Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

Aw, screw it. He’d make up something when the time came.

He watched the boy for three days before he approached him.

The first day that he followed him, he saw the boy enter the public school he attended, but three hours later he left it. He was holding books in his hand when he left the school, just as he had been when he’d left his home that morning. He wondered why the boy was leaving school so early in the day.

The boy walked a block from the school — but not in the direction of his home — put his books down in an alley behind a Dumpster, and covered them with old newspapers. Then he began to walk.

He appeared to walk aimlessly, no destination in mind. He would stop occasionally and sit at a bus stop or on a park bench or on a stoop. But he would just sit, looking down at his feet, not even paying attention to the people around him. The boy was unhappy and something was weighing heavily on his spirit. This was good.

The next day when the boy left his apartment building, he put his schoolbooks down behind another Dumpster, this one right near his apartment, and began walking again. For five hours he either walked or sat. He did nothing, participated in no activity, spoke to no one, ate nothing, then returned to his apartment, picked up the schoolbooks he’d hidden, and went into the building where he and his mother lived. He had obviously decided to stop going to school but didn’t want his mother to know.

On his fourth day in Cleveland, two things happened: a man, a Muslim, tried to hijack a plane in New York and that was the day he approached the boy.

He needed to find out more about the hijacking, but from what he’d heard it appeared that his brethren had helped the hijacker. Unfortunately, just as he had failed in Baltimore, whoever had assisted the man in New York had also failed. But not completely.

What Sheikh Osama wanted was for the faithful who lived in Western countries to rise up against the infidels. If outsiders attacked, as they had on 9/11, people would die, and the cause would be advanced, but what was happening now was far better. In London, in Madrid, in Paris, all the recent attacks had involved Muslims who lived in those countries — and that was important. First, the security forces of those countries, which were already stretched thin, were now forced to spend more time looking inward, at their own citizens. And this provided the second advantage. By investigating their own citizens, they alienated them. People already scorned because of their skin color and their religion were now harassed by the police, detained, their houses searched — and sometimes, as had been the case with the boy’s father, their lives were destroyed. The fact that there had been two back-to-back attacks on Washington committed by Americans … Well, even though the attacks had failed, they clearly demonstrated that God listened to Sheikh Osama.

When he approached, the boy was sitting on the ground, on a small grassy bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga River. He had come to this place twice before; he seemed to like watching the river as it flowed away from this ugly town. He sat down next to the boy. The boy glanced over at him but didn’t say anything, and looked back down at the river. He greeted the boy in the language of the boy’s father and wished God’s blessings on him. He could tell the boy was surprised to be addressed this way, but still he didn’t respond.

He had been thinking for four days about what he would say to the boy during their first meeting. He had been thinking that he would begin by saying how sorry he was for what had happened to the boy’s father and then lie to him and tell him how something similar had happened to someone he had loved. But he didn’t want to begin with a lie, and he still had not come to a decision when he sat down next to the boy. And then God told him how to begin.

He said, ‘What do you think about this man who tried to hijack that airplane this morning?’ And the boy, though he was still looking at the river and not at him, said, ‘I think it’s too bad he was killed before he could do what he planned.’

There are times when you meet someone and you have an instant connection. It was that way between him and the boy. The boy, of course, needed a father — so he would become his father. Also his teacher, his brother, and his friend. He would become whatever he needed to become to make the boy his own.

He had found the boy on the Internet while hiding in Philadelphia. He had searched for tragedy, and there he was. The boy’s father had made the mistake of going home to see his dying mother in Pakistan and, through sheer coincidence, through sheer bad luck, he happened to be in his mother’s village at the same time that one of Osama’s warriors was passing through. The Pakistani spies who worked for the Americans relayed this information to the CIA, and when the man returned home he was detained and questioned. He was detained for three months before the FBI was finally satisfied that he had no connection with al-Qaeda — other than being a Muslim.

The boy’s father had had a weak heart to begin with, and the stress caused by his imprisonment worsened his condition. He had also owned a shoe repair business, and in the time he was in jail his business died like a plant that has not been watered. His wife, a simple woman who had never become acclimated to American life, was brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown from being questioned by the police and because of what was happening to her husband. And the boy, of course, was harassed by his schoolmates, all those Christians who had pretended to be his friends. Two months after being released from jail, the boy’s father had a heart attack and died. The boy’s mother, who now survived on a small Social Security check, had to sell her home and move into a small apartment in a dirty part of a dirty city. The boy told him later that his mother was still so stunned by what had happened that she barely spoke.

He put a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and said, ‘You haven’t eaten all day. Let’s go somewhere and get some tea and some food. Let’s go talk about your father. Let’s talk about who you are.’

‘You look like you’ve been someplace where the sun actually shines,’ Hansen said.

‘Yeah, Key West,’ DeMarco said.

He’d gotten off the plane an hour ago and managed to make it to Jerry Hansen’s office at Homeland Security just as Hansen was shutting off his computer and locking up his safe. DeMarco’s plane had in fact been delayed leaving Miami because of security. They were searching every carry-on bag going onto every plane because of the attempted hijacking of the New York-D.C. shuttle.

‘Key West,’ Hansen echoed. ‘Man, that sounds good. It must have been ten degrees when I left for work this morning.’

‘Is that right?’ DeMarco said. He didn’t want to talk with Hansen about the weather or his aborted vacation. ‘I was just wondering if you could fill me in on that hijacker, like you did before with Reza Zarif.’

‘I dunno,’ Hansen said. ‘The general said I could talk to you about Zarif; he didn’t say anything about this other guy. Plus it’s kinda late.’

‘I cleared it with the general,’ DeMarco lied. ‘Call him up. He’ll tell you.’

DeMarco was betting that Andy Banks’s staff hated talking to him, Banks being the unpleasant, unreasonable, demanding bastard that he was.

Hansen studied DeMarco’s face, looking for signs that DeMarco was lying.

‘Nah, that’s okay,’ Hansen said, after a moment. ‘I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, it’s just like it was with Zarif. If you read the paper this morning, you got almost everything.’