Manhattan Lockdown (23 page)

Roland said, “We have no such reports. The coordination among federal, state, and city agencies has been remarkable.”

Another voice, a baritone, recognizable as one of NPR's radio broadcasters but impossible for Roland to name because of the anonymity of radio: “Do you have a timetable for President Carter's arrival?”

“Certainly the president is the best source of that information. I don't have it. I can tell you that he is in touch with me continuously. Everything I do, everything we do, is with his knowledge and approval and with the coordination and support of the exceptional professionals who serve him.”

“There are reliable reports,” the NPR reporter said, “that the president's security people view Manhattan now as a city in chaos and under siege, a kind of Baghdad or Kabul on the Hudson, and that the reason the president is not here rests on profound concerns about his safety.”

“Again I believe it's crucial not to exaggerate. New York is not Kabul or Baghdad or Damascus. There are not terrorist armies on
the outskirts about to invade. There have been terrible events committed by cadres of sick people. Those people are now, through the heroic efforts of Commissioner Carbone, either dead or captured or in disarray.”

The same voice continued, “But what about the president's arrival? What do you expect if he arrives?”

“Commissioner Carbone, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the other top-notch federal agencies involved with us, can protect the president.”

“When is he arriving?”

Gina leaned toward the microphone: “For security reasons, we can't make a comment on that.”

And then slender, soft-spoken Raj Gandhi spoke up. “Who is Silas Nasar?”

“We have no idea who that is,” Gina Carbone answered.

“Where is he? Is he in detention?” Raj asked.

“That, too,” Gina said, “is not something we can answer. It's difficult to detain a person we don't know.”

In reality, Gina Carbone wanted to find some way to confine, silence, or eliminate Raj Gandhi. None of that, she knew, was easy to do to a reporter for the
New York Times
.

Irv Rothstein then stepped directly in front of the microphone. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is all the time we have for now. Thank you for your attention.”

R
AJ GANDHI MET
Gabriel Hauser on the stone bench at the front of the Church of the Heavenly Rest at the corner of 90
^th
Street and Fifth Avenue. Directly across the avenue, at the Engineers' Gate to Central Park, dozens of runners moved north and south on the internal roadway that encircled the park for six miles. Bicyclists on five-thousand-dollar sleek machines and wearing colorful skintight clothes raced by. Just beyond the runners and bikers the leaves of an immense ancient tree shimmered in the clear light. And the acres of water in the reservoir glowed so much that the air above it seemed to have an incandescent brightness. A cluster of three fountains embedded in the reservoir sprayed tall columns of white water above the reservoir's surface, just as they did on normal days.

Raj removed his iPhone from the rumpled seersucker jacket he always wore. “Dr. Hauser, are you sure I can record this?”

“I said so twice, haven't I?”

Raj pressed the icon that converted the miraculous object to a voice and video recorder. “Let me start,” Raj said, “by telling you that I believe Silas Nasar was one of the masterminds, one of the key planners, of these attacks.”

Gabriel gave Raj a charming smile, saying something that Raj had never heard from anyone who had given him permission to record an interview. Reaching into the pocket of his well-tailored slacks, Gabriel brought out his own iPhone and held it aloft alongside
Raj's identical iPhone. “Not that I don't trust you,” Gabriel said, still smiling. “But I've read about the famous eighteen-minute gap in the Nixon Watergate tapes.”

Although surprised, Raj remained impassive.

Gabriel started, “Not Silas Nasar. His real name is Hakim Khomani.”

“How do you know that?”

“I had a close friend in Afghanistan. When I left the country, we continued to e-mail one another. He was, and I hope still is, a friend.”

“Who is he?”

“A nurse. He worked with me at the central hospital in Kabul. I was hustled out of Kabul quickly. I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye. I did have his e-mail address.
[email protected]
.”

Gabriel, a man who was trained to observe people as a whole person so that he could detect and diagnose conditions such as fear, deceit, illness, or comfort that other people might not see, for the first time looked at Raj Gandhi as he might look at a patient. Raj had slightly jaundiced eyes, thin hair, fingernails that were almost transparent, cheeks that were in the early stages of waste. He was either an incipient diabetic or a man who didn't yet know he was HIV-positive. He was also, Gabriel saw, shy and sincere. Reliable, a truth teller. And doomed.

“How do you know Khomani?”

“My friend in Afghanistan—we were lovers, Mr. Gandhi, as well as friends—told me he had relatives in the U.S. who had been able to come here during the Russian invasion in the '80s. Khomani, my friend's cousin, had a degree from MIT in electrical engineering. So when that war was under way, and Khomani told the American embassy he wanted to come here, he had easy access. Clans, blood relationships, those kinds of ties are important among Afghans.
The cousins stayed in touch. First by phone, expensive land lines at the time, by letters, and then by e-mails and text messages. They were both science types, well-educated, interested in technology, very early users of the Internet.”

The simple marble bench in front of the elegant church, which was like a cathedral on a small scale and one of the most beautiful buildings on the Upper East Side, was a popular resting place for people who had finished long runs in Central Park and for tourists to sit. Raj and Gabriel stopped speaking when a young woman runner, sweating, wearing a baseball cap from the back of which her braided blond hair extended to her shoulders, sat on the bench next to them. She took a slender cell phone from a pouch on her waistband. “Chumley's,” they overheard her say, “just reopened. Let me shower and change. See you there in two hours.”

Gabriel knew Chumley's was a bar on Second Avenue at 80
^th
Street. When she said, “
Ciao,”
Gabriel for the first time smiled at Raj Gandhi. When she stood up, moving effortlessly, she said to them, “Have a nice day.” And on her perfect legs she began running east on 90
^th
Street.

Gabriel, noticing that Raj had not looked at this exquisitely built young woman, said, “Life goes on.” Raj smiled. Gabriel had never met a gay Indian.

“Did you,” Raj asked, “meet Silas Nasar? Or Khomani?”

“I didn't, but I planned to.”

“Why?”

“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.”