Gods and Fathers (10 page)

“I can’t tell you much, you know, Mr. DeMarco.”

“Call me Matt.”

“Certainly.”

Behind Everett Stryker was a wall of glass, through which Matt could see all of New York Harbor some thirty stories below. Four tugboats were nudging a barge, top-heavy with red and blue cargo containers, between Liberty and Governors Islands. To the left, people were walking along the river on a promenade in Brooklyn, enjoying the first sunny day in a couple of weeks. To Matt’s right, sitting on handsome leather chairs were two young associates of Stryker’s, yellow legal pads on their laps, listening to their boss as if he were giving the Sermon on the Mount.

“I’ve resigned from the District Attorney’s office, if that makes any difference.”

“It doesn’t. It’s a matter of my client’s consent.”

“My son.”

“Yes.”

“Or is it Mr. al-Hassan you’re taking orders from?”

Stryker raised his white eyebrows at this, but did not respond immediately. Instead he picked up a crystal paperweight in the shape of a lion’s head from the top of his large and nearly empty desktop, turned it over casually once or twice and replaced it. If possible, the tall, sixtyish lawyer looked even more distinguished and elegant, in his charcoal gray suit, creamy white button-down shirt and two-hundred dollar tie, than he did the day Matt saw him going into the Tombs with Basil and Debra.

“I represent your son,” Stryker said, finally, his voice neutral.

“I came here to give you information, not receive it,” Matt said. “I appreciate you seeing me.” When he first sat down before Stryker’s throne of a desk, Matt had asked how the case was going as a matter of making preliminary conversation, small talk. Stryker’s answer—blunt and unexpected—had stung. Matt regretted his sarcastic response, ruing, not for the first time in his forty-seven years on earth, his inability to keep his temper in check.

“Would you like us to call Michael. Perhaps…”

“No,” Matt interrupted, “I’ll speak to him later.”

“Fine. I understand. What is it you came to tell me?”

“One of the D. A.’s key witnesses was killed last weekend. The doorman at Yasmine Hayek’s building, Felix Diaz. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Shot in the back of the head, like Yasmine.”

“Are there suspects?”

“I don’t know.”

Stryker drummed his fingers on his desk for a second or two before answering. “Jeff, Karen,” he said, looking over at the two young lawyers, “please excuse us for a moment.” The associates left, closing the office’s large oak door quietly behind them.

“I asked them to leave to protect you, Mr. DeMarco”

“Protect me?”

“How did you come by this information?”

“It was in the Daily News. I put two and two together.”

“You know the
Brady
case of course.”

Matt was silent for a second.
Brady v. Maryland
was the United States Supreme Court decision that in effect obligated all federal and state prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence to criminal defendants. Matt knew it well and had followed its dictates on numerous occasions, once or twice even disclosing the names of “Brady cops”—policemen with a known record of lying in their official capacity.

“Yes, I know it,” he answered finally.

“Then I don’t have to explain my position to you.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Of course. I’ll wait for Healy to formally notify me of this Diaz murder. If he doesn’t—and he should have by now—we’ll have an appealable issue.”

“Appealable issue? We want an acquittal, or a dismissal, not an appealable issue.”

“Yes, but I’m your son’s attorney. These tactical decisions are for me to make.”

“What about the GSR test?” Matt asked, his voice and demeanor neutral, under control, but not by much. “Why was that cancelled?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Michael says he didn’t handle the gun. He didn’t know it existed until he was arrested.”

“As I said…”

“You’re not at liberty to say.”

“Correct.”

“Did you know that TARU thinks the building’s security system was tampered with?”

“TARU?”

“The NYPD’s high-tech unit.”

“The report we received was silent on the issue.”

“Speak to Jane Manning at TARU. I spoke to her this morning. She thinks it’s edited.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” Stryker said, but wrote nothing down.

“The security company has absconded,” Matt said. “They must have something to hide.”

“And you know this how?”

“Friends at the NYPD.”

“You seem to have many friends in the NYPD.”

Matt ignored this. It was getting easier to control his temper now that he realized that Stryker was not only a condescending prick, which he had expected, but also an adversary, which he had not. Conflict was his milieu, it was where he had had lived nearly all his life.

“Perhaps the owner of the building knows where they are,” Matt said. “It’s a company called Westside Properties. You represent them.”

Stryker rose from his chair.

Matt stood as well.

“I do,” Stryker said. “That’s a matter of public record, on file with the Secretary of State’s office.”

“Who are the individual owners?” Matt asked. “I’d like to talk to them.”

“I’ll talk to them.”

“That’s privileged as well, I suppose.”

“You suppose correctly.”

Matt was taller than Stryker by several inches. He moved almost to the edge of Stryker’s long sleek desk.

“One more thing,” he said, looking the older attorney in the eye.

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“I don’t like the picture I’m getting here. And I don’t mean your million-dollar view. Michael and I have issues. But he’s my son, my only child. You don’t want my help, that’s fine. But if you sell him out, or if you fuck his case up, I won’t stop until you’re out of the profession. You’ll have to kill me to stop me.”

Stryker did not respond. Instead he pushed a button on his desk. Matt turned and headed for the door, which swung open as he approached it, revealing Stryker’s elegant middle-aged assistant, Ms. Hartman, who had greeted him with a fake smile when he arrived. She stepped aside to let Matt pass, not bothering to smile this time, her eyes looking past him to Stryker, to see what the great legal god wanted of her.

Basil al-Hassan sat alone on the terrace of his spacious apartment in Latakia, overlooking the Mediterranean, on which the reflection of the rising moon formed a sparkling pathway to the beach below. To the south the lights of the pyramid-shaped, multi-tiered Meridien Hotel were also reflected on the sea, and the sound of music from the hotel’s terrace café occasionally drifted his way. Beyond the tourist hotels were the city center and the modern harbor built twenty years ago, small but very busy now that Beirut—a real port city—was lost. Basil, a young engineer at the time, just out of the army, had fought hard for the construction of Latakia’s harbor facilities. He had had an audience with President Assad, who, prescient and succinct, had said,
yes, build it. We can trust no one in Beirut and perhaps will not be there forever.

He had not met with the new president Assad on this trip, only the Oil and Resources Minister and several of his subordinates. Barrels per day—the statistic around which pivoted the country’s economic policy—was the only topic of the meeting. That and how to reverse the grim, steadily declining numbers. Conversion to natural-gas-fired electric plants and intensified production were discussed, as was the status of exploration licenses granted to companies from China, Russia, and the U.S., none of which had borne any fruit.

At the meeting, as was required by unwritten but strictly enforced Syrian law, was a liaison to SMI, Syrian Military Intelligence. This man, Abdullah al-Haq, Basil had first heard of several years earlier via sources connected to the Mukhabarat, a murky figure who was said to actually be Iranian, and also said to have a very high body count as a free-roaming jihadist, protected by very powerful men—a human stinger missile launched by untouchable mullahs and presidents. Basil had first laid eyes on Haq at the Lebanese consulate in New York in the fall, at the same reception at which Michael DeMarco had met Yasmine Hayek. They had neither exchanged glances nor spoken that night, but Basil had remembered and taken note of this new face in a crowd that he knew from deep experience contained as many real diplomats as fake ones working clandestinely for various Syrian intelligence agencies. It was not, he realized, by coincidence that Haq appeared at the one Oil Ministry meeting in five that Basil was required to attend.

After the meeting, al-Haq had approached Basil privately.

“It is an honor to meet a war hero,” he had said. “And the discoverer of Deir ez-Zour.”

Basil did not reply immediately. Al-Haq was not complimenting him.

“And
your
service?” Basil said, ending his short silence. Haq was dressed in civilian clothes, a dark suit and tie, but Basil knew that all SMI operatives had military backgrounds. He also knew that to ask such a question was tantamount to an insult in the inbred and comingled Syrian military and intelligence cultures, which was his intention, his way of putting al-Haq on notice.

“Hama.”

“And your rank?”

“Colonel.”

“I thought you were stationed in New York?”

“I am, but I have been called back for a few days.” Basil watched Haq’s eyes as he said this. Yes,
colonel
, I know who you are.

“To attend this meeting?” Basil said.

“I am a last minute substitute.”

“Do you have any questions?” Basil had been through this drill many times. He never said anything to SMI that he had not said on the record at a minister-level meeting.

“Is there no hope for Deir ez-Zour?” the Colonel asked.

“You mean rebuilding the plutonium facility?”
Yes, I am in that loop
.
Are you surprised, Colonel?

“No, the oil field.”

“None, it is played out.”

“And the other fields? Are the foreigners optimistic?”

“They would not be here if they did not think they could find oil in commercial quantities. They are spending a great deal of money.”

“It takes a long time I suppose.”

“They are not playing in the desert.”

“Yes, I understand. By the way, I attended the funeral of Yasmine Hayek last month.”

“You know the family?”

“I went to pay our government’s respects.”

“Very sad.”

“I understand that you knew Pierre, during the war.”

“We served together.”

“He is a Christian, no? Maronite?”

“I did not know it at the time.”

“I see. And it is your wife’s son who stands accused of the girl’s murder. That must be difficult.”

“We are managing.”

“Your two young technicians, are they still with you?”

“What two technicians? Do you mean the two young men that Mustafa sponsored?”
Technician
, Basil knew, was SMI-speak for a your-wish-is-my-command terrorist, usually young, from a poor or non-existent family, a serious fanatic, brainwashed into committing mass murder for the
jihad. So,
he thought
, they are thinking of trying to pin the Hayek murder on me.

“Who is Mustafa?” Haq asked.

“My servant.”
The person I saw you talking to at the Lebanese reception last fall as I was passing a room with its door slightly ajar, looking for a quiet place to make a phone call.

“We understand they have disappeared, the two young men.”

“That looks to be the case,” Basil replied, “but you are mistaken. I have no technicians, as you call them, no employees in New York.”
Were Adnan and Ali Haq’s men? That would cast a different light on things.

An Oil Ministry limousine had carried Basil the two hundred-plus miles from Damascus to Latakia, to his old house in the hills, cared for year-round by a family retainer and his wife. On the old winding road that descended into the city from the foothills in the east, Basil instructed the driver, a childhood friend who still lived in Latakia, to stop at a small stand of ancient cedars. Exiting the limousine, he made the short walk to the burial ground laid out in a small clearing beyond the tree line. Once there he tore a palm stalk from a nearby tree and placed it on the grave of his first wife and son, the only child he would ever have. Kneeling, he placed both hands on the freshly raked soil and then pressed them to his face. Rising, he faced Mecca and recited the Muslim prayers for the dead child and the dead adult.

The brown earth was still on his face when he returned to the limousine. The driver, Gamal, a short hawk-faced man in a white shirt and black tie, stood stiffly while he opened the car’s rear door to let Basil in, saying nothing, not making eye contact, as if they were being watched, which was doubtful since no one had followed them and there were no cars or people on the hillside as far as the eye could see. But of course anything was possible in Syria, a Stalinist state as repressive as any in the Middle East.

In 1980, the Muslim Brotherhood, angry at what it saw as Syria’s secular ways, attempted to assassinate Syrian President Hafez al-Assad at a state reception in Damascus. Two hours later, two thousand Muslim Brotherhood prisoners were massacred at Tadmor Prison. Two years later, the city of Hama, the center of Muslim Brotherhood opposition to Assad and his BAATH Party, was destroyed, over a period of three weeks, from the air, by artillery, and by ground troops going from house to house. The outside press reported twenty thousand dead, but the number was closer to thirty thousand, many of them women and children who were unable to get out in time. This is where Abdullah al-Haq, sent to today’s meeting to give him a warning, had seen “combat,” probably doing much of the door-to-door killing of innocents.

Below, the row of palm trees along the beach was silhouetted by the light of the now risen moon. As Basil watched them swaying, their fronds like the hair of young girls blown gently by the cool night breeze, his thoughts returned to the framed photograph that he had placed on the dresser in his bedroom some thirty years ago, and that he had taken a long look at while washing and changing when he first arrived. In black and white, it was of Basil and Pierre Hayek in dust-covered and sweat-stained fatigues, their arms around each other, sitting on top of a tank in full sunlight in Beirut’s Karantina slum. Both were smiling broadly, as if to say that the heat and the dust and the sweat and the war itself were trifles compared to their friendship. Taken in early 1976 when Basil was twenty and Pierre nineteen, it seemed to Basil to not only capture him and his former friend at the height of their youthful beauty, but at the last moment of their human innocence. The next day the shelling began.

We are even now, Pierre
, he thought, on the verge of sleep.
So be it.

The vibrating of his cell phone in his shirt pocket interrupted Basil from his thoughts. He fished it out and looked at the screen.
Mustafa.
He pushed the off button, and returned the phone to his pocket. He would call Mustafa later or tomorrow. His instincts, honed over long years of looking out for danger, told him the call had something to do with Colonel Haq. And Adnan and Ali. Surely Haq knew they were dead. And that they had killed Yasmine Hayek. One looks out for danger in Syria, no matter what one’s status, and Basil’s status had plummeted in recent years along with the failing yield of Dier ez-Zour. The fallen hero.

In the morning, Gamal would arrive early to carry him to the airport in Damascus. Early enough to sit and sip thick espresso and chat with Gamal and three other childhood friends, who would arrive by foot before dawn. One of them, Mahmoud, was a technocrat who would scan the small house for bugs, so that they could talk freely. Quietly but freely.