Dead on Arrival

car and walk around a bit, but he couldn’t do that. He would bear the pain — as he’d always borne the pain — until it was safe to stop.

He headed in the direction of the freeway. With God’s blessing, he’d be in Philadelphia in two hours. There he had a place to go, a place set up in advance. There he might be safe.

What had those fools done?

Myron Clark was good at his job because he was smart and because he was patient, but most of all because he was tireless. He was abso lutely indefatigable.

He always looked fresh whenever he conducted an interrogation: his shirt wrinkle-free, his tie in place, face clean-shaven, hair carefully combed. He looked as if he’d just stepped from a shower after a full eight hours of peaceful sleep. The truth was that he was surviving on catnaps, but he would never allow the prisoners to see this. They had to think that Clark could go forever, that he’d never stop. And he wouldn’t.

Clark was interrogating the two men captured in the garage in Baltimore. He’d been interrogating them for twenty-six straight hours, and he could tell that the one named Omar al-Assad was going to break first. In fact, he was going to break the next time Clark talked to him.

Clark was an ordinary-looking man in his forties, five-nine, reced ing hairline, carrying twenty pounds he ought to lose. He wasn’t physically intimidating and he knew it — that’s why he had Warren Knox for an assistant. Knox was six-four, heavily muscled, and kept his hair cut close to his big knobby skull. He had a particularly brutal face, the kind you’d expect to see on a tattooed felon, and he always looked like he was just barely suppressing an incredible amount of rage. The truth was that Warren Knox was hardly violent at all; Clark had killed more men than Knox.

Omar had asked for a lawyer when the interrogation first began, and Clark had nodded to Knox and Knox had grabbed Omar by the throat and slammed him up against the wall of the interrogation room. As Omar was pinned against the wall, choking, his feet no longer touching the floor, Knox said, ‘If you say lawyer one more time I’m gonna kick your teeth out.’

That’s when Omar began to fully appreciate his situation. This wasn’t like TV. It wasn’t like all those Law and Order shows where the cops yelled at the prisoners but never touched them — and stopped yelling as soon as they asked for a mouthpiece. No, Clark and Knox had made it clear to Omar that he had no rights. He wasn’t going to be allowed to see anyone. Not a lawyer, not his partner, not his mother. He was completely alone.

If they took these clowns to trial, the fact that they’d trampled all over their rights as citizens could be a problem. The government’s lawyers would spout legal gibberish to minimize the damage, but convicting these guys wasn’t a priority, not at this point. In London, in Spain, in India, the subway attacks hadn’t involved just a single bomb; the terrorists had set off four or five bombs simultaneously. Clark needed to know if Omar and his pal had accomplices, and if he had to cause Omar a little discomfort to find this out … well, too bad for Omar.

So for twenty-six hours Omar wasn’t allowed to sleep. He’d be allowed to almost fall asleep, but just as his head would hit his chest, Knox would slam open the door to the interrogation room, cuff him on the back of the head, and tell him to go stand in the corner as if he were a truculent five-year-old.

And Omar was given no food and a lot of coffee. The coffee not only kept him awake but the caffeine in his empty stomach com pounded the condition of his already jangling nerves. Yes, Omar was ready. Omar’s partner — who was just a bit dumber than Omar and didn’t have Omar’s imagination — would last a bit longer, but not much.

Clark checked his appearance in the mirror near the interrogation room door and entered the room. He took a seat across the table from the prisoner and looked for a moment into his bloodshot eyes, his terrified young face. ‘Well, you’ve beaten me, Omar,’ he said, shak ing his head in mock disappointment. ‘My boss says we gotta send you someplace else, to see if some other guys can do better than me. We used to send people like you to Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, down there in Cuba. But Gitmo became a fishbowl, Omar. Too many pussy liberals always watchin’ over our shoulders, always tryin’ to make us play by the rules. Well, my friend, we’ve gotten a lot smarter since Gitmo. Now we use an island off the coast of Maine.’

Clark smiled sadly at Omar, as if he truly pitied him.

‘The army used to use the island for testing biological weapons. They have a facility there, and they have cages in the facility. The cages don’t have a lot of headroom because they used to keep monkeys in them — you know, the monkeys they used for the experiments. The monkeys are all dead now, but the cages are still there. But the best part isn’t the cages, Omar. The best part is that nobody knows about the island. And nobody knows what happens there.’

Omar al-Assad stared at Clark for a moment, maybe looking for mercy, but knowing by now that there was nothing merciful about Myron Clark.

‘We were going to explode the bomb in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel,’ Omar said.

In the next hour, Clark had the whole story. Omar al-Assad and his friend Bashar Hariri were American-born Muslims. They were eigh teen years of age, from low-income families, high school dropouts, and unemployed. Neither young man was particularly religious, and their tastes and style of dress were typical of Americans their age.

One Saturday evening, they attended a lecture at a local mosque. The main reason they attended was because it was cold outside, and free food and coffee came with the speech. The title of the lecture, which neither young man could remember exactly, was ‘The Impact of American Imperialism on the Muslim World.’ Something like that, they said.

The lecturer told the two Americans that his name was Muhammad — he might as well have said John Smith — and he was from Yemen, was an imam, and was traveling around America preaching to the faithful. He instantly became the two young Americans’ new best friend, spending hours with them, buying them din ners and hammering into their weak brains a message of hate. After a month he convinced them that blowing a hole in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, killing several hundred people, and disrupting com merce up and down the eastern seaboard would be a good and noble thing to do. And they’d each be given ten thousand dollars after the job was done.

Muhammad gave the young men the money to purchase a truck and the other ingredients they needed to make the bomb. He had been helping them assemble the bomb until just before Omar and Bashar were captured. All Omar knew — and ultimately, three hours later, Myron Clark believed him — was that Muhammad had to leave the garage to call someone, but Omar didn’t know who.

But the most important thing Omar told Clark was that Muham mad had an artificial leg. That’s what allowed the Bureau to find Muhammad in their files and determine who he really was — an honest-to-God al-Qaeda operative.

‘How did you catch us?’ an exhausted Omar asked.

Clark didn’t tell him, but they’d caught Omar and his buddy be cause a fertilizer seller hadn’t liked their looks.

They had needed two major ingredients for their bomb: ammonium nitrate fertilizer and a racing fuel composed primarily of nitromethane. At one of the places they’d purchased the ammonium nitrate, the fer tilizer supplier had asked the young men why they needed it and Omar had said that they operated a landscaping business. The supplier was used to dealing with beefy white farmers, and the two men purchasing the fertilizer were obviously of Middle Eastern ancestry, too young to be likely principals in any business and visibly nervous during the pur chase. He was on the phone to the FBI before the young men and their truck had exited his parking lot.

But instead of answering Omar’s question, Clark asked one of his own. ‘Why did you and Bashar decide to become martyrs? I mean, do you guys really believe all that virgins-in-paradise bullshit?’

‘Martyrs?’ Omar said. ‘We weren’t going to be martyrs.’

Then Omar explained. Their plan had been to drive the truck and another car — the car Muhammad had escaped in — into the tunnel, punch out the tires on the truck so it couldn’t be easily moved, and flee the scene in the second vehicle. They would have been miles away when the bomb exploded.

That’s when Clark unveiled the part of Muhammad’s plan that Omar obviously didn’t know.

‘Omar,’ he said, ‘your pal Muhammad had set the timer to deto nate the bomb two seconds after you armed it.’