Night Fall (31 page)

She replied, “You be safe.” She added, “To make up for the vacation we didn’t get to take, let’s try to meet in Paris on the way home.”

“It’s a date.”

A skycap took her luggage into the terminal, and she followed. We waved to each other through the glass.

I got back into the limo and proceeded to American Airlines.

We both had diplomatic passports, which are standard issue in our business, so checking in to Business Class was relatively painless. Security was a combination of a hassle and a joke. I probably could have handed my Glock to the brain-dead security screener and picked it up on the other side of the metal detector.

I had a few hours to kill, so I spent the time in the Business Class lounge, reading the papers and drinking free Bloody Marys.

My cell phone rang, and it was Kate. She said, “I’m about to board. I just wanted to say good-bye again, and tell you I love you.”

I said, “I love you, too.”

“You don’t hate me for getting you into this thing?”

“What thing? Oh,
this
thing. No problem. It just adds to the Corey legend.”

She stayed quiet a moment, then asked, “Are we done with TWA 800?”

“Absolutely. And Jack, if you’re listening, it was a mechanical malfunction in the center fuel tank.”

She stayed quiet again, then said, “Don’t forget to e-mail me when you arrive.”

“You, too.”

We exchanged a few more “I love you’s” and hung up.

A few hours later, while Kate was over the Atlantic Ocean, the video screen said my flight to London was boarding, and I walked toward the gate.

It had been exactly one week since the memorial service for the victims of TWA Flight 800, and in that week, I’d learned a lot of new things, none of which were doing me any good at this moment.

But in this game, you have to think long-term. You talk. You snoop. You rack your brain. Then you do it again.

There isn’t a single mystery in this world that doesn’t have a solution, if you live long enough to find it.

September

Home

Conclusions: CIA analysts do not believe that a missile was used to shoot down TWA Flight 800… There is absolutely no evidence, physical or otherwise, that a missile was employed.

CIA “Analytic Assessment,” March 28, 1997

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Home

Not having contracted malaria or been abducted, kidnapped, or murdered, I arrived at JFK on a Delta flight from London at 4:05P.M. on the Friday after Labor Day, having spent about forty days and forty nights in the desert wilderness of Yemen.

For the record, the place sucks.

Kate was still in Dar es Salaam, but she’d be home within the week. She seemed to be enjoying Tanzania, e-mailing me about friendly people, good food, interesting countryside, and all that. Rub it in.

Exactly why we’d gotten off with short tours was more of a mystery than why we’d been exiled in the first place-which was no mystery at all. Possibly, Jack Koenig and his colleagues believed that, as with a prison sentence, a short one teaches you a lesson, and a long one breeds resentment and revenge.

Wrong. I was still pissed off and not a bit grateful for my early release.

I cleared Passport Control and Immigration quickly since I wasn’t carrying anything except my overnight bag, a diplomatic passport, and a concealed grudge; I’d left my safari clothes in Yemen where they belonged, and my Glock was being shipped home through the embassy dip pouch. I was wearing tan slacks, a blue blazer, and a sport shirt, which looked good when I’d put them on about a day ago.

It seemed strange to be back in civilization, if that’s the right word for JFK International Airport. The sights, sounds, and smells-which I’d never noticed before-were jarring.

Aden, as it turned out, was not the actual capital of Yemen-some shit-hole town called Sana’a was, and I’d had to go there a few times on business, where I had the pleasure of meeting Ambassador Bodine. I introduced myself to her as a close friend of John O’Neill, though I’d met the gentleman only a few times. I didn’t get kicked out, which was the plan, but neither was I invited for dinner at the ambassador’s residence.

Aden, where I was stationed, was the port city where the
Cole
had been blown up, and it, too, sucked. The good news was that the Sheraton Hotel where the team stayed had a gym (the Marines had to show the staff how to put the equipment together) and a swimming pool (which we had to teach the staff how to clean), and I was as tan and fit as I’d ever been since I took three bullets up in Washington Heights about four years ago. I’d kept the drinking in Yemen to a bare minimum, learned to like fish, rather than drink like one, and experienced the joys of chastity. I felt like a new man, but the old man needed a drink, a hamburger, and sex.

I stopped at the lounge and ordered a beer and hamburger at the bar.

I had my cell phone, but the battery was as dead as my dick at the moment, and I asked the bartender to plug in my charger, which he was happy to do. I explained, “I was in the Arabian desert.”

“Nice tan.”

“Place called Yemen. Dirt cheap. You should go there. The people are great.”

“Well, welcome home.”

“Thanks.”

There had actually been e-mail service in Aden, through Yahoo! for some reason, and this is how Kate and I had kept in touch, along with an occasional international call. We never mentioned TWA 800, but I’d had lots of time to think about it.

I’d e-mailed John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explaining that I was on a secret and dangerous mission for the government, and I might be a few days or years late for class. I suggested they start without me.

The TV over the bar was tuned to the news channel, and it appeared that nothing had happened in my absence. The weather guy said it was another beautiful late summer day in New York, with more of the same in the days ahead. Good. Aden was a furnace. The interior of Yemen was hell. Why do people live in these places?

I ordered another beer and scanned a
Daily News
on the bar. There wasn’t much news, and I read the sports section and checked my horoscope:
Don’t be surprised if you have feelings of ecstasy, jealousy, agony, and bliss all in a day’s work
. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Anyway, in Aden, I worked with six FBI agents, including two women, and four NYPD guys from the Anti-Terrorist Task Force, two of whom I knew, so it was okay. Along with the investigators, we had about twenty Marines armed to the teeth, and an eight-man FBI SWAT team, all of whom rotated duty as sharpshooters on the roof of the Sheraton, and which the hotel, I think, used in their marketing strategy for the few other guests.

The mission also included about a dozen Diplomatic Security Service people, and a few Army and Navy intelligence personnel, and of course, the CIA, whose identity and number was a big secret, but I counted four. All the Americans got along fairly well because there was no one else to talk to in that godforsaken place.

My duties in Aden consisted of working with their corrupt and stunningly stupid intelligence people to get leads on the perpetrators of the
Cole
attack. Most of these guys spoke some kind of English, left over from the British colonial days, but whenever my teammates and I got too nosy or aggressive, they forgot their second language.

Now and then, Yemen intelligence would round up the usual suspects and drag them down to police headquarters so we could see some progress in the investigation. About once a week, five or six task force guys would be taken to the police station to question these miserable wretches through inept and lying interpreters in a fetid, windowless interrogation room. The intelligence guys would smack the suspects around a little for our benefit and tell us they were getting close to the “foreign terrorists” who blew up the
Cole.

Personally, I think these suspects were hired for the day, but I appreciated the police interrogation techniques. Just kidding.

And then there were the “informants,” who gave us useless leads in exchange for a couple of bucks. I swear I saw some of these informants in police uniforms around town on the days they weren’t being informants.

Basically, we were pissing into the wind, and our presence there was purely symbolic; seventeen American sailors were dead, an American warship had been put out of commission, and the administration needed to show they were doing something. But when John O’Neill had actually tried to do something, he got the boot.

As a point of interest, a week ago, word had reached Yemen that John O’Neill had left the FBI and was now working as a security consultant for the World Trade Center. I should see him about a job-depending on how the TWA thing played out; I was going to be either very employable, or unemployed forever.

Kate, in her e-mails, told me she was having a lot more luck in Tanzania, where the government was helpful, partly as a result of losing hundreds of its citizens in the U.S. Embassy bombings.

The Yemen government, on the other hand, was not only unhelpful, but also treacherous and hostile, and the guy who was head of their intelligence service, some slimeball named Colonel Anzi, who we nicknamed Colonel Nazi, made Jack Koenig look like Mother Teresa.

There had been an element of danger in Yemen, and we always traveled with bulletproof vests and armed Marines or SWAT guys. We didn’t mix much with the locals, and I slept with Mrs. Glock every night.

Our hotel had been mortared and rocketed a few years before by some rebel group, but they were all dead now, and we only had to worry about the terrorists who blew up the
Cole
and undoubtedly wanted to blow up the Sheraton Hotel, first chance they got.

Meanwhile, my beloved Kate was whooping it up in Dar es Salaam. I had another beer and got my imagination fired up, concocting stories about wild tribal horsemen attacking my Jeep on the way to Sana’a, being jumped by assassins in the casbah, and narrowly escaping the bite of a deadly cobra placed in my bed by Yemen intelligence men.

I mean, this could have happened. I thought about trying one of these stories out on the bartender, but he was busy, so I just asked him for my cell phone.

I dialed Dom Fanelli’s cell phone, and he answered.

I said, “I’m back.”

“Hey! I was worried about you. I followed the news every day from Kuwait.”

“I was in Yemen.”

“Really? Same shit. Right?”

“Probably. I’m at JFK. Can’t talk long in case they’re still on my case. Where are you?”

“In the office. But I can talk.”

“Good. How’s my apartment?”

“Great… I would have cleaned it if I knew… anyway, how was Yemen?”

“It’s a well-kept secret.”

“Yeah? How are the babes?”

“I gotta tell ya-this place was like Scandinavia with sunshine.”

“No shit? They have nude beaches?”

“They don’t even allow women to wear bathing suits on the beach.” Which was true.

“Mama mia! Maybe I should put my papers in for the ATTF.”

“Do it soon, before the word gets out.”

“Yeah. Right. You’re jerking me off.” He asked, “How’s Kate?”

“Coming home in a few days.”

“That’s great. Let’s have a night out.”

“I’ll try. I’m on admin leave for ten days, and I’m taking some vacation time, so Kate and I are going to Paris.”

“Terrific. You deserve it. What are you doing tonight?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh, right. Those names.”

“I need to get off this phone in a few minutes, Dom. Talk to me.”

“Okay. Forget Gonzalez Perez. Brock, Christopher, two possibles who fit, one in Daytona Beach, one in San Francisco. You want the particulars?”

“Shoot.”

He gave me the addresses and phone numbers, and I wrote them on a cocktail napkin.

He said, “Roxanne Scarangello. Got what I think is a positive. Ready to copy?”

“Ready.”

“Okay… where did I put that…?”

“On the bulletin board?”

“No… here it is. Okay, Scarangello, Roxanne, age twenty-seven, in her third year of a PhD program at University of Pennsylvania-that’s in Philly. Got a BA and an MA from the same place-bullshit, more shit, piled higher and deeper.”

“She start class?”

“Yeah. Well, she was registered. Should have started today, actually.”

“Current address?”

“Lives on Chestnut Street with a boyfriend named Sam Carlson. Mama’s not happy.” He gave me the address, apartment, and cell phone number. He added, “I did a standard credit check on her-those credit bastards have more background on people than the FBI-and I discovered she used to work summers at the Bayview Hotel in Westhampton Beach. That’s the babe, right?”

“Right.”

“I even got a photo from her college yearbook. Nice-looking. You want it?”

“Maybe. Anything else? Criminal? Civil?”

“No. Clean. But she’s got no visible means of support, except maybe the boyfriend, but he’s a student and his credit report sucks, too, and I did a background on her parents, who aren’t exactly rich.”

“Scholarship?”

“That’s it. Some kind of school scholarship, with a stipend. And knowing where you’re coming from, I checked further and found out that this is a U.S. government-supported scholarship, but maybe that’s just a coincidence.”

“Maybe. Nice work.”

“Piece of cake. Meet me for a beer. You owe me one.”

“I do, but I’m jet-lagged.”

“Bullshit. You’re going to Philly. Take a break, John. Meet me at the Judson Grill. Full of Hampton babes back after Labor Day. Hey, you might get a lead there.”

I smiled and said, “Dom, I’ve kept my dick in my pants for six weeks. Don’t tempt me.”

“Six weeks? How do you know it still works?”

“Go sanitize my apartment. I’ll be home late tonight, or early tomorrow. Ciao.”

“Ciao, baby. Welcome home. Think about what you’re doing-you don’t want to go back to Yemen.”

“Thanks.” I shut off my cell phone, then paid the bar tab and tipped the bartender a five for the electricity.

I walked into the terminal where a digital clock said it was 5:01P.M., and I reset my watch to earth time.

I actually
was
jet-lagged, and I’d been in the same clothes for over a day, and quite frankly I’d make a Yemeni camel jockey gag.

I should be going home, but I was going to Philadelphia.

I went to the Hertz counter and rented a mid-sized Ford Taurus, and within thirty minutes I was on the Shore Parkway, heading toward the Verrazano Bridge, the radio playing, and my cell phone plugged into the car outlet.

I called my home answering machine and retrieved a few dozen messages from people who seemed surprised or confused about us being out of the country. There were about six messages from Dom Fanelli, all saying, “Kate, John-you home yet? I thought I’d check your apartment for you. Okay, just checking.”

This is the guy who tells
me
to be careful. Detective Fanelli was going to wind up on the wrong side of a domestic homicide case.

I shut off the cell phone, and left it charging. My beeper, in fact, had not worked in Yemen, but following Jack’s orders I’d left it on the whole time, and the battery was dead. But it was on.

I also recalled that Mr. Koenig had given me a direct order not to involve myself in TWA 800. I should have asked him to clarify that, which I’ll do next time I see him.

I drove over the Verrazano, across Staten Island, and across the Goethals Bridge, then onto I-95 in New Jersey, and headed south toward Philadelphia. I should be there in less than two hours.

Roxanne Scarangello.
She may not know anything, but if Griffith and Nash spoke to her, then I needed to speak to her.

I was five years and two months behind the curve on this one, but it’s never too late to re-open a case.