“I cared very much about Mohammad, my Afghan friend. He wrote that Khomani had married, and now lived under the name Silas Nasar. He had e-mailed pictures of Khomani’s wife and their two sons. The wife was an Afghan beauty, as I could see from the pictures. But the younger son had cerebral palsy. He was three. From the pictures, I could see, Mr. Gandhi, that his condition was terrible. I felt that Mohammad, who was a very compassionate man with children of his own, wanted to know more about his cousin and his family.”
“Mohammad was married?” For the first time Raj, impassive and matter of fact, looked surprised.
“Yes. Haven’t you ever heard of such a thing before? It was once known as closeted gay men.”
“Of course.”
“Do you have children?” Gabriel asked.
“No, I work. I’m one of those people married to my work. No children, either.”
Gabriel’s tone became more intense. He cultivated a quiet, comforting demeanor, that doctor’s style of reassurance. “You told me that you had crucial news for me. Your words, Mr. Gandhi. I’ve said a lot. I’m a doctor. I’ve learned to listen. Where is Cameron?”
“Cameron Dewar is missing because he was arrested.”
“Say that again.”
“Arrested.”
“Where is he?”
“The Secret Service has him.”
“Why?”
“Why, Dr. Hauser? Because he knows you.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Gabriel was for a moment angry with this evasive, overly well-mannered, fragile-looking man. “How do you know he was arrested?”
“The source I mentioned.”
“Who the fuck is this source? I want to talk to him.” “I truly don’t know who he is.”
“First you tell me you can’t tell me who he is. Now you tell me you don’t know who he is.” Gabriel caught himself. His anger at various times during the last two days was, he believed, far too intense and unpredictable. His work as a doctor had taught him that quiet persistence drew out more of the truth and more information from patients. “What else did this man say? Or is the source a woman?”
“It’s a man. Quite sarcastic, unpleasant to deal with. But so far everything he’s told me has been accurate. He is what we call in our business a reliable source.”
“What else did he say about Cam?”
“He’s in a secret place. He’s being asked questions about who you know, who you have conversations with, what you hear, what you write, to whom you write.”
“What are they doing to him?”
“So far just talking to him. And he is talking to them. How the two of you met? When did the two of you become sexually active? Do you have HIV? What have you told him about the Army? Has he read the letters you wrote to the president, congressmen, the secretary of defense, even the editor at the Times when you were objecting to Don’t ask, don’t tell. They seem to have copies of every letter you wrote.”
“Of course they do,” Gabriel said. “I sent them. I wanted them to be read. I kept copies. They were all in a Barneys shoebox in our apartment. I don’t think Cam ever looked at them until a few hours ago.”
Raj paused. He, too, was patient. Like Gabriel he knew that patience, not anger, not threats, not shouting, extracted information. Raj said, “Most of all, though, they want to know about you and Silas Nasar, the cousin.”
“Silas Nasar? They already know about Silas Nasar.”
“They also believe,” Raj said, “that you met him and knew him before the bombings.”
“Knew him? No, I never saw him. But we spoke. Several times. We exchanged e-mails and texts. He sounded so much like his cousin. They were raised together. I knew he was going to be on the steps of the museum on Sunday. He told me he resembled his cousin. He even sent me by text a not particularly clear picture of himself. I knew we would recognize each other. The picture did make me believe they were related.”
“They believe,” Raj said, “that you had already met him and knew him. How often did you talk to Silas?”
“Not really sure. He was very easy to talk to. He had lots of opinions, as did his cousin. But Mohammad was more difficult to speak with, although his English was completely understandable. But the language was a Sunni dialect. Silas was almost, you would think, a native English speaker.”
Everything about the elegant Church of the Heavenly Rest was symmetrical. The two identical low spires, the carved facades that were mirror images of one another, the twin huge medieval doors whose gold hinges were identical. And that remarkable name, almost symmetrical itself: the Church of the Heavenly Rest which, as Gabriel had thought since he was a boy, had a distinctive name so unlike any other church he’d ever heard of except possibly the immense, poorly maintained, and never completed Cathedral of Saint John the Divine near the Columbia campus on upper Amsterdam Avenue. That cathedral stood at the edge of the then still dangerous Morningside Park, dense as a jungle, boulder-strewn, an ideal haven for thieves and muggers.
The Church of the Heavenly Rest was so symmetrical, so balanced, that there was a marble bench on the other side of the ornate wooden doors. And there were large concrete planters next to each bench that bore slender yew trees newly planted because the previous harsh winter destroyed the earlier, more mature ones. A banner imprinted with the single immense word Rejoice was suspended over the doors. It rustled in the mild summer breeze.
Minute recording devices had been implanted in the tender flesh of the new trees in the planters as soon as Gina Carbone had learned that the two men had arranged to meet on one of the church’s smooth granite benches. Across the avenue just inside the entrance to the Engineers’ Gate, a thickset man who had the heft and dimensions of a college football player and a skinny woman, both in runner’s clothes, listened on earbuds to every word that Gabriel Hauser and Raj Gandhi spoke. So, too, did Gina Carbone.
The man posing as a runner asked into a small microphone that was a part of the earbud, “What do you want us to do?”
Naked, Tony Garafalo stretched out on the sheets on the bed near the desk at which Gina was seated. She was naked, too, except for a thick Regency Hotel towel draped around her waist.
Tony was staring at the profile of her remarkably shapely, youthful breasts.
Gina said, “Remember, you’re runners. Keep moving. These two guys are smart. They’ll notice you if you’re just standing around.” Gina was one of those rare people who knew the arts of command. “Get your asses moving. You have the drop on them for five hundred yards. Your equipment will pick up everything they say even when they can’t see you.”
Then Gina heard Gabriel Hauser’s increasingly edgy, aggravated voice. “Mr. Gandhi, when I called you because I couldn’t find Cam you said you could help. So far you know only something I had already suspected. That the bastards have arrested Cam. You haven’t told me how much danger he is in, where he is, how I can get him back.”
“I believe I know where he is.”
“Where?”
“There’s a dark prison in an old pier on the East River. In it are about two dozen Islamic men who were secretly arrested within minutes or hours after the first explosions yesterday.”
“I’m going down there. I have a bike in the basement of my building. Where is it?”
“A derelict pier just below Houston Street. I’ve tried to get in a few times. Haven’t succeeded. Pier 37.”
Two casually dressed men, both Sunni Muslims, stood at the iron fence surrounding the Cooper-Hewitt Museum just across 90th Street on the east side of Fifth Avenue. Behind the ornate fence the museum itself was shrouded, as it had been for two years, by gauzy, translucent veils that protected the museum and passersby from construction debris during the long course of the museum’s reconstruction. Using slender, essentially invisible equipment that Silas Nasar had given them, they, too, listened to the conversation between Raj Gandhi and Gabriel Hauser. They could have been the tourists they appeared to be.