Reckless Endangerment (45 page)

“No, not really,” said Lucy. “We have guns. Do you think when Tran dies, he’ll be a holy soul in purgatory?”

Marlene had to clear her throat. “Well, you know that’s hard to say, Lucy. It’s not something I’m comfortable speculating on.” What a mealy-mouthed answer, thought Marlene. The kid’s looking for spiritual guidance, and here I am…

“At least he’ll have me to pray for him,” said Lucy. “I’m probably the only one in the whole world he’ll have praying. Do you ever think about that? What it’s
really
like after you die?”

“As little as I can. When I do, it’s me being carried up to Heaven by angels blowing trumpets.” Meant as a light remark, but Lucy responded straight-faced.

“You know, Mom,” she said, “honestly, the way you’re going … I wouldn’t count on it.”

The radio detonator was manufactured in Czechoslovakia and was an excellent and reliable design. Ibn-Salemeh sat at a table made of pallets and plywood in his warehouse and tested its circuits with a Radio Shack galvanometer, one of the few articles of equipment he had purchased in New York. That too was part of the plan—everything had been shipped in through America’s porous borders—no suspicious purchases of ingredients, no risky thefts to accomplish. What they needed was in the crates. He picked up the code transmitter and gave it to Khalid, who walked away with it to the end of the warehouse. At Ibn-Salemeh’s shouted directions, he pushed buttons and Ibn-Salemeh noted with satisfaction that the detonator armed itself and sent the correct signal to the circuit that actually fired the detonating charge. He called Khalid back.

“Does it work?” Khalid asked.

“Perfectly. Are they almost ready?”

Khalid went to check. The Daoud bakery van had been backed up to the lip of the loading dock. The steel shelves that had lined both sides of the van had been removed, and the men had just finished bolting the last of the thick steel plates into place. The five-gallon cans, twenty of them, were filled and lined up on the dock. Khalid squatted down and looked inside the van. The driver’s side, the floor, and the overhead had been reinforced with the plate steel. The passenger side remained the original thin sheet-metal. Khalid understood the principle. When a bomb explodes, a relatively small volume of solid turns almost instantly into a very, very large quantity of hot gas. The key word is
almost.
Left to themselves, explosives explode spherically, exerting equal pressure in all directions, but if early in the explosion the nascent event is directed, shown that there is less resistance to expansion in one direction than in another, then the explosion can be directed, shaped even, like an ephemeral sculpture. This was the point of the steel plates. When the 250-kilogram bomb detonated, it would first vaporize the plastic fuel cans and ignite the diesel fuel. The fetal inferno would probe its womb, seeking a way out. In the first few milliseconds of its existence, it would discover the weak passenger-side wall, and that is where the main force of the explosion would go. A great fiery bubble would erupt from the side of the van. Traveling at thousands of feet per second, it would knock down, pulverize, and roast anything in its path.

Walid was confined to the warehouse office while they worked on his truck. He looked at his watch every five minutes, and wondered if Posie would be waiting at the arranged place when they let him go. Previously, when alone and with nothing to do, he had thought about self-sacrifice, and about honor, which involved slaughtering his sister; and he had also thought, in a vague, incoherent way, about sex. Now he thought more concretely, about breasts, and about the slippery feel and scent of the woman’s genitals, and about how she squirmed and cried out when, after much instruction, he was able to manipulate them in a satisfactory way. Dying for the cause had become less attractive to him.

They finished bolting in the plates and returned the shelf units to the interior of the van. They rolled the bomb out on its dolly. Ibn-Salemeh screwed the radio fuse into the detonator and placed it into the fuse socket in the nose of the bomb. He supervised the movement of the bomb—three men working slowly and in complete concentration—from the dolly to its place on the lowest shelf on the driver’s side. It was secured to the shelf with strapping. A plywood box, painted black, was fitted over it. Then the jerry cans of fuel were arranged around it, taking up the rest of the lower shelf and most of the one above it.

“Fine. Get the boy,” said Ibn-Salemeh.

Walid came out, blinking. He was told to get into the truck. Khalid spoke to him through the window.

“Here are your orders: you must first of all behave normally. Go directly home. Go to the mosque. Bake your bread. Tomorrow morning and Sunday you will travel the route you have been traveling these past weeks, exactly. Exactly! Do you understand?”

“Yes. What have you done to the truck?” He shrank from the other man’s glare. “If someone asks.”

“We have installed communications equipment,” said Khalid. “Very advanced, so the Zionists will not be able to spy on us. This is also the explanation of the steel plates. It is shielding, you understand?”

“Yes. What is that smell?”

“Diesel oil. It is for a secret generator we have. You will be informed where to take it through the communications device.”

“Really? But I have no earphones.”

“There is a loudspeaker. Believe me, Walid, you will have no trouble hearing it.”

“Roland’s back with us,” said the D.A. when Karp came into his office. “The hospital just called. Hillyer’s in intensive care; they doubt he’ll make it. My God! I’ve lost count. What is that, eight cops? Why can’t they catch this guy?”

Karp sat down in a side chair, massaged his brow, and said, “I asked Fulton that very question just now. It’s not so crazy when you think about it. How do we catch any criminal once we have his face? The cops hit the usual hangouts, ask around. Snitches love dropping one on a cop killer. Yeah, that looks like Ernie. He hangs at the White Rose on Third. Guys have girlfriends, pals, relatives. This guy’s from out of town. He’s got no known connection in the City except the Erbes woman and the Obregons. The woman, we now find, ran to the Dominican Republic last week. The Obregons we have. He doesn’t hang out. He changes his appearance. Hillyer said, just before he went out, that the guy showed at Roland’s as a woman.”

“Wonderful! And on the Arab front?”

“Some progress. They located the house in Park Slope the Arabs were using and raided it. Not much in it, and what there was led to stuff we already knew about. Packing material from the basement seems to match the stuff found in the Daoud van, but we knew that too. These guys are good, boss.”

“Yeah, and I’m tired of hearing that. What about the airplane business, that sheik?”

“Same thing—the cops arrive at the Carlyle, where they were staying, and just missed them. They’re at large in a white stretch limo, if you can believe it. The cops are stopping everything that even looks like a white Caddie limo. The beautiful people could be in for some lumps. Expect irate calls.”

“I’ll brace myself. Any other good news?”

“No. Beatings and scuffles all over town, mini-riots. The cops canceled leaves this afternoon, indefinitely, until these guys are in the can. Easter weekend. So we got fifteen thousand armed men wandering around the city, all of them with attitudes. To add to the civic peace, Rabbi Lowenstein has announced a rally and a march down Bedford Avenue on Sunday.”

“I heard. The cops refused a permit.”

“Right, but he claims he’s going ahead with it anyway, according to my many contacts in the Jewish community.”

“I thought he died,” said the D.A.

“Thank you,” said Karp sourly. “You forget, my brother is a fanatic too. I got one of my infrequent calls from him this afternoon, asking me to use my influence to get the permit issued. When I told him I thought it was a shitty idea, he vouchsafed to me, in so many words, that the rabbi didn’t need no stinkin’ permit.”

“Christ!”

“Yeah, that too, Easter Sunday. I realize the big churches have toned down the anti-Semitic aspects, but there’s a lot of little churches in town that haven’t got the message. Then you’ve got a huge black community, maybe a fifth of them either Nation of Islam members or sympathizers. There’s a Muslim leader in Bed-Stuy who’s saying that if the Jews do a march, he’s going to take his people out on the streets too. Okay, that’s Brooklyn, but if Brooklyn goes up, we won’t be far behind. The other thing is, we got a lot of itchy, scared cops looking for a thin Hispanic guy armed with a machine gun and grenades. There are at least fifty thousand people in the city who fit that general description, not counting girls, who he might be too. Okay, let’s say a cop spots somebody he thinks might be our guy. What’s he going to do? Excuse me, sir, or ma’am, could I see some identification? No, he is not. He’s going to pull his piece and scream, ‘Freeze, motherfucker!’ This is going to cause tensions in the Hispanic community. The wrong people are going to get shot. It won’t do, Jack.”

“What’s the alternative?” asked Keegan.

“We have to draw him to a place
we
choose, where there won’t be any confusion, and where there’s a reduced chance of bullets taking out innocent people. And we already know what’ll draw him.”

“Meaning …?”

Karp took a breath. He had been thinking about this since the meeting at the FBI, and discussed it with Fulton, who said, when heavily pressed, that it was feasible, and now he laid it in front of Keegan, briefly, ignoring the growing frown on his boss’s face.

“Absolutely not,” said Keegan forcefully.

“I’ll take that as a provisional yes,” said Karp.

“We are not going back to the hotel,” said Ibn-Salemeh.

The six other men looked at him in surprise.

“Why not?” Khalid asked.

“Because the desk man called on the car phone with the arranged signal. The police were there. They knew we were there.”

A silence, then a chorus of confused expostulations. It was Khalid who first divined the implications. “Then they have the plane too,” he exclaimed. “What has happened?” Khalid’s tone was not what it usually was when he addressed Ibn-Salemeh. The others noticed this. Each man made a small nervous gesture or cast a glance, and a rippling movement passed through the little group, as if an animal were moving through high grass. Ibn-Salemeh did not seem to notice this.

“Obviously, they found it and discovered that the people who left the airport were not those who arrived from overseas. It does not matter.”

“How does it not matter?” Khalid cried. “That plane was our escape. How are we going to get out of the city after the bomb explodes on Sunday?”

“The bomb will explode tomorrow,” said Ibn-Salemeh abruptly. “On Saturday.”

Another stunner. All their planning had been based on a Sunday target.

“The longer we stay in the city, the more risk we endure. We will stay here tonight. It is not as comfortable as in the hotel, but adequate. Tomorrow we will take the gray van, which is a perfectly clean vehicle that no one is looking for, drive to the target, wait for the bread truck, detonate the bomb, and drive slowly away. We will cross the river and drive to Detroit, where we have friends. We can then easily cross the border and fly out of Canada on Canadian passports.” He paused to see what effect this was having. Nods. “Which I took care to provide for all of us in case something went wrong with our first plan. You should know that there is always a backup.” Smiles now; the crisis was over. The remarkable Ibn-Salemeh had again outsmarted his enemies.

“Throw some tarpaulins and trash over that Cadillac,” he ordered. “We don’t want anyone seeing it from the street. Rifaat! Take the van and get us something to eat. Oh, and buy one of those portable television sets. We must continue to keep informed. What is it, Hussein?”

Hussein was looking confused. “Effendi, the Cadillac—does this mean we will not be returning it for the deposit?”

Ibn-Salemeh stared at him in amazement. Then he burst into uproarious laughter and clapped the man hard on the back, and after a moment the others joined in. Even Khalid.

EIGHTEEN

M
arlene dropped Lucy off at the EVWS, where the twins were being made much of by the residents and staff, had a few words with the crippled, but by-God-back-on-the-job Mattie Duran, got laughed at by same because of the Hadassah operation, made some calls out of Mattie’s office, and had a few words with Tran about the weekend’s chores. (Easter was not normally a domestic-violence accelerator on the scale of Christmas or Thanksgiving, but families did get together then, and for some families this was not wise. Daddy might bring a fluffy ducky for the kiddies just to show he was still a good dad, and a couple of quarts of malt liquor for himself, and at the end of the afternoon the ducky might well be the only thing walking.) This accomplished, she drove up to Fifty-eighth and Fifth.

She found a growing mess. The organization had invited over two hundred of its hardworking youth leaders from around the country to come to New York, enjoy themselves, and hear uplifting speeches. Four charter buses had been engaged to ferry these people around the city, and bring them by headquarters for various events, one each day of the weekend. They had not, however, arranged with the police to suspend parking on Fifty-eighth Street, so that the buses had to disgorge while double-parked, thus completely blocking the traffic on Fifty-eighth Street, both of which are violations of the NYC traffic code, which fact was being pointed out to the bus drivers and the youth leaders by a cop (summons book in hand) when Marlene walked up, she having cleverly parked in a garage on Sixth.

Marlene dived in, spread charm, explained that in fact Osborne had arranged for the parking restriction, but the current emergency had prevented the police from tagging the block, and in general resolved the dispute to the satisfaction of everyone except the youth leader, a chubby person from Minneapolis, who did not like the idea that the buses would have to disgorge some unknown distance away, requiring several hundred out-of-towners to run the deadly gauntlet of a New York thoroughfare. Keeping her temper and a straight face with some difficulty, Marlene promised to provide security for these expeditionaries. The group dispersed; the buses stenched off to their barn.