Gods and Fathers (21 page)

Michael and Antonio stopped at the door to Lucky’s basement. They had groped the secret passage’s rough stone wall in the pitch black, keeping their eyes on the rectangular line of light around the door at its far end. Standing still, trying not to breathe, they listened to the faint but unmistakable sound of rock music on the other side of the door. Turning the knob as silently as he could, Michael pushed the door open and they stepped quietly into the basement, finding themselves, as Michael had said, behind the seven-foot high wooden frame of a long abandoned coal stall. The music was louder now, coming from the opposite side of the room, which they could see was lit by an electric bulb in a wire cage hung between dirt-encrusted steel beams in the exposed ceiling. They crouched and waited for some other sound, but heard nothing.

Gesturing to Antonio to stay low, Michael stepped on the concrete foundation that held the stall and peered over the top plank. A man, about twenty, his eyes closed, his head against the wall to his right, an automatic rifle resting on his lap, was sitting on the bottom step of the open wooden staircase that led up to Lucky’s back hallway. Next to him on an overturned plastic bucket was a transistor radio on which the Doors’
Light My Fire
was playing at low volume through the hiss of interspersed static. Michael scanned the room quickly, then crouched back behind the wooden wall. He mouthed
I don’t see her
to Antonio, and was about to indicate that there was a man with a gun, when the teenager gripped the top of the stall and began to rise to look for himself. As he did, the top plank tore off with a loud crack. Plank in hand, Antonio ducked and froze, as did Michael. At first they heard only the music, but within a second or two came the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching the coal bin. When they got close, Antonio sprung out and swung the plank full force, striking the guard, if that’s what he was, in the side of the head, knocking him to the concrete floor and sending his rifle clattering across the room. Before the man could move, Antonio swung the plank again, this time hitting him square on the top of his head and knocking him out cold.

“He’s out,” Michael said. “Listen. Do you hear anything?”

They stood still for a second or two, looking down at the felled rifleman.

“No,” Antonio said, finally. “Just the music.”

“Is she here?” said Michael. They both looked around the room, which was filled with more junk than Michael had remembered. Dusty cases of old soda bottles were piled on the floor. Gallon paint cans, bags of grout and stacks of cracked ceramic tiles lined the shelves, a chipped sink covered with cobwebs sat in a corner. The smell of mold and must filled the air.

“What was he guarding if it wasn’t her?” Antonio said.

“She has to be…
There
.” Michael pointed to a tattered blanket, army green, hanging over the space under the stairs. Antonio reached the spot in one long step, sweeping the blanket away to reveal Jade kneeling on a dirty mattress, her hands trussed behind her back to her feet, a bruise covering the whole of one side of her face, gagged, a towel tied around her eyes.

“
Mom
,” Antonio said, kneeling and taking her face in his hands. “Mom.”

The Catamount Motel, with its apple orchard and pretty, oval pond, was set in a small hollow, surrounded by rocky, tree-covered outcroppings on all sides. On one of these outcroppings, behind a row of stunted mountain laurel, crouched Matt DeMarco and Basil al-Hassan. Both had field glasses to their eyes, which they had trained at the moment on the entrance of the motel’s driveway on Route 12. Occasionally one or the other would swing his binoculars over to look at the door to Room 6, and then back again. The same strong wind that had riled Everett Stryker’s thick white hair last night had swept away the clouds over the Hudson Valley, leaving a clear, pale blue sky through which the sun was shining brightly. The surrounding snow-clad fields and woods, the frozen pond, and the motel’s low-pitched snow-covered roof were glistening with a liquid whiteness as the first warm sunlight in a month reached them.

Adnan Farah was not in Room 6. He had been there for the past three days, but was now on his way to Beirut at the request of the Dutch government. From conversations he had had with McCann and Goode, who had been summoned to the commissioner’s office for a six AM meeting, Matt had learned that The Hague had not taken well the loss of the Fuchs brothers, who had dedicated most of their lives to keeping The Netherlands safe. Apparently Josef and Wilem had been on the phone while they were holed up with Farah in Room 6 of the Catamount. The Dutch prime minister had called the Secretary-General of the UN, and persuaded him to demand that Farah, a suspect in the UN’s investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, be handed over to Monteverde, and that Erhard Fuchs’ surveillance log be made available, as was Ehrhard’s wish, to the Manhattan District Attorney. The US, officially in full support of the UN investigation, had agreed.
Bill Crow?
Jack had said,
He doesn’t exist
.
Alec Mason? A suicide
.
That’s a different league they play in, Matt.

Someone high up in the US Justice Department had called Jon Healy, who had then moved, with undignified alacrity, to dismiss the charges against Michael.

Jade, who had been mistreated but not raped, was at Matt’s house in Pound Ridge, resting. Michael and Antonio were there as well. Jack and Clarke had rounded up some off-duty NYPD officers to do protection duty. Many more than were needed had offered. Matt had called Crow several times, to try to lure him out, but his calls had gone to a dead phone.
Back into the woodwork
, Matt had said to himself,
with the other cockroaches.

Which left Haq, the mastermind, the start of all the killing, the dead bodies all pointing back at him. Basil wanted him dead, and Matt, leaving Jack and Clarke out of it, had agreed to help the man who had posted Michael’s bail and buried his mother, who had tried to help him rescue Jade, and who was a Muslim on the side of the angels in an Islamic world gone mad.

Early this morning a young Syrian associate of Hassan’s had materialized in a beat-up van, wired the door to Room 6 with a quiet professionalism, and vanished in the space of thirty minutes. Then, Basil, through a maze of official and unofficial channels, had reached Haq, his countryman, his compatriot, and told him that he knew where Adnan Farah was and that he felt it his patriotic duty to inform him of the young technician’s whereabouts.
He cannot move,
Basil had told Haq.
He is sick. He wants to talk to you, Colonel, only you. The people that were holding him have vanished. He says they told him many interesting things about the Hariri investigation, things he would like to pass along to you personally. He called me, but he won’t speak to me, only to you or Mustafa, who has returned to Syria to be with his sick brother.

Why would he believe you? Matt, who had heard Basil’s end of the conversation, asked.

He thinks I am desperate, trying to curry favor, Basil had answered. He cannot reach Mustafa. He may think his faithful servant has turned on him, that he has his own agenda.

Freeing his son?

Yes. Adnan can expose him. I think he will come.

What if he doesn’t show?

One way or another, I will need asylum.

They had taken up their position after the call to Haq. Three hours had passed. A few minutes ago, a pickup went by on Route 12, the only car they had seen all morning.

“We could just leave,” said Matt. “The bomb will go off whether we’re here or not.”

“He may send someone else,” said Basil. “I want…”

Before Basil could finish his sentence, the gleam of a car turning off Route 12 onto the Catamount’s snow-covered driveway caught both of their eyes at the same time. They raised their binoculars to see a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates churning slowly through the snow toward the motel, then stopping in front of Room 6. Three men got out, one from the front passenger side and the others from the back, all dressed like bankers in overcoats and wool scarves, and headed across the small concrete apron that ran along the front of the rooms. The driver stayed behind, pulling the large sedan forward into the motel’s parking lot, where he began to make a sweeping U-turn in the snow. Matt followed the sedan with his binoculars for a second, then returned them to Room 6.

“Is one of them Haq?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hassan replied. “The one on the right.”

Matt could see that Haq was older, perhaps sixty, the other two younger, in their twenties. One of the young ones approached the door first, reached for the doorknob and began to turn it. Then all three disappeared in a ball of fire as Room 6 exploded, spewing smoke and burning debris out to a fifty-foot perimeter, some of it, still burning, landing on the hood of the sedan, which had come to a sudden stop in the middle of its U-turn. Matt and Basil watched as the Mercedes, snow spraying from the treads of its German-made tires, circled the ashen debris field, sped along the driveway and turned onto Route 12, disappearing quickly from view behind the tall pine trees that lined it.

“Let’s go,” Basil said, smiling, getting to his feet.

Then a shot rang out and the handsome Syrian was on the ground, a bullet hole, perfectly round, ringed with blood, in the middle of his forehead.

“Fuck,” Matt said, throwing himself flat and bellying toward Hassan. “Basil?” he said, when he reached him, taking him by the arm and shaking him. Dead. “Fuck.” Then another shot hit a tree behind him and another hit the small boulder he had been crouching behind. Staying on his stomach, Matt reached for his binoculars, crawled to a small opening between the boulder and the mountain laurel and took a look across the hollow, a distance of about a hundred yards. The sun was behind him, shining on the opposite rocky ledge. His eyes were drawn to a quick bright flash. Swinging the glasses toward it, he saw Bill Crow, on one knee, aiming a scoped rifle in his direction.

Looking around, Matt saw a laurel branch, narrow at the bottom but still leafed at the top, in the snow some ten feet away. He belly-crawled to it, and, reaching it, turned onto his back and pulled off his black Gore-Tex jacket. Still on his back, looking up through the trees to that pretty blue sky, he placed the leafy end of the branch inside his jacket, up near the collar. Taking hold of the other end, he raised the jacket and almost immediately a shot ripped through it above the breast pocket, where a person’s heart would be. He pulled the jacket down, turned onto his belly again and elbowed his way back to the opening next to the boulder. He saw nothing, no flashes from a scope, no Crow.
No more moving
, he said to himself.
The sun’s behind you, there won’t be a reflection from your lens.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the SIG P226 Jack had given him last night to replace the Ingram he had left at the War Memorial.
It’s a present,
Jack had said, pulling the pistol from a case of un-numbered automatic and semi-automatic handguns that his friends in the Counterterrorism Bureau had given him.
You may still need it.

Wait
, he said to himself.
Wait until dark
.

But he didn’t have to wait. There was Crow stepping down from his rock perch, his rifle slung over his shoulder. When he reached the pond, Matt, still fully prone, extended his arms, cradled the SIG and aimed it at Crow’s feet.
It’ll kick like a motherfucker
, McCann had said.
Aim low, keep it on automatic. The rounds will spray upward.
When Crow was almost to his side of the pond, Matt pulled firmly on the trigger, then watched as the Native American with the large chip on his shoulder, the chip that had killed him, pitched forward onto the ice, slid a few feet and came to a stop, his arms and legs splayed out like he was skydiving. Skydiving and bleeding at the same time, the ice around him turning a deep shimmering crimson.

The thumping sound from the driveway re-announced itself when Matt turned off the water after rinsing the last of the lunch dishes. Except for that, the house and the whole neighborhood was quiet, as it always was in Pound Ridge. Peaceful. The boys had devoured the potatoes and eggs and hot peppers he had made and served with thick slices of Italian bread, and then gone out and shoveled the last of the snow off the half-court he had laid out eight years ago. The court had never been used, and neither had the Wilson ball that Michael retrieved from a utility closet in the garage. The day was clear and sunny and warm, the first touch of spring in the air. Jade was out buying food for dinner.

Last night in bed, she had told him about her conversation with Antonio.

He cried, Matt. He said it wasn’t right that my life was so hard. Only God can judge, he said. He said he knew that’s why I went to church all the time, to ask God for something. He said he would make my life better. He promised he would.

He’s a good kid, Matt had said, holding Jade close, hoping that her porn movies, a teenaged lapse of judgment that she saw as her big sin, were behind her at last.
We punish ourselves,
Matteo used to say
. We make the stick from hard wood and pick it up and use it until God takes it from our hand.

In his bedroom office, Matt made a fire, then sat and turned to the two weeks’ worth of mail that he had pulled from his mailbox last night. He sorted it, threw away the junk stuff, then opened the bills, putting them aside for payment. From here, through the window at his desk alcove, he could see the boys playing. Michael was no match for Antonio, but he didn’t seem to understand that. He kept crouching, hustling, dogging the taller and much more graceful and naturally athletic teenager, making him work for every basket. When he had the ball, Michael was equally blind to his own lack of talent. Using his elbows like pistons he somehow managed to score twice while Matt was watching, to Antonio’s seven buckets. Not bad for a kid with soccer legs and no jumping ability. Antonio, for his part, was not taking Michael lightly. He scowled as much as he smiled at his much smaller opponent’s tenacity.
I think they like each other.

After the bills, there was only one item left, a padded brown envelope with Debra’s Park Avenue return address in the upper left corner.
Debra, what are you sending me?
In the sixteen years they had been divorced she had never sent him so much as a note, not even a sarcastic one. Inside were two DVDs in white, unlabeled sleeves, and a note, in Debra’s hand, on beautiful cream-colored paper with her initials embossed in flowing script on top. He picked up the envelope he had just torn open to look at the postmark. March 3rd, the day she killed herself. Outside, the thumping continued. He could hear Antonio laugh and say something to Michael.

He read the note first:

Matt,

Please tell Michael not to plead guilty to anything. The enclosed videos prove his innocence. There is another video that may come out after I’m gone. So be it. You don’t owe me anything, not after I turned Michael against you, but I’m asking you, for his sake, to defend me. What I did was very bad, but I would have stopped Adnan and Ali. I was planning to. Blame it on my drugs. They made me more paranoid, not less, more insecure, not less. I was hallucinating, playing out a secret wish that I knew I could stop at any moment. Mustafa tricked me, and used Adnan and Ali for his own purposes. When I told him to put a stop to it, he told me they could not be reached. He said they had run away with the money. And then it happened, and I entered hell.

One more thing, tell Michael about the day we met, the person I used to be, that we loved each other once. And that I will always love him.

Debra

March 3, 2009

He slipped the first DVD into the slot on the TV on the shelf to the right of his desk and pushed the play button. After some static and a gray screen, Adnan and Ali appeared, knocking on the door to an apartment with the number 1102 on it. The date and time were running digitally along the bottom left.
January 30, 2009, 1:18 PM, 1:19 PM…
Yasmine Hayek let them in, and the short video came to an abrupt end.
You must have stolen this from Mustafa
, Matt said out loud,
that took some heart.

He ejected the first DVD, inserted the second one and pushed the play button again, expecting a continuation of the first tape, perhaps Adnan and Ali coming out of Yasmine’s apartment.
Again the static and again the gray screen, but now there was Debra, sitting at a desk in an office somewhere, a small, feminine study. Park Avenue, most likely. Adnan and Ali were standing across from her. And there was sound.

Sit
, Debra said. She was impeccably dressed, as usual. Her long dark hair framed her handsome face, as usual. But something about her was not as usual, something that chilled Matt’s heart as he sat and watched.

As you wish
,
Mrs.
The two young killers sat on chairs with flower print cushions facing his ex-wife.

Have you considered my offer?

Yes.

Are you willing to do this for me?

Yes.

Adnan, the smart one, was doing the talking.

Here,
Debra said.
There’s ten thousand dollars there
. She handed a thick brown envelope across the desk. Adnan took it.

Do you know where she lives, the Excelsior, apartment 1102?

Yes, we know.

Do you have your tickets?

Yes.

I do not wish to see you again, ever.

As you wish, Mrs.

The date and time ran across the bottom of this DVD as well, January 25, 2009, 5:02 PM. 5:03PM…

Matt ejected the DVD and brought it with him to the window at his desk. The thumping had stopped. Michael and Antonio were sitting on the ground, back to back, against the steel post that held the backboard. Michael’s face was flushed and he was laughing. Antonio was smiling and shaking his head. Jade was pulling into the driveway. The boys got up and began to help her unload the groceries.

Matt took the second DVD and the note and brought them over to the fireplace, where the fire was crackling, giving off a warmth he did not feel.
Debra
, he said, pressing the thumb and index finger of his free hand to his eyes, seeing his ex-wife’s face, young and beautiful, on the day they met in 1987, and then on the day she killed herself, when he told her about Mustafa’s secret taping; death, the idea of suicide, in her eyes.
Debra.

Then he threw the note and the DVD into the fire, and watched them ignite, melt and disappear.