Act of Terror

CHAPTER THIRTY

New York City

M ujaheed Beg stood against the peeling yellow wallpaper of the crowded hotel room looking over his shoulder out the window. Six stories below, the clang and clatter of garbage trucks on Thirty-ninth Street helped to drown out the soup of angry voices in the suite with him. The Mervi brooded sullenly, keeping his back to the wall. It angered him that the doctor had insisted on his presence in New York when he was so close to finding out more about the dark woman who had almost stumbled onto him at Arbakova’s house.

Still, the doctor was his employer. When he’d called to tell Beg to take the five-o’clock Acela Express out of Union Station for New York, the Mervi had grudgingly complied.

Now he found himself at the Eastgate Tower, standing in a room that was, as many rooms were in Manhattan, little larger than a closet. The hotel was just a short distance from the United Nations. Groups of foreign nationals were the norm, even in the day and age where men with dark skin and a Middle Eastern look were viewed as potential terrorists anywhere else.

Dr. Badeeb sat on the edge of the queen bed. He lit his sixth cigarette of the evening with the butt of his fifth, grinding out the old one in a glass ashtray on the mattress beside him. He picked a bit of tobacco off his lip and waved away the plume of blue smoke that encircled his face.

Over the course of the last two hours, eight other men had slipped into the room one at a time, each with dark faces and even darker dispositions. Some smoked, sitting on the low dresser beside the television. Others squatted along the wall, peering sullenly over black beards and thick mustaches.

The room smelled of old cigarettes, burned coffee, and body odor. Beg was a creature of the desert and yearned for the smell of wind, or at the very least, fresh blood.

“Brothers,” Badeeb said, waving his cigarette in the air. “Please, we must remain calm. Think of all our young friends. They have become martyrs in our struggle. Do you not see the news and what the Americans are doing to one another?”

Mustafa Mahmoud, a gaunt firebrand from Lahore, threw up his hands. He had the only chair in the room. “I must ask you the selfsame question, Doctor. Do you not watch the news? This infidel congressman, Hartman Drake, is to be the next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

A murmur of consent hummed around the other men in the room.

Mahmoud continued, his words clicking off his tongue. “Have you not heard what this man says about Pakistan or Palestine or the entire Middle East? He would bomb all Muslim countries off the map if given the opportunity.”

Badeeb pressed the flat of his right hand to his chest. “I understand your worry,” he said. “But we are compelled to continue with our original course of action. Assets are in place. We have traveled much too far to alter plans at this point in time.”

Mahmoud stood abruptly and stared directly into Badeeb’s sweating face. Beg moved forward a half step. Watching. The others in the room fell completely silent.

“My brothers,” Badeeb said, waving Beg to stay back. “I promise you. I myself will take care of Drake when the time is right. I am certain he will be invited to the infidel wedding.”

“Of course, you know best, Doctor,” the skinny Pakistani muttered. “I am but a simple hotel keeper. But think on this. If we continue on your original plan, and Hartman Drake does not attend this wedding, he will have the power to do untold damage.”

“I ask you to trust me,” Badeeb whispered, bowing his head.

Mujaheed Beg held his breath. The doctor paid him well, but there was far more to his work than mere employment. He saw the doctor’s dedication, saw the devotion the man gave to his jihad. Of all the men in the room, Beg was perhaps the only one who could have faith in the doctor’s plan-and when it concerned Hartman Drake, such faith was proving difficult even for him.

The man needed to die.