Chapter 68
I finished my breakfast. The coffee pot was empty. So I finished my eight-dollar bottle of water and lobbed it end over end toward the trash can. It struck the rim with a hollow plastic sound and bounced out and rolled away across the carpet. Not a good sign, if I were superstitious. But I’m not.
“Total of nineteen men,” I said. “Four left the country already and two are walking wounded with broken jaws and elbows. That leaves thirteen on active service.”
Sansom said, “Broken jaws and elbows? How did that happen?”
“They were out looking for me. They might be hot shit in the hills with grenade launchers, but scuffling on the street seems not to be their main strength.”
“Did you write on their foreheads?”
“One of them. Why?”
“The FBI got a call from the Bellevue emergency room. Two unidentified foreigners were dumped there after a beating. One of them had writing on his forehead.”
“Punishment,” I said. “The Hoths must have been displeased with their performance. So they gave them up, to encourage the others.”
“Ruthless people.”
“Where are they now?”
“Secure rooms in the hospital. Because one of them was there before. Some previous emergency at Penn Station. He’s not saying anything. The FBI is trying to work out who the hell he is.”
“What’s taking them so long? I wrote Lila’s name on his head. I wrote, Lila, call me. How many people named Lila is the Bureau interested in right now?”
Sansom shook his head. “Give them some credit. The part with the name had been skinned off with a knife.”
I stepped over and opened the second bottle of eight-dollar water. Took a sip. It tasted good. But no better than two-dollar water. Or free water, from the tap.
“Thirteen people,” I said.
“Plus the Hoths themselves,” Springfield said.
“OK, fifteen.”
“Suicide mission.”
“We’re all going to die,” I said. “The only questions are how and when.”
“We can’t actively help you,” Sansom said. “You understand that, right? This is going to end with a minimum of one and a maximum of fifteen homicides on the streets of New York City. We can’t be a part of that. We can’t be within a million miles of it.”
“Because of politics?”
“Because of a lot of reasons.”
“I’m not asking for help.”
“You’re a maniac.”
“They’re going to think so.”
“You got a schedule in mind?”
“Soon. No sense in waiting.”
“The minimum one homicide would be you, of course. In which case I wouldn’t know where to look for my photograph.”
“So keep your fingers crossed for me.”
“The responsible thing would be for you to tell me now.”
“No, the responsible thing would be for me to get a job as a school bus driver.”
“To survive?”
“To keep your word.”
“What did you learn in Officer Candidate School?”
“That brother officers are to be trusted. Especially brother officers of equal rank.”
“There you go, then.”
“But we weren’t really brothers. We were in very different branches of the service.”
“You got that right. I was working hard while you were flying all over the world kissing terrorist ass. You didn’t even get a Purple Heart.”
He didn’t answer.
“Just kidding,” I said. “But you better hope I’m not the first homicide, or you might be hearing that kind of thing all the time.”
“So tell me now.”
“I need you watching my back.”
He said, “I read your record.”
“You told me that.”
“You got your Purple Heart for being blown up by that truck bomb in Beirut. The Marine barracks.”
“I remember it well.”
“You got a disfiguring scar.”
“Want to see it?”
“No. But you need to remember, that wasn’t the Hoths.”
“What are you, my therapist?”
“No. But that doesn’t make my statement any the less true.”
“I don’t know who it was in Beirut. Nobody does, for sure. But whoever, they were the Hoths’ brother officers.”
“You’re motivated by revenge. And you still feel guilty about Susan Mark.”
“So?”
“So you might not be operating at peak efficiency.”
“Worried about me?”
“About myself, mainly. I want my photograph back.”
“You’ll get it.”
“At least give me a clue where it is.”
“You know what I know. I figured it out. So you’ll figure it out.”
“You were a cop. Different skill set.”
“So you’ll be slower. But it ain’t rocket science.”
“So what kind of science is it?”
“Think like a regular person for once. Not like a soldier or a politician.”
He tried. He failed. He said, “At least tell me why I shouldn’t destroy it.”
“You know what I know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Or maybe you don’t know what I know. Because you’re too close to yourself. Me, I’m just a member of the public.”
“So?”
“I’m sure you’re a hell of a guy, Sansom. I’m sure you’d be a great senator. But at the end of the day any senator is just one out of a hundred. They’re all fairly interchangeable. Can you give me a name? Of one individual senator who truly made a difference to anything?”
Sansom didn’t answer.
“Can you tell me how you personally are going to screw Al Qaeda?”
He started to talk about the Armed Services Committee, and Foreign Relations, and Intelligence, and budgets, and oversight. Like a boilerplate speech. Like he was out on the stump. I asked him, “What part of all that wouldn’t be done by whoever else might get the job, assuming you don’t?”
He didn’t answer. I asked him, “Imagine a cave in the north west of Pakistan. Imagine the Al Qaeda brass sitting there, right now. Are they tearing their hair out and saying, holy shit, we better not let John Sansom make it to the U.S. Senate? Are you top of their agenda?”
He said, “Probably not.”
“So why do they want the photograph?”
“Small victories,” he said. “Better than nothing.”
“It’s a lot of work for a small victory, don’t you think? Two agents plus nineteen men plus three months?”
“The United States would be embarrassed.”
“But not very. Look at the Rumsfeld photograph. Nobody cared. Times change, things move on. People understand that, if they even notice at all. Americans are either very mature and sensible, or very oblivious. I’m never quite sure which. But either way, that picture would be a damp squib. It might destroy you personally, but destroying one American at a time isn’t how Al Qaeda operates.”
“It would hurt Reagan’s memory.”
“Who cares? Most Americans don’t even remember him. Most Americans think Reagan is an airport in Washington.”
“I think you’re underestimating.”
“And I think you’re overestimating. You’re too close to the process.”
“I think that photograph would hurt.”
“But who would it hurt? What does the government think?”
“You know that the Defense Department is trying like crazy to get it back.”
“Is it? Then why did they give the job to their B-team?”
“You think those guys were their B-team?”
“I sincerely hope so. If that was their A-team, we should all move to Canada.”
Sansom didn’t answer.
I said, “The picture might do you some local damage in North Carolina. But apparently that’s all. We’re not seeing any kind of maximum effort from the DoD. Because there’s no real national downside.”
“That’s not an accurate read.”
“OK, it’s bad for us. It’s evidence of a strategic error. It’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, and it’s going to put egg on our face. But that’s all. It’s not the end of the world. We’re not going to fall apart.”
“So Al Qaeda’s expectations are too high? You’re saying they’re wrong too? They don’t understand the American people the way you do?”
“No, I’m saying this whole thing is a little lopsided. It’s slightly asymmetric. Al Qaeda fielded an A-team and we fielded a B-team. Therefore their desire to grab that photograph is just a little bit stronger than our desire to hold on to it.”
Sansom said nothing.
“And we have to ask, why wasn’t Susan Mark just told to copy it? If their aim was to embarrass us, then copying it would have been a better idea. Because when it came to light, and skeptics claimed it had been faked, which they would, then the original would still be on file, and we couldn’t have denied it with a straight face.”
“OK.”
“But Susan Mark wasn’t told to copy it. She was told to steal it, effectively. To take it away from us. With no trace left behind. Which added considerable risk and visibility.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means they want to have it, and equally they want us not to have it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You need to cast your mind back. You need to figure out exactly what that camera saw. Because Al Qaeda doesn’t want to publicize that photograph. They stole it because they want to suppress it.”
“Why would they?”
“Because however bad it is for you, there’s something in it that’s even worse for Osama bin Laden.”