Countdown, page 8
No answer from inside.
He hits the door again with his fist and—
The door bursts open and at least two men reach out and seize him, then drag him into the house and start closing the door.
I move fast. The door slams shut on my left booted foot.
There’s yelling inside and I lean back and slam in with my left shoulder and hip, getting the door wide enough so I can go through it. As I push my way in, I recover my MP5 from underneath my coat and bring it right up, and now I’m in the entryway, taking in the whole mess in one quick glance.
Jeremy, facedown on the floor, a man squatting on his shoulders, a pistol at the base of Jeremy’s neck.
Another man, also on the floor, kneeling, pointing a pistol at Jeremy.
And a third man, halfway through another door, AK-47 at his side, but he can’t bring it into play because the doorway is too narrow. There are narrow carpets on the stone floor, another closed door, flickering lights, and the scent of incense and something cooking.
Three armed men and me.
Outnumbered, but I’m definitely not outgunned.
But it’s a stalemate for sure.
Chapter 23
FREDDIE FARRADY is a detective with Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, on assignment in Manhattan. He would never admit this to his mates back home, but he’s grown to love American street vendors and their hot dogs. He’s on Church Street near the World Trade Center memorials, about ten meters from the entrance to the Cortlandt Street subway station.
He’s eating another hot dog while waiting for his target to show up. He has on blue jeans, black sneakers, and a plain tan jacket. Topping it off is a New York Yankees baseball cap that’s one size too large for his head, allowing him to lower the visor to obscure his face. New York isn’t quite up to London standards when it comes to CCTV, but Freddie still wants to minimize the chances of his recorded image being used anytime soon.
He checks his watch. The target is always on schedule, arriving here at the station from his job at One World Trade Center, give or take ten minutes.
Somewhere underneath him in the station is his temporary boss and the other half of his surveillance team, Portia Grayson of MI5. And for all intents and purposes, that’s it. Running a two-person surveillance is a bloody strange job—a surveillance like this usually takes six or seven folks—but being with Special Branch means taking on all sorts of strange jobs.
There.
Walking through the early commuters heading home, the target approaches the station.
He is Mike Patel, formerly of Manchester, now a worker with a company doing business at the new One World Trade Center.
The target walks quickly and confidently into the station. Freddie polishes off his hot dog, crumples up the napkin, and drops it into an overflowing waste bin as he races across the street.
He doesn’t spare a glance behind him, where the ghost of Tower Two lives in his mind, where his older cousin, Malcolm, worked in American finance—and burned to death back on that dark day.
The station is filthy—no surprise there—but Freddie ignores his surroundings as he follows the target through the turnstiles. Patel goes through and Freddie does the same, two turnstiles down from him, making sure his cap is tugged low.
Patel slowly weaves in and out of the crowd, pausing for a moment behind a steel girder, then stops on the platform and stands still. Freddie pretends to throw something into another overflowing waste bin—really, how hard can it be to empty these bins on a regular basis?—and glances up at the digital readout telling him and a few scores of people that the incoming W line train is only two minutes away.
Freddie waits.
He hears the familiar crackle of a police radio and turns. Coming up the platform are two heavily armed men of the NYPD, wearing helmets, body armor, and cut-down AR-15s slung over their chests. Freddie quickly turns away; he wants to see if Patel has noticed the police—and, if so, is he doing anything.
No, not a thing.
Patel is just staring down at the tracks, waiting, with seemingly not a worry in the world.
Freddie wishes he knew what that was like. Not a worry in the world because among his worries is the fact that not only is he here in Manhattan without an NYPD liaison being aware of his presence, he’s also carrying a small Glock 26 9mm pistol strapped to his ankle—quite illegally, of course.
The train’s headlight appears at the end of the tunnel. With a whoosh and a rattling roar, the train pulls into the station and slows to a stop. Patel gets on with the rest of the pushing commuters, and Freddie joins the fray.
Three stops and twenty-one minutes later, Freddie is back out in the open air on 31st Street near Astoria Boulevard, a working-class area of Queens that has the rattling monstrosity of an elevated highway nearby, with lots of immigrants and poor folks, which means Patel fits right in.
En route to this destination—same as the time before, and the time before that, and so forth and so on—Freddie exchanged his Yankees black-and-white cap for an orange-and-blue Mets cap. He also turned his jacket inside out; it’s now a dark blue.
The weather feels better here in this part of Queens, with two- and three-story buildings and the sidewalks bustling with people, and he pauses, reverses course, and continues his tail until Patel goes up the steps of his brick building at the corner of 30th Street and Newtown Avenue. Again, no surprise.
He leans against a utility pole, yawns like he’s just gotten off a twelve-hour shift, and waits just a bit more to see if anyone else goes in. Nope—same as before.
There are small stores up and down this crowded stretch of Queens, from shoe shops to bodegas, and a few blocks away is a mosque. Not once has Patel been seen going into the mosque.
Freddie turns and nearly bumps into the MI5 woman, Portia Grayson, who’s frowning down at him. Portia is much taller than Freddie and probably weighs about the same. Freddie’s farmer granddad would say the woman with the short black hair and skinny face looks like a funny string bean, wearing American gray workout slacks and a dark blue sweatshirt with a faded Epcot seal on the front.
But Portia is not in a funny mood.
“Get walking,” she says. Freddie scratches his chin and starts walking, and five minutes later they’re at a little luncheonette, taking adjoining booths.
The talk is low and in spurts, so others coming and going can’t tell that they know each other.
“You shouldn’t hang around like that,” says Portia in her disapproving voice. “You’ll get spotted.”
“Then get us more bodies out here, so we can do a proper job,” he says.
“We have what we have,” she says. “Stop complaining. Anything out of the ordinary to report?”
“No,” Freddie says. “Came off shift, caught the tube, walked to his grotty little apartment. That’s it.”
“All right,” she says. “I’ll take the night work. You watch him in the morning when he leaves.”
Freddie tries not to sigh, thinking of his squalid little second-story motel room several blocks away on Broadway, with its fights in the parking lot and the yells and come-ons from the local hookers, trying to catch some business.
“Sure, boss,” he says. “But I sure would like to know what the little bastard is up to.”
“Don’t we all,” she snaps back.
“He’s here illegally, he’s Muslim, and he has access to the entire One World Trade Center.”
“And?”
Freddie waits for a moment before proceeding.
Oh, what the hell, he thinks. This is a temporary assignment. It’s not like she can do too much to his career once this silly job gets wrapped up.
“What if he’s placing explosives?” Freddie asks. “He’s been there for months. Maybe he’s part of a plot to take the building down and—”
Portia interrupts him.
“Don’t make jokes like that,” she says.
He can sense her anger even though she’s not looking at him.
“I’m not joking,” Freddie says, his long-dead cousin Malcolm still haunting him.
Chapter 24
LONG SECONDS drag by like hours as I stand rock steady, moving my MP5 here, there, and everywhere to keep the three men under watch.
The armed men are staring at me. I decide the guy with the AK-47 will be the first to get it if he attempts to move back and bring the weapon up, because in an enclosed space like this, the inefficient pray-and-spray shooting tactic would actually work.
The guys on the ground are next up: the one with the pistol at the base of Jeremy’s neck will be target number two, and—
“Amy.”
—because the guy kneeling, aiming at Jeremy, his hand is shaking—
“Amy.”
—but if any of the three make a move toward me, they’re dead.
“Amy, damn it,” Jeremy says, “I’m talking to you!”
I keep moving my MP5, swiveling back and forth, back and forth.
“So you are,” I say. “You tell these three assholes to drop their weapons.”
Jeremy swears at me. “They’re relatives of Nassim. They aren’t bad guys.”
“They have a funny way of showing it.”
“They didn’t recognize me, they didn’t like the tone of my voice, so they dragged me in,” Jeremy says, his voice muffled some because his head’s plastered against a carpet.
The man with a gun against Jeremy’s neck rattles off a long stream of angry Arabic words. Jeremy replies in Arabic as well, softer, and says, “They wanted to check me out before bringing Nassim out. But then you broke in, and now they’re pissed.”
“Too bad,” I say, still not hesitating in moving my MP5 to keep these three off balance. “I saw you assaulted. Now, tell them to drop it.”
“They won’t do it,” Jeremy says. “You’re a woman.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “Tell them to do it.”
Jeremy tries another long stream of Arabic. The guy at the doorway seems to relax, still holding his AK-47—still in a bad position, and not aiming at me—while the guy kneeling says something to the guy on Jeremy’s back, followed by some arguing and snapping at each other. Then the fellow with the AK-47 shrugs, puts the rifle down, and steps into the crowded entryway.
I let out a breath. Then, without any more debate, the second guy puts his pistol on the floor and steps back, joining the other standing man.
That leaves just the angry, bearded, armed man on Jeremy’s back. The pistol is still pressed against Jeremy’s neck, but I feel a lot better with just one target to worry about. I stop waving my MP5 and take two steps forward, aiming the rifle at his forehead.
He nearly spits at me.
“Jeremy…”
“Amy, it’s a family honor thing, a macho thing, a—”
I say in my best low and fierce voice, “You tell him if he doesn’t drop that pistol in the next three seconds, I’m going to make it a blood-and-brains-on-the-wall thing.”
“Ricky?” A man’s voice is calling out from deep inside the house. “Ricky? Is that truly you?”
I flash my eyes to the doorway, where a plump, older, smiling man is approaching. His hands are empty. Good. I go back to staring at my target as the new man and his heavy cologne come to join us. He’s fifty or so—thick mustache, thick black hair, dark-gray pinstripe suit and vest. A gold pocket-watch chain dangling out front.
Still flat on the carpet, Jeremy says, “Hello, Nassim. We seem to be in a bit of a bother here.”
Nassim smiles down at Jeremy and says, “Ah, my boys. They are eager ones, but sometimes so very, very impolite.”
He barks out a command, but the man on Jeremy’s back doesn’t move. He says something back and Jeremy whispers, “Oh, that’s not good.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Nassim speaks up. “My apologies, young lady. It seems my nephew Tariq is a bit more…traditional than his cousins. He believes we are buckling under a woman’s eye.”
I make a quick decision and lower my MP5. “Give Tariq my deepest apologies. Tell him I mean no disrespect, but that I am honor-bound to protect and defend the wounded warrior underneath him. Tell him again I apologize and that I now know my place.”
Nassim nods, then speaks to his nephew. Still angry, Tariq looks up at me but then removes the pistol from Jeremy’s neck. He slips it into a waistband holster and starts to rise.
I shoulder my MP5 and offer Tariq a hand to help him up, and I think he’s surprised by my offer, but he takes my hand and I help him to his feet.
Then I let go, swivel hard, and use my right elbow to punch his nose.
He cries out, stumbles over the form of Jeremy, and slams hard to the ground. I step over Jeremy, disarm Tariq, and stick his pistol in my own waistband.
All the men are staring at me save for Tariq, who has his hands up to his bloody nose.
I shrug.
“Sorry,” I say. “I slipped.”
Chapter 25
IT’S EARLY evening in Paris and Nadia Khadra is heading home after another long day at the Institut Pasteur at 25–28 Rue du Dr Roux. She is a microbiologist by trade and has worked at the institute for three years. The famed facility has spent decades studying infectious diseases from diphtheria to influenza to yellow fever.
She descends into the Metro station and patiently waits for her train on the clean and orderly train platform. For the past year, the institute has been quietly working on another deadly infectious disease—and Nadia considers the day she learned that to be the luckiest day of her life.
And the day she met the wealthy, bearded, and determined older Arab man who financed her was her second-luckiest day.
She pays 1.90 euros for a one-way ticket. The boxy, white-and-green Line 12 train glides in on its rubber tires right on time, and she joins the other commuters entering its sliding doors.
In less than a week, Nadia reflects, she will be riding the subway system in New York City, and she shudders at what she will find there. Friends of hers at the institute have told her that the subways in New York are dirty and loud, with pickpockets and thieves all around. She hopes she will have the bravery to do what must be done.
Half an hour later, Nadia gets off at the Marx Dormoy station and briskly walks up into the open air of the Goutte d’Or section of Paris. It’s a relatively poor neighborhood, with more than a third of its residents from North Africa—like her family, originally from Algeria—and she makes enough money at the institute to move to a better neighborhood, but she won’t. She has fond memories of growing up here with her maman, who was a seamstress in a number of the so-called sweatshops working out of dank buildings and warehouses, and she will never leave what is known in Paris as Little Africa. She never knew her papa—never cared to know him; for all Nadia knows, the man is dead.
She stops in at a boulangerie to get a fresh baguette for later, then walks the ten minutes home, past little shops and cafés, the traffic honking and burbling along, a number of local women dressed in chadors. Though a few walls bear graffiti from the Front National, France’s right-wing anti-immigrant party, Nadia (who is Muslim but hasn’t entered a mosque in years) still loves this part of Paris. To those who painted the walls in hate, she wishes she could say, “Why?” These poor people from Algeria, Chad, and parts of North Africa, they were once part of the French Empire. And that empire is responsible for the colonialism and destruction that broke these families and brought them here.
Nadia arrives at her little three-story apartment house at 4 Rue de Torcy, a small yellow building with black shutters and narrow balconies. Before she can enter the door to her first-floor flat, the building’s owner—Madame Juliette Therien—bustles out, holding a colored sheet of paper in her plump hands.
“Mademoiselle Khadra, working late again, eh?”
“That I am, that I am,” she says, the baguette under her right arm, her large purse over her left.
“Well, I need to show you this,” she says, waving the paper in the air. “The electric bill, it came today, eh? But I opened yours by mistake. But look! Look!”
Nadia takes the Électricité de France (EDF) utility bill, thinking, Oh no, you silly, snoopy old bird, that was no mistake, and glances at the six-page printout with the familiar blue-and-orange EDF logo in the upper left corner. “Look! Look! You are using three times as much power as me!” says Madame Therien. “And four times as much as the Urbi family!”
Yes, yes, Nadia thinks, the poor Urbi family, migrants from Benin, shoved into the second floor while Therien resides on the top floor like a queen. The Urbis are loud—playing music at all hours, their children stomping overhead—but not once has Nadia complained.
Nadia doesn’t want to make waves, draw attention.
“I don’t see the problem,” Nadia says. “I pay the bill every two months. Why should you care?”
Her landlord folds her beefy arms. She’s a heavyset woman who wears lots of makeup, exaggerated painted-in eyebrows, and billowing dresses in bright colors, and nearly always, her bare, leathery feet in open-toed sandals.
“I’ll tell you the problem,” she says. “Whatever you’re doing in my cellar, it’s putting a strain on my poor building and its wiring and circuits.”
“I doubt that.”
Madame Therien shakes her head. “I can’t take that chance. I must insist that I go into the cellar, see what you’re doing down there.”
Sweet Allah no, Nadia thinks. She says, “Please…it’s delicate work, doing research for my doctorate. You might…ruin something, even by accident.”
“It’s my building, my cellar.”
Nadia smiles as best she can. “I promise…Madame Therien, my work is almost at an end. In a few days…you may inspect the cellar as much as you wish. And in two months I will show you my EDF bill. You will see it drop significantly.”
The old woman waits, then reluctantly nods and smiles back. “If you say so, Mademoiselle.”
