The Sleeper (22 page)

A thunder of guns sounded outside the back of the store, and new streams of daylight cut through the fog of chlorine as bullets blasted more holes in the plywood, holes in the sheet-metal side of the building, and holes in the roof.

Betsy was sitting up on the scaffolding opposite me. She waved and pointed at the level below me, at Miriam. I was gasping, taking in a little more poison with every breath. Part of the sniper's corpse beneath me started to vibrate. Then it stopped. Then it vibrated again. A telephone. A much bigger one than most people carried, almost the size of a brick. I didn't answer it, but I took it.

Betsy was holding her arm and it looked like a black stain covered her fingers. She leaned on her side, trying to see what was going on, but with no strength left.

The gunfire outside ended and a splintering of wood brought an explosion of light, then through it shadows of men dressed in black, masked in rubber, armored and armed for war. I tried to shout to them, but my throat was raw with chlorine and blood. I left the corpse of the sniper where it was and struggled down to Miriam. Somebody below shouted at me with an electronic voice. But I didn't hear. Couldn't listen. My little girl was lying on the platform so still; still as death. Her tiny hands were next to her face. But she hadn't taken the mask off. She did what Daddy told her. And then she quit breathing.

Glimpses of Westfield and the sky flashed by through the window on the back of the speeding ambulance—a church steeple, a stoplight, the sign in front of the Kansas Inn, which was the last motel on the edge of town—then Westfield grew smaller, farther away, and disappeared.

A hand over my face held down the respirator. My throat and lungs ached and I sucked every breath like it was my last. “My daughter,” I said. “My wife.”

“They've gone up ahead to Ark City,” said the attendant. “Betsy and—your little girl's name is Miriam, right?” I recognized him now as Jack Whitten, the owner of Whitten's jewelry shop, where I'd bought Betsy her ring. He was a hard-drinking old bachelor most of the time, but he spent part of his week as a real sober, real dedicated rescue volunteer.

“They're alive,” I said.

Jack hesitated for just a second. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Don't try to talk. They're gonna be just fine.”

I tried to sit up and he pushed me back down, his hand still over the respirator mask. “I heard Miriam is responding to CPR. And Betsy—Kurt, Betsy is going to be fine, but she did take a bullet in her shoulder.”

The siren moaned around us.

“That was a hell of a thing you all did back there,” Jack said.

I opened my mouth, then closed it, silent and aching.

“Who'd have thought those bastards would come to Westfield? Attacking our children! Kurt, God only knows what they'd have done with that poison gas if you hadn't stopped them.”

He was convinced and proud of this half-made-up story about “their” poison gas. Maybe it would do as the truth.

“Deputy Nichols was mad as hell, I can tell you. He said Betsy warned him and then he called the FBI and that was the biggest mistake he ever made. They told him to wait until they got to the scene. Do nothing. Can you believe it? Hell, if Nichols had kept waiting, you might still be in there.”

I put my hand on my bare chest, feeling for the pocket of the blue jean jacket, but it wasn't on me any more, there were just thin rubber tubes all over me.

“What do you need?” Jack asked.

“Phone.”

“That's going to have to wait.” He took his hand off my face and picked up the jacket from the bench beside him and reached into the pocket. “I haven't seen a phone this big since I don't know when,” he said. “ ‘Iridium.' What kind of phone is that?”

“Satellite.”

“Whoa. Serious stuff. How do you turn it off? Interferes with things in an ambulance just like in an airplane.”

I reached for it, then hugged it to me. My heart pounded and the monitors in the ambulance beeped like a slot-machine jackpot.

“What the hell you doing, Kurt?”

If he turned it off, I might not be able to turn it back on. I pushed the menu button.

“Come on, Kurt.”

I scrolled up and down looking for “Recent Calls.” There were six, all from the same number, 212-555-3728. I showed it to Jack. “Please write down,” I said.

 

The light in the hospital room was dim and the only sound I heard at first was the faint whoosh of the oxygen machine. I tried to look at my watch, but on my wrist I read my name on a plastic band with a bar code.

“I'm sorry, Kurt.” The voice in the chair beside me was familiar.

“Griffin?”

“I'm really sorry.”

“Where's Betsy? Where's Miriam?”

“I should never have let them get dragged into this.”

“Where the fuck are they?”

“Down the hall.”

“I want to see them.”

“As soon as you can walk.”

I ripped the oxygen tube out from under my nose and stood up, bracing on the side of the bed.

“Hold on,” said Griffin.

The saline drip was on a rolling stand. I used it as a kind of crutch. “Let's go,” I said.

There were two beds in the dim room down where they had my family. Miriam was on the near one. Betsy on the far one. Both of my girls had oxygen tubes in their noses and pain and fear had drained all the color from their faces. Miriam's open eyes stared straight at the ceiling. I wanted to kiss her and hug her, but I was afraid I'd hurt her somehow. She saw me and started thrashing in the bed. I stepped back. She froze again, looking at me in horror.

“She'll get better,” said Betsy.

“You are the bravest woman in the world,” I said.

“Woman?”

“Life-saving Angel,” I said.

She smiled, and then the smile faded. “Angel of Death,” she said.

“Oh, Darlin',” I said, trying not to unplug anything as I hugged her. “You saved so many lives today. Mine and Miriam's, and all the thousands of people those assholes wanted to kill.”

“We stopped a few bad guys.”

“We sure did.”

“But we didn't save the world.” She looked at me, and then at Griffin.

“We've done all we can do,” I said. “We've done all we're going to do.”

“Let's end it somehow, Kurt.”

“We will,” I said.

I held her as tight as I could and we stayed that way for a long time that wanted to be forever.

 

About halfway down the night-empty hall between my family's hospital room and mine, I turned on Griffin and threw him against the wall. He didn't fight back, but waited until, seconds later, I had no breath in my body and I stood before him red-faced and helpless.

“Don't bother killing me, Kurt. I'm leaving the Agency,” he said. “I'm AWOL right now, as far as they're concerned.”

“Who gives a shit which agency you work for.”

“I'm leaving the government.”

“Why don't you just get out of here and leave me—leave
us
—alone?”

“I'm leaving the government because I saw you betrayed, and I couldn't do anything about it. I'm leaving because when you got back here and you were waiting—we should have watched you twenty-four/seven, just to protect you.”

“Go on.”

“But we didn't. The Agency had to stand back and the FBI wouldn't pick up. I tried to check in on you. But—”

“You're telling me that I was here as bait, me and my family like some rotten pieces of meat in a crab trap, and there was nobody interested enough to haul it in.”

“Worse. Not
allowed
to bring you in.”

“Reason?”

“A jurisdiction thing. They said I couldn't make a case for why anyone would come after you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them you had some unfinished business with the bad guys, something about a genie in a bottle. I told them some of the bad guys had already come sniffing around here.”

“And they said—”

“Said it wasn't enough to go on. And if we didn't get it out of you at Gitmo, we weren't going to.”

“You should have warned me.”

“Wasn't allowed. That's why I'm quitting.”

“When was all this decided.”

“Weeks ago. Then again yesterday, when we picked up some intel about people on their way here. Then again today, when we knew they got here. Every time, the word that came down was to leave you alone.”

“All alone.”

“Yeah.”

“Even when the shooting started, nobody was going to send in the cavalry?”

He nodded. I opened the door to my hospital room. “None of this makes sense.” I didn't know what to say. “I still don't understand why.”

“Maybe the Evil Doers were supposed to get what they came for.”

A weight of emotion like a slab of lead pushed down on me. “I got to rest now,” I said. “But if you think you owe me something, do me one favor.”

“What's that?”

I pulled the Iridium phone out of my jacket on the door. It was dead. I unfolded the little paper with the number scrawled by Jack Whitten in the ambulance. And I handed the phone and the number to Griffin.

“Stay in the Agency,” I said. “At least for a few more weeks.”

The sun was just coming up and half of America lay behind me in the night. Filling-station coffee sat in my gut like battery acid and my lungs were still raw from the chlorine. My eyes in the rearview mirror were red as dawn. But I was wide awake as I headed toward the Holland Tunnel and saw the emptiness where the Twin Towers used to be. I heard my voice as if it belonged to somebody else saying, “My God,” and then again, “My God,” and I was glad for all that I had done, and what I had not done, in my life. And for what I was about to do.

I didn't dare think anymore that I could end this war. I wasn't sure that anyone I loved would ever be safe. But today or tomorrow would get us closer to the end, closer to safety—a lot closer than we'd been since those two towers disappeared. That's what I believed as my pickup inched into the tunnel under the Hudson.

Griffin was waiting for me in Manhattan. He'd traced the satellite phone to a company registered in the Bahamas. Through the Agency databases he peeled away layer after layer of corporate fronts until he focused on a financial consultant in New York. That was as much as he would tell me on the phone. “This is really a strange one,” he said. “I think this could be the sleeper of all sleepers. We need—I need you here, and I need you now.”

It was hard to leave Betsy and Miriam. Real hard. They were feeling better but they were still in Ark City Hospital. Folks were protecting us. The doctors. The sheriff's office. Everybody. And we all figured it was better for them to stay there, stay safe, stay away from the reporters who came nosing around about the “gang war in Westfield” story that went out on TV.

As Deputy Nichols told it to the press, a bunch of criminals from Wichita tried to take over our town. They pistol-whipped Sam Perkins and tied him up and stole the chlorine—and nobody knew what they were going to use it for. Nobody was sure, either, why they took some children hostage and killed the teacher. “Crazy violent crackheads,” is what Deputy Nichols called them. “They must have thought Westfield was easy pickings, but they was wrong. All six was killed in the shoot-out.”

The deputy didn't count the Salafis or the men killed at Jeffers' Rocks. He didn't mention them at all. He didn't have to. Bodies disappear in America these days, especially the bodies of foreigners. No one asked. No one told. So no one knew they were ever there. The FBI said it was still looking into the case, but had no comment on “what appeared to be a matter of state jurisdiction.”

“Was this terrorism?” one of the reporters on Channel 2 asked Deputy Nichols. “They was terrorizing,” he told her. “But this wasn't nothing to do with terrorism.” Westfield was happy to live with that story, and after a couple of days so was the rest of the country.

I wished that it could all be secret. I wished that we could protect our people, our families, our babies without them ever needing to know. I wished my baby girl had never had to see what she saw, or feel what she felt.

And now I was in Manhattan, where the early-morning air smelled of garbage, sick-sweet and rotten, like day-old corpses on a battlefield. Rush hour hadn't really started yet. Eighth Avenue was wide open. By six-thirty I was at Columbus Circle and parked the truck in a lot and walked into Central Park. The roads and paths there were full of runners. It was like the city had poured all its restless flesh onto the pavement. Young men and women loped along at measured speeds, checking their watches and sucking on water bottles. Old men shuffled and bicyclers rushed by like kamikazes. Some joggers listened to rock and roll running cadences, others to the morning news. Dogs trotted beside their masters. Mothers ran behind their three-wheeled strollers, their babies braving the wind like little Red Barons.

It was a scene I'd seen more times than I remembered in those months when I lived here in 1992 and 1993. I used to run by the reservoir. But I never saw it quite like this before, knowing for sure how easy it would be for all this life to end. Didn't they see what happened here on September 11? Didn't they know the danger? Didn't they care that it could happen again right now? Or tomorrow? Any time at all? They were beyond caring. They were blessed by forgetfulness, protected by ignorance, which is maybe, just maybe, the greatest blessing.

In the narrow paths, across the little wooden bridges, in the part of the park called the Ramble, I found Griffin on a bench above the pond, just where he said he'd be. He wore a white short-sleeve shirt with a loose tie; his jacket was beside him and he had a Starbucks cup in his hand. He held another cup out for me.

“You look like shit,” he said.

“I'm here,” I said.

“You got a change of clothes? Something besides that T-shirt?”

“In the backpack. You got something to tell me?”

“A lot,” he said, watching and waiting while some tourists in Bermuda shorts strolled by speaking Italian. “That sat phone was registered to a Bahamas holding company owned by a Cayman Island company—”

“Give me the name of the man.”

Griffin nodded. “Uh-hunh. Ryan Handal. Mean anything to you?”

“Nothing. Who the fuck is he? Where is he?”

“You can look him up in
The New York Times.
There's an interesting article about him.”

“Does it give his address?”

“Yeah. It does.”

“Where is he now?”

“Where are any of them? Gone. Dust. Nothing but bits of jewelry and teeth.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I'm saying that Ryan Handal is one of the three thousand.”

“One of the three thousand killed in the Trade Center?”

Griffin nodded.

I sat back on the bench and watched an old man throwing a stick into the pond so his black Labrador would swim out and retrieve it. “Is that why I drove twenty-one hours to get here? Is that the end of the story?”

“It's a start,” said Griffin. “Just a start. There's more but we don't know for sure what it means. And there's none of it that you're supposed to hear, not from me, not from anybody.” Griffin took a sip of his coffee and watched the Labrador shaking the pond off his back. Griffin pulled a printed page from the
Times
Web site out of his pocket. There was no picture, just a headline:
ALWAYS READY TO HELP
.

I handed the page back to Griffin. “The sniper's phone belonged to this guy?”

“To his company. Yeah.”

“And the number I gave you?”

Griffin smiled. “To the cell phone of a V. Bernstein.”

“What does she have to say?”

“Not much. She was in her sixties and after last September she decided to retire up in Maine. Last month she slipped on some rocks at the beach—hit her head and drowned.”

“You're kidding.”

“No.” Griffin tossed his unfinished coffee out on the ground and put the empty cup back in the sack. “No, I'm not kidding.”

“We're close, ain't we?”

Griffin nodded his head real slowly, like he was afraid to be too sure. “And you haven't heard the best yet,” he said. “The obit makes it sound like Handal bet on a growing industry and won, but that's only one of the ways he made money. Some of his biggest hits came from shorting stocks.”

“Which means…”

“Basically it means he bet on stocks going down. And if they did, the difference between the loan he got to pay for the stock and the price it actually sold for went into his pocket. A bank was left holding the stock, which he had put up as collateral, and he was left holding the money. He did that for most of the last ten years, and won real big on a couple of health and insurance stocks. All told, about fifty million dollars.”

“Sounds big to me.”

“Nothing compared to what he would have made if he'd lived. A little over a year ago he started shorting a lot of insurance stocks, and even stocks in areas where he never was active before, like airlines. And all of the stocks bottomed after September eleventh. Just dropped through the floor. If he'd cashed in at the end of September and early October, like he was supposed to, he would have collected about three hundred and fifty million dollars.”

“But he was dead.”

“Yeah. He was dead.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“Some of those trades drew attention after September eleven. Do you remember the stories?”

“I saw a couple of headlines, but I was busy with other things.”

“Yeah, well, there were calls for an investigation because it looked like somebody made a hell of a lot of money out of the tragedy—somebody who might have known what was coming. Then they found out the biggest investor was Handal and he was killed in his office on the ninety-third floor of the north tower, and that was the end of their investigation.”

“But not yours.”

“No. Handal's estate collected on most of those trades. The charity he set up, the La Merced Foundation, pulled in almost three hundred million dollars. And when you look at it closely, La Merced is kind of a strange thing. It's really a one-man show run by Handal's executor, a lawyer named José Oriente.”

“So Handal's dead. What do we do?”

“We do Oriente. He came to the United States from Panama about the same time as Handal, and he was just about as successful. Oriente is real low profile in public, but high profile with the people who count. He's been invited to Kennebunkport by the President's father.”

“Maybe I'm just more tired than I thought, Griffin. Where's the Qaeda connection? Where's the jihad connection? I don't get it.”

“I don't know. But there's something here. Can't you smell it? All that money that went into the second-wave attacks—the ones you helped us stop—where did it come from? I think a lot of it came from La Merced's pot of gold. But the more I look into it, the more stone walls I run into. This Oriente has so many friends you wouldn't believe it. He's a big campaign contributor. Both parties. Nobody in the government wants to touch him. Nobody even wants him talked to. You go through channels and every channel is blocked.”

“So here I am.”

“Uh-hunh.”

“To get around the channels.”

“That's right. Who better?” Griffin smiled and shook his head. “The Agency knows I'm thinking about leaving; they don't like that, and they don't trust me. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm sure as hell not supposed to be talking to you. But I know one thing: there were eleven men in Kansas who snatched your daughter and would have killed her—and killed you—and killed Betsy if they could—and they wanted to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. There was a voice that guided them, and it came to them over a phone from Handal's company and the number belonged to Handal's assistant. Since there's nothing left of Mr. Handal but the dust at Ground Zero and nothing left of Ms. Bernstein but the ashes at her crematorium, it seems to me that Oriente—the head of the foundation and the executor of the Handal estate—is the guy to talk to. But nobody wants me to do that, and nobody will do it for me. What do we do? What do
you
do?” He stared at the pond for inspiration. “The first thing you can do is change your shirt and put on a tie if you've got one.” Griffin looked at his watch. “Oriente is supposed to be at a breakfast over at Sixty-sixth and Park this morning. I figure he'll be coming out of the building in about thirty minutes. Just about enough time for us to walk there.”