The Brotherhood Conspiracy (15 page)

The truck was not speeding, by any means. Ben Ali had given strict instructions that they be very careful with the heavy load but, most of all, that they remain below the posted speed limit. So why were so many of the cars on this road honking their horns at the truck . . . many of the drivers gesturing toward Mustafa. He didn’t understand.

They came to the tunnel that carries the FDR under the United Nations Plaza and, for a moment, Ben Ali was afraid the safe wouldn’t clear the tunnel’s low entry. He took a breath as the truck made it into the tunnel, but froze when a white NYPD cruiser raced by on his left, its lights flashing like an alien apparition.

The police cruiser closed on the truck and pulled up alongside.

“Pull the truck over,” he could hear through his open window.

The truck began to increase speed, the exit for the 59th Street Bridge just ahead.

“Pull the truck over . . . now!” came the order from the police car as it added its sirens to its array of flashing lights.

The truck closed rapidly on the exit, a big, sweeping, left-turning curve. Ben Ali’s eyes opened wide. As the truck careened into the exit’s curve, the safe began to shift to the right. The truck bed settled down on the right tires and the left tires looked as if they were about to leave the ground. The police cruiser braked heavily to get behind the truck and away from the safe. Ben Ali’s tires were screaming as he jammed on his brakes to avoid both the police car and the dangerously listing truck.

At what seemed like the last moment, the truck straightened out. But the exit curve did not. The truck slammed into the concrete barrier on the outside of the curve, pushed it aside, and continued on into the ramp of oncoming traffic exiting from the downtown side of the FDR.

It was mayhem. As oncoming cars slammed into each other trying to avoid a
collision with the flatbed, the truck crossed the far ramp, ran up onto the sidewalk, and came to rest in a small park beside a veterinary hospital. The safe sat at the edge of the flatbed, then, as if it were rising from sleep, the truck rolled ponderously over onto its right side, the safe gouging a huge chunk of grass out of the park.

The police cruiser, pulled over to the berm of the exit curve, sat empty, its doors open, as the two uniformed officers, guns drawn, zigzagged through the mangled cars toward the truck.

Shaken, but not panicked, Ben Ali eased the taxi around the stopped police cruiser and slowly inched his way onto 61st Street. The carnage was behind him, but his eyes were on the flatbed truck, and the two police officers who were staring into the empty cab, already calling in for help.

Allah be praised. They will know where to meet me.

Once the city’s Parks Department cleansed Bryant Park of its drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and most pickpockets, and renovated the broad, green expanse on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, New York City gained its most beautiful midtown oasis. Gravel walkways under broad shade trees bordered the well-tended grass rectangle that welcomed luncheon picnics, sun-bathers, and Monday Movie Nights several times during the summer.

To rid the park of its darker element, the city installed lights—lots of them—antique-looking, copper patina lampposts with frosted-glass globes. Cosmopolitan cute, they gave off plenty of light, enough to dispel most shadows, even under the trees.

Which left Kais and Aziz little cover. There was even less shadow surrounding the massive Humanities and Social Sciences Library that fronted Bryant Park along Fifth Avenue. There was no way to be invisible.

It was late Sunday night. There were a few strolling couples crossing through the park. Traffic on 42nd Street was a trickle of its normal deluge. A light breeze carried the smell of pizza across the lawn and gently mussed the leaves on the plane trees. It was quiet.

On their third circuit around the perimeter of the park and library they identified their best chance of entry. At the back corner of the library building, on the northwest side of the park along 42nd Street, there was a prewar, stone
public restroom, now closed. Behind the stone restroom, which stood on its own, separated from the shuttered restaurants along the library’s rear terrace, was a dark, sheltered space to store trash. Behind that, toward the back of the library building, was a small, wooded plot that was relatively isolated. Across a wide gravel walkway from the plot, a set of stone stairs dropped down from the building’s surrounding wall into the darkness of the library’s northeast corner. The stairs were guarded by a locked, wrought-iron gate.

And a security guard, sitting on the wall, having a smoke.

Kais looked at his watch. Time spilled from his window of opportunity.

He tapped Aziz on the arm, and they slipped around the far side of the restroom, ducked into the shadow surrounding the dumpster, then crawled through the darkness of the wooded plot, toward the gate and the guard. Coptic cross amulets—with the lightning bolt slashing through on the diagonal—dangled outside of their shirts.

Kais crossed the gravel path, hesitating in the shadow of a large bush that flanked the gate and butted against the wall. He could smell the guard’s body odor.

Thrashing loudly, Aziz emerged from the darkness of the wooded plot onto the sidewalk of 42nd Street and immediately captured the guard’s attention. As the guard tossed away his cigarette and motioned in the direction of Aziz—“Hey, you”—Kais slid to the side of the bush away from the guard’s vision. A two-sided blade in his right hand, Kais placed his foot on a jutting piece of the wall and drew his arm back.

A brilliant shaft of light exploded in the night, bathing Kais in its blue-white illumination, the knife poised to swing into the sitting guard’s neck.

“Don’t move . . . not an inch.”

Kais’s eyes shifted to the left, to the gravel walkway, and traveled down the shaft of light. He heard the guard dismounting the wall as he saw a blue-uniformed New York policeman emerge from the shadow of the wooded plot, a service revolver resting across the arm that held the flashlight. Kais began to raise his hands, then shoved off his left foot and rolled his body to clear the wall.

He heard the noise and was spun around like a rag doll by the pain that incinerated his chest. By the time his body hit the sidewalk, he heard no more.

The darkness was intense on the western side of the building, in the small alleyway between the Collector’s Club and the apartment building at the corner of 35th Street and Madison Avenue. At 3:30 on a Monday morning, New York’s streets are mostly abandoned, silent strips of asphalt. An occasional taxi. A bus. Then the unnatural quiet.

Ali Suliman—dressed entirely in black, his head and face, except his dark eyes, covered by a black hood—edged down the side of the building, feeling for the service door he knew was cut into the stone foundation. In his right hand he held the “scrambler,” a high-powered, microwave-impulse transmitter designed to confuse and countermand any electronic security system, converting its programmed security code to a new code supplied by the scrambler device. Suliman located the touch pad beside the service door, positioned the scrambler under it, and triggered the intense impulse. He took a deep breath, punched in the counterfeit code, gingerly pushed against the heavy metal door, and waited for any telltale sign of an alarm.

The door swung easily inward. Suliman stepped quickly into the dark of the building, disappearing into the shadows, out of sight of the closed circuit cameras. He saw the blinking red and green lights of the building’s internal security apparatus on the wall to his right, placed the scrambler against the face of the metal box, just below the keypad, and triggered a second pulse. The lights all burned green, and steady, and Suliman breathed once again.

So much for electronic gadgetry. The ornamental wrought-iron gate guarding the Collector’s Club vault and archives was secured not by digital electronics but by a much more fundamental security system. A padlock . . . a huge padlock, its hasp girded with strips of wound steel, a half-inch tempered steel shackle, impervious to bolt cutters, holding it in place. Suliman shrugged.

He placed the black duffle bag in his left hand on the marble floor, unzipped the top, and withdrew a device about two feet long, a muffled electric motor at one end, attached to two steel arms, side-by-side, with flat, spade-shaped, grooved pads at the ends. Suliman positioned the arms of the device between two of the wrought-iron bars, pushed a button on the motor, and watched the arms swing outward until they touched the bars. Then the bars began to move, pushed apart by the small, but powerful, arms of a miniature version of the Jaws of Life.

Twenty minutes later, Suliman squeezed through a ragged, two-foot-wide opening in the wrought-iron gate. He ignored the priceless archives of the world’s rarest stamps arranged in wooden bins and cabinets to his left and moved with purposeful haste to the vault on the right, behind the proctor’s desk, hidden by thick, dark green velvet drapes. His heartbeat quickened as he eased the drapes aside and stepped up to the face of the vault. His right hand rose, fingers outstretched toward the metal vault, but stopped in midair.

He saw this style vault once before, when the Prophet’s Guard attempted to break into a secure diamond deposit vault in South Africa. This was not what he was told to expect. The vault door was imprinted with the highest level Swiss Security rating, UL3. A fingerprint scanner he expected to be able to deal with. But this? The fingerprint scanner on this safe required a unique customer code and a biometric hand scan before access was permitted to the fingerprint scan. Worse for Ali Suliman was the seismic alarm which would detect any vibration in the walls, floor, or ceiling of the vault. Neither his skill nor the scrambler would overcome this vault’s security. A bomb would fail to move the double-plated, welded doors.

Suliman stood before the vault, absently fingering through his black shirt the amulet that hung around his neck. This vault was an unexpected impediment, a barrier to overcome. Somehow, he would discover a way to fulfill his mission.

Suliman moved away from the vault as if it were a sleeping infant. And his eyes fell on the ragged hole he had ripped in the room’s wrought-iron gate. Only, now, the task had become much more difficult.