Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The woman’s English was heavily accented but understandable; what her native tongue was DeMarco had no idea.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said, and showed her his ID and explained that he worked for the U.S. Congress.

The woman glanced at his identification and looked back at DeMarco’s face. She had a truly impressive scowl. He bet she scared the hell out of small children.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Just to speak to Mrs Khalid. I want … I need to ask her a few questions.’

‘About what?’

‘Is she here?’ DeMarco said. This woman may have had him outweighed and intimidated, but she was starting to annoy him.

The woman stood there for a moment longer, like the immovable object she was, and finally stepped back so DeMarco could enter the apartment. Sitting on a couch inside the small apartment was another black woman. This woman was wearing a scarf on her head and a drab gray-colored robe that reached her knees. Beneath the robe she had on jeans. Sitting near the woman were three children, two girls and one boy, ranging in age from maybe two to eight. All the children had enormous luminous dark eyes.

The scowling woman who had opened the door said something in a foreign language that DeMarco couldn’t identify, and the children left the room without a murmur of protest. As the children were leaving, DeMarco looked for some sign that Mrs Khalid and her children had been recently abused. This was important, but he couldn’t see any marks or bruises or any other indicator that she or her kids had been hurt or restrained in any way. All he could see was that Mrs Khalid was scared to death.

‘The reason I’m here,’ DeMarco said, ‘is I’d like to know if you have any other explanation for why your husband did what he did. I mean, I know he lost his job and he was angry, but hijacking an airplane?’ Hell, he might as well spit it out. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say is: Did someone make Youseff hijack that plane?’

The big woman spoke. ‘Mrs Khalid doesn’t speak English,’ she said.

Oh, great.

‘Well, can you tell her what I said?’ DeMarco asked.

The big woman talked to Youseff’s wife for what seemed an unusually long time for a simple question, and Mrs Khalid’s response was equally long. As she spoke, DeMarco could hear the agony in her voice even if he couldn’t understand the words. Finally the big woman turned to DeMarco and said, ‘She doesn’t know.’

All that talk, and he gets a three-word response.

‘Then ask her if she or her children were used in any way to force her husband to hijack the plane.’ She should at least know that , DeMarco was thinking.

The woman looked at DeMarco for a moment as if he were crazy, then had another long conversation with Mrs Khalid. The women must have talked for at least three minutes, and by the time they were done Mrs Khalid was weeping.

‘She says no,’ the big woman said to DeMarco.

Jesus, this was hopeless. He had no idea what the two women were saying to each other — he didn’t even know what language they were speaking — and all he was getting was one-word answers. He told the big woman he didn’t have anything else to ask and rose to leave. As he was doing so, Mrs Khalid said something to him.

The big woman said to DeMarco, ‘She wants to know what will happen to her and her children. Will they be sent back to Africa?’

‘I’m sorry,’ DeMarco said, ‘but I have no idea.’ Then, because he knew his response had just added to the poor woman’s anguish, he added, ‘But I’m sure that if she wasn’t involved in any way with what her husband did she has nothing to fear.’

‘Bullshit,’ the big woman said. She pronounced the word perfectly.

After his short fruitless meeting with Mrs Khalid, DeMarco had five hours to kill before his flight back to D.C. so he decided to visit a man named Orin Blunt. Blunt was the air marshal who had shot Youseff Khalid in the head from a sitting position in the airplane.

The newspapers said there’d been no interaction between Blunt and Khalid before the shooting, but DeMarco still wanted to talk to him. He wanted to hear directly about the moments leading up to the hijacking and see if Blunt remembered anything Khalid had said that hadn’t been reported in the papers. The other thing was — and he didn’t know why — DeMarco just wanted to put his eyes on the guy.

About the only thing DeMarco knew about federal air marshals was what he’d seen on a television show, probably 60 Minutes . At one time the marshals had worked for the FAA in the Department of Transportation, but when the Department of Homeland Security was formed, the air marshals were placed under the Transportation Security Administration. The only other thing he knew was that to be a marshal one had to be able to shoot the eye out of a gnat with a handgun, such a qualification being reasonable if your job entailed shooting hijackers in crowded airplanes flying at thirty-five thousand feet.

Blunt worked out of an office at JFK Airport. DeMarco took a cab to the airport and located the air marshals’ office, where he found three men engaged in an intense discussion about the New York Giants. Two of the men were white, the third man black, and none of them was physically impressive. They were all of average height and weight, not muscular but not skinny or fat either. If you saw them seated in the coach section of an airplane dressed in rumpled suits, they’d look like tired salesmen on their way home.

DeMarco showed them his ID and told them he was a lawyer who worked for Congress. If the marshals were impressed, they disguised their awe quite well. He asked where he could find Blunt and was told that the man was on administrative leave. That made sense. DeMarco guessed that when a marshal shot somebody — though he couldn’t recall this ever happening before — the bosses would probably conduct some sort of review and take the guy off duty until the review was complete. But he didn’t bother to confirm this with the three guys in the bullpen; he could tell they’d be no help at all. When he asked where Blunt lived, they as much as told him to go shit in his hat. If he wanted that sort of information he’d have to talk to their supervisor, who was in D.C. and wouldn’t be back for two days.

So DeMarco thanked Blunt’s coworkers for all their help, called directory assistance, and got an address and a phone number for Blunt in the town of Commack on Long Island. He called the phone number; nobody answered. He caught another cab, took a long, expensive ride out to Blunt’s place, and discovered that Blunt wasn’t home.

There’s an old mountain man’s saying: Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. The bear, that day, had DeMarco for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

He had spent every day with the boy for the last five days. The boy would come to his motel in the morning and they would pray together and read the Koran for an hour — and then they would begin to talk. He soon found out that he didn’t need to fan the boy’s hatred. What he did instead was provide a structure for his beliefs, some perspective, and, of course, the history that the boy lacked. Having spent his whole life in America, the boy’s concept of reality, of what was happening in the rest of the world, was completely distorted. So he told the boy about his own people, how they’d suffered, how they’d died, how they’d been exploited — and how they would continue to be exploited if good men didn’t act. He spoke a lot about how the world would be a better place if everyone followed the true path. And the boy soaked it all up, like he’d been waiting his whole life to have someone explain the things to him that he already felt in his heart but didn’t know how to put into words.