Escape (50 page)

Jojola looked into the eyes of Miriam Khalifa and prepared to die. He knew by the weight of the AK-47 he held that, like the handgun, there were no bullets in the clip. Still, he thought he could kill Malovo with a blow to the head before the guards cut him down with their guns.

Then a voice entered his head, asking him to stop. A spiritual man who, in the way of his people, believed that spirits inhabited the world, he paid attention. As a child he had learned that some spirits who spoke to people were bad, but many helped the living. Sometimes they appeared as animals, or
kachina
spirits. Now, the image of a woman dressed in robes, her hair covered by a hajib, her face veiled, came to his mind.

Salaam,
John Jojola,
the woman said in a language he did not know but understood.
Miriam asks you to let her go without fighting. She is prepared for martyrdom in the hope that her one death may prevent thousands, even millions, done in the name of Allah, but not with his blessing.

I can't do that,
Jojola replied.
I won't see her butchered without a fight.

Please, this is how it must be. She asks that you remember the lessons you taught her from chess. That sometimes one piece must be sacrificed for the good of the many. This is her last request, and she asks that you honor it so that you will live to do as you must tomorrow.

Jojola bowed his head, but then sensed Tran tensing for a fight to the death. "Do nothing," he said in Vietnamese. "This is as it should be."

Tran looked at him, his eyes angry, but after a moment he nodded.

"Is there a problem?" Malovo asked, signaling for the cameraman to stop filming.

"Jihad is not slaughtering helpless women in a basement," Tran replied.

Malovo laughed. "You? The man who sank a ferry full of helpless women and children and then shot them in the water?"

"It was an attack done in front of the world."

Malovo looked at him with scorn. "You have your reasons. I have mine." She signaled the cameraman, who pressed the button; the green light came back on.

Malovo pulled Miriam's head back, exposing her throat. She expected to see fear and waited to hear the young woman beg for her life. But instead, Miriam smiled at her.

"La ilaha illal lah!
There is no God but God," Miriam testified calmly, looking into the dark, beautiful eyes of Hazrat Fatemeh Masumeh, "and Muhammad is the Messenger of God."

The response enraged Malovo. No
one should face such a hideous death so easily. But she'll scream when she feels my knife,
the assassin assured herself, and with a quick, violent motion drew the blade across her victim's throat, pleased to feel the hot blood spurt across her hand. But there was no scream, no desperate gurgling as the woman drowned in her blood.

Suddenly afraid, Malovo pushed Miriam forward to die.
"Allah-u-Akbar,"
she cried out, raising the bloody knife over her head. But there was no response from the others.

Miriam felt a burning sensation in her neck.
Where are you, Aalimah? I am afraid.

Here I am, child, here I am.
The scent of roses filled the air.

Hazrat! It is dark, and I am lost!

Take my hand, Miriam. There ... can you see? It is Ramadan and the gates of Paradise are open!

Yes, yes, now I see. I am not afraid. Allah-u-Akbar ... God is Great!

Nadya Malovo looked at the clock radio on the desk, which belonged to her now-former lover. Seven a.m. Another hour before most of the employees who worked in the building would arrive. Plenty of time to get done what she had to do.

She looked out the window onto the immense office complex. Comprising nine main buildings, it covered eighteen acres—about ten city blocks— and had cost a billion dollars to build. The most secure, technologically advanced structures in the world, the buildings had been designed with one purpose in mind: to draw big-money companies from Manhattan into Brooklyn.

It was considered the Fort Knox of office complexes. The entire facility could be cut off from public utilities for weeks and still be fully operational, and its designers believed it could withstand Oklahoma City-style truck bombs. After September 11, 2001, engineers had even determined that, with a certain amount of impact damage and casualties, it could hold up against a direct hit from an airliner. Those who had moved out of Manhattan and into the complex for financial or space reasons prior to 9/11 considered themselves lucky.

It was the home of Brooklyn Polytechnic University, an advanced engineering school, as well as a number of major financial institutions and businesses including Bear Steams, JP Morgan Chase, Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Securities Industries Information Corporation. In one of the buildings, the leaders of the financial world would gather in the event of a worldwide disaster. And in fact, on December 31, 1999, they had met there to see if the predictions of the Y2K catastrophe would come to fruition.

However, it was more than an educational and financial nexus. The building in which Malovo stood on Tuesday morning housed several of the most important nerve centers for New York City. These included the headquarters for the New York Fire Department and the New York Police Department 911 call center—every cop car dispatched in the city got the call from that building in Brooklyn.

When The Sheik had first suggested his plan, the biggest obstacle to carrying it out had been a company called Specialized Applications Integrated Corporation (SAIC). A rather benign-sounding name, Malovo thought, for a high-tech security and surveillance company so advanced that it was responsible for the security and surveillance requirements of the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a variety of other government agencies and financial giants.

It had been clear that the potential impact of The Sheik's plan was tremendous. Nothing like it had ever happened before. However, it could only be implemented if Malovo was able to figure out a way around, or through, SAIC, and that presented a huge problem.

The first issue had been solving the problem in time for The Sheik's artificial deadline of the first day of Ramadan. She had argued that the plan should go into effect when it was ready, not a date set months ahead of time for what she considered silly reasons. But The Sheik had insisted that the propaganda benefits of striking on that date were too great to pass up.

She had started by looking for weaknesses in the building's security. Dean Newbury was able to help by providing the architect's blueprints for the building, which were supposed to have been in a safe and inaccessible, as well as names and personal data on SAIC personnel who might have the security clearances she needed.

However, her attempts to breach the corporation had been fruitless. She knew that she was getting a little older and the lines in her face a bit more pronounced, but she liked to think that, given time, no man, and few women, could resist her charms. But time was not something she had a lot of, and the corporation selected its people with care, putting them through rigorous security clearances and keeping them under surveillance. They were real pros with the best technology in the spy and security business; just trying to get close to one of them might have raised suspicions and exposed the plan.

Next, Malovo looked into the building's janitorial services company, a business owned by a Russian immigrant on Atlantic Boulevard near Coney Island. After dating the owner for two weeks, she realized he didn't have the security clearances she needed, so she dropped him.

It looked like they'd have to try a direct assault. Perhaps commandeering an airliner, or a ground attack to force entry. Either one, she told Dean Newbury, was likely to end in failure. "We would need to reach the twentieth floor—up the stairwell or the elevator, all in view of security cameras, I'm sure, and then fight our way past a well-armed, well-trained security force, which would have every advantage."

"What about a missile attack from the outside?" Newbury had suggested. She had dismissed that idea. "We'd have to get into another building just as well-protected to shoot directly across," she said. "And, of course, the target has to be destroyed at the exact right moment, or the plan will not work. No, the only way to do this is to gain access to the interior." Malovo was just about to reconsider renewing her affair with the janitorial services owner—at least he could get her inside the building and perhaps buy her enough time to take the security forces by surprise—when Newbury provided the key to the castle. His people had discovered that although SAIC took care of security for the specific floor that she was targeting, a good, but less sophisticated firm handled security for the rest of the building.

Newbury's information had led her to the security manager for the day shift. Leonard "Leo" Sipowitz was a fifty-year-old ex-Marine trapped in a— as he described it to her on their first date—"passionless marriage." Newbury's source told her what bar Sipowitz liked to stop in for a drink on the way home to Yonkers and pointed him out to her as he was leaving the building. She'd wandered into the bar one day, apparently on the verge of tears, and made sure she was close to where he was sitting when she whimpered that she had a flat tire and didn't know how to fix it.

As expected, the ex-Marine was the sort to come to the rescue of a damsel in distress, especially if she was wearing a short skirt and a tight blouse. "Where are you from?" Sipowitz asked as he finished changing the tire.

"Brighton Beach," she replied, applying the accent that American men found irresistible.

Sipowitz laughed. "I meant originally."

"Oh, forgive me, my English is not so good. I am from Chechnya. You know of it?"

"Sure," he replied. "Part of the old Soviet Union. I didn't know there were such beautiful women in Chechnya."

"And I did not know that American men could be so charming," she said, blushing prettily. "Or so handsome."

Soon they were carrying on a torrid affair, meeting in hotel rooms, parks, and the back seats of cars all over the Five Boroughs. As far as Sipowitz was concerned, she was the perfect mistress. She told him that she had just gotten out of a mail-order bride marriage to an ugly older man "who beat me and made me perform unnatural acts." However, she was willing to give some of those acts a "second chance" because of her love for Sipowitz. The failed marriage had turned her off from starting anything permanent; she didn't want him to leave his wife, nor was she demanding in respect to expensive gifts. She was, indeed, perfect.

At first, he wouldn't talk much about his work. He said only that he was a "muckity-muck" with a security firm with "a lot of very important clients." She said she found his line of work very sexy. "It makes me hot," she purred and demonstrated what she meant.

That was how Sipowitz learned that "Natalie" had this thing for making love in unusual places, and that the chance of getting caught turned her on. Soon a ride in an elevator was an excuse for a quickie, supplemented by hand-jobs beneath the tablecloth at expensive restaurants. She'd even managed fellatio on the Ferris wheel at Coney Island, after which he confessed that she was the most exciting woman he'd ever met.

Of course, the very thought of his pale, hairy body, which at one time could have been "a lean mean fighting machine" but had since gone to seed, made her ill. Preferring women for sex anyway, she considered her encounters with "Leo" among her finest acting jobs as she pretended to have multiple orgasms during his rather weak performances.

Then came the night she'd been waiting for when, after letting him do one of the "unnatural acts," he told her that he loved her. It didn't mean he could leave his wife just yet, "but maybe someday, when the kids are grown, you and I can think about making a life together."

Malovo began to cry. "It is a nice dream. But how can you speak of making a life together when there are so many secrets between us still?"

"What do you mean, darling?"

"Secrets ... like, I don't even really know what you do for a living.... You could be a ... an insurance salesman," she cried, the implication being that an insurance salesman would have never been allowed to do what they had just done.

Sipowitz chuckled and ran his hand down her naked back. "I ain't no insurance salesman," he said, but it didn't stop her from burying her head in a pillow and sobbing.

Sipowitz weighed what he should do. He'd been a good Marine—fought for his country—and had been highly recruited by the firm that put him in charge of day security. They paid him more than five times what he'd made in the Marines, plus benefits and perks worth another year's salary.

However, his boss, and a square-jawed Cro-Magnon from SAIC, had emphasized when he was hired that he couldn't tell anyone except his wife where he worked. "It leaves you open to espionage," Mr. Cro-Magnon explained.

Sipowitz had followed the rules like a good Marine. Not even his parents or siblings, or any of his buddies from the Corps who dropped in from time to time, knew anything more than that he had a high-level job with a security firm. They all assumed he did secret government work and left it at that.

"You must promise to keep this a secret," he'd told the sobbing Natalie. "I'd lose my job if they knew I told you." The sobbing stopped. "You know the MetroTech buildings in Brooklyn?" Her beautiful blonde head nodded. "I work in one of those. In fact, I'm in charge of security at the most important one."

Natalie had flipped over onto her back, exposing the magnificent breasts that seemed impervious to gravity even after her nearly forty years on the planet. "That is exciting," she exclaimed, letting her hand drift to the inside of his thigh. "Is very James Bond, no?"

"Well, I guess in a manner of speaking. Now, is that better?"

"Can I see this place?" Her hand stopped wandering.

He thought about it and then nodded. "I can probably get you a tour, say you're a possible new hire," he said. "But there will be a quick security check, my guys will have to run your fingerprints and ... What is it, darling?"

At the mention of the word "fingerprints," Natalie smiled sadly and shook her head. "That is okay, my love," she said, using the "L" word for the first time. "It is not possible."

Sipowitz had pressed her to know what the problem was. "If it's the background check ... that's not much of anything," he said. "Just covers my butt if the bosses ask about you. I'd still probably get in trouble, but my guys will cover for me. They're mostly ex-Corps, too. That is, unless you're a terrorist or something." He'd laughed at the joke until she turned over on her stomach and started crying again.

Finally, after much pleading, Natalie confessed that she was in the country illegally. After her marriage fell apart, her mean old husband had reported her to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get her deported. If his men ran her fingerprints, they'd learn that there was a deportation order out for her arrest; they'd have her on the next plane back to Chechnya.

"So you see, I am not to visit your place of work, my love," she sniffled. "And you should probably have nothing more to do with me. I am a bad person."

"No, no you're not." Sipowitz hugged her. "The immigration laws are all screwy." He thought for a moment. "You know what, there's another way." At his clearance level, he was allowed to bring his wife on the premises so long as he was with her at all times.

All it had taken was to steal his wife's driver's license and talk her into giving him a set of her fingerprints on a card. "They're doing background checks on all family members," he'd explained to his wife, who long ago had stopped caring about what he did for a living.

Then it had been easy to slip Natalie's photograph into his wife's license, bring her to the building, and substitute his wife's fingerprint card for Natalie's. Of course, his crew knew that the good-looking "cougar," their term for a beautiful, "mature" woman, wasn't the boss's wife. But the guy was a bona-fide war hero who'd done his tours in the first Gulf War and Afghanistan; everyone knew his wife was a shrew. So if he was getting a little on the side, then
Semper Fi,
they weren't going to raise a ruckus.

Sipowitz was glad he had thought of the old switcheroo. Once he got Natalie into the building, she couldn't keep her hands off of him. Suddenly she wanted to "do it" everywhere—from a stall in the executive washroom of Bears Steam to the desk of the chairman of JP Morgan early in the morning before he came to work. His crew cooperated by turning off the security cameras whenever the boss and his girl wanted to get busy in some new location.

There were a few floors, he told her, where he couldn't get her in. "Mostly just a bunch of computers anyway," he explained. "But they're kind of sensitive, so they have their own private security guys who know about that high-tech stuff." He and his crew and the other guys worked together in the sense that they'd report anything suspicious to each other, but otherwise their activities were autonomous.

Natalie's favorite place to visit during their trysts was the security firm's main office, which occupied the top floor of the thirty-story building, a location that allowed his firm to provide complete security for anyone landing on the helicopter pad. But what occupied most of his crew's time was what went on inside the building, from the top on down to the men stationed at the front desk. Natalie was fascinated by the security cameras they used to monitor the building and its environs, such as the bomb-proof underground garage. And sex in Sipowitz's office was particularly exciting.