“It humanizes you, sir.”
“Could we not have met, say, at a nice Popeye’s? Now that’s an advance in civilization!”
He had napped, he had showered, he had deodorized, he had prayed—or had he? hard to remember—he had refreshed with several Dexedrine and felt ready as a tiger. Gul had laid out the clothes. But now, before leaving for Mo’s, came his favorite moment in any journey: the winding of the watches.
“Sir, the servants are ready.”
He sat down, barefoot, poured himself a glass of water.
“They may proceed,” he said.
The factotum muttered a command and one by one a half dozen servants came in bent and reverent, and placed an odd object on the bureau, the coffee table, the mantel, the bedside table, any stable surface in the bedroom of the vast, plush suite. Since there were by far more odd objects than servants, the procession took a while until each had put his object exactly where it should be and gone back for another one, then gotten back in line. When they were finally done, the factotum Abba Gul made certain that all were equidistant in space, all aligned perfectly.
They were watch winders, elegant boxes that opened to reveal velvet, er, whatchamacallits—things maybe?—protrusions, protuberances, armatures, whatever. If there was a word for it, Zarzi did not know it. In effect, they were artificial limbs, wrists actually. Then came the watches, removed from their travel cases. Rolexes, Patek Philippes, Blancpains, Raymond Weils, Vacheron Constantins, Bell & Rosses, Breguets, Chopards, Girard-Perregauxs, Piagets, Cartiers, Omegas, Fortises, and so on and so forth, more than eight dozen of them, all mechanical analogs, all clicking away in perfect time, all second hands indexed exactly to the second designations on the faces and not between, as happens on cheap quartz movements, all elegant, all expensive, all shiny. One by one, in a certain order, a servant slid the watch he bore onto the artificial wrist of the opened box until the room resembled the discreetly expensive private viewing arena of a high-end Parisian jewelry store. It then developed that each box also sported a discreet cord, which was now unrolled by servants and each plug inserted into a lengthy socket box, which was in turn plugged into the hotel’s electrical system.
“Sir?”
“Yes, proceed, Gul,” said the Great Man.
Gul pressed the main switch on the socket box and each of the velvet wrists began a slow, methodical revolution, describing a circle about four inches in circumference. Thus, the watches, all self-winders, the culmination of the watchmaker’s art, received their two hours of energy to keep them running perfectly. No longer was the space a jewelry showroom, but rather a kind of ghost hall full of apparitions rotating the watches to precise life, in soundless synchronicity, a symphony of gently moving disks of numbers. As it was dark, the radiated digits gleamed more brightly, but the many gold pieces had their own organic process by which they magnified what little ambient glow their surfaces caught and reflected.
It was like a slow-motion pyrotechnic show and behind each watch face, Zarzi knew, was a galaxy of gears and shafts and pins and jewels, set together with inexorable logic driven by extraordinary imagination and discipline, traceable back to the original verge escapement device created by who knows what forgotten genius in the European Middle Ages. It was, of course, the West: not computers or skyscrapers or women with bulging thighs and naked, painted toes; all that came later. But this was its core, its essence, and he loved it so and he hated it just as fervently, all the gear wheels, the tiny springs, the rotating winder weights, the hands sweeping inexorably around, measuring not time, as so many thought, but only the tension within their mainspring. That is what the watch calibrated; time was a metaphor against which it was applied. There was no time, not really, not that could be touched, weighed, licked, tasted, felt. The watches ticked against their own winding and the imagination that had designed the winding mechanism; it was magic, it was profound, it was touching, he loved it so much in all its glory and damnation.
BALTIMORE FBI HQ
WOODLAWN, BEYOND BELTWAY
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
1700 HOURS
THE NEXT DAY
Six meetings, and at each, Bob had given his little speech on Ray Cruz’s standing offhand capability. Twice to Agency people, to the Baltimore metropolitans, the Maryland State Police, and two Secret Service meetings and at each positions were marked, radio frequencies verified, aviation coordinates laid in, the parade of intricate planning and counterplanning gone over a third, a fourth, a fifth time.
Everybody was exhausted. But nobody was going home.
Bob sat with Nick and several others—ties loosened, jackets off, sleeves rolled up—in the special agent in charge’s corner office in the bland office building the Bureau had rented, and then decorated in the mind-numbing scheme known as Nineties Bureaucracy. One touch stood out: one of the office’s bosses had been female, and she’d supervised a witty Dick Tracy toy and comic strip exhibit in the foyer, behind glass. None of the men noticed it and none of the subsequent male SAICs bothered to take it down.
The occasion was a situation report, sitrep in the jazzy vernacular. A special agent had just summed up the day’s efforts in locating Ray Cruz, which included a sweep of all motels and hotels, rental apartments, trailer parks, homeless shelters; monitoring all local law enforcement reports, all speeding and misdemeanor charges (idiotic, Swagger thought; Ray Cruz wasn’t about to get in a bar fight); and so forth and so on, including employee canvasses of all retail and eating establishments, review of postal activity, delivery by private carrier, garbage pickup, road crew work, traffic light maintenance, meter maids, et cetera. All telephone tips had been checked out, all the unglamorous clerk’s work that is the essence of law enforcement.
“Nothing.”
“You’re the expert,” someone said to Swagger. “Where’s a marine sniper go to ground?”
“Right now,” said Bob, “he’d be in a hole covered with leaves and branches. His face would be dark green and black; he’d be ready to shit in the hole, piss in the hole, eat in the hole, and die in the hole. He crawled a long way to get to that hole and he ain’t about to give it up.”
There was a little laughter, mostly of a tired sort.
Nick asked a special agent Travis, “Anything new from Washington?”
“More stuff on the Cruz background investigation.”
“Sergeant Swagger, take a look at it, see if it’s anything, when you get a moment.”
“Sure,” said Bob.
“Hey,” said the Baltimore SWAT supervisor, “Sergeant Swagger, I remember you said yesterday ‘good Catholic boy.’ I’m wondering if Cruz could get hold of a priest’s garment and get into that steeple in the square that way.”
“Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate,” someone else said.
“We’ve canvassed the church, but it’s a very good suggestion,” said Nick. “And Cruz seems to have the self-effacing low profile of a priest, so he’d fit right in. I’ll detail some extra men there tomorrow.”
Bob said, “Camouflage.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant?”
“Camouflage.”
“You’re thinking he’ll disguise himself as a bush? Or maybe he’s already there, disguised as a bush?”
There was some laughter and even Bob had a grin from the agent’s wisecrack.
“No,” said Bob, “I don’t mean in that way. Despite what I just said, he ain’t going to paint his face green and glue twigs to his head or wear no suit that looks like a swamp. But camouflage is at the center of the mind-set. That’s what the mission was about in Afghanistan. Camouflage. Blending in. Okay, not with the ground but with the local population. So . . . what would he camouflage himself as?”
There was silence.
“Put it another way; where would he locate so he wouldn’t be noticed? What is his first quality? What is the first thing about him?”
“He’s a marine.”
“He’s a sniper.”
“H
e’s a hero.”
“He’s gone crazy.”
“All that’s no help at all,” said Nick. “Bob, what are you thinking?”
“First of all, he’s Filipino. He was raised in the Philippines. He speaks Tagalog without an accent. With other Filipinos, his features blend in; he ain’t what we’re calling ‘exotic.’ He becomes more Filipino in a group of Filipinos. They probably accept him on faith. He knows you guys ain’t penetrated them because there’s so few of them, a stranger would stick out, and you probably don’t have too many Filipino special agents.”
“Where is this going?” said Nick.
“I’m trying to think how he’d think. Here’s what I come up with: maybe somewhere there’s a Filipino who’s already passed our once-over lightly. He’s got a kitchen job, something in food service, maybe delivery, in the shoot zone. He’s a recent immigrant, don’t speak the language too good. It’s a low-level job, but he’s been on it a batch of months, so it’s okay. So I’m thinking Ray, in that calm, methodical, focused way of his, has found him. He’s befriended him, he’s offered him some money, he’s earned his trust as a Filipino, speaking the language. This guy don’t know nothing, but the money’s for the people back home, how could he turn it down? So Ray takes over that identity tomorrow. He gets in under that name and the people he fools don’t even look close at him. He’s one of the little folks who carry out the shit and scrub the toilets and wipe up the puke and wash the piss off the sidewalks each morning. Ray goes in as that guy, his ID and his name on the list gets him through our security. Nobody’s looking close at faces in photos and faces on people. And he’s Asian, they all look alike to any busy cop at a checkpoint. And remember, he don’t need an escape route. He’s not trying to get out, and that makes his penetration much easier. So tomorrow he steps out of the kitchen across the street or down the block, and he’s got a way-cut-down 700 with scope, maybe just a good red dot. The package is maybe sixteen inches long, enough to get a good shoulder brace and cheek weld, you could do it with a hacksaw. He can see the hubbub, and when the agents come out, out comes the rifle, there’s Zarzi, he goes to target and ticks off the shot offhand standing in one second and you’ve got brains all over the sidewalk. Whiskey Two-Two, mission accomplished, over and out. That’s what he’s got to work with, that’s what he’d do.”
“Is that what you’d do?” asked a police officer.
“I’d have to find a white trash cranky old sack full of hot air and bad breath, but it’s the same principle.”
“We don’t have any evidence,” someone said. “He could also paint his skin black, buy a wig, and go Afro into the shoot zone, knowing that we’re hesitant to confront Afros.”
“But Afro falls apart if he’s confronted. One second of close examination and Afro goes away. Filipino doesn’t go away, and if he’s got the right easy-to-come-by docs, he’s in,” another argued.
“All right,” said Nick, “let’s run this and see where it takes us. Maybe nowhere. Maybe there are no Filipinos in the area and Swagger’s been smoking that weird pipe again.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Swagger said, to some laughter.
Nick ordered, “Check the lists of the already vetted. See if you can come up with any names of Filipino nationals, or immigrants. Maybe we get an address, and if so, maybe we raid. Maybe we nab the guy before he gets out of bed.”
It took an hour. The run-through of the hundred-odd vetted workers in the shoot zone for tomorrow indeed included four of possible Filipino derivation, an Abated, a Batujong, a Ganaban, and an Ulat, working at three different restaurants, an Indian, a Chinese, and a barbecued rib house known to be popular with gays (“Boy’s Town,” as it was called, was the next district north of Mount Vernon).
Calls to Immigration produced data on three of the four, who were not citizens yet. The fourth, a citizen, was a seventy-year-old sous-chef at an upscale place just marginally in the zone. He was discarded.
Immigration faxed the paperwork. Of the three, only one fit the profile. His name was Ricardo Ulat, from Mindanao originally, thirty-six years old, a dishwasher at a popular Indian restaurant just across the street and down half a block from the Zabol. He had been in the country a little over six months. But it turned out he lived at the same address in a suburban town bordering the city called Pikesville as one of the other, older immigrants. Possibly they were uncle and nephew or cousins? There were no legal problems, though the house had been raided once in 2002 in a search—futile, as it turned out—for Filipino illegals.
Pikesville wasn’t in Baltimore but some other entity called “Baltimore County” with a separate police force. New phone calls, new introductions, new arrangements had to be made, but ultimately, the county police input showed no complaints against the house, no altercations or police visits or calls, no trouble. The Filipinos were very good visitors. A traffic ticket for the older Batujong, that was all. The cops put Nick and Bob and the team in touch with the commander of the county police station, responsible for Pikesville and an old hand there, and he gave them a rundown on speakerphone.
“The neighborhood used to be Jewish when Baltimore was the Jerusalem of the East Coast. Lots of big old homes, built by prosperous business owners, bankers, furriers, restaurateurs, that sort of thing, at the turn of the century through the twenties. It’s now what you call a ‘changing neighborhood.’ It’s about sixty percent black, forty percent what we’d call ‘mixed ethnic.’ Real estate has been depressed for a few decades as the rich people move farther out. One of the things we’ve seen is a kind of ‘rooming house’ phenomenon. A restaurant guy, who depends on cheap labor, some of it possibly illegal, will buy one of these big old arks at low cost, do absolutely nothing to fix it up, and turn it into a kind of dormitory for his low-end labor force. With some of these, you’ve got continuous problems that generate a lot of complaints, fights, drugs, parties, noise, trashed property, sometimes a killing, which requires a lot of police activity.
“The Filipinos, though, are different. Never a fight, never a party, no drinking hardly at all, very tidy, lawn is always mowed, no rubbish anywhere. You’d never be able to tell that 1216 Crenshaw has ten occupants, all single. These are usually rural guys; they’re not from the big, crazy cities like Manila or Cebu, they’re not sophisticated and criminally inclined. What they do, they get the visa, they sign up with an employer, a restaurant guy who needs the cheap labor, and they come over here for seven years. It’s pretty awful, living four to a room in a country whose language they don’t speak and whose culture they don’t even get. But they work hard, live very simply, and manage to send home a pile of money. They’re really helping out their families. After the seven, very few of them jump and go illegal; they go back, having done their duty, and another family member comes over. So what you’ve got at 1216 is just that, a houseful of very quiet, hardworking guys without English skills at any level who just want to go home.”
Nick said, “Captain, we may want to raid tomorrow morning at dawn. These guys work late, and our best bet to nab all of them is early morning. I’ve got people at the federal level trying to get a search warrant, I may have to bring Immigration in, but I’m wondering if you’d provide perimeter security for our team, and if we need it, I’m hoping you could make a phone call to a local prosecutor on our behalf, and we’d go in under your flag. It’s not a hard bust, a kick-ass raid. I don’t want to disturb or harass these guys, but I need to contain them totally, and run a careful search for a possible terrorist suspect of Filipino heritage. This seems like our best possibility for apprehending him, if he’s there.”
“Sure,” said the commander. “Happy to.”
“I’m going to give you over to Special Agent Matthews,” Nick said, “for further coordination and logistical requirements.”
He handed the phone off.
“Okay,” he said, “Swagger and I are going to drive out there discreetly and take a look. You guys get on with the planning; again, let me emph
asize, this is about containment. I don’t want any battering rams or flash-bangs, I don’t want any SWAT monkey suits or MP5s and Ninja Commando Force 9 bullshit. I want a lot of people in civilian clothes, wearing comfortable shoes and FBI raid jackets, I want to flood that zone, I want it all to go smooth and quiet and I don’t want any of these subjects to have cause to complain of police harassment, is that clear?”
PIKESVILLE, MARYLAND
THE 1200 BLOCK OF CRENSHAW AVENUE
0130 HOURS
Bob and Nick sat in Nick’s government-issue Crown Victoria, across the street and four houses down from the big dwelling at 1216, which just sat there in Gothic splendor, a many-turreted old beast of a house that had to have been built by a jeweler or a dry-cleaning magnate of the century before. Trees overhung the streets, and the houses, all of them big and most of them dark, were smothered in landscaping—though it was shabby and overgrown, as the original owners, with their American dream of success, had long since moved on, and the inheritors didn’t pay as much attention to the details. It was actually only a few minutes’ drive from the FBI office via a one-exit trek on the beltway. But Bob didn’t like sitting there.
“I don’t advise parking here.”
“I want to see if there are any surprises. We have the house plan, we have satellite photos from National Reconnaissance satellites, but I want to make sure no doors or windows are boarded up, or there are any new entrances. Relax. It’s dark.”
Nick was examining the property through his own night vision binoculars, and taking notes.
“This guy has radar for aggression,” said Bob. “That’s how he’s stayed alive so long. If he’s in the house, he’ll note that we pulled up and nobody left the car. Maybe he’s got binocs on us right now.”
“Okay, okay,” said Nick, “almost done.”
“Suppose one of ’em comes home about now and sees the two white guys in the big black sedan spying and tells the others.”