Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

‘Is the marshal dead too?’ Neil said.

‘Not that I know of. I tried to see him when I went up to New York, but he wasn’t home. He’s one of the reasons I need some help; while I’m trying to track him down I need to get some other things moving.’

Now DeMarco could see what Neil had taken from the box. It was one of those games they give hyperactive ten-year-olds on car trips, the type where you try to get all the little BBs to roll into the proper hole. Neil was now playing with the game.

‘I’ll tell you another thing that’s bothering me,’ DeMarco said, speaking to the top of Neil’s head as he tilted the BB toy back and forth in his hands. ‘With the exception of Zarif’s family, none of these three terrorist events resulted in anyone dying except the supposed terrorists. Reza was shot down before he could crash his plane into the White House, Mustafa’s bomb didn’t explode, and the shuttle hijacker was killed before he could do anything other than scare a planeful of people. If al-Qaeda’s really behind these things, I have a hard time believing they’re this inept.’

‘So what do you want us to do?’ Emma said, speaking for the first time.

‘A bunch of things. The first thing I want Neil to do is find out who Broderick’s biggest backers are.’

‘Bastard,’ Neil said, speaking to one of the BBs; then he added, ‘Do you actually think Broderick could be personally involved in these incidents?’

‘I’m not saying he is,’ DeMarco said, ‘but everything that’s happened works in his favor. So maybe that’s why someone is doing these things, to scare people and get Broderick’s bill passed, and maybe that same person is backing Broderick financially.’

‘I don’t know,’ Neil said, sounding unconvinced. ‘Someone would have to really want that bill passed. I mean — Jesus, two kids were killed.’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ DeMarco said, ‘and I can come up with a couple different motives. One is hate. Whoever’s doing this hates Muslims and wants them treated like the Jews in Nazi Germany, little yellow stars of … of somebody pinned to their coats.’

‘But why do they hate Muslims?’

‘Hell, I don’t know, Neil! Why are some people bigots? Why do some people become white supremacists? And, by the by, the guy Donny Cray worked for, some character name Jubal Pugh, heads up some white-power group and Rollie had some racist literature in his house. So maybe the people doing this are just Muslim-hating white-power loonies. Guys like Timothy McVeigh who get a screwball idea in their head and start blowing things up.’

Before either Emma or Neil could object to DeMarco’s logic — or point out the flaws in his logic — DeMarco said, ‘Another motive could be money.’

‘Money?’ Neil said. ‘How could anyone make money from this?’

‘I don’t know, but whenever a law is passed in Congress, some people make money and some people lose money. It’s like a political law of physics.’

‘But how could someone make any money by kicking out Muslim students?’ Neil said.

‘I just said I don’t know, Neil! Will you put that damn game down and pay attention? What I do know is that we need to look for a money motive, particularly among anyone backing Broderick.’

‘There’s something else we should look for,’ Emma said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Expertise. If these events were not orchestrated by al-Qaeda, you need to look for somebody or some group who has the ability to acquire C-Four and fabricate a plastic gun. Somebody who has the experience, the contacts, and the organizational ability to plan these ops.’

‘Good point,’ DeMarco said. Then, sounding like the man in charge, knowing that no one was ever in charge of Neil or Emma, he added, ‘So Neil finds out who’s supporting Broderick financially, and sees if any of these people could have a hate or a money motive and if they have the expertise to pull this stuff off. He also pulls the financial records for Rollie and this air marshal who shot the hijacker to see if there’s anything squirrelly there. I wanna know how Rollie paid for his RV. I’m going to get the autopsy results for Rollie and Donny Cray, and I want to check out this air marshal some more.’

‘And what do you want me to do?’ Emma said.

The problem, DeMarco had told Emma, was that he didn’t know any Muslims. Not one. He hadn’t been able to talk to Youseff’s wife, in part because she didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak whatever language people from Somalia spoke. Not even knowing the name of the language they spoke in Somalia showed how ignorant he was. But the other reason he hadn’t been successful questioning her was because he was a white guy and looked just like all the white FBI guys who had already questioned her.

The biggest weakness in DeMarco’s conspiracy theory was that he could find no evidence that either Mustafa Ahmed or Youseff Khalid had been coerced to do what they did. He suspected in Reza Zarif’s case that somebody — possibly the late and unlamented Donny Cray — had held a gun to the heads of Reza’s children, but he couldn’t find anyone who had been killed or kidnapped or tortured to make Youseff and Mustafa do what they did. And one of the reasons he couldn’t do this was because he couldn’t get people to talk to him.

But Emma did know Muslims. And she wasn’t a white man. DeMarco wanted Emma to see if she could find someone close to Mustafa Ahmed who might have been used to force him to strap on a bomb. They decided to focus on Mustafa because he had lived in D.C., whereas Youseff’s family was in New York.

The first thing Emma did was call a man who knew a number of languages spoken in Muslim countries. He was an interpreter who worked at the DIA, his parents were from Pakistan, and he was a Muslim. His name was Zafarullah Nazimuddin, a name almost impossible for most of his coworkers to pronounce or remember. His American friends all called him Zafa.

Emma paid a gypsy cabdriver to borrow his cab for the day and then told Zafa she wanted him to pretend to be a cabbie, park at some of the stands where Mustafa used to wait, and talk to drivers who knew him. She wanted Zafa to find out as much as he could about Mustafa and identify the people closest to him. Zafa, being very bright, took less than three hours to accomplish his mission.

‘Emma,’ he said, ‘everybody all says the same thing. Mustafa was a soccer nut, and the person closest to him was one of his nieces. The girl’s an Olympic-caliber player, and she was given a scholarship to UVA. The guy kept a picture of her on the sun visor of his cab, a shot he took of her heading the ball into the goal, and he was always showing it to his pals.’ Four hours later Emma was in Charlottesville, Virginia, lying to a sweet woman in student housing to find out where Mustafa’s niece resided.

Anisa Aziz wasn’t so much pretty as striking. She had an angular face, high cheekbones, a strong nose, and heavy eyebrows over intense black eyes. Her eyes radiated intelligence. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, and maybe it was the athletic wear, but Emma had the impression that this girl just flew down the field when she was playing. To Emma, Anisa had seemed unusually nervous when she answered her door and saw Emma standing there. Maybe that was because Emma was a stranger or maybe it was because she had been expecting someone official to come calling — someone from the FBI — because of what her uncle had done.

‘May I help you?’ she said to Emma.

‘I’d like to talk to you about your uncle,’ Emma said.

‘Are you with the police? The FBI?’

‘No,’ Emma said, ‘but I’m working with somebody in the government who doesn’t believe that your uncle was a terrorist, somebody who believes he was forced to do what he did.’