“Dick, I can’t bullshit all morning. Meet me soonest in that place in Chinatown. You know the one?”
“One Hung Low?”
“Right. Next to the Vietnamese place called Phuc Yu.” I hung up, found a pushcart, and got two Polish sausages on a roll, one without mustard.
I went back into 26 Fed and up to my office.
I gave Harry his Polish sausage, went to the coffee bar, and got a cup of black coffee. On the wall were FBI Wanted Posters in English and Arabic, including two for Mr. Osama bin Laden-one for the USS
The other odd thing was that bin Laden had never actually taken credit for any of the attacks that he’d supposedly masterminded. It was the CIA who had fingered him, but I wondered how they knew for sure. The point was, as I’d discussed with Kate yesterday, terrorist groups and individuals had apparently stopped bragging about their work, and this could be the case in the TWA 800 explosion.
I looked at the face of Osama bin Laden on the Wanted Poster. Weird-looking guy. In fact, all these Mideast gentlemen on the dozen or so Wanted Posters looked scary, but maybe anyone on a Wanted Poster looks like a perp in that context.
I stared at the poster of my old nemesis, Asad Khalil, a.k.a. The Lion. This was the one guy who looked fairly normal-well groomed and good-looking-but if you looked hard into those eyes, you saw the scary stuff.
The text under Mr. Khalil’s picture was vague, speaking only of multiple murders of American and European nationals in various countries. The Justice Department reward was a measly one million bucks, which I personally found insulting, considering this scumbag tried to kill me and was still out there.
Actually, if Ted Nash were still alive, he’d be even more insulted since it was Asad Khalil who had put a bullet from a sniper rifle through Ted’s head.
I went back to my desk, sat down, and turned on my computer. I got on the Internet and typed in “TWA 800.”
The internal security people sometimes checked what you were accessing, of course, but if they were checking up on me, then they already knew what I was up to.
I saw that the entries for TWA 800 could take a week to go through, so I got on to the FIRO Web site first, and spent half an hour reading about conspiracy and cover-up.
I perused a few other Web sites along with some investigative articles from magazines and newspapers. The earlier articles, I noticed, the ones written within six months of the crash, raised a lot of questions that weren’t resolved in the articles written later, even by the reporters who had initially raised the questions.
I sensed Harry looking at me, and I raised my eyes to his.
He asked me, “Are you going to eat that?”
I handed the sausage across the low wall separating us, got off the Internet, and shut down my computer.
I put my jacket on and said, “I’m late for my sensitivity class.”
He chuckled.
I walked to Kate’s workstation, and she looked up from her computer, then exited from whatever she was reading, which must have been something I wasn’t cleared to read, or an e-mail from her boyfriend.
I said to her, “I’ve got to meet someone.”
Most wives would ask, “Who?” but in this business, we don’t ask that question, and she asked, “How long?”
“Less than an hour. If you’re free, I’ll meet you for lunch at Ecco. One o’clock.”
She smiled. “It’s a date. I’ll make a reservation.”
Public displays of affection are not encouraged here in the Ministry of Love, so I saluted her and left.
I exited the building and bought the
A lot of cops as well as FBI agents had meets in Chinatown. Why? Because it was easier to spot people who might be following you around, unless of course those people were Chinese. Also, it was cheap. I had no idea where the CIA had their off-site meetings, but I suspected the Yale Club. In any case, I seemed not to have been followed from 26 Fed.
I walked past, then doubled back into this little Chinese restaurant called Dim Sum Go, which the NYPD had affectionately renamed One Hung Low, and took a seat in an empty booth in the rear, facing the door.
The restaurant looked like it might once have been the hallway of the tenement in which it was housed. This was a strictly local place, devoid of even the most clueless tourists or uptown trendoids looking for an urban dining adventure. More important, it was probably the only Chinese restaurant in New York that served coffee, thanks to the NYPD clientele. Donuts next.
It was not yet noon, and the place was fairly empty, except for a few locals drinking what smelled like So Long tea out of bowls and chattering away in Cantonese, though the couple at the next booth was speaking Mandarin.
I’m making this up.
There was an exquisitely beautiful young Chinese woman waiting tables, and I watched her moving around as if she were floating on air.
She floated toward me, we smiled, and she floated away to be replaced by an old crone wearing bedroom slippers. God, I think, plays cruel jokes on married men. I ordered coffee.
The old lady shuffled off, and I read the sports section of the
They were prepping the day’s mystery dishes in the kitchen, and I thought I heard a cat, a dog, and a duck, followed by chopping sounds, then silence. Smelled good, though.
I read the paper, sipped my coffee, and waited for Dick Kearns.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dick Kearns came through the door, spotted me, and we shook hands as he slid into the booth facing me.
I said, “Thanks for coming.”
“No problem. But I need to be Midtown at one.”
Dick was about sixty, had all his hair and teeth, was always a sharp dresser, and today was no exception.
I asked him, “You see the Yankees game last night?”
“Yeah. Great game. You see it?”
“I was working.” I asked him, “How’s Mo?”
“She’s good. She used to bitch about my hours on homicide, then about my hours with the ATTF. Now that I’m working at home, she has something new to bitch about. She told me, ‘I said for better or worse, Dick, but I never said for lunch.’”
I smiled.
He asked, “How’s married life treating you?”
“Great. It helps that we’re in the same business. And I get free legal advice.”
He smiled and said, “You could do worse. She’s a doll.”
“I thank God every day.”
“Speaking of legal advice, you hear from Robin?”
“Now and then. She flies past my balcony on her broom and waves.”
He laughed.
The prelims out of the way, I changed the subject and asked him, “You enjoy what you do?”
