“So, what more can I do for you, caro?” Francesca had whispered, kissing him after he had given her the money.
“Let’s say I need to get rid of something.”
“Disposal,” she said, nibbling on his ear, “is a Camorra specialty.”
“I think,” he said, his arm around her waist, “we should continue this conversation in the bedroom.”
When he got back to Turin, Liz found a long dark hair on his shirt and smelled Francesca, sniffing at him like a cat and letting him know about it till he slapped her in the face and explained it to her. She got up and started to leave and he showed her the gun. He called Jamal in then and had him show her the bodies in the refrigeration locker, and when Jamal brought her back, she was quieter. Afterward they made love and she cried and told him she still loved him and how much she hated the Israelis. But he knew he couldn’t trust her, and decided to take her with him to New York after the migration from Turin to Rome in a big rig with COMPAGNIA BOLOGNA PARTES DI CAMIONS ALL’INGROSSO on the sides and the rest of the team making the trip down the autostrada in separate vans and cars.
Now, their first stop after leaving the hotel in midtown was at the office he had rented in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. They went there to pick up the package he had FedExed from Calexico. From Brooklyn, they took the subway to the 169th Street station in Jamaica, Queens, exiting on Hillside Avenue. The street was lined with small East Asian stores and curry restaurants with signs in Bangla and English. They walked a few blocks to the apartment he had rented six months earlier at the same time he set up the office in Brooklyn. He unlocked the door and turned on the air-conditioner units. The apartment was almost completely bare of furniture, except for a large freezer and, in the bedroom, a few shopping bags of supplies. He gave Liz the address where the girl lived with her brother and told her to wait for him there.
“I want to stay,” she said.
“It’s dangerous,” he said. “Once I start making it, it could explode any second. This mixture, HMTD, is the most volatile thing you can imagine. The slightest jar, ordinary room temperature, anything can set it off.”
“I want to be part of this,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, looking at him like a soldier with Palestine her flag, and the two of them kissed, her tongue darting into his mouth, a portable Mykonos.
While they waited for the apartment to cool, he put on latex gloves and took the backpack out of the FedEx box, tearing up and flushing any identifying labels from the box down the toilet. He took the spray equipment stamped APASNAST! — Danger! — in Cyrillic lettering out of the backpack and made sure it was ready. When the apartment was cold enough, Liz helped him carry the shopping bags from the other room to the bathtub along with a big mixing bowl and other implements.
“Here we go,” he said, opening the first jar. He took a deep breath before pouring the liquid into the bowl. “This is a very bad explosive. I hate it.”
“If it’s so bad, why do you use it?”
“It’s terrible to work with, but it has one enormous advantage. We don’t have to take it through customs. You can make it anywhere from ordinary household ingredients: hair bleach, a food flavoring, and something you can buy at any camping or sporting goods store. It’s powerful, completely legal, and the authorities never know a thing until it blows up,” he said, and despite the coldness of the bathroom, which was making her shiver, he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.
When he was done, he had about a dozen pounds of solid HMTD, which he set with a detonator connected to leads from a cell phone, before putting it in a plastic bag. He placed the bag in the backpack surrounded with pellets of dry ice to keep it cold. Then he put the spray equipment back into the backpack on a piece of canvas on top of the dry ice. He put the backpack on, turned everything off in the apartment, locked it, and they walked the four blocks to the apartment of the young Bangladeshi woman and her brother, careful not to jar the backpack and calling first to make sure the brother and sister were both home from work.
Bharati opened the door and let them in. Her brother, a small dark man with longish hair, who called the Palestinian “Bahadur” and Liz “Begum,” led them toward the kitchen. The Palestinian took off the backpack and carried it like a priest with a chalice of holy wine to the kitchen, but there wasn’t enough room in the refrigerator and he had them empty food out to put the backpack in.
They sat in the living room and the young woman, her large dark eyes glancing first at Liz and then at the Palestinian, served them tea. After they had sipped the tea, the brother blurted: “About the money?”
“Do you have a computer?” the Palestinian asked. The brother nodded. “Check your account.”
While they waited, the Palestinian asked the young woman if she was ready. She looked down, glancing shyly at him from under her lashes, and nodded.
“I have two children. My sister loves them. She will do what is needed,” the brother said, coming back in.
The Palestinian told him to leave.
“She is my sister. I should be here,” the brother said.
“In that case, I’ll have to kill you,” the Palestinian said, taking out a gun. The brother blanched. “We need to talk of operational matters. Afterward, the police may come to you. You can’t tell them what you don’t know.”
The Palestinian went into a shooting stance. The brother couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. After a moment he nodded and left.
The Palestinian turned to the young woman. He went over how to use the spray equipment in the backpack and showed her the photograph of the helicopter pilot, Atif Khan, on his cell phone screen. When she was sure she would be able to recognize the pilot on sight, he erased the image. He spread out an MTA map of the New York subway system they got at the hotel and went over when and how she would rendezvous with Khan. The Palestinian took a photo of her with his cell phone to show Khan.
“You understand we considered other alternatives,” he told Bharati. “The simplest would have been to do it in the subway, but there was no way you could have gone through a train spraying and not attract attention. We want days for the pathogen to incubate before the authorities know what has happened.”
“My brother’s children, my family, will be safe?” she asked, her eyes searching his face. Liz watched her like a hawk.
“They must use the antibiotic I have given you. No other kind will work. Do not go near the refrigerator till it is time. The explosive must be kept cold, but the spray should not be frozen. If you need to, eat out. Here’s money,” he added, giving her cash. “You will know the exact day when you get a phone call that uses the phrase ‘al Jabbar, the Giant, is high in the sky.’” He showed her how to use the cell phone for the explosive. “Remember, the explosive is only if something goes wrong. They would do things, you understand? I don’t want them to hurt you.”
“We have to go,” Liz said, standing up.
“Will I see you again?” the young woman asked softly, not daring to look at him.
“It will be a long time before it’s safe for me to be in America,” he said.
On the train back to Manhattan, after they left the apartment, Liz turned on him: “What the bloody hell was that? If she could’ve, she’d have gobbled you up like a Cadbury.”
“She wanted me to save her,” he said. “Her brother got into money trouble with a local Bangladeshi gang. She’s doing it to save her nieces from being without a father. She doesn’t want to die.”
“I could scratch her eyes out. She could barely keep her hands off you.”
“I brought you with me to see her, didn’t I?” he demanded over the screech of the wheels on the track. “Don’t make me think you’re a liability.” He looked hard at her, forcing her to look away. When she looked back, her eyes were swimming. She tried to smile.
“Will she go through with it?” she asked finally.
“She’s a good Muslim girl. I trust her more than some of these bullshit young men who talk jihad and killing and in the end piss themselves like children when it comes time to do something.”
“I hate to admit it, but she’s worth ten of the brother,” Liz said.
“Yes, but she and the brother won’t see it that way.”
They took the train back to Grand Central, where they parted; he to meet with the helicopter pilot, while she checked out of the hotel and left for the airport. They would meet in Chicago. He took the BMT Brighton line to the Midwood section of Brooklyn, getting out at the Avenue H station and walking to the apartment house where the Pakistani helicopter pilot lived with his wife and two young boys. The Palestinian knew that, Khan, the Pakistani wasn’t a true believer. Khan had a Brazilian girlfriend, and the money was for a new start for him and his girlfriend in Brazil.
