Dead on Arrival

connect Mahoney to Ali Zarif.

Ali was an Iranian immigrant who had come to this country when he was ten and had known Mahoney from the time they were teenagers. Mahoney had been the catcher on his high school baseball team, and Ali Zarif had pitched. How the young Iranian had learned to throw a curve ball was but another legend of the American melting pot.

In his twenties, Ali leased a space near Boston’s Quincy Market and began to sell rugs. Persian rugs, Chinese rugs, Indian rugs. He sold beautiful, expensive rugs. Forty years later, he owned two other stores in the Boston area. When his friend John Mahoney made his first run for Congress those many years ago, Ali helped with the young politician’s campaign, registered his fellow Muslims to vote — and they all voted for John Mahoney. But Ali was just a successful businessman and not a big-name donor or a guy who craved the spotlight. Unless the press discovered that Hassan Zarif had visited Mahoney — or became aware that the floors of Mahoney’s Boston home were covered with Ali’s rugs — Mahoney’s friendship with Ali would most likely remain hidden from the media.

Regarding Reza Zarif, DeMarco decided that before he talked to the Bureau or anyone else, he needed to do a little preliminary research. And this meant bending over and picking from the stack of newspapers on the floor next to his desk the last two days’ editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. He’d read the articles about Reza before, but when he’d read them the first time he’d just been another shocked citizen and not a man assigned to uncover the reasons behind a terrorist act.

As he hated to work in his windowless office, DeMarco decided to accomplish his research on Reza in more pleasant surroundings: the Hawk and Dove, a Capitol Hill bar that had been in business almost as long as politicians had been taking bribes. He plopped down onto a bar stool, greeted the barman, and ordered a martini. He had discovered that the first martini of the day sharpened his mental powers; the martinis that followed tended to have the opposite effect. Drink in hand, he then spread open the papers to read for a second time what all the Pulitzer Prize winners had to say about Reza.

There was no question that he was flying the plane that the Air National Guard had blown out of the sky two days ago. The plane had been co-owned by Reza and three other lawyers, the other men all white Christians. The morning he attacked the White House, Reza had been seen by two people at the Stafford airfield who had known him for five and seven years respectively, and one of those men had seen Reza climb into the cockpit of the Cessna.

Ten minutes after the F-16 pilot had identified the tail numbers on the Cessna, FBI agents had been dispatched to Reza’s home in Arlington. Inside the house they found Reza’s wife and two children — a boy of eight and a girl of eleven — all dead. They’d each been shot once in the head with a.9mm automatic that had been found sitting in the middle of the Zarifs’ dining room table like some sort of ugly lethal centerpiece. Reza’s fingerprints were on the gun.

One sentence in the article said that the FBI had found a document in Reza’s house that indicated he had ties to al-Qaeda, but that’s all the FBI would tell the press. The Bureau claimed that the specifics of the document were classified because disclosing them could affect other ongoing operations, which was a fairly standard explanation used by the feds when they wanted to keep something from the media. Whether the explanation was true or not was a different issue.

Had Reza Zarif been an Iranian national who had slipped into the country using a false passport, his actions might have made some sense: just another radical Muslim who had decided to strike a blow for his brethren in the jihad and sacrificed himself and his family in the process. But that’s not who Reza Zarif had been.

Reza and his brother, Hassan, were Americans, born and raised in Boston. They attended public schools, and then Reza went to Boston College where he obtained a law degree. After law school, he moved to Washington, worked briefly for the Department of Justice, then established a small private practice near his home in Arlington, Virginia. A large number of his clients had been of Middle Eastern descent and he dealt mostly with mundane matters related to wills, taxes, and property. And he prospered.

But all this changed with 9/11. Reza became a fervent advocate for American Muslims. He was concerned that, in the backlash following the attacks, Muslims would suffer the same fate as Japanese Americans had following Pearl Harbor. He objected loudly and publicly to the Patriot Act and defended several Muslims, all American citizens, who had been detained or incarcerated for allegedly having terrorist connections.

Reza was handsome and articulate and passionate. He became an occasional guest on NOW and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and when Senator William Broderick made his famous speech, Reza became one of his most vocal opponents. Two weeks before his death, Reza appeared with Broderick on Meet the Press — and he lost it. He absolutely lost it.

The morning of the show he’d flown in from New York, where he had been defending a client, and had received disproportionate attention from airport security personnel. So when he arrived on Russert’s set he was already angry. For a while he maintained his composure with Broderick, but then Broderick made a remark about how performing background checks on American Muslims seemed like a pretty sensible thing to do, them being the people most likely to be terrorists. It wasn’t so much what Broderick said as the way he said it, as if it was no big deal — and Reza just went nuts. He rose up from his chair, pointed his finger at Broderick’s pale face, and screamed at him for several minutes, spittle flying from his mouth. Russert cut to a commercial when the fireworks died down, and when the show resumed Reza had left the set — which was too bad, as Broderick was then able to use the remaining air time to give his standard pitch.

Unfortunately, one of the things Reza said to Broderick was that 9/11 had occurred in part because of people like Broderick, people who made absolutely no attempt to understand the struggles of Muslims throughout the world. And maybe, Reza had said, it would take another 9/11 before Broderick and his kind would wake up.

Using less technical jargon than they normally did, the FBI concluded that Reza Zarif had just plain snapped. In the last seven years, he had dug himself into a deep financial pit because he had neglected his law practice, and he was perpetually resentful because the government’s lawyers usually kicked his ass in court. He’d lost weight, his hair had turned prematurely gray, and, always an emotional man, he’d become downright volatile, flying into rages on the slightest provocation. To help make the FBI’s point, The New York Times showed a still picture of Reza berating Broderick on Meet the Press, his eyes bugging out, his face twisted with fury, looking in general like an escapee from a mental institution. He just snapped, the FBI spokesman said.

So who should DeMarco believe: Hassan Zarif, a man who claimed his brother was not only sane but patriotic, or a legion of qualified FBI agents who had gathered a mountain of evidence and had guys with doctorates in psychology backing up their claims?

DeMarco decided that the answer to that question would have to wait until tomorrow.

He ordered a second martini.

7

As the cab cruised down Main Street at precisely thirty miles per hour, Jeremy Potter took in the neat shops, the old-fashioned lampposts, the courthouse that had been the background for a Rockwell cover on The Saturday Evening Post — and he immediately begin to relax. The last two months had been very hectic. He was so glad to be home.

For two months, he’d worked like an absolute slave. He’d spent hours on the Internet and had taken trips to Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Trenton to observe people who often lived in minority neighborhoods and where, being a small white man of fifty-three, he’d felt quite vulnerable. And then there’d been the meetings with the two government people. Those meetings hadn’t taken long, but they’d been extremely stressful, by far the riskiest part of his assignment. But now it was finally over and he’d been successful, and Mr Lincoln had been very pleased.

He didn’t know why Mr Lincoln had asked him to do what he did, but that wasn’t at all unusual. He would be given a task — typically research, sometimes surveillance, frequently duties as a courier — but he would rarely know how his role fit into Mr Lincoln’s grand design. Come to think of it, it seemed as if this time he knew much