Gods and Fathers (20 page)

“Put your hand on the cutting board, Everett,” Jack McCann said. He was standing to the right of the seated, white-haired lawyer. In his right hand McCann held the meat cleaver that he had found, along with the two-inch thick cutting board, in Basil al-Hassan’s uber-designed and exceptionally well-stocked kitchen.

“What?”

“This is crude and old-fashioned,” McCann said, “but I’ve never seen it fail with an amateur like you.”

“You’re insane.”

Jack looked at Clarke Goode, who was standing to the left of Stryker at the large and solidly built oak utility table in Hassan’s kitchen, and nodded. Goode, whose hand was bigger than the meat cleaver, took hold of the lawyer’s right wrist and pressed it to the cutting board.

“Spread your fingers,” Goode said. “Unless you want to lose them all at once.”

Matt DeMarco, standing next to McCann, leaned in as Stryker complied. He looked at his watch. He had no doubt that Mustafa’s deadline was real. At one PM tomorrow, Jade would be dead. And sometime tomorrow morning Crow would be calling, wanting to see Farah. They had to be working together, Mustafa and Crow. He was glad he had changed his mind about involving Jack and Clarke. They had “arrested” Stryker outside his office building an hour ago. Another kidnapping. But how else to sit him down and open him up? If this turned out badly, they’d all be going to prison.

“Stryker,” Matt said. “Listen to me. Syria’s been on the United States’ terrorist-state list longer than any other country. You’ve been fronting for them, setting up phony corporations, misstating the true stockholders, buying property, all illegal, all as an unregistered agent of an enemy country. Only the people in this room know this at the moment. If you don’t help us, you’re going to jail. If you do, you can walk out of here. I don’t care how you make your money.”

“Where’s Hassan?” Stryker said. “Why am I here?”

“He left the country,” Clarke answered. “He was working undercover for the NYPD.”

“One more time,” Jack McCann said, raising the heavy, professional-grade cleaver, its five-inch wide blade gleaming, “can you reach Mustafa al-Rahim?”

“Fuck him,” Clarke Goode said. “Take the pinky.”

“
Yes
,” Stryker said before Clarke had finished his sentence. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and soaking through the collar and armpits of his thirty-count, custom made Egyptian cotton dress shirt. There was even sweat in his eyes, which were darting back and forth from McCann to Matt.

“Good,” McCann said. “Let me ask you a few questions first.”

“Can I wipe my face?” Stryker asked.

“Sure.” McCann reached into his back pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief and handed it to the lawyer, who took it with his free hand and wiped the sweat from his eyes and brow.

“Let me,” Matt said. He could see that Stryker had given up. His Ivy League education and country club existence had prepared him to betray his country for a few million dollars, but not for this. Not for Clarke Goode’s big black hand flattening his wrist to a scarred cutting board with a meat cleaver hovering over his manicured fingers.

“Has he come to your office?” Matt asked Stryker.

“No, never,” the lawyer answered.

“How many deals have you done with him?”

“Four, the Excelsior, the two places in Queens, and the house in Locust Valley.”

“What’s the other place in Queens?”

“An old factory and warehouse on 137
^th
Street.”

“The one behind Lucky’s?”

“I believe so.”

“Why are you visiting his son?”

“To make sure he’s not being mistreated. To show the prison authorities he has some clout.”

“And the money for the property purchases was all wired to your trust account?”

“Yes.”

“If we trace it,” Goode said, “where do think it will lead us?”

“I don’t know,” Stryker said, his eyes shifting from Matt to Goode. “Mustafa told me he was working for a wealthy oil man. I thought it was Hassan.”

“Have you met Mustafa?” Matt asked.

“Yes, twice.”

“Where?”

“In Battery Park, near my office.”

“Where in Battery Park?”

“At the War Memorial.”

“The concrete slabs?”

“Yes. By the eagle.”

“Did he come alone?”

“Yes.”

“What were those meetings about?”

“Both times it was to pass letters from his son that I smuggled out of the prison.”

“Good, tell him you have another one,” said Clarke.

“No,” Matt said. “Tell him he has to sign papers for Wael’s release, that he’s getting out tomorrow. Tell him he has to agree to take custody of Wael.”

“Here’s your phone,” Jack said. They had thoroughly searched Stryker both in their car and when they arrived at the Park Avenue apartment. “Call him. Tell him to meet you there at ten.”

“What if he says no?”

“He won’t,” Matt said.

“What if he does?”

“He won’t,” Matt said. “Trust me.”

“Put that thing down,” Stryker said, looking at the meat cleaver.

“No,” said McCann. “If you fuck around then the whole hand comes off.”

“Don’t miss,” Goode said, edging his hand a bit north of Stryker’s wrist, but continuing to apply the same pressure, if not more.

With his free hand, the white-haired—and now white-faced—lawyer took the phone from Jack McCann and began dialing.

“It’s locked,” said Michael. He had just returned from the men’s room at Lucky’s, where he had taken a moment to try the door at the end of the back hall that led down to the basement, the door that he and Adnan and Ali used to use when they took the tunnel from the building across the alley.

“Let’s go,” Antonio replied.

“No, we’ve only been here ten minutes.”

“I don’t want to wait.”

“We have to. They know me. It won’t look good.”

“How long?”

“One more beer. Drink up.”

“If you say so.”

Michael nodded to Rex and pointed to the glasses in front of him and Antonio. Rex, smiling, began pouring two fresh beers from one of the taps arranged in the middle of the long bar. When he brought them over, Michael said, “Is Mustafa coming in? I have to talk to him.”

“He’s gone,” the bartender answered. “Visiting his sick brother in Syria.”

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you reach him?”

“I can try to get a message to him.”

“Tell him I want to take the deal, but I want to speak to him first. He’ll know what I’m talking about. Ask him to call me.”

“Of course.”

“What about Moe and Curley? Have they been around?”

“Moe and Curly?”

“The two guys who are always here. One has a funny beard, like the ace of spades. I think they work for Mustafa.”

“What about them?”

“I’m just asking. Maybe they can reach Mustafa for me. I really need to talk to him.”

“They’re gone too,” said Rex. He wasn’t smiling now, but Michael didn’t care. The whole Lucky’s crew had betrayed him, starting with Adnan and Ali. Had made a fool of him, had framed him for murder.

“OK, thanks,” Michael said. “I appreciate your help. I’ll wait to hear from Mustafa.”

“Why are we driving around Queens?” Antonio asked.

“I want to make sure we’re not being followed.”

Antonio remained silent. His mom kidnapped. Fuck. Could that really be?

“Keep checking your mirror,” Michael said. “I’ll pull over by that lot up there.”

The vacant lot was surrounded by a chain link fence trampled down in two or three places, where locals had entered to strip an abandoned construction site of all moveable objects. Just a cinder block foundation, framed by rubble and strewn junk, including a muddy mattress and a twisted tricycle with no wheels. It was on a corner, meaning it had good views of cars coming from two sides.

“I should call the cops,” Antonio said.

“My dad said not to.”

“Why not?”

“I told you. They’ll kill her.”

“There’s no one following us.”

“OK,” said Michael. He had been watching the traffic as far down both blocks as he could see. No one had stopped when they had, no one had circled the block. “One thing,” he said.

“What?”

“We could get killed.”

“You told me.”

“I’m telling you again.”

When they talked on the phone when he was in Florida, his mom had sounded funny to Antonio. A little different. After being the only man in her life for the last five years, since she divorced asshole number two, he could tell when something was different, when something was on her mind. Caught up in his own life, he had never asked her what that particular thing might be. A man? A case she was working on? Money? It was in her again last night. He should have asked her. “Tell me the plan,” he said.

“We probably have to go in through a window. The tunnel has a light, but we won’t turn it on.”

“What kind of a tunnel? Can I stand in it?”

“It’s a hallway, really. Yes you can stand. You might have to duck a little. How tall are you?”

“Six-five.”

“The door to the basement opens behind an old wooden coal stall. We can check the room out and not be seen.”

“What kind of a room?”

“A square room with junk in it, some shelves with junk on them. Old paint cans, shit like that.”

“How big?”

“Not big, like the size of your bedroom. The ceiling’s low, so you’ll have to duck some more.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

Matteo, Sr. had taken Matt to the East Coast War Memorial on the day it was dedicated by President Kennedy in 1963. His father’s brother Sabato, a merchant marine man lost in the North Atlantic in 1942, was one of the names inscribed on the eight stone slabs that flanked a bronze eagle on a raised semi-circular concrete platform at the north end of the park. Matt, one at the time, remembered nothing of the day. He liked to go to the dedications, Matteo, if he could. He went by himself to the dedication in 1951, by President Eisenhower, of the Marine Corps National Memorial in Washington. When Matt was ten, in 1972, his dad took him to see the Corp’s Sunset Parade at the Memorial, featuring the Drum and Bugle Corps and the Silent Drill Platoon.
The flag flies every day here,
Matteo had said.
It’s the only one.
In 1986 they went to the dedication of the Beirut Memorial at Camp Lejuene, where the tears fell like rain, including Matteo’s. They were planning to go to the opening ceremony for the Korean War Memorial scheduled for July, 1993, when Matteo died. Matt went without him, but that was his last, until tonight.
Are you here, Pop?
he said to himself.
I hope so
.

“He’s late,” Matt thought. They had arrived early, he and Jack and Clarke and Stryker, in time to give the lawyer his simple instructions:
Stand there and wait, we’ll do the rest
, and to post themselves as invisibly as they could. His watch now read 10:05. He was sitting on a bench under a copse of trees about fifty yards away, watching Stryker, who was standing next to the eagle, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his camel hair coat up. The eagle was lit by recessed ground lights, which formed a spotlight of sorts on Stryker. The wind off of New York Bay was up and whipping the lawyer’s white hair into a froth.
A character out of Shakespeare,
Matt thought,
or a Greek tragedy, the king about to take a big fall.

His gloved hand gripped the Ingram 19 in his coat pocket, produced nonchalantly by Jack McCann from the glove compartment of his unmarked car on the short ride down to the tip of Manhattan.
CB’s got plenty of these
, Jack had said, smiling, holding his own Ingram to Stryker’s ribs in the back seat. Jack and Clarke were in the trees behind the platform, also some fifty yards away. The starkly bare trees afforded little cover, but the night sky was filled with thick clouds, making the park beyond the cone of light around the eagle a dense, near-impenetrable black.

A bearded figure appeared, bulky in a short thick coat and a woolen cap, climbing the six or seven steps that swept visitors up to the memorial’s promenade. He had appeared from Matt’s right, seemingly out of nowhere, but then Matt realized he had been standing among the trees nearby all along, waiting in the same black cover as he and Jack and Clarke were, doing his own reconnaissance. Matt got to his feet and began walking toward the memorial. Jack and Clarke, he knew, were doing the same. He had taken only a few steps, still hidden by the night, when two other men appeared, from behind the stone slabs, and took up positions on either side of Mustafa and Stryker. Both were wearing dark leather overcoats. One was tall and thin, with a perfect V-shaped beard on his face, the other squat and full-bearded. Both had their hands in the pockets of their overcoats.

When Matt reached the steps he pulled his Ingram out and stepped quickly onto the platform. “Hold it,” he said, pointing the pistol at Mustafa and his two young soldiers. “Don’t move.” At almost the same moment, Jack and Clarke appeared, Jack from the right, Clarke from the left, their pistols in their hands, their arms extended. “Get down,” Clarke shouted. “Down on the ground.” He was about twenty steps away from the four men clustered under the bronze eagle, the ground lights on them as if they were players on a stage, frozen for a second, but waiting for a cue to perform. V-beard and his partner each drew pistols from their coat pockets, but before they could take aim, Matt began firing, as did Jack and Clarke. Mustafa pushed Stryker in front of him as this hell broke loose. In a matter of seconds, Mustafa, Stryker, V-beard and his partner were down, all shot in the chest, all dead.

“Leave your guns,” said Jack. “Take theirs.”

“Leave our guns?” Matt said.

“They’re CB guns, Matt,” said Clarke. “Untraceable.”

“These two guys killed Mustafa and Stryker,” Jack said, picking up a Glock 17 and placing his Ingram next to V-beard’s gloved hand. “God knows why. That
is
Mustafa, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Matt answered.

“Good, drop your gun next to him,” said Clarke. Matt did as he was told, while Goode picked up full-beard’s gun and replaced it with his own.

“Must have been a hell of a shoot out,” said Jack, smiling his wicked smile.