The Ninth Step (25 page)

One week later, in the middle of a night off work, he woke to a pounding on his front door. Bleary-eyed, he opened it to find three men who identified themselves as federal agents. Without explanation, they grabbed his arms, pulled them behind his back, and handcuffed him.

Ghizala came to the bedroom door, saw what was happening, and shouted at the men, but one of them blocked her from coming out.

“Abbu?” Enny, in her pink pajamas, stood frightened at the entrance to the living room, where she slept on the couch. “What is happening?”

“It’s okay,” Nadim told her. “Go back to sleep.”

He heard his daughter crying as he was dragged out of his home, still in his nightclothes.

“Why you are taking me?” Nadim said, his command of English failing him in his fear. “I do nothing!”

The men did not respond; they just hustled him out to the curb and shoved him into a waiting van.

“I have made application for green card!” he said. “My wife, American!”

The men wouldn’t answer.

“I have papers!” Nadim cried. “Please! In my house!”

The van roared off into the night.

Nadim sat shaken, arms aching behind his back. His captors, stone-faced, avoided looking at him; after a couple of minutes of listening to his baffled pleas, one of them pulled some duct tape from the glove department, ripped off a section, and slapped it over Nadim’s mouth.

He stared out the windshield at the red taillights glowing on the highway in front of the van. He was a professional driver and he could see where they were headed. Along the Prospect Expressway. Onto the Gowanus Expressway. Toward Sunset Park.

We will straighten this out, he told himself, struggling to calm his panicked heart. Ghizala will bring the immigration papers; these men will have to let me go.

BUT THEN THE HELL
began.

Outside a big windowless building on a desolate stretch of Brooklyn’s Second Avenue, a metal garage door slid up and the van screeched down a ramp. Nadim was yanked out into a bright basement parking lot where three new men were waiting. They wore brown pants and khaki shirts with epaulets, and they placed ankle restraints on him and marched him toward a doorway. One of the men stomped on the short chain that separated his ankle cuffs, and Nadim fell to the oily concrete.

“Get up, towelhead!”

Nadim stared up in incomprehension. The man, a big brute with a hard face and a strangely small mouth, grabbed his handcuffs and yanked him to his feet. Then, while the other two looked on, the man grabbed the back of Nadim’s head and mashed his face against a concrete pillar.

“I have done nothing!” Nadim mumbled. “Please! My wife, American citizen!”

The big man grabbed the middle finger of Nadim’s right hand and began to bend it back so far he feared it would snap.

“Please!” Nadim screamed.

“I had a cousin in the towers,” the big man said. “I hope you’re ready to feel some pain.”

“I have done nothing!”

“Come on,” one of the other men said to Nadim’s tormentor. “We gotta get him up to the S.H.U.”

AN ELEVATOR, BARRED GATES,
stark hallways, a bare room containing only a doctor’s examining chair and a weight scale.

The big man unlocked Nadim’s cuffs and leg shackles.

“Clothes off!”

Nadim just stared at him.

The man slapped him in the face. “I said
clothes off
.”

Slowly, not believing what was happening to him, Nadim began to comply.

The big man walked over to the door and shouted down the corridor. “Hey, Laney, come check this out!”

Just as Nadim got fully naked, a plump female guard appeared in the doorway, looked at him, and laughed.

Burning with shame, Nadim covered his groin with his hands.

“No,
please
,” he said. “I am Muslim.”

The big man imitated him in a high-pitched voice. “‘No! Please!’” He scowled. “I
know
you’re a Muslim, you fuckin’ terrorist! Hands at your sides.
Now
.”

UNDER THE CONEY ISLAND
boardwalk, Nadim tried to rouse himself to go find a better hiding place, but he was just too tired. His head dropped back against the cool sand, and those dark months, from the end of 2001 into the spring of 2002, played out again inside his mind.

The first three days had passed in a terrible blur.

He had been thrust into a tiny cell that reminded him of the bathroom on the airplane that had brought him here from Pakistan: windowless, bare, smelly, with a sink and toilet of polished steel. He spent his first few minutes inside, still cuffed and shackled, calling out through a slot in the door.

“Please! I drive for car service! No terrorist!”

The door swung open, knocking him backward onto the floor. The big man with the small mouth entered. He stepped on Nadim’s head and kept his foot there. “You need to understand something: you will speak only when spoken to. Or else I am gonna flush your towelhead down that fucking toilet, do you understand me?”

The foot left his head and Nadim looked up: the man’s face was contorted with rage.

“Please!” Nadim cried. “I have done nothing.” It was a misunderstanding. A simple case of mistaken identity. There was no reason for him to be here, swallowed up inside this windowless building, trapped inside this nightmare.

The big man knelt down and stared into Nadim’s face. “We know all about you, Hajji. One of your neighbors turned you in.”

Nadim thought of the dead dog and of its owner’s hate-filled threats of revenge, and suddenly he understood why he was here.

Now he was
truly
frightened.

THE HOURS PASSED, BUT
he didn’t know how many—he hadn’t seen a clock since he emerged from the van. He desperately wanted a cigarette, but he had no way to get one. After a while he needed to evacuate his bowels, but he noticed that there was no toilet paper in his cell, and so he refrained. He turned and lay down on his little metal bed; it was a bunk, but the upper berth was empty, with the mattress folded in half.

He expected that someone would show up at any minute and he would be able to explain about the neighbor and the dog, but no one came. Eventually, he curled up and tried to sleep, but the lights in the cell were so bright that they bored through his closed eyelids. He lay there and thought of his daughter, of her frightened face, and he prayed that his captors would let him call and tell her he was all right.

He would demand that they let him phone a lawyer. This was America, not some foreign dictatorship. He had rights. He had seen this on TV; everyone in America had rights.

But no one came.

Later, as he was finally dozing off, someone rapped on the door of his cell. Nadim jolted upright, but no one entered.

Again, he started to fall asleep; again someone banged on the door.

Hours passed.

Then days.

BRIGHT LIGHT, ALWAYS, AROUND
the clock, glaring in his face when he tried to sleep. Sometimes, when he was mercifully able to drift off, he would be awakened by a barrage of recorded sound, booming along the corridor, angry songs with screaming voices and thundering electric guitars. Even without the aural assault, he wouldn’t have been able to find deep sleep, racked as he was by the desire to smoke and tormented by thoughts of his worried daughter. No one would tell him what he was charged with, and he wasn’t allowed to call a lawyer.

He was kept in his little cell twenty-three hours a day; the other hour he was escorted up to a little recreation area on the roof, where he could pace back and forth, alone. But there were other prisoners in the area they called the S.H.U.; sometimes Nadim could hear their voices. Egyptians. Turks. Yemenis. There was a fellow Pakistani from Sahiwal across the corridor; Nadim was not allowed to talk with anyone, but sometimes in the middle of the white nights they managed to exchange a few words. The other prisoner’s name was Mahmood and he ran a little magazine stand on McDonald Avenue. As far as the man could tell, he had been detained because the FBI found it suspicious that he had been sending “too much money” to his brother in Karachi.

A sentry came by and ordered the men to be silent. The guards were angry—and confused, and scared. The sky had cracked open, that bright September morning, and their whole world had been shaken.

The one they called
Barshak
, though, and some of his colleagues, seemed neither confused nor scared. They appeared, in fact, almost glad about what had happened recently: it gave them a perfect excuse to vent some deep inner rage. Nadim remembered a vicious bully in his neighborhood when he was a child, and how Nadim had become expert at finding hiding places in order to avoid this boy. But now there was nowhere to hide. He was surrounded by people, day in, day out, who wished him harm. He couldn’t flee and he couldn’t fight. (On his second day in here, he had resisted Barshak’s rough handling. The result: another guard had been called in and they had taken turns grabbing one of Nadim’s manacled arms and swinging him into a wall. This treatment achieved its purpose: he had been forced to realize the futility of fighting back.)

And so the pressure built, with no way to release it, like a tornado trapped inside his brain.

E
VEN AFTER A LARGELY
sleepless night, Jack was wired and eager for action. He would have gone to the park for a run, but he couldn’t do that now, not with his security detail. Two new guys had replaced Tommy Searle and his partner; they were supposed to keep a protective eye on him until he went on duty. What were they gonna do, jog along beside him, like Secret Service guys forced to trot after the president out on his Texas ranch?

He was scheduled to work a four-to-midnight; he stayed home to think awhile. He was searching for the answers to several questions, but he had a feeling that he wasn’t looking in the right place. He read the paper to try to give his restless mind a break. Then he paced around some more.

In the early afternoon, he called the lieutenant from the bomb squad. And then—though he hated to do it—he phoned Brent Charlson.

“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know if you heard about this, but somebody planted a bomb under my car the other night.”

“My God!” the fed replied. “Do you know who did it?”

“I don’t. I thought it was probably due to a Mafia thing I’ve been investigating, but I just talked to someone at the bomb squad and he said that the explosive they used was Semtech. I remembered that you said that you had intercepted chatter involving that word. And here I’ve been poking around, looking for this Hasni guy. So I’m wondering: Do you think maybe word could have gone out to his terrorist cell? That they might have targeted me?”

He was fully prepared for more scorn or at least impatience from the fed, but Charlson’s reasonable, grandfatherly tone was back.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised, detective. We have reason to believe that the cell is directly connected to Al Qaeda. At the very least, they’re part of a splinter group. Now, these people are highly motivated, highly organized, and they’ve already proven that they’re willing to kill innocent bystanders. I don’t see why murdering an NYPD detective would trouble them one bit. I’ll be glad to look into this, to see if we’ve picked up any more chatter. I trust you’re taking security measures?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a couple of uniforms watching my house.”

“Good, good. Listen, I promise we’re gonna roll up the whole gang very soon. In the meantime, I’d suggest you just go about your normal routine and stay away from these guys. Okay?”

“Thanks,” Jack said. For once, he thought he might have even detected real comradeship in the fed’s voice. If there was one bond that could unite all law enforcement officers, it was the risk of getting killed on the job. From all Jack’s years as a cop, he knew that nothing could make you put aside petty differences faster than hearing a 10-13, a radio call about an officer in trouble.

On the other hand, someone had tried to kill him. And he had absolutely no intention of resting until he tracked that person down.

JACK’S SECURITY TEAM TRAILED
him until he was safely inside the Seven-oh precinct house. The uniforms stopped in to the detectives’ lounge for sodas, then bid him farewell until later that night.

He told his partner about the car bomb and about his suspicions.

“Christ!” Richie said. “Do you think I oughtta see about getting some security too?”

It sounded like a rather self-centered reaction, but Jack didn’t hold it against his partner—the man had a wife and two kids to worry about. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But we should definitely watch each other’s backs.” He glanced around the Seven-oh squad room. A busy day, evidently: most of the other detectives were out. He noticed a bumper sticker on the side of the next desk: it read
DON’T MAKE ME RELEASE THE FLYING MONKEYS!

He dug a pinkie in his ear. “I’m thinking about who we’ve interviewed: someone who might have sent a warning to Hasni or his buddies. The ex-wife? Not a likely prospect, I gotta admit—there was no love lost there. But if she heard from Hasni, she might have mentioned our visit.”

Richie frowned. “And there was the car-service boss and the other drivers. And the shopkeepers along Coney Island Ave. I know your business card doesn’t give your home address, but it would hardly take a genius to track you down.”

Jack nodded. There was no shortage of candidates. He glanced at his partner’s worried face and decided that it wasn’t going to help anything if they were
both
freaked out. “Look at the bright side. It was probably just some Mob guy who thought I was getting too close. If that’s the deal, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Richie looked pained. “Hey, I’m not just thinking about
me
here!”

Jack nodded. “I know you’re not. And I appreciate it.” He sat up straight. “Let’s focus on finding Hasni. I’ve been thinking about why he and Brasciak both disappeared from the tax rolls back in Two thousand one. Now why does someone go off the radar like that?” He ticked off possibilities on his fingers. “They’ve just gone out of town for a while. They got fired or laid off. They’re out sick. Or they’re in jail or upstate.”