Threat Level Black

“So he probably doesn’t have access to a car, but he’s being supplied with credit cards,” said Macklin after Fisher returned to the compound and they marked out the ATMs on a large map of the city. “He’s trying to disguise where he is, so he makes withdrawals from all over the place. He has the antidote for Sarin poisoning in his basement, where he’s obviously playing chemist, though we’re not sure why. He buys a lot of Clorox: That eliminates biological traces, you know. If he was playing with some sort of bacteria, that would kill it.”

“It also cleans the toilet and whitens underwear,” said Fisher. “There’s a problem with connecting Faud to these ATM withdrawals.”

“What’s that?”

“They were made when he should have been at school.”

“You don’t think he had perfect attendance, do you?”

Fisher went to the computer where the task force’s information was fed. An investigator had spoken to his teachers and yes, Faud Daraghmeh had decent attendance. They hadn’t asked about particular dates. Fisher scrolled about halfway through the interview notes when he realized he’d missed the obvious.

“The card and the money were delivered by the guy who made the cell calls,” Fisher told Macklin. “Look at the dates. They’re the same.”

“So?”

“How long would five hundred dollars last in New York?”

Macklin shrugged. “Twenty minutes, if you spent it right.”

Fisher pulled up Faud’s and then Mrs. DeGarmo’s phone records-they’d gone to the phone company and gotten incoming as well as outgoing-and tried to find a pattern. A number repeated every few weeks, but to the landlady’s phone.

“We check these all out?” Fisher asked Macklin.

“Not enough time to look at her numbers yet.”

Fisher called the number, even though he figured it would be a relative. But the call wouldn’t go through. When they checked it, the number turned out to belong to a telephone booth near the subway station near the Washington Heights apartment.

So the courier would call-preferably though not always from the phone booth-before going to Queens. The calls were always around four in the afternoon, after Faud got home and while Mrs. DeGarmo was watching the last of her “stories” before making dinner, at least as she had described her day to Fisher. Something had caused him to deviate from that schedule once-the time they had been able to trace originally-but this was the more usual routine.

“You think he answered them in his apartment?” Macklin asked.

“You’re starting to get ahold of this investigating thing,” Fisher told him. “Let’s look at some more phone numbers, okay?”

The phone booth was in Staten Island, within walking distance of the ferry but not in the station. Four calls had been made on the same day as the calls to the Astoria apartment, though roughly three hours before those.

“So your theory is, he calls ahead to make sure his people are there, then comes along?” said Macklin as they walked from the booth to a nearby pizza joint for dinner.

“Probably that’s just a signal for them to meet him somewhere. If you’re just going to show up at the apartment, why call ahead?” said Fisher.

“He’s a courier, then.”

“Maybe, or maybe more important than that,” said Fisher. “He got off the ferry that one day the cell phone calls were made. The question is, why was he in Staten Island? But then again, that is one of the great unanswerable questions of all time.”

After two slices of killer anchovy pizza, Fisher and Macklin took a walk, crisscrossing an area roughly eight blocks from the phone booth, looking for anything the courier or whoever had made the calls had been interested in. The area was half-commercial and half-residential, and while not the busiest in the city there were plenty of people on the streets. They didn’t see any mosques.

While Staten Island was part of New York City, physically it was much closer to New Jersey, which loomed to the west and north and was visible over many of the buildings they passed. Three roadways connected to New Jersey; the only way to the rest of the city was either by the ferry or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which led to Brooklyn.

“Boat,” said Fisher.

“Boat?”

“It’s easier to get here by boat than by car.”

“Okay. How does that help us?”

“It doesn’t,” said Fisher.

“A lot of docks and slips and stuff back that way, the other side of Front and Bay Streets.”

“Yeah,” said Fisher, changing direction.

“Where we going?”

“Get some smokes. And a map of the train line.”

“There’s a train on Staten Island?”

The Staten Island train line ran down the eastern side of the island, from St. George to Tottenville. It ran far less often than the subways did, however. It connected to the ferry stop, and Fisher saw that it was unlikely their man had taken the train: With one exception, he made his phone calls before the train arrived at the terminal.

The bus system, on the other hand, was extensive; the possibilities led almost literally all over the island. So Fisher returned by necessity to his first theory: that the courier had made the call after walking from the area on foot.