Banquo's Ghosts (34 page)

Smith’s phone rang again. “Smith,” she said. This time, O’Hanlon. “So you guys lost Abdul the Tool?”

“Kind of you to notice.”

“Anything blown up yet?”

“Not that we can tell from here. Just a lot of bumped passengers smoking cigarettes by the curb.”

“I’m headed back to the Workbench Boys’ house in Queens for a look-see.”

O’Hanlon’s impatient,
Smith thought. Impatience caused mistakes—slipups like risking a search in broad daylight with the neighbors watching. Bad idea. Problem was, first time around when they’d tailed the lads to Brooklyn and the New Utrecht Avenue apartment walk-up, Jordan the Hung Fat Tech had never gone inside after their single sweep under the door. Their Sniffer showed no evidence of explosives. Or radiation. None. Nada. Then the surveillance had traipsed halfway across
Queens to stare at grimy row houses. But nobody’d gotten a Sniffer under there yet at all, just some wiretaps.

“All right,” she told her boss. “But you do know Abdul could be headed back to you
right now?”

“Relax. I’ve got a Con Ed guy with me.” That meant an agent disguised as a guy from the gas and electric company Consolidated Edison. Most likely Wesson, as a Con Ed employee in a blue jumper, which would at least give them a plausible excuse to be snooping around the place. “We’ve a report of your neighbor smelling gas”—a great standby.

O’Hanlon watched Wesson, his Con Ed Girl disappear around the side of the crummy Queens row house. She unlatched the gate in the chain-link fence at the front yard. Nearly tripping over the uneven concrete driveway—some slabs higher than others, with grass growing in between the cracks. Then moved around to the back. The backyard was overgrown, with browned-out shrubs and tangled ankle-high weeds, tramped down around a few flat stepping stones. A weathered deck, gray and warped.

First she knocked loudly, calling out, “Con Ed.” Then, as she waited, glanced around into the other backyards. An outdoor above-ground makeshift swimming pool was left over from summer next door. There were the rusted-out grills and rickety swing sets and garden hoses and the abandoned toys one would expect in the backyards of such a neighborhood. But no peering eyes that she could see, so she slipped a thin steel wedge, a jimmy, into the door jamb down near the knob and coaxed the doorknob till the door came free.

Agent Wesson stepped into the kitchen. Her skin crawled. Dirty dishes overflowed in the sink, and the smell of overripe Middle Eastern food filled her nostrils. Baba ghanoush gone wild. The linoleum floor curled up near the walls and looked like it would need a sandblaster to be anything near clean ever again. Ten old pizza boxes were stacked in one corner. Next, the dining room. She recalled seeing the ghostly outline microwave image in the Hung Fat van of a workbench in the
Brooklyn New Utrecht Avenue apartment. This time no workbench but a round dining room table piled high with bills, Arabic newspapers, and a
Windows for Dummies
book.

The workbench here amounted to no more than a corner of the dining room table: a soldering iron, a tiny hacksaw, razors, and—strangely—a sewing machine, next to it a Starbucks travel mug stuffed with large acrylic paint brushes. Underneath the dining room table a stackable plastic bin of the sort you bought at the Container Store. It was full of a couple of dozen tubes of artist’s paint. Wesson picked them up to look more closely: titanium white, an oil color, lead-based. A couple of plastic shopping bags from Blick’s Art Supply had been tossed in the bin too.

Next to the bin were some crumpled up and shredded . . .
what?
Mystery garments. Maybe vinyl vests? The shreds of vests? Wesson couldn’t tell. And next to them a stack of about a dozen pairs of brand new Jordache blue jeans.

She moved into the living room and opened a side cabinet that was part of the TV console. A couple of Adam Sandler DVDs. Did they know he’s Jewish? A Jenna Jameson video,
Hell on Heels.
She suspected the lads didn’t care about Jenna’s faith one way or another. And another unmarked DVD. Wesson picked up the radio on her belt and asked O’Hanlon how she was doing on time.

“How the hell should I know?” came the grumpy reply.

Wesson popped the DVD into the player, searched the cluttered coffee table for the remote, and hit play. Sure enough, Arabic chanting and someone in a white hood kneeling in front of masked AK-47-toting kidnappers. Yep, that’s our boys: A Beheading Video.

But then suddenly the scene shifted, and she stared at a new scene. Neon lights overlooking a troika of bearded, turbaned men. The hooded prisoner sat in a chair. Some kind of trial or tribunal. The pale canvas hood was removed. The prisoner was a woman. An accuser stepped into the scene, pointing and shouting. The woman in the chair stared at him with doleful eyes. But did not speak. The accuser—a man—was clearly angry at the woman. Was she his wife, daughter, sister? Wesson didn’t understand Farsi or Arabic, but clearly the accuser was enraged. And somehow the FBI agent knew the accused
was being charged with the worst crime in the world. Worse than murder. Adultery? She’d heard that victims of rape were often charged with adultery, as if it were the victim’s fault. Then justice was meted out. They called them honor killings.

The hood was slid over the woman’s head once more, and the camera wrenched away. A new scene flashed onto the screen. Daytime, in a backward village square. Rude houses, blank staring eyes of dark windows. A ring of men circled something on the ground. Each man carried a rock; first one threw his rock at the thing on the ground; then another threw his; then another. More rocks were brought and passed around the circle of men; the camera moved in for a closer look. The object on the ground looked like a soccer ball. The men were throwing rocks at a soccer ball—no! The thing was the hood, the woman’s canvas hood. She’d been buried up to her neck, and what Wesson was staring at was her
head
. The rocks began to fall again. The men were stoning her. Stoning the woman to death. The pale canvas hood changed from light to dark. Bleeding through the fabric as stone after stone found its mark. The image ended abruptly.

Shaken, Wesson slapped the video back into its case. Jesus, who
were
these people? What kind of ghouls watched something like that? She turned away from the TV, took a deep breath, and climbed the stairs on watery legs.

Three bedrooms, mattresses on the floors. Wesson walked into each room. They were stuffy and smelled of sweat and other bodily fluids she didn’t want to think about. Clothes strewn everywhere. They wore briefs, tidy whities—apparently not realizing that they shouldn’t be worn by any straight man over age thirteen. The closets mostly empty, with a stack of
Penthouses
and
Puritan
magazines below the hangers. A communal porn stash.

In the last bedroom, three brand new backpacks were piled on each other. Wesson picked one up. Surprisingly heavy. She patted it and noticed the pack was reinforced, with stiff leather seams sewn into the sides. Curious. Better keep moving.

The dingy bathroom had crumpled tissues in the corners and more than its share of shed pubic hairs. The mirror was speckled with
toothpaste dreck. Fetid water struggled to drain down the stopped-up sink. The Hung Fat crew should all chip in to get the boys a maid. But the shower took her aback.

The gleaming new shower head could have been picked by the producers of
Extreme Make-Over: Home Edition
. And the tub sported the damnedest shower curtain she had ever seen. You could zip it up all around to totally enclose a bather—a shower for the Boy in the Bubble. She opened a small cabinet in one of the walls and saw a bunch of sanitary materials of the sort you might find in a hospital—gloves, plastic footsies, shower caps.
What in God ’s name were these grungy bastards thinking . . .

O’Hanlon’s barking voice interrupted her reverie from her belt: “You’ve got about thirty seconds to get the hell out of there.”

Shit! That was advance warning?
Wesson started running down the steps, getting her story straight if she was caught inside. Front or back door—make a decision. Front or back? She headed to the back. Through the kitchen window she saw some lady from the house next door hanging wet laundry on a line. A Rottweiler with a studded collar was doing his business in the other adjacent backyard. Dammit! They could catch her either way. This was supposed to be a sneak-and-peek search—praise be to the Patriot Act—but so much for the sneak.

Outside the house O’Hanlon saw Wesson wasn’t going to make it, so he called an audible, a naked bootleg. Hakim-Abdul-Mohammed hadn’t parked on the street. He’d parked around the block. So O’Hanlon never saw him coming; the guy simply appeared a couple of dozen yards away from the front door. O’Hanlon jumped out of the car and tried to angle his approach just enough so he wouldn’t seem to be running up directly to Hakim.

“Hey, hey,” he called. Hakim stopped. “Hey, buddy.” Hakim waited for him to get closer, a look of dark suspicion on his face. “Can you tell me which way is Vine Street? Oh, there isn’t a Vine Street? Maybe it’s Wine Street?”

At that very moment Con Ed babe Wesson came out the front door. Yes, the front door, and O’Hanlon nearly fainted. Hakim-Abdul-Mohammed forgot about the strange Irishman in front of his nose and slammed through the metal gate.

“Hey! What you doing in my house? Who give you key?”

Wesson completely ignored him like the good bureaucrat she was pretending to be. She made a big show of getting out her radio, and with what little presence of mind O’Hanlon still possessed, he surreptitiously switched off his own so it wouldn’t squawk. Wesson, the complete Con Ed factotum, talked into her little black box: “Yeah. Done over here. No odor. No traces.” Then boldly to Hakim: “Are you the owner of this building?”

Taken aback, the guy merely muttered, “No, no, we only rent.”

“Well, listen up. We got a report of a gas odor coming from your house. Mandatory inspection. Nobody home, we still check. False report. Sorry about the back door. If you wish to file a complaint you can contact the district office in Grand Army Plaza, nine to five Monday through Thursday. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

On the sidewalk, O’Hanlon stared at them with his mouth open.

If Hakim-Abdul-Mohammed missed Wesson’s nonexistent Con Ed truck he didn’t remark upon it. He went inside somewhat chastened and clearly impressed with Consolidated Edison of the greater New York area. O’Hanlon vanished back into his sedan and drove in one direction; Wesson walked purposefully in another, up to the next house, and knocked on the door. There was a gas odor reported, and gas she would find.

Later, her boss got her on the radio.

“Uh, assuming you haven’t found any leaks, shall I pick you up somewhere?”

“No,” she radioed back. “I’ll meet you in the Hung Fat van later. You just square it with the two neighbors, a Hausfrau and the proud owner of a puppy dog. Also the Con Ed Brooklyn office, confirming the gas story in case Hakim really decides to file a complaint. Maybe they can send him some undecipherable paperwork, a quitclaim, confirming our inspection.”

They gathered around a table in a Banquo & Duncan conference room that evening to take stock of the day, Banquo presiding. Little six-ounce
bottles of water sat in front of each chair, a muted TV turned to a cable channel up in a corner of the room.

He’d never been a shouter. Not because he didn’t run across many people who needed shouting at, but because he knew what the shouting would do—unhinge within him a ghastly temper the control of which he’d made a habit of a lifetime, lest its thrashing wrath destroy everything around him.

He suppressed his irritation and bore in on the problem. Banquo leaned forward, both elbows on the table. “So do we know anything that’s not being reported about the airport incidents?”

Wallets replied, “No, not really. At LaGuardia, a half dozen guys ostentatiously started praying at a security checkpoint at each terminal. Prayer rugs, the whole nine yards. People got nervous. Then some bizarre and confrontational behavior with the TSA personnel. In two cases, they managed to run through the checkpoints, which meant the concourse had to be evacuated. I got a look at one of these guys at US Air. Young, shaved, and well dressed, spouting legal mumbo jumbo as soon as he was outside with a camera or two on him before the cops got him in the car to take him away. Clearly designed to have the most sympathetic spokesman possible for racial insensitivity complaints. Same basic story at JFK, although they didn’t get through security, and at Newark—because the LaGuardia action started a little sooner—the other airports were informed and shut them down as soon as they started praying.”