Fear City

  Wait. He’d spotted a Nokia label on her mobile phone. He unfolded the bill and found her number. Great! He grabbed her home phone and punched it in … and listened to ring … after ring … after—finally she answered.

  “Cristin?”

  But her recorded voice told him she couldn’t answer the phone right then but just leave a message and a number and she’d call him right back.

  “Shit!”

  The corkscrew winding through his neck tightened further.

  He saw her checkbook and bank statement. He hadn’t gone looking for them, but since they were right here …

  He flipped through her check register. Nothing unusual there … Victoria’s Secret and places like that. He unfolded her bank statement.

  “Holy shit!”

  Her balance was $52,647.38. She couldn’t make that much as an event planner, could she? Must have inherited a good piece of it … a dead grandmother or something.

  He pawed deeper into the drawer and came across a box of business cards. He’d seen these before: bright red with CELEBRATIONS across the middle in lemon-yellow script and “Events” below in smaller block print. An 800 number beckoned from the lower left corner.

  The company she worked for. Okay … call her bosses, wake up their asses and ask them where the hell she was. He punched in the number and a woman came on the line.

  “Celebrations. How can I help you?”

  They had someone answering the phones at this hour. Cool.

  “Hi, I’m looking for one of your party planners, Cristin Ott?”

  “Cristinott? Is that one name? How do you spell it?”

  “Two names.” He spelled it for her.

  “No, I’m sorry, we have no one by that name.”

  This couldn’t be right.

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa! She’s one of your event planners. She’s worked for you for years.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. She’s not listed. How did you get this number, if I may ask?”

  “It’s right here on her card.”

  “A Celebrations card?”

  “Yes—bright red with yellow printing.”

  “That would be it. But the only name printed on those cards is the company’s. Did she write her name on the back?”

  Jack knew the reverse would be blank but flipped it over anyway.

  “No. But I happen to know her personally—know her well. She works for you people.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve been misled, sir. No one by that name works for Celebrations—or let me put it this way: That name is not on my list of Celebrations employees.”

  Jack clenched his teeth against a swelling knot of anger.

  “Have you got a supervisor I could speak to?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Where are you located? I need to have a talk with someone in charge there.”

  “I’m the only one here and I’ve told you all I know.”

  “I just need your address.”

  “Sir, this is an answering service.”

  Jack bit his upper lip. Should have guessed that. He took a breath, gathered himself.

  “Okay, fine. Just tell me where Celebrations has its office and I’ll check directly with them.”

  “I don’t have that information available. And even if I did, I’m sure it would be against our rules to give it out.”

  Jack pulled the receiver from his ear but stopped himself from smashing it against the wall.

  Not my phone.

  Try another tack.

  “Please. She’s missing and I’m worried ab—”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you and I have other calls. Good night.”

  The line went dead.

  With deliberate slowness and exaggerated gentleness, Jack replaced the receiver on its cradle as the woman’s words came back to him.

  I’m afraid you’ve been misled, sir. No one by that name works for Celebrations …

  What the hell?

  FRIDAY

  1

  “You stayed there all night?” Abe said around a huge bite of a bialy.

  “Till the dawn’s early light.”

  Jack knew better than to show up twice in a row without an offering of consumables, so he’d brought Abe half a dozen bialys, still hot from the oven of a kosher bakery down the street. He nibbled at his own, not really hungry.

  “And she never showed?”

  “I stayed up calling every hospital in the five boroughs and asking to be connected to Cristin Ott’s room. When I struck out on that I’d ask the operator to switch me to the emergency room. Then I’d tell the emergency room that my sister, Cristin Ott, had been taken away in an ambulance but I didn’t know where to. Was she there? And between hospitals I’d call her cellular.”

  “Maybe she slept over at a friend’s.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. But she’d still answer her cell phone, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe she turned it off.”

  “I wouldn’t be doing any of this if she’d only called Le Pistou to cancel our lunch—”

  “Oy. You’d eat at a place called ‘Le Pistou’? Where is it? Next to Le Chazzerai?”

  “Abe, I’m worried. This isn’t like her.”

  “Sorry. I see that you are. But what do you know of her already? Sure, you saw her every Sunday for two years, but now the place where she said she worked has never heard of her.”

  “That’s what I don’t get. That’s what scares me.”

  “She was a party planner, you say?”

  “She preferred ‘event planner.’”

  “Whatever. Never in those years did she invite you to one of her events?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to sneak you in?”

  “No.”

  “And you never wondered why?”

  “To tell you the truth: no. Probably because I never wanted her to sneak me in. I’m not a party person, and the last place I want to be is stuck in a room with a bunch of people I don’t know, especially if they’re corporate types, or account execs, or deputy mayors, or state assemblymen. She organized private parties, not open to the public. Sneaking me in—even if I wanted in—would jeopardize her job, and that was something I did not want to do.”

  “So maybe she just had second thoughts. She didn’t want to start up with you again.”

  “Maybe. But I know her, Abe. She’s an up-front type. She would have called.”

  “Then you need to find this Celebrations place.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t tried. I went to the library and scoured all the phone books—went out as far as Suffolk County. No dice.”

  Abe’s expression turned dubious. “In all five boroughs and Nassau and Suffolk there’s no place called Celebrations?”

  “Oh, sure. About a dozen. But they sell party hats and helium balloons. And they don’t have eight hundred numbers.”

  “So give me this eight hundred number.”

  “No use calling. It’s just an answering service. I called back three times last night and got, as you like to say, bupkis.” A thought hit him. “Maybe I should try again this morning. Probably hit a different shift and might get a more cooperative operator.”

  “You shouldn’t count on it, so don’t do it. Like I said, give me this eight hundred number and I’ll find out the address.”

  “Of Celebrations?”

  “No, the answering service. Then you can go there and work your magic.”

  “If I could do magic I could find Cristin. But you can do that—find the address?”

  Abe gave one of his shrugs. “In my business I shouldn’t want to know who’s calling? And who I’m calling back?”

  “Yeah, I guess you would.”

  “Of course I would. I have a guy who can back-check numbers. Not out of the goodness of his heart does he do this, so you’ll have to pay.”

  “Whatever he wants.”

  “Good. I’ll have it for you later. Be somewhere I can call you.”

  “If I’m
not home I’ll be at Julio’s.”

  Abe had both numbers.

  He’d call Cristin’s place when he got home, and keep calling till he’d heard from Abe. And then he’d have a heart-to-heart with someone at Celebrations’ answering service.

  2

  Kadir was waiting by the Space Station’s front gate with Yousef and Salameh when a City Chemical truck arrived.

  “Got a delivery for unit forty-three-forty-four.”

  “That is us,” Kadir said, and punched in the code that would unlock the gate.

  They directed the truck to the center building and spent the next hour watching him unload the chemicals and store them in locker 4344 on the second floor. The driver asked them a number of times what they were going to do with all this stuff. Each time Kadir put him off by saying, “Manufacturing.”

  And that was true, in a way: They were manufacturing the downfall of the driver’s country.

  When everything was off-loaded and the driver gone, they found a dolly and brought containers of urea and nitric acid down to Salameh’s Nova and filled the trunk. After locking the unit, they drove over to JFK Boulevard and took it south into the Greenville section of Jersey City—so far south they were almost in Bayonne. There, following Ayyad’s directions, they found Pamrapo Avenue.

  Pamrapo was only a couple of blocks long but they missed the address on the first pass. The converted garage was not visible from the street. The driveway was little more than two ruts through winter-blighted weeds curving around the rusting remains of junked cars.

  Ayyad must have heard them coming because he stepped out the porchless front door as they arrived. He didn’t offer to help them as they unloaded the chemicals.

  Kadir and Salameh struggled with the heavy container of urea, maneuvering it through the door and into the unfurnished front room within. Yousef waited inside.

  “This is where we will do most of the mixing,” he said in Arabic. He pointed to the ceiling. “And by the way, we have an American neighbor upstairs—lives there with his dog. This is a thick-walled building, so it is unlikely he can hear anything, but just to be safe, we say nothing in English while we are here.”

  Kadir nodded as he looked around the empty room. “You said we’ll be mixing here. In what?”

  “That is your next assignment. We’ll need metal drums—the fifty-five-gallon size are easy to find and will work best.”

  “I know where we can get some,” Salameh said.

  “Good. Bring three. Oh, and pick up as many old newspapers as you can find.”

  “Newspapers?” Salameh said. “Why?”

  “I’ll explain later. Now get moving. The sooner you get them, the sooner we begin.”

  Kadir tugged on Salameh’s arm. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  He couldn’t wait to get started.

  3

  Abe had phoned and said the 800 number went to an answering service company located on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. When Jack arrived at the address he found himself peering through the window of an XXX peepshow and porn shop.

  Crap. What was going on?

  He backed up and took a look at the converted five-story tenement. A sign in the second-floor window said ANSWER MANAGEMENT in red block letters.

  Okay. Got it.

  The narrow door to the right of the store had been painted and repainted so many times that the trim had lost all its detail. A short row of black buttons was inset to the right. He pressed the one labeled ANSWER MANAGEMENT and waited to be buzzed in. Instead a woman’s tinny voice screeched from the speaker.

  “Who is it?”

  He should have anticipated this. When you worked above a porn shop, you didn’t simply buzz in everyone who rang. He used the name on his ID.

  “My name’s Jeff Cusic. I’m here to apply for a job.”

  “We’re not hiring.”

  “Is it because I’m a guy?”

  “No, because we’re not hiring.”

  “Do you have any males answering your phones?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, if you don’t, that’s sexual discrimination. Look, I’m not trying to cause trouble. Just let me fill out an application for when you do hire.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I pay a visit to the city Commission on Human Rights and file a complaint.”

  The speaker went silent for a while and Jack wondered if maybe she’d hung up, but then her voice returned.

  “Stand back and let me see what you look like.”

  “What does that—?”

  “If you look like trouble, you’re not getting in.”

  He stepped back from the door and spread his arms as he looked up. He couldn’t see anyone in the window.

  “Okay?”

  The door buzzed. He leaped to it and pushed his way inside. The woman who met him at the top of the stairs had a face only Anne Ramsey’s mother could love.

  “Are you for real?” she said.

  He held up his hands, showing his empty palms. “I come in peace. I just want to fill out an application.”

  “Why bother me?”

  “I’m trying all the answering services. My day job doesn’t pay enough, so I need a night job.”

  “What’s your day job?”

  “I move furniture. I need something off my feet at night.”

  Her expression looked even sourer as she shook her head. “You mean a job you can sleep through.”

  “Just let me apply.”

  With a sigh she motioned him into her small office. “We don’t have a form. I’ll give you an index card and you can leave your name and number.”

  “Fair enough.”

  As he was filling it out with his phony name and a made-up number, he checked out the three-drawer filing cabinet against the wall. The top drawer was labeled A-J. Clients?

  When he finished the card he said, “Can I peek at the working conditions?”

  With an exasperated look she walked to a door at the other end of the office. Jack caught a glimpse of a number of women sitting in little booths talking into headsets before he stepped to the filing cabinet and pulled open the top drawer.

  “Hey!” the woman said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  As she came toward him Jack found the C’s and flipped through the folders. The third was labeled Celebrations. He pulled it open as the boss lady arrived and tried to close the drawer on his hands.

  “Get away from there!”

  He backed away, but not before spotting the billing address, and a name: Rebecca J. Olesen.

  “Just curious.”

  Her face was red with fury as she reached for her phone. “I’m calling the police!”

  “No need,” he said, hurrying for the door.

  He hit the stairs running and burst out onto Ninth Avenue where he quick-walked down toward 42nd Street. He headed east, stopping along the way to buy a large, padded manila envelope. When he reached Grand Central Station, he turned downtown for three blocks to East 39th.

  Murray Hill. A high-rent neighborhood and home to a host of foreign diplomats connected to the UN. The number in the folder turned out to be an old brownstone renovated into office space.

  He took the two steps down to the entrance. A world of difference from Ninth Avenue. The door was thick, unsmudged glass. As he’d suspected when he’d seen the address, a security camera was mounted on the ceiling and pointed right at him. He checked the call buttons, set in polished brass. The third one down was labeled CELEBRATIONS. He pressed it.

  Eventually a woman’s voice said, “Yes?”

  “Package for Celebrations,” he said, sounding bored.

  Whoever she was she probably had a monitor that let her see who was at the door. She must have been satisfied with his appearance because she buzzed him in.

  As he entered the vestibule, a woman stepped through a door at the end of the hall and approached him. She had ash-blond hair, wore a business pantsuit, and looked to b
e in her late forties. Jack found her fairly attractive for a woman twice his age. She held out her hand as she neared.

  “Celebrations?” he said.

  She nodded. “Do you need me to sign?”

  “No,” he said as he handed her the unsealed, unaddressed envelope. “I need you to tell me if you’ve heard from Cristin Ott.”

  “Who?” Did she flinch at the name? He couldn’t be sure.

  “Cristin. Ott.” He pronounced the name carefully. “She didn’t come home last night.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of her.”

  The concern in her eyes said otherwise. But concern for whom? Herself or Cristin?

  “I’m pretty sure you have, Rebecca Olesen.”

  “I don’t know how you know my name but I’m very sure I have not heard of hers.”

  “She says—has said for years—that she works for Celebrations. Is there someone higher up the chain I can speak to?”

  “I’m it, I’m afraid. I’m Celebrations. And I don’t know your Cristin Ott.” She pulled a cellular phone from her jacket pocket. “And if you don’t leave right now I’m going to call the police.”

  The same threat, twice in an hour. For an instant Jack considered grabbing the phone and threatening to flatten her nose with it if she didn’t tell him. Because she knew—even if she didn’t know Cristin personally, she knew the name.

  Instead, he said, “You won’t help me find her? I’ve got a bad feeling about her.”

  There. A flinch. No question about it. “I wish I could help you, I really do, but I simply don’t know her. Now please leave.”

  Jack decided this was neither the time nor place to press the issue. He’d watch her, and when the time was right …

  Without a word he turned and walked away.

  4

  Mir Aimal Kasi followed Dolley Madison Boulevard on his way back from a delivery in Arlington. He had no idea who Dolley Madison was, and it wasn’t the fastest route back to Reston where his courier service was based, but it took him past a certain driveway in a section of McLean called Langley. He passed whenever he could. The trees along the road hid the headquarters of the hated CIA, the eyes and ears of the Great Satan where the ruination of Islam was plotted.