THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (17 page)

Decker held him by the elbow. “You mean you
will
not.”

Decker stepped back. He knew exactly what the professor meant. It didn’t pay for a man of Hassan’s reputation to be seen hobnobbing with the FBI. It would appear, well . . . unseemly to most of his constituencies. And it would certainly undermine the access he enjoyed to both the powerful throughout the Middle East, and to those who lay upon the outer fringes of the carpet of Islam – the radicals, the Fundamentalists, the pure of faith. Decker reached his hand out, adding. “Thank you, Professor.”

“What for?” He looked down at Decker’s hand, but he did not shake it. “You think I don’t understand the threat implicit in your visit?”

“Excuse me?” Decker noticed a small crowd of students gathering by the door.

“I’m an American citizen,” Hassan declared, puffing himself up. “Your veiled threats of deportation hold no currency with me. Bully me all you wish, but I will not compromise my principles. I will not turn away, or hide within the shell of my indifference.”

Decker smiled. Then he spun about, he scowled and headed out the door, pushing his way through the students in the hall.

Hassan kept up his bold soliloquy. “Threaten me all you want, Agent Decker, but I know my rights. They haven’t all been hijacked by the so-called ‘Department of Justice.’ I know tyranny when I smell it.”

The door closed with a bang. Decker started back down College Walk. He had just passed Low Plaza when his phone began to vibrate on his hip. He flipped it open. It was a text message. The note read:
Reading Room 26, Avery Library
. It was not signed but Decker knew the author. He stopped and asked a pretty young female student for directions. Avery was just up those steps by Low Library – third building on the right after St. Paul’s.

Reading Room 26 was empty. Even with the light turned off, Decker could tell. The air was absolutely still. But what had he expected? Then he noticed a leather-bound book on the table. He turned on the light. It was a copy of the Qur’an. He approached the table. The Muslim holy text was opened to Al-Takwir, Sura 81. He only had to glance at it to recognize the words:
When the sun is veiled, and the stars are dimmed, and the mountains are made to move, and ten-months pregnant she-camels are discarded as a means of transportation and the wild ones are gathered together, and the rivers are diverted, and people are brought together, and when the female infant buried alive is questioned about: For what crime was she killed? And when books are spread abroad, and when heaven is laid bare, and when hell is stoked up, and when the Garden is brought nigh, then everyone will know that which He has wrought.

Decker read the passage several times. He read the words, but while he now knew the source of the quotation, he still didn’t understand its meaning. Behind each door, three more always appeared, and then nine after that.

He headed out of Avery Hall, down the steps, and back toward Broadway and the subway station. It was growing colder by the minute. A girl with a knapsack on her back approached him from the river. Probably a coed, he thought. She looked a little like Maureen, the Irish girl he’d dated in Chicago. The same wavy, reddish-brown hair. The same nose and sky blue eyes. But this girl’s mouth was fuller. And she was younger too. She was wearing a long black coat with buttons that looked like they were made of bone or ivory. Decker sighed as she passed by. He watched her walk away. Then he turned and started down the steps into the subway station.

When he got back to the Village, it was almost five o’clock. Decker stopped off at a bar on Greenwich Avenue, not far from his apartment, and ordered a glass of cabernet. He drank it far too fast, trying to push the cold away, but it only made him more depressed. The case was going nowhere. Even with their APBs, they hadn’t been able to locate the suspects from the apartment in Queens. Decker missed Chicago. New York seemed so much bigger, so much less manageable. He should work out, he told himself, relieve the stress, but he didn’t feel like it.

Decker left the bar and suddenly resolved to go to a place about which Tony had once told him. He knew that he shouldn’t, but he found himself going anyway. As he walked, he thought again about Maureen O’Donnell. She had wanted him to settle down, to give up the Bureau, and a part of him had really tried. He had loved her, in his own way. But, in the end, he simply couldn’t do it. Somewhere along the road the job had become his life. He thought about Maureen’s white skin, her lips, her tender heavy breasts, the soft curve of her thighs where they had come together at the top, that triangle of light he’d always spotted as she walked away from him toward the bathroom to wash up after they’d finished making love.

Decker stopped in front of a building on Twenty-third Street. He buzzed and someone let him in. It was baking inside the lobby and he could feel himself begin to sweat as he climbed the stairs. There was a door at the top of the stairs with a small peephole. He knocked. The peephole opened and he said, “Anthony Bartolo sent me.” The door opened.

It was a cathouse. Young, barely dressed girls of all shapes and sizes and ethnicities were standing around by the front desk. He paid his entrance fee and ordered another glass of wine from a young Asian girl with small breasts and a heart-shaped ass. The girls kept coming up to him and, eventually, he picked one – a brunette with long straight hair. She was pale-skinned and soft and round. A little short, he thought, but decent-looking, with a pretty mouth covered in pink lipstick, and doe-like brown eyes.

She led him down the hall into a private room. It featured a simple cot with a pale blue sheet. There was only one pillow. She closed the door, told Decker to take off his clothes, and slipped into the bathroom. He could hear the water running behind the hollow wall. When she finally came out, she took her bra and panties off. She had large breasts for her frame, and two tiny dimples just above her ass. Her skin was startlingly white in the dim light. She helped him with his clothes.

He placed his hand across her mouth. He shook his head. She shrugged, plucked something from the cot, and got down on her knees before him. She took him in her mouth, staring up at him with her big brown eyes as she worked. Decker felt himself grow more and more excited, enlarging in her mouth, between those lips with the pink lipstick. She pulled back and he realized that he already had a condom on.

“You’re ready,” she said.

He pushed her roughly to the cot and entered her with ease. She was already wet. They fucked mechanically, methodically. He could feel his frustration, his anger rising up inside of him. After only a few minutes, he came and pulled away. She started to get up from the cot but he held her in his arms. “Not yet,” he said. “Just lay here for a minute.” His tone was so plaintive, so desperate and forlorn that she softened and lay back down beside him.

“It’ll cost you more,” she said.

He laughed bleakly. He could feel her breath on his face. It was minty fresh. He realized that she had a pockmark on one cheek, next to her ear, and a small white scar beneath her chin. For some strange reason, this made him happy. “It always does,” he said.

Chapter 15

Saturday, January 29 – 9:16 AM

New York City

Seamus Gallagher sat in the Blue Moon Diner just across from the offices of WKXY-TV on Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street. He sat there every day at this time, in the same red vinyl booth, looking out the same window at the passing cars and people jostling by. His enemies and detractors – and there were many of them; of that he was most proud – claimed it was because the diner had named a sandwich after him: corned beef and tongue on rye, with mustard. Others said he liked the window booth because it increased his chances of being recognized by passersby. And then there were those who speculated it was because a Moroccan owned the diner, and Gallagher . . . well, he felt at home there.

The truth was it was sheer convenience that had brought him to the Blue Moon five years earlier when he had first moved to New York from Atlanta and joined the news team at WKXY-TV. The diner was right across the street from the studios. Not that Gallagher was lazy by disposition. He hadn’t ascended through the firmament of local evening TV news, hadn’t crawled his way from Boston through Duluth and Biloxi, from Atlanta to New York by shirking his responsibilities. Indeed, he had stepped on countless others, destroyed myriad careers, in order to get where he was.

Freckled, red-haired with a square-shaped face, plump and rather short, Gallagher had had to labor extra hard for his success. He wasn’t just another pretty-boy-stuffed-shirt. He was a
real
reporter, a man of the streets, an old-fashioned news hound – at least, that’s how he liked to see himself, and it was the image he tried desperately to project.

Two years earlier, he’d covered a story about a Hassidic Jew who’d run over a black kid in Brooklyn. The accident had sparked a series of brutal riots during which a black man stabbed a young Hassidim. The black man – it turned out – was also a devout Muslim. The story received a lot of play. Many in the Jewish community thought the piece was not only incendiary but also anti-Semitic, and Gallagher received death threats for months. But the story earned him the respect of the New York Muslim communities. Then, after 9/11, he parlayed that reputation into some interesting exclusives with various Muslim clerics throughout the tri-state area resulting in numerous awards, including a coveted Emmy for the local evening news team. He wrote a book, which did reasonably well, although the reviews were mixed at best. Gallagher didn’t care. The notoriety garnered him a sizeable promotion, more money and more airtime than most with his experience. And, as a nice by-product, it had earned him his own sandwich at the Blue Moon Diner.

Gallagher finished up his cup of chicken soup and salad, and was reaching into his jacket for his wallet, when a young busboy appeared from nowhere and began to clear his table.

“Hey, I’m still eating here,” he uttered with disdain.

The busboy ignored him and continued to clear the table. He was a young Arab but Gallagher didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t one of the owner’s boys. “Are you deaf?” he said. “Can’t you wait ’til I’m done?”

The busboy stared at the reporter. “Gallagher?” he said, with a thick Middle Eastern accent. “Seamus Gallagher?” He began to clean the surface of the table with a rag.

“That’s right. Who are you?”

The young man didn’t answer. He reached behind his apron and took out a piece of paper. Then he dropped it on the table and, without another word, moved off.

Gallagher watched him weave and wiggle through the breakfast crowd, back toward the rear of the diner. The reporter shook his head. He picked up the piece of paper. It was a hand-written note. It read:
On Friday, 28 January, a train transporting highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau, Kazakhstan, for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City, was hijacked by Gulzhan Baqrah on behalf of El Aqrab and the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. Eight kilos of HEU was stolen, enough to make a nuclear bomb with a one kiloton yield. Unless El Aqrab is released from his Zionist cell, the Brotherhood will detonate a WMD somewhere on the soil of our enemies. It is the will of Allah.

The reporter read the note again. He could feel his pulse quicken. He looked toward the rear of the diner. The busboy had disappeared.

Gallagher got up and snaked his way through the crowd. “Hey, Omar,” he said to one of the young waiters drifting by. He grabbed him by the elbow. The waiter almost dropped his plate of eggs and bacon on the floor. “Omar, what’s the name of your new busboy?” Gallagher insisted.

The waiter scanned the rear of the diner. He shook his head. “There is no other busboy. Just Ahmed, Mr. Gallagher.” He inched away. “Do you want me to get him?”

It was no use. The boy had vanished. “No, it’s okay. Never mind,” he said.

Gallagher squeezed back to his booth, tossed a few dollars on the table, and started for the door. His heart still pounded in his chest.
This is starting out as an interesting day
, he thought. He had planned to run a follow-up on his Gentry Hall story, the senior citizens’ center where a seventy-seven year old great-grandmother had been sexually molested a few weeks earlier. But now, out of the sky, out of the heavens, someone had dropped this bomb into his lap. Literally. He opened the door and stepped outside. He reached into his camel hair jacket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. He lit one up. The sidewalk buzzed with pedestrians. Cabs and vans and cars and trucks choked the streets and avenues. Gallagher looked up at the WKXY-TV studios across the way, at the offices, the stores. At the apartment buildings.
Somewhere on the soil of our enemies
. He tossed his cigarette into the street. It tasted of death. Perhaps he was getting a cold.