I had my cell phone, but the battery was as dead as my dick at the moment, and I asked the bartender to plug in my charger, which he was happy to do. I explained, “I was in the Arabian desert.”
“Nice tan.”
“Place called Yemen. Dirt cheap. You should go there. The people are great.”
“Well, welcome home.”
“Thanks.”
There had actually been e-mail service in Aden, through Yahoo! for some reason, and this is how Kate and I had kept in touch, along with an occasional international call. We never mentioned TWA 800, but I’d had lots of time to think about it.
I’d e-mailed John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explaining that I was on a secret and dangerous mission for the government, and I might be a few days or years late for class. I suggested they start without me.
The TV over the bar was tuned to the news channel, and it appeared that nothing had happened in my absence. The weather guy said it was another beautiful late summer day in New York, with more of the same in the days ahead. Good. Aden was a furnace. The interior of Yemen was hell. Why do people live in these places?
I ordered another beer and scanned a
Anyway, in Aden, I worked with six FBI agents, including two women, and four NYPD guys from the Anti- Terrorist Task Force, two of whom I knew, so it was okay. Along with the investigators, we had about twenty Marines armed to the teeth, and an eight-man FBI SWAT team, all of whom rotated duty as sharpshooters on the roof of the Sheraton, and which the hotel, I think, used in their marketing strategy for the few other guests.
The mission also included about a dozen Diplomatic Security Service people, and a few Army and Navy intelligence personnel, and of course, the CIA, whose identity and number was a big secret, but I counted four. All the Americans got along fairly well because there was no one else to talk to in that godforsaken place.
My duties in Aden consisted of working with their corrupt and stunningly stupid intelligence people to get leads on the perpetrators of the
Now and then, Yemen intelligence would round up the usual suspects and drag them down to police headquarters so we could see some progress in the investigation. About once a week, five or six task force guys would be taken to the police station to question these miserable wretches through inept and lying interpreters in a fetid, windowless interrogation room. The intelligence guys would smack the suspects around a little for our benefit and tell us they were getting close to the “foreign terrorists” who blew up the
Personally, I think these suspects were hired for the day, but I appreciated the police interrogation techniques. Just kidding.
And then there were the “informants,” who gave us useless leads in exchange for a couple of bucks. I swear I saw some of these informants in police uniforms around town on the days they weren’t being informants.
Basically, we were pissing into the wind, and our presence there was purely symbolic; seventeen American sailors were dead, an American warship had been put out of commission, and the administration needed to show they were doing something. But when John O’Neill had actually tried to do something, he got the boot.
As a point of interest, a week ago, word had reached Yemen that John O’Neill had left the FBI and was now working as a security consultant for the World Trade Center. I should see him about a job-depending on how the TWA thing played out; I was going to be either very employable, or unemployed forever.
Kate, in her e-mails, told me she was having a lot more luck in Tanzania, where the government was helpful, partly as a result of losing hundreds of its citizens in the U.S. Embassy bombings.
The Yemen government, on the other hand, was not only unhelpful, but also treacherous and hostile, and the guy who was head of their intelligence service, some slimeball named Colonel Anzi, who we nicknamed Colonel Nazi, made Jack Koenig look like Mother Teresa.
There had been an element of danger in Yemen, and we always traveled with bulletproof vests and armed Marines or SWAT guys. We didn’t mix much with the locals, and I slept with Mrs. Glock every night.
Our hotel had been mortared and rocketed a few years before by some rebel group, but they were all dead now, and we only had to worry about the terrorists who blew up the
Meanwhile, my beloved Kate was whooping it up in Dar es Salaam. I had another beer and got my imagination fired up, concocting stories about wild tribal horsemen attacking my Jeep on the way to Sana’a, being jumped by assassins in the casbah, and narrowly escaping the bite of a deadly cobra placed in my bed by Yemen intelligence men.
I mean, this could have happened. I thought about trying one of these stories out on the bartender, but he was busy, so I just asked him for my cell phone.
I dialed Dom Fanelli’s cell phone, and he answered.
I said, “I’m back.”
“Hey! I was worried about you. I followed the news every day from Kuwait.”
“I was in Yemen.”
“Really? Same shit. Right?”
“Probably. I’m at JFK. Can’t talk long in case they’re still on my case. Where are you?”
“In the office. But I can talk.”
“Good. How’s my apartment?”
“Great… I would have cleaned it if I knew… anyway, how was Yemen?”
“It’s a well-kept secret.”
“Yeah? How are the babes?”
“I gotta tell ya-this place was like Scandinavia with sunshine.”
“No shit? They have nude beaches?”
“They don’t even allow women to wear bathing suits on the beach.” Which was true.
“Mama mia! Maybe I should put my papers in for the ATTF.”
“Do it soon, before the word gets out.”
“Yeah. Right. You’re jerking me off.” He asked, “How’s Kate?”
“Coming home in a few days.”
“That’s great. Let’s have a night out.”
“I’ll try. I’m on admin leave for ten days, and I’m taking some vacation time, so Kate and I are going to Paris.”
“Terrific. You deserve it. What are you doing tonight?”
“You tell me.”
“Oh, right. Those names.”
“I need to get off this phone in a few minutes, Dom. Talk to me.”
“Okay. Forget Gonzalez Perez. Brock, Christopher, two possibles who fit, one in Daytona Beach, one in San Francisco. You want the particulars?”
“Shoot.”
He gave me the addresses and phone numbers, and I wrote them on a cocktail napkin.
He said, “Roxanne Scarangello. Got what I think is a positive. Ready to copy?”
“Ready.”
“Okay… where did I put that…?”
“On the bulletin board?”
“No… here it is. Okay, Scarangello, Roxanne, age twenty-seven, in her third year of a PhD program at University of Pennsylvania-that’s in Philly. Got a BA and an MA from the same place-bullshit, more shit, piled higher and deeper.”
“She start class?”
“Yeah. Well, she was registered. Should have started today, actually.”
“Current address?”
“Lives on Chestnut Street with a boyfriend named Sam Carlson. Mama’s not happy.” He gave me the address,
