UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Peter Luger Steak House, an old redbrick Brooklyn landmark, would have been a sight for sore eyes.
But nothing is even close to normal, I thought as I pulled into the parking lot across from its famous brown awning.
Emily and I weren’t there to chow down on some USDA Prime but to meet up with Chief Fabretti. They’d put the mayor in the ground at Queens’s Calvary Cemetery this morning, and a lot of brass and pols had gathered with the mayor’s family at his favorite restaurant after the service.
Still too busy scouring through everything we’d found at al Gharsi’s to attend the service, Emily and I had watched snatches of it broadcast live on TV. Several thousand people had attended, including the vice president.
Watching Mayor Doucette’s bright American flag–draped coffin being brought through the cemetery gates on a horse-drawn carriage, I couldn’t stop shaking my head.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about the rousing speech he’d given right before he’d been shot and how he’d bravely insisted on holding the speech outside to help the city heal. Though the sun was shining, it was one very dark day for the city.
I spotted Fabretti straight off inside the door at the end of the three-deep bar talking to a white-shirted female cop who split as we stepped up.
“Mike, Emily—thanks for meeting here on short notice. Drink?” Fabretti said over the crowd hum.
Fabretti tipped his glass at us ceremoniously after the bartender brought us a couple of ice-cold Stellas.
“First, I want to congratulate you guys on a job well done. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me, Mike.”
Emily and I looked at each other.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to tell those press jackals that we finally have someone in custody,” Fabretti continued as he patted me on the shoulder.
“Whoa, boss,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but this thing ain’t over.”
“What do you mean? You bagged al Gharsi last night, right? He hasn’t escaped, has he?”
“No. Al Gharsi is involved. He obviously knows something about the PayPal thing, but he’s not behind it,” said Emily.
“This guy isn’t it?” Fabretti said. “He runs a frickin’ terrorist training camp! This guy’s affiliated with al Qaeda.”
“All that is true, but the level of sophistication of the attacks implies a lot of money and massive technical expertise. A deep thinker with deep pockets. That doesn’t exactly describe al Gharsi.”
“Emily’s right,” I said, “especially about the deep pockets. I’d say al Gharsi was on a shoestring budget, except his kids didn’t even seem to have any shoes.”
“Precisely. The whole place stinks of poverty and desperation,” Emily said. “I think al Gharsi was used. Like the NYU students. He was a patsy, a cutout.”
“What about his pocket litter? You know, his computers and cell-phone records. What have you found?” said Fabretti hopefully.
“Nothing conclusive and nothing new,” Emily said. “We’re not back to square one, but we’re close to it.”
“Shit,” he said, staring a glum hole through the bottles at the back of the bar.
Of course he was upset. Careers had been smashed to pieces over far lesser cases than this. But it wasn’t just that, I thought as I remembered Fabretti with his dog in his house—a meeting that felt like it took place a billion years ago. He lived here, too. This was killing him. Killing all of us. The city hadn’t been this psychologically screwed up since 9/11.
“We need to find these people,” Fabretti said.
I nodded as I stared over the crowded bar into the restaurant. The Tudor beams and dark paneling. The busy waiters in their old-fashioned white shirts and aprons and black bow ties. Looking at them, I thought of all the millions of busy people in the city trying to keep the wheels on, trying to do right, to support and protect their families.
But nothing was safe. Not anymore.
PART THREE
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY
CHAPTER 51
THE NEXT DAWN’S early light found Emily and me on Nineteenth Avenue in East Elmhurst, Queens.
Near the on-ramp of the bridge to the Rikers Island jail, we had the unmarked tucked behind an abandoned truck trailer. To our right was an old chain-link fence with empty gin bottles and scraggly trees behind it. To our left was a four-square-block industrial zone of manufacturing firms and warehouses.
I glanced at my phone as the metal howl of an unseen airliner from nearby LaGuardia Airport ripped through the gray sky overhead.
“What time you got?” I said.
“Another five minutes,” Emily said, much more calmly than I felt.
I tucked my phone back into a pouch of my heavy Kevlar vest and blotted sweat off my face with a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin.
I’m sweating, all right, I thought as I blinked at the black barrel of the automatic M4 rifle propped upright on the dash beside my knee.