Dead on Arrival

revenues for the good city of Dirt Water — it’s just a city council doing its job by exercising its right of eminent domain.’

‘Fine, Emma. Conspiracies are in the eye of the beholder. But I’m not talking about grandma and a freeway exit.’

‘So what are you talking about?’

‘I think,’ DeMarco said, ‘there’s a chance that Reza Zarif tried to crash a plane into the White House because somebody told him that they were going to kill his wife and kids if he didn’t. But then the … the bad guys, they killed his family anyway.’

Emma could do two things that DeMarco had always wanted to be able to do. She could arch a single eyebrow and she could whistle through her teeth to call a cab. She now arched an eyebrow, the left one.

‘And what makes you think that Mr Zarif didn’t do exactly what the papers — and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — said?’

DeMarco explained. He said the FBI’s theory was that Reza had just snapped because of all the pressure he’d been under lately and then decided to commit an irrational act of terrorism that would bring attention to the plight of Muslims worldwide. The problem with that theory was neither Mahoney nor anyone else who knew Reza well could accept that he would do something like that. But what they really couldn’t accept was that he would kill his wife and two young children.

‘So I asked myself,’ DeMarco said, ‘what if someone held a gun to the heads of Reza’s kids and told him to fly the plane? I think if Reza thought that might save his children, he’d do it. He was an experienced pilot and he knew he was going to get blown out of the sky, just like he was. What I’m saying is, I think the man would have been willing to commit suicide if he thought it might keep his family alive, especially if he knew he wasn’t going to kill anybody else, much less the president.’

‘But what makes you think anybody held a gun to his kids’ heads?’ Emma said.

‘Two things, and I’ve already told you the first: my gut feeling that he wouldn’t have done what he did if he wasn’t forced.’

‘Well, that’s weak,’ Emma said.

‘The second thing is the fingerprint on the bullet box.’

DeMarco explained how Donny Cray’s fingerprint had been discovered on the box of bullets used to kill Reza Zarif’s family and the FBI’s conclusion as to why the single fingerprint was there.

‘So,’ DeMarco said, ‘one explanation for that fingerprint is that this yokel Cray sold Reza a gun just like the FBI thinks. But another explanation is maybe Cray was in Reza’s house.’

‘But what motive would Cray have?’ Emma said.

‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said.

‘And this other guy, the one who hijacked the shuttle. Did someone force him too?’

‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said again. He was getting tired of saying that.

He told her how questioning Youseff Khalid’s wife had been a little tough since she didn’t speak English, but he said he didn’t see any evidence that the woman had been abused in any way and she denied — he thought — that she’d been used to coerce her husband to hijack the shuttle.

‘Well, shit, Joe,’ Emma said, clearly unimpressed with DeMarco’s logic.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But what really makes me think there might be an honest-to-God conspiracy going on is not Reza Zarif or Youseff Khalid but the cabdriver who tried to walk into the Capitol with blocks of C-Four strapped to his chest.’

Mustafa Ahmed came from Pakistan thirty years ago, and twenty years ago he became an American citizen. According to newspaper reports, he wasn’t known to have been involved in any political organizations, and he rarely attended his mosque. His only outside interest appeared to be soccer. He had bought an expensive cable package primarily so he could watch international games, and three times in his life he had taken vacations to attend World Cup matches. He had never married but he did have a large extended family, three siblings and a passel of nieces and nephews whom he reportedly spoiled rotten.

Following his attempt to detonate a bomb inside the Capitol, the FBI searched Mustafa’s house and found a folder filled with literature — pamphlets and books and articles taken off the Internet — that were sympathetic to radical Muslim causes. All Mustafa’s friends and family, people who had been in his house, said they had never seen such reading material in the place before and they had never heard Mustafa side with al-Qaeda politics. They all said the same thing. The only thing the man cared about was soccer, and he didn’t have a political bone in his scrawny body.

Folks did admit that Mustafa was a very emotional man, one of those little mouse-that-roared guys who took offense easily and was always ranting and raving about something. And a month before he attempted to blow up the Capitol he lost a case in traffic court that he was felt was due to religious bias. His car had been broadsided by a white man, and the white man claimed Mustafa had run a red light. Mustafa swore the light was green, but the white judge sided with the other man, and a bailiff had to drag Mustafa out of the courtroom as he screamed curses at the judge, calling him a fool and a bigot.

Mustafa’s friends admitted that he’d been outraged by what had happened but refused to agree that losing a case in court would have provoked him into doing what he did. The FBI discovered, however, that the court’s decision had a profound impact on Mustafa’s life. Mustafa’s cab company was a loosely affiliated group of gypsy drivers, men who owned their own cabs, and the cabs were insured by the drivers, not the company. For whatever reason, Mustafa had missed a payment on his auto insurance and he didn’t have the money to pay for the damage to his cab or the white man’s car. So Mustafa hadn’t just lost a case in court. He hadn’t worked in a month, he had lost his means of earning a living, and he was being hammered on by collection agencies to pay his bills.

As with Youseff Khalid, the man who hijacked the New York-D.C. shuttle, the FBI suspected that Mustafa had been helped by somebody. Somebody had given Youseff the plastic gun he had snuck onboard the plane, and somebody had provided the C-4 and constructed the bomb that Mustafa had strapped to his chest. The only reason the bomb didn’t explode, the FBI explained, was that one of the wires connecting the dead man’s switch to the detonator had somehow torn loose, maybe when Mustafa put on the raincoat he had worn over the bricks of C-4. But somebody had made the bomb, and it probably wasn’t Mustafa.

With the two kids who had tried to blow up the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, the Bureau knew for a fact that an al-Qaeda operative was involved. In the case of Mustafa Ahmed and Youseff Khalid they were convinced of similar organized terrorist involvement but as yet had no concrete evidence to support their theory. But when one took into account all the factors involved — the literature in Mustafa’s house, his bitterness toward the judicial system, the sophisticated bomb vest, the depression caused by his financial problems — the FBI believed it had a pretty good case that Mustafa, with the help of some radical group, had the motive and means to blow up the Capitol.

But the real problem with all of this, DeMarco told Emma, was not Mustafa but the guy who had killed Mustafa.

His name was Rollie.

* * *

‘Rollie?’ Emma said.

‘Right,’ DeMarco said. ‘His full name is Roland, but he looks like a Rollie and everybody calls him Rollie.’

Roland Patterson was a short overweight guy with bad feet who always looked puzzled. He was a security guard who screened people entering the Capitol and made sure they walked through the metal detector. And if the detector alarmed, Rollie would tell them to take the change out of their pockets. That was Rollie’s job.

‘I’ve never talked to the guy,’ DeMarco told Emma, ‘but I see him in the morning, about half the time when I go to my office. And right away you get a sense of him. The other guards will be sitting there bullshitting, and they’ll be giving Rollie a hard time. He’s just that kind of guy, the kind other guys are always teasing about something. And he always has this confused look on his face.’

What DeMarco meant was that if one of the other guards said, ‘Hey, Rollie, go get us some coffee,’ Rollie’s brow would furl and he’d get an expression on his face as if he were being asked to make a number of extremely complex decisions. Where should he go for the coffee? What size cups should he get? Should he pay for the coffee or ask the other guys to pay? DeMarco had no evidence that Rollie was in any way stupid. He was just a guy who mulled things over slowly and took his time answering.

The other thing about Rollie was that he almost always worked near one of the Capitol’s entrances, at a job where he could sit for long periods. Supposedly, Rollie had a partial disability, some problem with his feet that