to sweat profusely, and then to shake as if overcome by fever.

J
ACK LEIGHTNER WAS A
humble man, but there was one thing that he felt was a bit beneath him: riding the subway. A homicide detective spent a good part of his life in cars, crisscrossing the borough, chasing after suspects, arriving at crime scenes like the cavalry coming over a hill. You didn’t worry much about parking, and certainly not about getting tickets. But this morning he had to testify in a Manhattan courtroom, down near City Hall, and he’d hardly be the only one with an official parking permit on his dash, so he decided to just bite the bullet and ride the train.

As it went over the Manhattan Bridge, he opened his briefcase and reread his case file. Trials took a long time to wend their way through New York City’s overloaded court system, but this case was particularly old. The defendant, a forty-five-year-old male with severe anger-management issues, had killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage. Then, overcome by remorse, he had jumped in his car, sped away, and decided to kill himself by careening into the side of a gasoline truck parked at a service station (no doubt imagining the massive fireball you always saw in such situations on TV). But the truck had not blown up—the car had wedged itself underneath the fuel tank, and the killer broke most of the bones in his body. He had ended up in the infirmary at Rikers Island for almost a year. Jack was thankful for his detailed notes.

Bright sun poured through the train’s windows and he glanced down at the broad East River, and the pewter harbor, and then the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan came into view. And then, of course, he was thinking about terrorism and the Hasni investigation. Frowning, he forced his attention back to the papers spread out on his lap; if he couldn’t focus, the trial of this other killer might well go off track. But he looked up:
there it was again,
the fleeting sense that he was missing some simple but crucial detail in the Hasni investigation, something that had been in front of his face all along.

At his stop, along with a throng of fellow riders, he pushed out the door past a tide of rude city dwellers pressing into the car, and then he strode toward the exit. The fluorescent lights gleamed against the sides of the white-tiled tunnel, and hundreds of New Yorkers threaded their way past each other on the crowded platform. Jack noticed that half of them carried shopping bags or briefcases or knapsacks, and again he couldn’t help thinking of terrorists, of the coordinated series of explosions that had rocked a number of commuter trains in Madrid the year before, killing almost two hundred. He couldn’t remember if the bombers had blown themselves up, but there certainly seemed to be no lack of fanatics around the world who would. As a detective, Jack had seen hundreds of killers motivated by rage, fear, or greed, but it still seemed hard to believe that human beings might commit mass murder and simultaneous suicide, driven just by politics or religious devotion. It was even more incredible that they could believe that such a horrible act might get them into any reasonable heaven.

BY LUNCHTIME, HE WAS
back on his home turf in Brooklyn. He arrived five minutes before his son, at their usual spot, a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue.

On a number of previous occasions he had been caught up in work and rushed in late, or had even forgotten their appointments, and he knew that the kid registered every disappointment in a mental ledger, a stack of little resentments perched atop the great fat letdown of his parents’ divorce. Luckily, though, he’d had the foresight to set the alarm in his cell phone. And he swore to himself that when his son arrived, he would forget about everything else and pay total attention to the kid.

The waitress brought him a cup of coffee, and he stared at the luncheonette’s back wall, which was covered with nets and plastic fish, in keeping with the general Greek theme. He mused about this morning’s perp who had lost his marbles and bludgeoned his wife, and about terrorists, and about a long-ago murder in Red Hook.

His son slid into the booth, startling him.

“Wow,” Ben said, “you actually beat me here! That’s gotta be a record.”

Jack decided to ignore the slight snark and accept the acknowledgment. “You want some coffee or something?”

Ben picked up a menu. “Let me think about it for a sec.”

Jack watched his son consider his choices. The kid was several inches taller than his old man. He wore a red flannel shirt; he looked rather gaunt in it, but he might have put on a couple of pounds since their last get-together. Jack noticed that his son’s skin seemed to be clearing up and he was glad for that; the mid-twenties were already a pretty self-conscious age, but Ben’s acne had burdened the kid with extra shyness.

Jack’s mind began to drift again. Don’t think about Nadim Hasni, he told himself. Or Frank Raucci. Think about your son, right here in front of you. “D’you know what you want?” he asked, then turned to look for the waitress. “I’m just gonna get a cheeseburger.” He turned back to Ben. “So—are you eating meat these days, or are you a veggie again?” Ben tended to fluctuate between the two, and to get annoyed if Jack couldn’t remember his latest stance.

The kid started to answer, but Jack sat bolt upright.
Remembering.

He jumped up. “Listen: I’ve just gotta do something real quick. I’ll be back in two minutes, I swear.”

Ben’s face settled into its customary pout, but Jack was already on his way out of the coffee shop. Out on the sidewalk, he glanced up and down the avenue, then turned down the cross street. Up ahead, on the next corner, he spotted a deli and broke into a trot.

He hurried in between several ranks of brightly colored floral bouquets, barely acknowledged the nod of the Korean proprietor, and moved into one of the aisles, scanning the products arrayed there.
No.
He turned a corner and came up the other aisle.
There!
He stared at a row of cans of baked beans, the same brand that Nadim Hasni had used to crush the head of Robert Brasciak. Jack could picture the original clearly in his mind. Not the label with the green stripe, like those on the left. Not the vegetarian variety, but the ones on the right, with the blue stripe. He reached out, picked up a can, and turned it so he could see the list of contents.

And there it was.

Jack returned to the luncheonette and his son but spent the rest of their lunch in a bit of a daze. What was a radical Islamic fundamentalist, a Muslim fanatic, doing shopping for a dinner that contained a substantial helping of
pork
?

THERE WAS A SILENCE
on the other end of the line, and then Brent Charlson finally spoke.

“Let me get this straight: we’re in the middle of investigating a major threat to national security and you want to talk to me about the ingredients in a
can of beans
?”

Jack looked out the windshield of his car, still parked on busy Smith Street, outside the diner. “These guys, these terrorists, they’re supposed to be fundamentalist Islamic—”

“So he was shopping for a neighbor! So what?! Is that your idea of detective work?”

“I’m just looking at the evidence.”

“You don’t
know
the evidence, detective, not even a tenth of it. You’re not in the middle of this investigation. We already have enough rock solid information to put these guys away for life.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

Charlson’s voice rose. “
Why don’t we?
Because we want to make sure we get the whole goddamn cell, that’s why. And this ridiculous beans nonsense is a great example of why we didn’t bring the NYPD into this in the first place. This isn’t amateur hour.”

“All I’m saying, is it possible that Nadim Hasni is not really a part of the group?”

“Oh, I see,” Charlson said, voice dripping with irony. “Maybe he’s just an innocent bystander who got caught up in this case by accident?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you forgetting one little detail? The man has already murdered someone in cold blood. What kind of goddamn beans he was buying doesn’t alter that fact!”

“Okay, but—”

“You know what I’m looking at right this moment, detective? I’m in my office, staring at a confidential memo from the NSA. You know what ‘NSA’ stands for?”

Jack knew full well, but he was so irritated by the condescension in the fed’s voice that he didn’t bother to reply. “What does it say?”

“I’ll tell you: it says there’s been a considerable spike this week in intercepted international chatter. It says they recognized a number of coded words, like ‘New York’ and April’ and ‘Semtech’. That’s a plastic explosive.”

Again with the condescension. “Okay, but I was just—”

“Do I need to draw you a fucking picture? All right, I
will
: the next time I see you, I’m going to show you surveillance photographs of Nadim Hasni welcoming other members of the terrorist cell into his own goddamn apartment. And I’ll show you some recent big wire transfers of cash that just came in from Pakistan. But right now, detective, you’re wasting my time, and every second in this case is precious. So get off the phone and go take care of your own business.”

Jack started to say something else, but his phone went dead. He sat there in his car and resolved to double his efforts on the case.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON,
even Richie Powker was not terribly impressed by Jack’s baked bean theory.

The squad room was busy: phones ringing, radios squawking, some detective in the corner having a heated phone argument with what sounded like her daughter or son. Jack watched as a couple of beefy white detectives marched in, herding a handcuffed, fairly harmless-looking Hispanic teen. The kid wore a profound look of despair: he’d probably gotten caught doing something stupid, and now the consequences—which he had previously ignored—were staring him smack in his young mook face.

Richie leaned forward in his overburdened chair. “I don’t like this Charlson guy,” he said to Jack. “I don’t like feds in general. They didn’t work the real evidence they had before Nine-eleven, and then they went and made up stuff so they could go into Iraq. Not to mention that this particular bastard is implying some nasty crap about me and my wife.” He frowned. “But even
I
have to admit that this beans thing seems a little thin. Maybe Hasni
was
just doing some shopping as a favor to a neighbor. Or maybe he’s not a religious nut—maybe he just likes blowing shit up.”