Banquo's Ghosts (51 page)

O’Hanlon corralled his men back near the door and sent two agents outside to ensure that nobody went for the Honda, as God knows what might be in it—and waited for the hazmat team. O’Hanlon would’ve liked to have come with a hazmat, but with everything else going on, the city’s twenty or so truck squads were stretched mighty thin. And as the minutes ticked by, the DOJ lawyer grew more and more annoyed. He’d given up barking into his radio, “Okay, when dammit? Gimme an ETA.” After ten minutes, you could hear audible arguing from behind the partition in a foreign language and then desperate shouting. Suddenly one of the Workbench Boys stumbled out. The kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen—a young Jihadi scared out of his wits, panting with an open mouth.

“Stop!” O’Hanlon yelled. “No further! No further.” He trained his gun on the kid and took one step into the cavernous factory. The young man looked as if he had jumped into a huge bag of flour, except the substance on him was a shiny metallic color instead of matte white. “Get down!” O’Hanlon shouted. Cautiously, the young Jihadi dropped to his knees. “All the way down!” As the young man stretched out on his belly, he began to writhe. A moment later, convulsing in pain. Crying, no longer afraid of the gun or the G-Men—just for his life.

O’Hanlon and his four G-Men looked at one another. “What now?” one of them said.

“Don’t touch him,” O’Hanlon said.

“Can we use their own protective gear and go grab him?” another asked, referring to the abandoned work suits.

“Don’t touch
anything,
” O’Hanlon said. He looked at his radio, and a thousand curses for the tardy hazmat team ran through his mind. Ten minutes later the hazmat van pulled up, and extra protective suits were handed around. In another ten minutes, O’Hanlon, his four G-Men, and two hazmat technicians—fully suited up—walked across the concrete factory floor toward the first kid. The young man hadn’t moved
since the van arrived. He’d stopped thrashing and died quietly enough while everyone was putting on their gear.

There came the sound of movement from behind the metal partition. The other Workbench Boy stumbled out from behind the partition, gripping the wall edge for support. Everyone was close enough now to see what lay behind the barrier, a conical mound of metallic flour—what Landfill and Gravel men call a “yard”—about six foot by eight foot. Suddenly O’Hanlon realized they might have found the Holy Grail of Grunge. That this was where the raw fairy dust had been kept, perhaps added to secretly, kilo after kilo—only waiting for pickup by the backpack teams to mix and load into their satchels. Waiting for orders. He made a mental note to have Bryce track down who owned or leased this dump.

The two Jihadis had simply come for a scheduled pickup, about to don their protective gear to get a few scoops, when the door blew open. Then ran into the metallic pile to escape O’Hanlon and Co. Perhaps even draw the G-Men along. An act of suicidal bravery, or stupidity. Perversity? Sacrifice? Devotion? Perhaps all of the above.

The last Jihadi stepped toward them, labored step after labored step. Everyone stood frozen, horrified by the sight. His flesh was coming off his arms. He looked like the living model of a nightmare painting by Munch, and in the awful quiet of the warehouse, they heard a low crackle. He was literally melting before their eyes. All at once, he collapsed before them in a dissolving, discoagulating heap. One of the G-Men sprinted for the door, clawing at his hazmat helmet. He’d seen enough.

The Nasir computer turned out to be the mother lode. When the technician teased the raw information out of it, a Farsi speaker went through it as quickly as possible, and the intel was passed around the Waldorf conference table. Farah Nasir must have been an aficionado of modern Western art because she gave her six backpack teams the names of painters: Pollack, Klimt, Chagall, Johns, Dali, and—weirdly enough—Warhol (no one ever said she had taste). The leader of each group would call her and say the name of their painter at each crucial stage of the
process; when they had their gear ready—jeans, shoes, backpacks, gloves, specially outfitted shower—they notified her they were prepared to pick up the Grunge or get a delivery of it from the Gowanus machine shop.

“Composition varied. It was up to the delivery cells to do their own mix. One part refined plutonium, one part uranium, one part calcium chloride, and one part commercial powdered baby laxative as a dispersal medium. You can breathe it in; you can get it on your skin. If you drop it on the sidewalk and it rains, the laxative melts away, leaving heavy radioactive dust. The perfect terror weapon. And the chlorine burns.”

Bryce took a breath, then added, “There was a three-sentence memo from Sheik Kutmar dated five days earlier: ‘You have authorization to begin the
distribution
. Any risk of capture must be met by your martyrdom. Praise be to Allah.’ ”

Banquo scoffed to no one in particular, “Pious pimp. Safe at home, sending his girls out to work the neighborhood.”

Out in the city, cell phone service had been overwhelmed and crashed. There were a few scuffles at points of exit—when people realized, for instance, that no, they weren’t getting on a ferry across to Weehawken, New Jersey. There were a couple of “citizen’s arrests” of innocent, backpack-wielding Middle Eastern college students, and Sikh cab-drivers were harassed, the lot of the poor Sikhs in the aftermath of 9/11 too—the burden of their conspicuous turbans and the ignorance of their tormentors. But, by and large, the streets emptied without incident, the mass of New Yorkers making their own way, as they always do, during blackouts, subway floods, whatever else the urban gods of fortune threw their way, to be overcome with the gritty, pushy, complaining fortitude that characterized their urban breed.

Hazmat cleanup crews were already working to keep select spots in Manhattan from becoming Superfund cleanup sites for decades, while the focus of the media universe had become the Waldorf. It was surrounded on all sides by satellite trucks, their mushroom dishes pointed upward at the hotel’s Art Deco towers in a kind of homage. Federal
officials had shown up, but otherwise not much had changed: the Mayor was huddled with his deputy and underlings, desperately plotting what could be his redeeming second act with the press; everyone else naturally deferred to Banquo, even those who outranked him and had no real idea who he was or why he was there.

No one in the Waldorf knew what to expect next, but there was hope that when O’Hanlon found the Grunge pile, the worst might be over. Were there any Jihadis left? Were they only the first wave? How about other cities? And
where
were the canisters from Iran—never far from Banquo’s mind—with their potential for something much worse? Johnson stood at a window, looking down a deserted Lexington Avenue, where red tail lights would usually be stopped at traffic lights, then flowing down the Avenue, the corpuscles of the city’s life blood. The emptiness was eerie—“the very witching time of night, when church-yards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world.”

A terrible vision of an utterly abandoned metropolis passed through his mind, a steel-and-concrete wasteland after something much worse than this, after . . . but his reverie was broken by Banquo gently tapping his shoulder. Maybe he guessed what was on Johnson’s mind. Tapping his shoulder got his attention but was also somehow reassuring.

Johnson turned to him. “Peter,” Banquo said. “We think you should talk to Yasmine.” She had been left in the holding cage all this time, almost as an afterthought, but also because no one quite knew what to do with her. She had quickly clammed up again after the water, and no one had any appetite for pushing her anymore. “She may feel compelled to say something to you. Whether it’s useful or not, who knows?” Johnson considered the man’s words pensively for a moment.

“I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, but a few hours ago she had a bag over my kid’s head. So . . .” Johnson shrugged. “I’d be more than happy to put a carpenter ant in her ear. And stop it up with candle wax.”

“Sorry, no carpenter ants. But you can keep her rattled. For reasons of cosmic justice if you like. Or as our friend Wallets occasionally puts it, ‘Karma sucks.’ ”

After the earlier scene with Yasmine, Johnson wasn’t eager to be enlisted as an interrogator, but the ever-curious journalist in him figured
what the hell,
he’d be the George Plimpton of interrogations. Not like he didn’t have a score to settle.

Yasmine didn’t seem surprised to see him when he entered the cage. She sat cuffed to the bench, with her head cocked to the side like a teenager with a bad attitude. Her lips were bruised, as were the corners of her mouth, her hair still wet and stringy, falling down around her shoulders. Johnson searched her face for the fantasy woman he once imagined so long ago in Iran, the noble stoic opponent of the regime. Secret Head of La Résistance. But that fantasy was long gone, replaced by the Muslim Diabolical Genius: Islamo-Nazi-Girl. Replaced finally by this bedraggled and broken scarecrow, a rag doll who’d lost her luster of arrogant, omni-competence.

“I looked up the word
Djjal,
” he told her. “It means Deceiver. The Muslim Anti-Christ. Besides Yossi, you have anyone else in mind?”

She said nothing, just shrugged.

Johnson felt contempt for her creeping in, along with anger. Just as she must have felt for him when their circumstances were reversed, the inevitable result of having power over someone so humiliated and weak.

“I was wondering about the mules with canisters lost on the Iraq border. The material from Esfahan. They weren’t part of any of this, were they? Never were?” Johnson let the question hang. Her eyes were indifferent.

“Maybe they should have sent a professional,” Johnson snorted. “Isn’t that what you once told me? Or words to that effect? ‘Clumsy journalist’? What should we call you?”

She narrowed her eyes and again ignored him. He pressed on.

“You’ve managed to make a bigger hash of things than I
ever
did in Iran. Remember when you told me how backwards Iran used to be? Well, happy days are here again.” He leaned forward, quietly and conspiratorially, dead serious, but with a gleam in his eye:

“Y ’know, I think these people are going to want to send you back to the Stone Age.”

“I
am
a professional,” she finally spat back, a delayed reaction.

“No, Yasmine, you’re a professional
fool.
You undertook a pointless line of action in a city of innocents that can only start a war. A war you’ll
lose. You’re either crazy or some Muslim Yamamoto of Iran, launching an attack that could only result in the destruction of your county. In the Japanese admiral’s case, Yamamoto thought America was proud and just and knew the consequences of his action. Something tells me, you never thought it through that far.”

Her eyes flitted away for a moment. He snorted. “And you called
me
pathetic.”

“
Pointless
?” she said. “Consequences?” she taunted. Their eyes met, and she sat up straighter. “That’s funny from the very font of surrender and appeasement.” Her voice took on a sarcastic edge: “
The State Department interprets the evidence its own way. The court of International Opinion another.
You won’t hit us, Mr. Johnson. The Marine Barracks, Khobar, Iraq, and now our
dirt
in your subways—they’re all just a taste, just a taste of what’s to come . . . ”

She kept on: “Who’s afraid of the big bad American Wolf? Not us. We murder hundreds and hundreds of United States’ soldiers with pure impunity. We fill any country we wish with guns and rockets. Our Shahab 3 missile can reach anywhere in the Middle East, London, and the heart of Europe. Soon, even New York itself. We hold out our hand to be kissed by every aristocratic diplomat on earth. And they kiss it every time. You won’t bomb us, Mr. Johnson. You can abuse me in this room all you like—you and your friends entertain yourselves with chest-thumping stories afterwards—but we know what you’re made of.
Dialogue.
” The word was pure insult, making Johnson wince. “We’ll kill another hundred Americans soldiers in Iraq, another thousand people in New York, and the only thing we’ll grant you is an
audience
in the throne room of the world. So you may come once more on bended knee to touch our hand.”