Witness to Death (10 page)

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 the an address in Jersey City. Turned out to be 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 beauracracy 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 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.

Enough civilians mingled around the tape that he could blend in. Edging his way toward the ambulance, he shut out the waves, the sirens, the traffic, and the background noise from onlookers and focused on the words the detectives were saying. He watched the hulking detective’s lips move, trying to match it with one of the sounds he heard. Just like the CIA taught him at the Farm.

“—ation on fire. Take them to Greenville. There’s room there.”

Greenville was a hospital on JFK Boulevard. He wanted to see the bodies up close. He didn’t think he’d recognized any of them, but he had to be sure. Of course, he also wanted to take a look at their belongings, see if there were any clues to who they were, who they worked for. But—-what did the cop just say?—the police station was on fire? That meant the evidence would be locked up in a police car’s trunk for a while. It would be less difficult to follow and examine the bodies.

The ambulance sped off, sirens blaring. Callahan listened to the detectives talk some more, and heard these guys had no IDs on them. In fact, there was no evidence other than the bodies.
What?
All these guys were armed. Where’d the guns go?

Callahan went back to his car. He took his time, walking a few blocks out of the way. He doubted they’d been able to connect his car to the situation, but he didn’t want to be surprised. When he rounded the corner from the west, his car was alone, untouched and unobserved.

Getting in the car, he hoped the hospitals were busy with injuries and not deaths tonight. He didn’t need to walk in on an autopsy.

****

Twenty minutes later, wearing thick glasses and a baseball cap he kept in the car, Callahan stepped past a nurse who smiled at him. She asked if she could help him and he shook his head. When she asked what he needed he said the bathroom and nodded to the restroom behind her. She smiled again and moved along. Callahan kept going, rounded a corner, and ducked into a stairwell. The smell as he descended the stairs changed from lemon air freshener to stale cigarette smoke. He wondered how long it’d been since they ventilated the stairwell. Smoking hadn’t been allowed in public buildings for a few years. And who knew how long in a hospital.

When he entered a long yellow hall, he saw why the air smelled that way. A guy in light blue scrubs and long lab coat dropped a cigarette on to the floor, trying to step on it quickly before anyone saw what he was doing. He looked up and saw Callahan.

“You’re not supposed to be down here, sir,” the labcoat said.

“My mistake. I was looking for the maternity ward,” Callahan said, stepping further into the hallway.

The labcoat shrugged. “That’s on the 3rd—”

Callahan wrapped his forearm around the throat of the labcoat, stepped behind him and pulled. He cut the air to his windpipe, and waited until the guy passed out. There wasn’t time to talk his way into the morgue, and to be honest, Callahan wasn’t in the mood to try.

He dragged the unconscious body around the corner, and tucked it in a janitor’s closet. The door to the morgue was locked, and there was a small keypad on the wall. Callahan flipped through his PDA, looking at the codes Weller had uploaded. He found the line marked Greenville and typed in the five digit code. The door hissed and the lock snapped open.

He stepped through double swinging doors into a white tiled room that held two stainless steel metal carts and a bunch of drawers in the wall. It’d been a while since Callahan’d been in a morgue.

He opened the first drawer and tugged out the body, a blond man with a bullet hole in his chest. No other markings. He appeared to be in good shape, but nothing to give away his training. When Callahan checked the other four bodies, he didn’t find any indication who sent these men to kill him. Short haircuts, bullet holes, a few scars, but no tattoos or anything else that stood out. If he had to guess he’d say military, but beyond that he couldn’t put a finger on which division. He took photos. When he snapped one of the guy he interviewed, he marked it with a caption.

The skin on the bodies was all ashen, and gray, except for the bullet holes, which had dried reddish brown. Hours of training at the range had paid off again. Nice shots.

Callahan texted the pictures of the bodies to Weller.

He left the morgue and checked on the labcoat. The guy was stirring. His breathing was normal. Time to get the hell out of there.

John and Ashley stepped into her apartment. They hadn’t talked on the car ride from Jersey City. John had tried once more to ask what the hell was going on, but Ashley just shook her head and turned up the radio. “Thunder Road.” John spent the rest of the trip breathing through his mouth so he didn’t smell the smoke anymore. And flexing his forearms to stop the tremors.

The apartment was cluttered. Three day old newspapers were scattered across the table. The room smelled faintly of old coffee. A half filled glass of wine was on the floor next to her chair. It rested on top of a folder with a name on it. John could make out “Peter,” but not the last name. He hadn’t been to her place in a week, and he wondered how long that glass had been there.

The room felt cold. He took a breath through his nose, and let it out through his mouth. The smell of smoke was still there.

“Why did you come for me, Ashley?”