Manhattan Lockdown (19 page)

Gabriel found time and opportunity over the next two weeks to come into contact with Mohammad. Three days after they met, Mohammad accepted Gabriel's invitation to have tea at a dusty, beaten up café not far from the cinder-block hospital in Kabul. Gabriel soon learned that Mohammad was married and had three children. On his iPhone there were pictures of his wife, their two daughters, and their son, a miniature version of Mohammad. In the vivid color pictures of her, Mohammad's wife was smiling, ravishing. She looked like a model, not hooded and dour like the typical, silent women of Afghanistan.

Although Gabriel smiled at the sequence of family portraits, he was disappointed. He had hoped that Mohammad, gentle, intelligent, attentive, and so fundamentally different from the thousands of menacing and taciturn Iraqi and Afghan men Gabriel had encountered for two years, was attracted to him. But Mohammad's marriage to a vibrant woman undermined Gabriel's hopes, expectations, and desires.

But then Gabriel learned that it had been many months since Mohammad had seen his wife and children, who lived with his parents in Helmand province. Mohammad, who learned to speak English extremely well from a man who had worked with CIA advisers during the ten years of the futile Soviet invasion, had been
recruited by the Army to train and work with American soldiers. He had been essentially unemployed since the 2001 invasion and the opportunity to work with the U.S. Army carried rich rewards. He was given a new skill, nursing, and a salary far richer than anything he had ever earned.

Gabriel lived in a building not far from the hospital. Constructed with cinder blocks in two months, the building was integrated, meaning that Army officers had most of the apartments, but Afghan civilians who worked for the Army as medical personnel, security guards, and translators also lived there. Gabriel's place was neat and Spartan. He actually liked its feel of austerity and orderliness.

It took an enormous amount of planning and tension for Gabriel to pull together the nerve to invite Mohammad to the apartment for the first time. Once they were there, Gabriel served tea and cookies. He didn't drink booze by choice and Mohammad didn't drink it because of the rules of custom and religion. They faced each other over a glass coffee table, Gabriel on a hard white sofa and Mohammad in an ersatz Eames-style chair. In the background, the civilized voices of the NPR anchors spoke about the civil war in Syria and a new movie by Woody Allen.

Mohammad was a reader. Like almost every other Afghan associated with Americans, he owned a cell phone and an iPad. It often struck Gabriel as he walked in the streets of Kabul that people who had little or no food did have cell phones. Mohammad had a subscription to the
New York Times
and the
Guardian
on his iPad.

Their conversations were always easy, wide-ranging, and unrestrained except for one area, Gabriel's love for men. Mohammad rarely mentioned his wife and never talked about sex. For his part, Gabriel found it difficult to shift his attention away from the slender man's handsome face, the elegant gestures of his hands, and lucidity of his intelligent eyes. It didn't escape Gabriel's notice that in
all the hours they spent together at the hospital, he never once saw Mohammad give even a furtive, much less leering, look at any of the female doctors and nurses.

On a hot Thursday night after Mohammad had left his apartment, Gabriel Hauser made a decision: the next evening when they were drinking tea in his apartment he would reach out for Mohammad's slender, almost hairless hand and say simply, “I'm in love with you.” He was prepared to lose this alluring, gratifying friendship, and to risk a horrified reaction, or to provoke a beating, on the frail hope that this man might kiss him and slip out of his clothes to reveal a body that Gabriel was certain was sleek and sylph-like.

But that moment never came. It was on that Friday morning that the unctuous colonel asked, “Can I have a few words with you, Major Hauser?” and told him he was being removed from Afghanistan that night, sent to Germany, and dishonorably discharged from the Army. Three hours before reporting to Bagram Air Base for his flight out of the country, he met Mohammad in the shabby café that had become the place where they regularly took their breaks together. He told Mohammad he was being exiled from the country immediately. “Do you want to know why?” he asked Mohammad.

“I know why, Gabriel.”

Mohammad walked through the stifling, dusty Afghan evening to Gabriel's apartment building. Gabriel's duffel bag and soft suitcases were already in the lobby of the building, and the locks to the apartment door had already been changed. In the dark in the last twenty yards of their walk Mohammad's soft right hand sought out and clasped Gabriel's hand. Gabriel was overwhelmed by love for this man. And by hatred for the Army.

***

Cam was visibly distressed. When he was angry or disturbed, he repeatedly moved small objects from place to place. There were clean coffee mugs on the small dining table, and Cam was shifting them as if they were inverted cups in a shell game.

Even as he registered that Cam was upset and distracted, Gabriel kissed him on the shoulder as soon he entered the apartment. Cam had taken the responsibility for bringing the wounded Oliver to the office of their friend John Higgins, a gay veterinarian whose cozy animal hospital on East 84
^th
Street was the most popular veterinary hospital on the East Side. John loved Oliver. The wonderful dog reciprocated that love. Even though Oliver knew that the brownstone where John lived and worked was the place where he was poked and pinched and sometimes put in the kennel for a weekend, he always bounded happily up the steps and barked joyously when he saw Dr. Higgins in his immaculate white coat.

“John almost vomited when I unwrapped Oliver's blanket. He was upset; he asked what happened.”

“‘The fucking police,' I told him. ‘Gabriel stitched up his wounds, but we need you to take a look at him and treat him here'. John said he would, and I left Oliver there.”

Always sensitive to Cam's moods, Gabriel sensed that Cam's obvious irritation was tied to something other than, or in addition to, the injuries to Oliver. “You're upset, baby, aren't you?”

Gabriel was right. Every muscle of Cam's long and elegant body seemed to tense up. Cam began speaking rapidly, as if in the midstream of his thoughts. “After I left Oliver at John's two men started walking beside me. They said they were agents from the NSA. They offered to show me their badges. I told them I didn't have any spare change today.”

“I'm so sorry I got you into this.”

“No bother, Gabriel. I'm in it, hook, line, and sinker. I couldn't
shake them off. They were like seasoned panhandlers. They just continued walking with me, one to my left and the other to my right.”

Gabriel leaned against the refrigerator in the sleek, sun-filled kitchen. It pained him to see Cam's nervous agitation and distress. Gabriel said again, “I'm sorry.”

“But listen, Gabriel. They told me things that truly scare me. About you.”

Internally Gabriel flushed. It was a powerful emotion of fear, concern, and inchoate shame.
What now?
he wondered.

“They handed me pages of e-mails between you and a man in Afghanistan named Mohammad Hussein. Lots of them read like love letters.”

“Cam, I told you I had a dear friend there. I even told you his name. Don't you remember?”

“I don't intrude on your e-mails, Gabriel. I assumed you sent notes like postcards to him from time to time.”

“He was the only friend I had for two years.” Gabriel, still so physically anxious that he detected the quaver in his own voice, said, “He has a wife and kids.”

“Bullshit. You were betraying me, Gabriel. For six months you were telling him everything you were doing to get permission for
him
, not him and his family, to come here. You described your letters to the State Department, to the Secretary of the Army, telling them about all the heroic work Mohammad did for injured soldiers, the hours he spent just sitting with them. Christ, you even compared him to Walt Whitman spending two years in Union Army hospitals during the Civil War playing guardian angel to wounded soldiers. As if the people you sent these letters to even knew who Walt Whitman was. A gay poet trying to comfort wounded soldiers and falling in love with some of them.”

“I thought he was in danger in Afghanistan. I think he still is.
After all, he's devoted his life to working with Americans. He's a marked man.”

“And what were you going to do if you got him here?”

“Set him up as an aide or a nurse in a hospital.”

“I don't think so. I saw pictures of him. He is very attractive. Very. I read the e-mails. They weren't about travel arrangements or finding work for him.”

“Come on, Cam, please, I love you. And besides, he lost interest. I haven't heard from him in a month.”

“I know. Your e-mails to him have been heartsick. He hasn't gotten back to you in a month, no matter how much you plead.”

“That's not true.”

“Don't jive me, Gabriel. I've read them. I've got them here.” He gestured to a neat stack of papers on which the e-mails had been printed.

“I'm sorry, Cam. It was one of those runaway emotional attachments. There was never a chance that he'd be allowed to come here. I'm not the only person in the world who loses control over what he writes in e-mails and text messages.”

“Do you want to know why you haven't heard from him?”

Something in the wounded, angry tone with which Cam now spoke made Gabriel even more anxious. He asked, “Why? What's wrong? Has he been hurt?”

“No, Gabriel. He's been arrested. The guys who walked with me and gave me these e-mails said he was part of a plot to blow up a hospital. He was a plant of ISIS or Al-Qaeda. He cultivated you because he thought while you were there you would lead him to a hospital or ward where high-ranking officers were treated. After all, you were a major. When they booted you out of Afghanistan, your lover thought that you might be able to bring him here. These guys from the NSA said your boyfriend from Afghanistan would
become a ‘sleeper,' a plotter for ISIS. That's why he begged you to help him. What a perfect cover, if you think about it.”

“None of that's true.”

“This is why these people are so interested in you, Gabriel. You need to hear this. Your friend Mohammad has told them you knew about these bombings before they happened.”

“That's off the wall, Cam. Totally beyond crazy. They're making it up.”

“They told me he sent you regular letters, by mail, introducing you to his ‘family' here. I saw the letters. They were picked up by the government from Nasar's home just after the first bombings at the Met. One of them is about Silas Nasar. A man with a big birthmark on his face.”

“I never met that man.”

“Really? You met him at the museum. They know you treated him on the steps of the museum and then at the hospital. Even exchanged what looked like a big bracelet with him. Muslim men don't wear bracelets. The NSA guys think it was a communications device.”

“That's a fantasy. Why would he be there and let himself get caught in an explosion?”

“Because he was overseeing the last-minute preparations, they said, and the first food wagon had a faulty timing mechanism. It worked, but too soon. And Silas got caught in it.”

“You know this is crazy, Cam. Why would I do these things? I just want to lead a quiet life, treating patients, doing whatever good I can do. And loving you.”

“They know about all the angry protests and objections and appeals you filed after you were discharged. Your letters to the
Times
and other papers that were never printed. They think you're angry and sick and deluded. They told me I should persuade you to talk
with them right away. If you help them, they say, you can help yourself. You might get a lighter jail sentence, they said, if you cooperate right away.”

Gabriel knew that his hands and lips were shaking and that Cam could see that. Cam moved to him and hugged him. “This is all so sick, Gabriel. I want our life back. Look at what we've lost.”

S
HE WAS LARGER
and older than most of the women runners who even on this day, three hours after the assault in the George Washington Carver Houses, flowed uptown and downtown on the narrow esplanade along the shoreline of the East River as if this were a holiday on a lucid day in early summer. Gina had changed into running clothes in the back of an unmarked van parked near the seaport piers that had long ago replaced the seedy, mob-dominated Fulton Fish Market and that now had the feel of a suburban shopping mall. She slipped into the crowds of young runners. Moving gracefully, she made her way uptown to Pier 37.

The narrowest possible slit was open in the rusty, rundown chain-link fence that ringed the front of Pier 37. Unobtrusively she veered out of the stream of other runners, the innumerable slim blond girls in running shorts and tops and baseball caps out of which their ponytails hung, the tall young men, even a team of Sikh runners with their turbans in place, and slid through the slit in the fence. She was followed by the three muscular men, also in running gear, all carrying weapons in pouches in Nike belts—her bodyguards.

Raj Gandhi stood directly in front of the pier. He had been stung by the odd caller's criticism that he hadn't done enough shoe leather work. After Raj had reserved one of the plain unmarked Fords owned by the
Times
, he drove crosstown and parked the car near a cluster of several abandoned piers south of Houston Street.

The numbers assigned to the piers were random, inexplicable. Pier 63 was followed by Pier 71 and then Pier 37. All of them were massive, abandoned for decades, relics of the 1940s and the 1950s. Like prison camps, they were surrounded by chain-link fences, some with razor wire on top.