Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

Pugh said that before boarding the plane in New York, Youseff was allowed to speak with his mistress so he’d be assured she was still alive, and Randy told Youseff the same thing he’d told Reza Zarif: since Youseff’s mistress had never seen Randy’s or Harlan Rhodes’s faces, they wouldn’t kill her if Youseff did what he was supposed to do.

‘But they killed her, didn’t they?’ Clark said.

‘Yeah,’ fraid so. And they had to rape her a little before they did. You know, so it’d just look like your ordinary big-city crime.’

Clark stood up. ‘Jubal, we’re gonna take a break now. I’m afraid if we don’t stop for a minute, I just might break every bone in your face.’

They were keeping Pugh in a cabin at Quantico, and the cabin was in the woods on a piece of land that Clark wished he owned. The setting was so peaceful you’d never guess it currently housed a piece of human flotsam like Jubal Pugh. Clark took in the aroma of the pines and let the cold air blast his cheeks red, then he called a number and told an agent to get the details on Athena Warner’s death. Following the call, he just sat there looking into the woods for five minutes. When he felt Pugh was safe from him, he went back inside.

‘Okay,’ Clark said, ‘now tell me what you did to Mustafa Ahmed.’

‘Who?’ Pugh said.

‘The cabdriver. The Capitol Hill bomber.’

‘Oh, yeah. I have a hard time keeping all them sand niggers’ names straight in my head.’

Clark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘I swear, Pugh, that if you don’t show a little more respect for these people you killed, I’m gonna-’

‘Hey, sorry. Didn’t know they was friends of yours. And I didn’t kill nobody .’

Clark just shook his head and made a get-on-with-it motion with his hand.

Pugh said the same ploy was used again: Mustafa and his niece were captured, and Mustafa was told to act like he was going blow up the Capitol or the girl would be killed, and if she talked her mother and younger brother would also die.

Then Clark realized what Pugh had just said.

‘What do you mean, act like he was going to blow up the Capitol?’ Clark asked.

‘Jones said to tell those people,’ Pugh said, ‘that they didn’t actually have to kill anyone. All that Youseff guy had to do was try to hijack the plane: you know, get the gun on board, wave it around. Same way with the cabbie. He just had to put on the bomb vest and show it to the guards. He was told the bomb wouldn’t go off.’

Now it made more sense to Clark. If he was given a choice of either seeing his family killed or blowing up the Capitol and crippling the United States government, would he do it? He didn’t know. But if the choice was only to sacrifice himself to save his family, it would certainly be an easier decision. So now he understood. In all three cases the Muslim Americans involved knew in advance they’d be killed before they could actually harm other people. Or maybe they didn’t all know that they’d be killed. Reza Zarif certainly did; he knew his plane would be shot down. But it was possible that neither Youseff Khalid nor Mustafa Ahmed knew they’d be shot. Youseff had been told only that he had to attempt to hijack the plane, and Mustafa was told the bomb vest wouldn’t explode.

‘So why didn’t your men kill Mustafa’s niece?’ Clark asked Pugh. ‘They killed Zarif’s family and Khalid’s mistress.’

‘’Cause Jones said not to. He said not to hurt her at all.’

Clark figured that by not killing Anisa Aziz there was no way anyone could claim that Mustafa had been coerced to commit an act of terrorism, provided Anisa was too afraid to talk, which she had been. And in the case of Khalid’s mistress, no one even connected her death to Khalid.

‘What pissed ol’ Randy off,’ Pugh said, ‘was havin’ a juicy little college girl like her all tied up naked and not bein’ able to poke her one.’ Pugh laughed and added, ‘He did tell me he got a little stinky-finger, though.’

Clark hit Jubal Pugh in the nose with the palm of his right hand. He didn’t know if he broke Jubal’s nose or not. He did know that he didn’t care.

Myron Clark finished his initial interrogation of Jubal Pugh, Pugh answering the remaining questions with cotton balls shoved into his nostrils. Clark would question the man several more times in the days to come, asking the same questions over and over again to make sure Pugh’s story didn’t change, but right now he was briefing a senior agent named Merrill Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was the Bureau’s current point man on the terrorist attacks, the last point man having been fired because he’d failed — with five thousand agents at his disposal — to figure out that it was Pugh and not al-Qaeda who was behind the attacks.

‘And you think Pugh’s telling the truth about the Capitol Hill cop?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said. ‘Pugh’s guys had nothing to do with his death or with paying him to shoot the cabdriver.’

‘And the air marshal?’

‘Same thing. Jones arranged that on his own.’

‘And this guy Jack?’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘Pugh doesn’t know who he is, just someone Jones assigned to make sure Pugh’s guys followed orders. He’s obviously somebody with a lot more discipline than Pugh’s people.’

‘And the senator, who the hell killed him? Congress is goin’ nuts over that. We’ve got so goddamn many agents looking for Broderick’s killer, we’re hardly doing anything else.’

‘Pugh says he doesn’t know who killed Broderick and I believe him. Maybe it was this guy Jack or somebody else. I mean, Jones sounds like some kinda organizational genius. Killing Broderick, if he killed Broderick, could have been a separate operation.’

‘Christ!’ Fitzsimmons said. He looked for a minute as if he was going to take out all his frustration on Myron Clark, but he didn’t.

‘Well, sit Pugh down with an artist,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘and let’s see if we can get a lead on Jack.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said, although he’d already arranged for that.

‘And we’ll talk later, Agent Clark, about you losing control with the prisoner.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said again.

Mahoney had requested that the FBI brief two of his associates, Emma and DeMarco. Mahoney didn’t tell the Bureau why they should brief these two civilians, nor did he explain their relationship to him, but at the present time nobody in Washington was refusing Mahoney anything. And Special Agent Merrill Fitzsimmons, the man assigned to brief them, acted unusually humble. At some point the Bureau would go back to being the arrogant, insular organization it had always been, but for the moment the egg stains on the agency’s face were still all too evident.

Fitzsimmons was a tall lean man in his fifties with gray hair. He was soft-spoken, cool, and collected and had been with the Bureau almost thirty years. DeMarco could tell that Agent Fitzsimmons was a fellow who was normally quite pleased with himself.

Fitzsimmons told them everything they’d learned from Jubal Pugh and then said, ‘As you know, Pugh met with a man who called himself Mr Jones in a waffle house in Winchester, and Pugh’s boy, Randy, took a picture of the guy. Here’s the photo.’ Fitzsimmons pushed a button on a laptop sitting on the table in front of him, and a picture flashed onto a screen at the other end of the table. The picture showed a man with long black hair and a full black beard, wearing sunglasses and a Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball cap. The only feature that could be clearly distinguished on the man’s face was his nose, and in the picture the man was sitting against a plain white wall.