“Emily’s right,” I said, “especially about the deep pockets. I’d say al Gharsi was on a shoestring budget, except his kids didn’t even seem to have any shoes.”
“Precisely. The whole place stinks of poverty and desperation,” Emily said. “I think al Gharsi was used. Like the NYU students. He was a patsy, a cutout.”
“What about his pocket litter? You know, his computers and cell-phone records. What have you found?” said Fabretti hopefully.
“Nothing conclusive and nothing new,” Emily said. “We’re not back to square one, but we’re close to it.”
“Shit,” he said, staring a glum hole through the bottles at the back of the bar.
Of course he was upset. Careers had been smashed to pieces over far lesser cases than this. But it wasn’t just that, I thought as I remembered Fabretti with his dog in his house—a meeting that felt like it took place a billion years ago. He lived here, too. This was killing him. Killing all of us. The city hadn’t been this psychologically screwed up since 9/11.
“We need to find these people,” Fabretti said.
I nodded as I stared over the crowded bar into the restaurant. The Tudor beams and dark paneling. The busy waiters in their old-fashioned white shirts and aprons and black bow ties. Looking at them, I thought of all the millions of busy people in the city trying to keep the wheels on, trying to do right, to support and protect their families.
But nothing was safe. Not anymore.
Part Three
All Work and No Play
Chapter 51
The next dawn’s early light found Emily and me on Nineteenth Avenue in East Elmhurst, Queens.
Near the on-ramp of the bridge to the Rikers Island jail, we had the unmarked tucked behind an abandoned truck trailer. To our right was an old chain-link fence with empty gin bottles and scraggly trees behind it. To our left was a four-square-block industrial zone of manufacturing firms and warehouses.
I glanced at my phone as the metal howl of an unseen airliner from nearby LaGuardia Airport ripped through the gray sky overhead.
“What time you got?” I said.
“Another five minutes,” Emily said, much more calmly than I felt.
I tucked my phone back into a pouch of my heavy Kevlar vest and blotted sweat off my f
ace with a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin.
I’m sweating, all right, I thought as I blinked at the black barrel of the automatic M4 rifle propped upright on the dash beside my knee.
Sweating bullets.
We were about to hit one of the industrial buildings on our second antiterrorist raid in forty-eight hours. This newest lead had come in last night around midnight. It had been sifted out of the electronics that we had collected from al Gharsi’s dump upstate. It had been pulled from his kids’ Xbox, of all things. The Wi-Fi–linked gaming networks that allowed players to communicate with each other were being used by al Gharsi to make contact with the group of Queens-based terrorists to whom we were about to pay what we hoped was an unexpected morning visit.
This group of nefarious and dangerous American-hating losers was a new one for me. They were Nigerians, and it was speculated that they were members of an offshoot of al Qaeda based in Nigeria called Boko Haram. A hasty surveillance operation on the locale had spotted at least six to eight Nigerian men working, and apparently living, inside a massive carpet- and rug-importing warehouse.
Two of the Nigerians had been identified from photographs as being on student visas. What had really set off alarm bells were the cell-phone records of one of the two students, who had apparently been in contact with a man overseas named Abubar Kwaja. Kwaja was a wanted Nigerian-based wealthy arms dealer who supplied Boko Haram with weapons.
That a half dozen likely heavily armed jihadist jackwads were in such close proximity to LaGuardia Airport was blood-chilling. That’s why the brass had let the leash off on a tactical raid immediately. We needed to go on this and go on this now.
Although the new lead was a godsend after such a lack of progress, it was actually a rough setup in terms of takedown. Our target, two blocks away, was an old one-story brick industrial building that covered the whole block from 47th to 46th Streets. The fortresslike building had closed steel shutters over both its doorway and driveway and rusted wire mesh over its windows. It was also somewhat isolated, sandwiched between two storage yards, which put a damper on any kind of flank stealth approach.
There were more than a hundred cops and agents about to swoop in, but I still had a bad feeling. You wanted to model and game a raid for a bit before going into such a heavily fortified target; have backup plans for backup plans; be as prepared as possible. But we didn’t have time for all that. Getting in there was not going to be quick or easy by any stretch.
“If there’s anything good to say about things,” I mumbled to Emily, “at least there aren’t a lot of people around.”
“Besides me.” Emily nodded with her eyes closed and her hands clasped as she said the Lord’s Prayer under her breath.
I decided to join her when her phone suddenly pinged with a text.