“Come on, Cam, please, I love you. And besides, he lost interest. I haven’t heard from him in a month.”
“I know. Your e-mails to him have been heartsick. He hasn’t gotten back to you in a month, no matter how much you plead.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t jive me, Gabriel. I’ve read them. I’ve got them here.” He gestured to a neat stack of papers on which the e-mails had been printed.
“I’m sorry, Cam. It was one of those runaway emotional attachments. There was never a chance that he’d be allowed to come here. I’m not the only person in the world who loses control over what he writes in e-mails and text messages.”
“Do you want to know why you haven’t heard from him?”
Something in the wounded, angry tone with which Cam now spoke made Gabriel even more anxious. He asked, “Why? What’s wrong? Has he been hurt?”
“No, Gabriel. He’s been arrested. The guys who walked with me and gave me these e-mails said he was part of a plot to blow up a hospital. He was a plant of ISIS or Al-Qaeda. He cultivated you because he thought while you were there you would lead him to a hospital or ward where high-ranking officers were treated. After all, you were a major. When they booted you out of Afghanistan, your lover thought that you might be able to bring him here. These guys from the NSA said your boyfriend from Afghanistan would become a ‘sleeper,’ a plotter for ISIS. That’s why he begged you to help him. What a perfect cover, if you think about it.”
“None of that’s true.”
“This is why these people are so interested in you, Gabriel. You need to hear this. Your friend Mohammad has told them you knew about these bombings before they happened.”
“That’s off the wall, Cam. Totally beyond crazy. They’re making it up.”
“They told me he sent you regular letters, by mail, introducing you to his ‘family’ here. I saw the letters. They were picked up by the government from Nasar’s home just after the first bombings at the Met. One of them is about Silas Nasar. A man with a big birthmark on his face.”
“I never met that man.”
“Really? You met him at the museum. They know you treated him on the steps of the museum and then at the hospital. Even exchanged what looked like a big bracelet with him. Muslim men don’t wear bracelets. The NSA guys think it was a communications device.”
“That’s a fantasy. Why would he be there and let himself get caught in an explosion?”
“Because he was overseeing the last-minute preparations, they said, and the first food wagon had a faulty timing mechanism. It worked, but too soon. And Silas got caught in it.”
“You know this is crazy, Cam. Why would I do these things? I just want to lead a quiet life, treating patients, doing whatever good I can do. And loving you.”
“They know about all the angry protests and objections and appeals you filed after you were discharged. Your letters to the Times and other papers that were never printed. They think you’re angry and sick and deluded. They told me I should persuade you to talk with them right away. If you help them, they say, you can help yourself. You might get a lighter jail sentence, they said, if you cooperate right away.”
Gabriel knew that his hands and lips were shaking and that Cam could see that. Cam moved to him and hugged him. “This is all so sick, Gabriel. I want our life back. Look at what we’ve lost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SHE WAS LARGER and older than most of the women runners who even on this day, three hours after the assault in the George Washington Carver Houses, flowed uptown and downtown on the narrow esplanade along the shoreline of the East River as if this were a holiday on a lucid day in early summer. Gina had changed into running clothes in the back of an unmarked van parked near the seaport piers that had long ago replaced the seedy, mob-dominated Fulton Fish Market and that now had the feel of a suburban shopping mall. She slipped into the crowds of young runners. Moving gracefully, she made her way uptown to Pier 37.
The narrowest possible slit was open in the rusty, rundown chain-link fence that ringed the front of Pier 37. Unobtrusively she veered out of the stream of other runners, the innumerable slim blond girls in running shorts and tops and baseball caps out of which their ponytails hung, the tall young men, even a team of Sikh runners with their turbans in place, and slid through the slit in the fence. She was followed by the three muscular men, also in running gear, all carrying weapons in pouches in Nike belts-her bodyguards.
Raj Gandhi stood directly in front of the pier. He had been stung by the odd caller’s criticism that he hadn’t done enough shoe leather work. After Raj had reserved one of the plain unmarked Fords owned by the Times, he drove crosstown and parked the car near a cluster of several abandoned piers south of Houston Street.
The numbers assigned to the piers were random, inexplicable. Pier 63 was followed by Pier 71 and then Pier 37. All of them were massive, abandoned for decades, relics of the 1940s and the 1950s. Like prison camps, they were surrounded by chain-link fences, some with razor wire on top.
Before he saw Gina Carbone slip like a phantom through a gap in the fence, Raj was baffled as to why he had acted on the eccentric direction of a man who could be, and probably was, deranged. Raj felt if he had been a savvy New Yorker rather than a newcomer and outsider he would have seen through the caller to the crank and recognized that it was just a guy who entertained himself with the fun of sending a New York Times reporter on a pointless frolic.
But Raj had the reporter’s imperious urge to act, the sense that he and he alone was learning something remarkable. And suddenly he was rewarded by the sight of the raven-haired and disguised police commissioner of the largest city in America, a woman who was the leading general of a police force bigger than the armies of most countries, slipping through a slit in the fence and jogging in runner’s gear toward a derelict warehouse. He used his iPhone to create a video of the scene.
Raj was a small man. He was also frail. When he had been taunted at Oxford for his accent, his clothes, and his diminutive parents the two times they visited their scholarship-endowed son, he stood still, shaking with fear, and took whatever abuse, punch or push was inflicted on him. During his years as a young journalist in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, he always cringed at the sound of gunfire or explosions. There was a time in Iraq when he was essentially confined to the fortress known as the Green Zone, living in such anxious fear that he used Valium and Xanax so often that he was afraid he would become addicted. He never drank alcohol.
But now he walked deliberately and steadily to the slit in the chain-link fence through which Gina Carbone and her guards had passed, as if into another world because they had disappeared quickly into one of the warehouse doors. There had been reporters in Iraq who thought of themselves as swashbucklers and who in fact acted that way. Although Raj was not one of them, he felt energized and fearless as he approached the same gap, the only non-runner on the chipped concrete pathway in front of the fence.
His sleeve caught on the exposed point of one of the torn links of the fence. That tug, that slight tear in the fabric of his shirt, also ripped his courage away. He jerked back from the fence as if it were a lick of fire. Once inside the perimeter of the fence, alone on the rutted pavement, he had a sense that he was vulnerable and exposed to danger. And then he had what he knew was an absurd thought: I’m invulnerable, I’m a reporter for the New York Times. As a student at Oxford he was obsessed with Shakespeare’s plays. Now he focused on the line in The Tempest where a powerful, invulnerable spirit says of his companions, My ministers are alike invulnerable.