Читать книгу Witness To Death - Dave White - Страница 22
ОглавлениеAn hour and a half after taking the train in, Callahan took a cab out of New York.
No one was looking for him according to Weller, and as far as he could tell, the cops were watching the trains, not automobile traffic. Port Authority had never been any good at watching the tunnels anyway. They put one cop on the Jersey side, and he was supposed to catch the one suspicious truck out of the ten thousand that went through the tunnels each day.
On the car ride, his cabbie Ranjit tried to convince him that the Lincoln Tunnel was the best way to Jersey City. It wasn’t, but Callahan didn’t argue. The longer routes were the safest. He checked his voice mail.
No messages. There were several missed calls from Michelle, however. He guessed that if John had gone to the police, he’d been arrested. By now, Michelle must have heard.
Callahan should call her back. But there was no time. He couldn’t get in an argument now.
Instead, he dialed the DHS. After going through the code phrases again, he was put in touch with Candy Balascio. Candy was the one who put him in touch with Omar when Callahan had first come over from the CIA, two years after he’d started working for the government.
He needed to find Omar Thabata, and Candy was the first place to go.
That was how the night had started, but with the explosions and violence, he’d lost sight of that. If Thabata was smart, he’d be packing his shit, aborting his plan—whatever it was—and booking a flight back to Pakistan.
****
The first time Callahan had heard of Thabata, though, he was sitting in long term parking outside Newark Liberty Airport. It was the summer of 2003, and Callahan had just been hired by the DHS. They sent him to New York to learn the ropes with some of the members of the FBI Terrorist taskforce. Callahan looked through the windshield of his car, staring at the New York skyline and imagining mounds of rubble and cracked buildings where the Twin Towers used to be.
They’d just dodged another bullet.
One of the FBI agents working the case, Hank Manfra, opened the passenger door and sat down next to him.
“Did you shower?” Callahan asked.
It wasn’t a code. The guy smelled like rotten Parmesan cheese. Leave it to Callahan to get assigned his first case, and have to meet up with someone with B.O. Candy Balascio had called Callahan before the sun came up and told him and Manfra to get down to the airport.
Manfra laughed. “Arresting bad guys makes me work up a sweat.”
“Me too.” But I shower.
“The bomb would have taken out front of the terminal. All those people waiting to be picked up.”
“C4?” Callahan wished he’d gotten out of the car before Manfra got in. He’d need at least three air fresheners to salvage the interior.
Manfr shrugged. “Haven’t gotten a look at the device yet. There are things going on in Jersey City. Even better, one of the guys in cuffs is willing to tell our bosses about them.”
That seemed too easy to Callahan. In the past it’d taken an electric drill aimed toward the ear, a scream, and a gunshot, leaving these assholes to infer that the friends who kept quiet were dead. His personal favorite was waterboarding. Watching a guy try to talk while spitting water, knowing you had him in the palm of your hand. The CIA’d been doing anything to get these guys to talk. And here, this guy wanted to just hand him the information.
DHS was proving to be an easy job. “What kinds of things?” Callahan tried to picture the guys they’d arrested talking to each other in the back of the van they were currently handcuffed in, panicking.
Two young Muslims, Mohammad Al-Fariq and Jawad Ibrahim, had taken a cab to the airport. When they got out, they each carried a large gym bag. Just as they were about to place them on the ground, Manfra and Callahan approached with a warrant. The men were arrested and the bags were searched. Once Manfra saw the explosives inside, he ordered the terminal evacuated.
Now one of them wanted to talk. Callahan shifted in his seat and took a deep breath through his mouth.
“The email we intercepted from Al-Fariq—it was going to someone important, wasn’t it?”
Manfra sat straight and turned slowly toward Callahan.
“You ever hear of Omar Thabata?” he asked. “I haven’t. We’re lucky we caught the email. Al-Fariq was so confident, damn thing wasn’t even written in code. Check the files.”
Callahan sent a text to Candy, asking her to look him up.
“I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?”
“According to Ibrahim, he’s the guy who planned this whole thing. Lives in J. C.”
“Let’s talk to him.”
Callahan radioed over to the van and told them not to leave yet. He drove over to it and stood outside the double doors. He could hear muffled voices through them, and it sounded like arguing. The conversation stopped when Callahan opened the doors. Al-Fariq turned his head toward Callahan, while Ibrahim stared at the floor.
“I want to talk to your superiors,” Ibrahim said.
“Shut up,” Al-Fariq hissed.
“Doesn’t matter what you want. We’re gonna put you away for a long time. Guantanamo, you hear of it? It’s not nice there. I’ve been there.”
Sweat dripped off Ibrahim’s nose. Al-Fariq swore.
“I will tell you something. I will give you a piece of free information. And when you find I’m right, you’ll come back to me,” Ibrahim said.
Callahan waited, widening his eyes so they knew he was intrigued. Manfra leaned against the van, sniffed, and wiped at his nose.
“The man who planned this. He is an angry man,” Ibrahim said. “Omar Thabata. He contacted us through our mosque in Irivington. We’ve not been in touch since.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Callahan said. “If he’s as dangerous as you make him sound, he’d be in our database. Like you two idiots.”
Manfra shook his head, then wiped his nose again.
“We were told we could contact him in Jersey City. Where he lives.” Ibrahim rattled off an address in Jersey City, another mosque. “I’ve only met him once. When I picked up—”
“Shut up!” Al-Fariq screamed. Ibrahim listened this time.
Turned out Ibrahim wanted to cut a deal to stay out of Guantanamo. He’d heard the stories of military prisons and wanted nothing to do with them. He was supposed to die at the airport that day. For his cause. Not be tortured by Americans. He wanted to cut a deal to go to Newark State Penitentary.
Not that the inmates would treat him any better. But Ibrahim didn’t need to know that at the moment.
The following Thursday, Callahan and two feds raided a mosque in Jersey City. Omar wasn’t there. But his name started to pop up in emails and phone taps. There were whispers of him. Informants said he was planning something big, but it had to be foolproof, something that wouldn’t fail. He would wait until the right moment.
But Callahan didn’t remain on the case. Weller reassigned him, put him undercover, doctored the files to make it look like he went back to the CIA and Afghanistan. His file said he was killed in the line of duty three weeks later. His superiors didn’t even know he existed.
The DHS was a nebulous part of the government. It controlled many different agencies, such as the Secret Service, the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection. Weller sold Callahan on the job, saying how easy it’d be to hide one person in a bureaucracy and have him get the dirty work done. Callahan assumed there were others like him throughout the country, but never asked about it.
****
And Omar Thabata had remained just a name, until tonight.
“What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” Candy said, when she got him on the line.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“What do you need?”
“Omar Thabata. Weller gave me an address of a mosque where he’d been seen last. Maybe two weeks ago. I wanted to see if you had anything more recent.”
Candy took a deep breath. He’d heard that sound too many times over the years. Every time he was in a tough spot and called her for help, she’d take a deep breath and get him the answer he needed.
“We haven’t heard a peep from him. No emails. No phone calls. He went off the grid,” she said.
Callahan took a deep breath himself. “I saw him tonight.” He told her about the meeting he was supposed to witness, and then what happened on the docks.
“So, I guess he’d be an important guy to catch up with.” He could hear Candy’s smug smile in her voice.
“Good guess.”
“Well, how’d you find out where he’d be tonight?”
“A friend.”
“You try asking that friend again?”
“Probably not in my best interest at the moment.”
“I’ll talk to Duffy. See what we can find out.”
“I said the same thing to Weller,” Callahan said. “I want to talk to her.”
“What’d he say?”
“Not to. Plausible deniability.”
Candy said, “I thought I heard Duffy mention you by name once.”
Callahan felt cold. “Probably not. You want, ask Weller if you can talk to her about me. I’m going to try the mosque after I run another errand. I want to catch them off guard in the middle of the night. If you find anything out before then, let me know.”
Sixty-three dollars later, Ranjit dropped him off a block away from where he’d left his car earlier in the evening. He could see the yellow tape and flood lights the cops had set up around the waterfront. Uniforms and guys in long jackets milled around near an ambulance, where two paramedics lifted three body bags into the back. Callahan walked in their direction.
