Dead on Arrival

mental instability.’

Hansen laughed. ‘Did you see Zarif on Meet the Press?’

‘No, but I read about it.’

‘Well, you oughta watch a tape of the show. You talk about a guy that was wrapped too tight, that was Reza Zarif. The guy acted like such a maniac when he went off on Broderick, you don’t have to be Sigmund-fucking-Freud to know he had some problems. And then, of course, you got the small issue that he wasted his entire family before he decided to take on two F-Sixteens in a Cessna.’

DeMarco had to concede that point too.

‘Going back to the al-Qaeda link,’ DeMarco said, ‘was there any evidence that he had accomplices?’

‘The Bureau’s still looking into that,’ Hansen said. ‘Half the people Zarif represented were on the FBI’s watch list, but so far there’s no evidence that anybody helped him. He didn’t need any help to fly that plane, and as for somebody other than family being in his house, there’s no indication that there was. The neighbors didn’t see anybody around that morning, and there were no strange cars parked in the neighborhood. The only thing is, the Zarif house is right on Sixty-six and one of those noise-suppression walls runs along his backyard line. Theoretically, somebody could have parked on the highway, ninja’d over the wall, and gotten into his house that way, but that’s pretty unlikely.’

‘There were no unidentified fingerprints found in the house?’ DeMarco said.

‘There was a shitload of unidentified prints,’ Hansen said. ‘The Bureau matched about eighty percent of them to Zarif’s family and their friends and his clients, but they still have a bunch they can’t tie to anybody. So far they haven’t found a print for anybody that’s some kinda radical Muslim al-Qaeda wing nut.’

‘But they still have twenty percent of the prints unidentified?’

‘Yeah, but it’s early.’

‘How ’bout the gun Reza used to kill his family. I heard’ — DeMarco couldn’t tell Hansen that his source was Reza Zarif’s brother — ‘that Reza Zarif never owned a gun in his life.’

‘According to one of his friends,’ Hansen said, ‘Zarif had talked about buying a gun a couple months ago. There’d been some vandalism at his place, somebody spray-painting anti-Muslim shit on his door, and when those yahoos tried to blow up the Harbor Tunnel, his family started getting threatening phone calls. And that really got Zarif upset. So anyway, Zarif’s flying buddy said Reza had been thinking about getting a gun.’

‘Was the gun registered in Reza’s name?’ DeMarco asked.

‘No, but the Bureau has a pretty good idea where he got it from: a punk named Donny Cray.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The Bureau found a fingerprint on a box of bullets in Reza’s house. They found a partial thumbprint on the little flap thing that you use to close the box, and they matched the print to Cray. He’s a small-time punk who’s into a lot of stuff, mostly gun and drug related. DEA and ATF both have him in their files. Anyway, one of the things Cray has been known to do is steal guns — or buy stolen guns from his friends — and sell ’em at swap meets. So the Bureau thinks there’s a good chance Reza got his gun from him. The FBI figured a guy like Reza, an Arab-looking guy, wouldn’t try to buy a gun legally because he’d be worried that after he filled out the paperwork some redneck gun-shop owner would report him as a potential terrorist.’

‘So how does the Bureau know Cray wasn’t involved in some way?’

‘For a couple of reasons,’ Hansen said. ‘First, the only fingerprint from Cray found in the house was the one partial print on the bullet box, while Reza’s prints were all over the gun, on all the bullets in the clip, and on the casings of the bullets that had been fired. It was obvious that Reza had loaded the gun himself.

‘The second reason why the Bureau’s sure that Cray wasn’t involved,’ Hansen said, ‘is motive. Or, in this case, lack of a motive. Donny Cray was into dope and guns, not radical Muslim causes, and there’s no logical reason why some Virginia peckerhead like him would help Zarif try to fly a plane into the White House.’

‘Has Cray admitted to selling Reza the gun?’ DeMarco said.

‘Not yet. The Bureau can’t find him.’

‘Can’t find him?’

‘The guy lives in a trailer, and every once in a while he hooks it up to his truck and takes off, especially in the winter. He likes going to Florida; he’s got friends down there. The Feebs’ll run him down eventually.’

‘So why wasn’t this in the papers? I mean about Cray’s fingerprint on the bullet box.’

‘Because the Bureau doesn’t want to give rise to a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense when all they have is one partial print from a guy who’s known to sell guns. And the kind of dumb questions you’re asking proves they’re right.’

9

He couldn’t find a position where he was comfortable. Before the woman had sat down next to him, he’d been able to stretch his right leg out, but with her sitting there he was forced to sit with both knees pressed against the seat in front of him. The woman, a heavyset Hispanic, nodded and smiled at him before she sat down, but at the same time it was clear she expected him to move his leg and make room for her. In his country, she would have stood in the aisle of the bus until he permitted her to sit.

And she wasn’t even a real American, yet like all women in this country — all women exposed to this country — she had an air of confidence about her that infuriated him. The men here were weak and undeservedly arrogant, and the culture as a whole was decadent and wasteful, but the women were the worst. They went about with their heads uncovered and their faces unveiled, the young ones dressing like painted whores, but their lack of modesty was not as infuriating as their presumption — no, not a presumption, their conviction — that they were equal to men. And it wasn’t even the rich highborn ones who acted this way. This woman, who probably cleaned toilets for a living, had no doubt that she had a right to speak to him, to sit next to him, to intrude into his space and his thoughts as if she were his equal.

He had crossed into the United States from Mexico, and on his way to the East Coast he had stopped at a restaurant in Texas. He ordered coffee and the waitress brought him a cup that was tepid and weak, as if it had been made with yesterday’s grounds. He told her this and said, ‘Bring me another cup,’ and she had said, ‘You mean, Bring me another cup please, now, don’t you, honey?’ She was smiling when she said this, but at the same time she was serious, correcting his manners. He looked at her and said, ‘I meant what I said. Make me a decent cup of hot coffee.’ And she had said, ‘You know what, sugar? You can just go fuck yourself.’ And then she’d walked away and started talking to another waitress, laughing as she gestured at him with her head. He’d left the restaurant a few minutes later, his face burning with embarrassment. He’d thought about waiting until she left work and cutting off her lips, but of course he didn’t. He was too disciplined to permit himself such an indulgence.

He saw a sign on the highway. The bus was still a hundred miles from Cleveland, a hundred more miles of sitting in this cramped seat next to this woman, his right leg on fire. It would have been so much better if he could have flown from Philadelphia to Cleveland, but he could no longer take the risk. So now he traveled by bus and by train and by car, but usually by bus. Security on trains had become tighter since London and Madrid, and he was always worried that in a car he would be pulled over by some country sheriff because of his race.

And the problem with air travel wasn’t just that he was an Arab, it was his right leg. Below the knee it was made of metal and plastic and it set off the detectors in airports. Thanks to the two fools in Baltimore, the American security forces knew about his leg, and any foreigner with an artificial leg would be detained until his identity could be confirmed. It wouldn’t matter if he shaved his head or put padding in his cheeks or wore a wig and contact lenses; it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t look anything like the poor picture they had of him in which he wore a beard. They would detain him until the FBI examined him, and the FBI would confirm his identity.

So now he traveled on buses with cleaning women, taking seven hours to make a journey that should have taken an hour and a half. But that was all right. He had a lifetime in which to complete his mission.