“You’re in good shape,” she said, admiring his physique. “Are you a professional athlete or something?”
Decker smiled. “I guess you could say that.”
“What’s your name?”
“John.”
She laughed. “I bet,” she said. “Hi, John. My name is—”
He placed his hand across her mouth. He shook his head. She shrugged, plucked something from the cot, and got down on her knees before him. She took him in her mouth, staring up at him with her big brown eyes as she worked. Decker felt himself grow more and more excited, enlarging in her mouth, between those lips with the pink lipstick. She pulled back and he realized that he already had a condom on.
“You’re ready,” she said.
He pushed her roughly to the cot and entered her with ease. She was already wet. They fucked mechanically, methodically. He could feel his frustration, his anger rising up inside of him. After only a few minutes, he came and pulled away. She started to get up from the cot but he held her in his arms. “Not yet,” he said. “Just lay here for a minute.” His tone was so plaintive, so desperate and forlorn that she softened and lay back down beside him.
“It’ll cost you more,” she said.
He laughed bleakly. He could feel her breath on his face. It was minty fresh. He realized that she had a pockmark on one cheek, next to her ear, and a small white scar beneath her chin. For some strange reason, this made him happy. “It always does,” he said.
Chapter 15
Seamus Gallagher sat in the Blue Moon Diner just across from the offices of WKXY-TV on Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street. He sat there every day at this time, in the same red vinyl booth, looking out the same window at the passing cars and people jostling by. His enemies and detractors — and there were many of them; of that he was most proud — claimed it was because the diner had named a sandwich after him: corned beef and tongue on rye, with mustard. Others said he liked the window booth because it increased his chances of being recognized by passersby. And then there were those who speculated it was because a Moroccan owned the diner, and Gallagher… well, he felt at home there.
The truth was it was sheer convenience that had brought him to the Blue Moon five years earlier when he had first moved to New York from Atlanta and joined the news team at WKXY-TV. The diner was right across the street from the studios. Not that Gallagher was lazy by disposition. He hadn’t ascended through the firmament of local evening TV news, hadn’t crawled his way from Boston through Duluth and Biloxi, from Atlanta to New York by shirking his responsibilities. Indeed, he had stepped on countless others, destroyed myriad careers, in order to get where he was.
Freckled, red-haired with a square-shaped face, plump and rather short, Gallagher had had to labor extra hard for his success. He wasn’t just another pretty-boy-stuffed-shirt. He was a real reporter, a man of the streets, an old-fashioned news hound — at least, that’s how he liked to see himself, and it was the image he tried desperately to project.
Two years earlier, he’d covered a story about a Hassidic Jew who’d run over a black kid in Brooklyn. The accident had sparked a series of brutal riots during which a black man stabbed a young Hassidim. The black man — it turned out — was also a devout Muslim. The story received a lot of play. Many in the Jewish community thought the piece was not only incendiary but also anti-Semitic, and Gallagher received death threats for months. But the story earned him the respect of the New York Muslim communities. Then, after 9/11, he parlayed that reputation into some interesting exclusives with various Muslim clerics throughout the tri-state area resulting in numerous awards, including a coveted Emmy for the local evening news team. He wrote a book, which did reasonably well, although the reviews were mixed at best. Gallagher didn’t care. The notoriety garnered him a sizeable promotion, more money and more airtime than most with his experience. And, as a nice by-product, it had earned him his own sandwich at the Blue Moon Diner.
Gallagher finished up his cup of chicken soup and salad, and was reaching into his jacket for his wallet, when a young busboy appeared from nowhere and began to clear his table.
“Hey, I’m still eating here,” he uttered with disdain.
The busboy ignored him and continued to clear the table. He was a young Arab but Gallagher didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t one of the owner’s boys. “Are you deaf?” he said. “Can’t you wait ’til I’m done?”
The busboy stared at the reporter. “Gallagher?” he said, with a thick Middle Eastern accent. “Seamus Gallagher?” He began to clean the surface of the table with a rag.
“That’s right. Who are you?”
The young man didn’t answer. He reached behind his apron and took out a piece of paper. Then he dropped it on the table and, without another word, moved off.
Gallagher watched him weave and wiggle through the breakfast crowd, back toward the rear of the diner. The reporter shook his head. He picked up the piece of paper. It was a hand-written note. It read: On Friday, 28 January, a train transporting highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau, Kazakhstan, for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City, was hijacked by Gulzhan Baqrah on behalf of El Aqrab and the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. Eight kilos of HEU was stolen, enough to make a nuclear bomb with a one kiloton yield. Unless El Aqrab is released from his Zionist cell, the Brotherhood will detonate a WMD somewhere on the soil of our enemies. It is the will of Allah.
The reporter read the note again. He could feel his pulse quicken. He looked toward the rear of the diner. The busboy had disappeared.
Gallagher got up and snaked his way through the crowd. “Hey, Omar,” he said to one of the young waiters drifting by. He grabbed him by the elbow. The waiter almost dropped his plate of eggs and bacon on the floor. “Omar, what’s the name of your new busboy?” Gallagher insisted.
The waiter turned, and freed himself, and laid the plate beside him on a nearby table. “What busboy?”
“The one who cleared my booth.”
“Ahmed?”
“No, not Ahmed. I know Ahmed. Some other Arab kid. I think he went into the kitchen.”
The waiter scanned the rear of the diner. He shook his head. “There is no other busboy. Just Ahmed, Mr. Gallagher.” He inched away. “Do you want me to get him?”
It was no use. The boy had vanished. “No, it’s okay. Never mind,” he said.
Gallagher squeezed back to his booth, tossed a few dollars on the table, and started for the door. His heart still pounded in his chest. This is starting out as an interesting day, he thought. He had planned to run a follow-up on his Gentry Hall story, the senior citizens’ center where a seventy-seven year old great-grandmother had been sexually molested a few weeks earlier. But now, out of the sky, out of the heavens, someone had dropped this bomb into his lap. Literally. He opened the door and stepped outside. He reached into his camel hair jacket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. He lit one up. The sidewalk buzzed with pedestrians. Cabs and vans and cars and trucks choked the streets and avenues. Gallagher looked up at the WKXY-TV studios across the way, at the offices, the stores. At the apartment buildings. Somewhere on the soil of our enemies. He tossed his cigarette into the street. It tasted of death. Perhaps he was getting a cold.