I was walking. And then I was lying flat on my back on the ground, the low boom still reverberating, the wind knocked out of me, the lantern gone somewhere, the hill beneath me quaking like a water bed.
49
They weren’t gentle. I told them I could walk and they paid me no attention, just went on carrying me through the woods, four of them holding my four limbs while one went ahead with a flashlight and the last two trailed, shining their own flashlights left and right into the shadowed trees. “I really can walk,” I repeated, and one of the ones behind me said, “Shut up, you.”
It had taken them only two minutes to reach me through the woods, where I lay on my back, catching my breath and trying to figure out what had happened and whether or not anything on my body was broken. I was about to sit up, in fact, when I saw the lights coming and decided the safest thing was to make no sudden moves. I was therefore still lying on my back on the ground when they reached me, seven men who looked uncomfortably like the members of Barq Cyrenica, except that they were more neatly and expensively dressed. Flashlights shone on my face, and when I raised a hand to shield my eyes, a tough-sounding voice snapped, “Don’t move!”
So I didn’t move. They studied me, approached me, patted me down where I lay, and talked me over with one another in a language I didn’t understand. I might have tried to explain myself, but what was the point? These were just the low-level troops, who would eventually bring me to someone of authority; that’s when the explanations could start.
One of them had a walkie-talkie, which from time to time barked in that same language, and the fellow barked back at it, and after a couple of minutes they picked me up and hauled me away with them through the woods. That’s when I told them I could walk, and they let me know they didn’t give a damn.
The mosque loomed in the darkness, with a few lit windows on the ground floor and the rest just a massive domed shape in the dark. The man in front opened a door, spilling more light out onto the ground, and I was carried inside and down a long cream-colored corridor with recessed ceiling lights. I tried to look left and right, catching glimpses of doors, some open and some closed, but my captors were all so close to me and hustling me along so quickly that I got very little sense of where I was.
Then they turned left and, with some difficulty, steered me through a doorway, the man in front switching on the same sort of recessed ceiling light as I’d seen in the hall. When they got me inside, there were more quick orders in that language and I was set on my feet, abruptly and rather roughly. Most of the men left. I stood there swaying, my sense of balance lost for the moment, and the man who’d told me to shut up faced me from near the door, his expression cold and hostile. “You will wait,” he said, and turned toward the door.
“For what?”
Ignoring me, he went out and shut the door, and I heard the scratch of the key. All over again, locked in. I can’t go through it all twice, I thought.
But I shouldn’t have to. These were legitimate people, not terrorists; sooner or later they would connect me to the authorities. In the meantime they quite understandably wanted to keep me on ice, and all I should do at this point was, as the man had said, wait.
In a small and nearly empty windowless office. A small metal desk bore a telephone, a blotter, and empty In and Out trays. A wooden swivel chair behind it, a square metal wastebasket beside it, and a leatherette chair with wooden arms in front of it completed the furniture. When I opened the desk drawers, they were all empty. An office not in use at the moment, that’s all.
How long would I have to wait? Long enough to think about what had happened outside, certainly. I’d been walking along and all at once the earth had shrugged, knocking me down the way Sugar Ray is knocked down in the back of the station wagon when I make a sharp turn. I hadn’t heard anything — or I didn’t remember hearing anything — but what could that have been other than an explosion?
The dynamite in the tunnel. The mosque was still here, obviously, so they mustn’t have had the dynamite in the right position yet, but surely that was what had gone up, with who knows how many of the men of Barq Cyrenica trapped inside it by the van with which I’d corked the entrance.
Was I responsible? Was something I’d done with the van the cause, several minutes later, of the dynamite blowing up? That was an uncomfortable idea, and I was just settling down to study it, pacing back and forth in the small room, when the sound of the door being unlocked was followed by its opening, and the entrance of Hassan Tabari.
I stared at him. This was the last thing I’d expected. “By golly, you do get around!” I told him.
“So do you,” he said coldly. Two more men came in after him and shut the door. These were a very different type, obviously Americans, in slacks and sport coats, white shirts and modest ties. “These men,” Tabari said, gesturing to them, “are from your FBI. Perhaps now you will answer the question you wouldn’t answer when we talked on the plane.”
I didn’t get it. “What question? I could never figure out what the hell you were up to. You didn’t ask any questions.”
“I asked you what your relationship was with Arab groups,” he said. “Not in so many words, of course. But that was the question.”
Thinking back to our conversation on the plane, I could see that he had in fact been fishing for an answer to that question, but of course at the time I’d had no relationship with Arab groups, at least none I knew about, so his subtlety had got him nowhere. “All right,” I said, nodding. “My primary relationship with Arab groups is that one of them, called Barq Cyrenica, tried to kill me and then later on kidnapped me.”
One of the FBI men said, “How long have you known about Barq Cyrenica?”
“I learned the name less than an hour ago. Their try at killing me took place on Monday of this week, only I didn’t know who they were then. I reported the attempt to the Los—”
“We know about that.”
“This makes no sense,” Tabari said. He was angry and baffled, and didn’t like to be either. None of us had taken either of the room’s two chairs, but while the FBI men and I stood facing one another, Tabari paced back and forth beside us, from time to time throwing me discontented looks. Now he stopped and said, “Why were they interested in you in the first place? That was the question, that was why I traveled with you. Here is a group of extremists, operating in this part of the world for the first time, and we have information that they are taking a great interest in one television actor named Sam Holt. Why? Is Sam Holt a sympathizer with these ruffians? Is Sam Holt a person connected to some other part of Islam, opposed to the terrorists? We search Sam Holt’s background, we come up with nothing, we have no idea if he’s someone we should protect or someone we should guard ourselves against. Why is Barq Cyrenica so interested in this person? What do these people have in mind to do in California? I traveled with you and learned nothing, but the next day Barq Cyrenica people were found in your house in New York, and of course you insisted you knew nothing about them.”
I said, “So that was you in the cab! I saw you going up Sixth Avenue.”
Ignoring that, Tabari said, “And now, accompanied by an explosion, you climb the fence and walk into our arms, in the middle of the night.”
“I’ll tell you the whole story,” I promised him. “Some of it I’ve already given the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, but the rest I didn’t know until after I was kidnapped.”