But this time around, because the police knew this was a copycat, the PR release was a bit more generous, stating that the cabbie had been shot three times, that he’d been robbed of his night’s receipts, and that his assailant, as described by two eyewitnesses, was a black man in his early twenties, about five feet seven inches tall, weighing some hundred and sixty pounds and wearing blue jeans, white sneakers, a brown leather jacket, and a black ski cap pulled low on his forehead.
The man who’d murdered the previous three cabbies must have laughed himself silly.
Especially when another bombing took place that Tuesday afternoon.
The city’s Joint Terrorist Task Force was an odd mix of elite city detectives, FBI Special Agents, Homeland Security people, and a handful of CIA spooks. Special Agent in Charge Brian Hooper and a team of four other Task Force officers arrived at The Merrie Coffee Bean at three that afternoon, not half an hour after a suicide bomber had killed himself and a dozen patrons sitting at tables on the sidewalk outside. Seven wounded people had already been carried by ambulance to the closest hospital, Abingdon Memorial, on the river at Condon Street.
The coffee shop was a shambles.
Wrought iron tables and chairs had been twisted into surreal and smoldering bits of modern sculpture. Glass shards lay all over the sidewalk and inside the shop gutted and flooded by the Fire Department.
A dazed and dazzled waitress, wide-eyed and smoke-smudged but remarkably unharmed otherwise, told Hooper that she was at the cappuccino machine picking up an order when she heard someone yelling outside. She thought at first it was one of the customers, sometimes they got into arguments over choice tables. She turned from the counter to look outside, and saw this slight man running toward the door of the shop, yelling at the top of his lungs...
“What was he yelling, miss, do you remember?” Hooper asked.
Hooper was polite and soft-spoken, wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a blue tie, and polished black shoes. Two detectives from the Five-Oh had also responded. Casually, dressed in sport jackets, slacks, and shirts open at the throat, they looked like bums in contrast. They stood by trying to look interested and significant while Hooper conducted the questioning.
“Something about Jews,” the waitress said. “He had a foreign accent, you know, so it was hard to understand him to begin with. And this was like a rant, so that made it even more difficult. Besides, it all happened so fast. He was running from the open sidewalk down this, like, space we have between the tables? Like an aisle that leads to the front of the shop? And he was yelling Jews-this, Jews-that, and waving his arms in the air like some kind of nut? Then all at once there was this terrific explosion, it almost knocked me off my feet, and I was all the way inside the shop, near the cap machine. And I saw... there was like sunshine outside, you know? Like shining through the windows? And all of a sudden I saw all body parts flying in the air in the sunshine. Like in silhouette. All these people getting blown apart. It was, like, awesome.”
Hooper and his men went picking through the rubble.
The two detectives from the Five-Oh were thinking this was very bad shit here.
If I’ve already realized what I hoped to accomplish, why press my luck, as they say? The thing has escalated beyond my wildest expectations. So leave it well enough alone, he told himself.
But that idiot last night has surely complicated matters. The police aren’t fools, they’ll recognize at once that last night’s murder couldn’t possibly be linked to the other three. So perhaps another one was in order, after all. To nail it to the wall. Four would round it off, wouldn’t it?
To the Navajo Indians — well, Native Americans, as they say — the number four was sacred. Four different times of day, four sacred mountains, four sacred plants, four different directions. East was symbolic of Positive Thinking. South was for Planning. West for Life itself. North for Hope and Strength. They believed all this, the Navajo people. Religions were so peculiar. The things people believed. The things he himself had once believed, long ago, so very long ago.
Of course the number four wasn’t truly sacred, that was just something the Navajos believed. The way Christians believed that the number 666 was the mark of the beast, who was the Antichrist and who — well, of course, what else? — had to be Jewish, right? There were even people who believed that the Internet acronym “www” for “World Wide Web” really transliterated into the Hebrew letter “vav” repeated three times, vav, vav, vav, the numerical equivalent of 666, the mark of the beast. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six, Revelations 13. Oh yes, I’ve read the Bible, thank you, and the Koran, and the teachings of Buddha, and they’re all total bullshit, as they say. But there are people who believe in a matrix, too, and not all of them are in padded rooms wearing straitjackets.
So, yes, I think there should be another one tonight, a tip of the hat, as they say, to the Navajo’s sacred number four, and that will be the end of it. The last one. The same signature mark of the beast, the six-pointed star of the Antichrist. Then let them go searching the synagogues for me. Let them try to find the murdering Jew. After tonight, I will be finished!
Tonight, he thought.
Yes.
Abbas Miandad was a Muslim cab driver, and no fool.
Four Muslim cabbies had already been killed since Friday night, and he didn’t want to be number five. He did not own a pistol — carrying a pistol would be exceedingly stupid in a city already so en-flamed against people of the Islamic faith — nor did he own a dagger or a sword, but his wife’s kitchen was well stocked with utensils and before he set out on his midnight shift he took a huge bread knife from the rack...
“Where are you going with that?” his wife asked.
She was watching television.
They were reporting that there’d been a suicide bombing that afternoon. They were saying the bomber had not been identified as yet.
“Never mind,” he told her, and wrapped a dishtowel around the knife and packed it in a small tote bag that had BARNES & NOBLE lettered on it.
He had unwrapped the knife the moment he drove out of the garage. At three that Wednesday morning, it was still in the pouch on the driver’s side of the cab. He had locked the cab when he stopped for a coffee break. Now, he walked up the street to where he’d parked the cab near the corner, and saw a man dressed all in black, bending to look into the back seat. He walked to him swiftly.
“Help you, sir?” he asked.
The man straightened up.
“I thought you might be napping in there,” he said, and smiled.
“No, sir,” he said. “Did you need a taxi?”
“Is this your cab?”
“It is.”
“Can you take me to Majesta?” he said.
“Where are you going, sir?”