Foreign Influence_A Thriller Read online

  With Nasiri’s full name and cab number, they approached the owner of his cab, Yellow Cab Company.

  Because of his position with Public Vehicles, Paul Davidson was fairly well known by the cab operators. He was also, because of his no-BS, take-no-prisoners style, fairly disliked.

  He wasted no time in going straight to the top at Yellow, calling the director of operations at his home and waking him up. After Davidson threatened to enact a crackdown of epic proportions on Yellow Cabs across the city, the director agreed to meet him the next morning at their corporate offices.

  When Davidson and Vaughan showed up, the director was there, along with the company’s corporate counsel, who quickly and repeatedly pointed out that their cooperation was in no way an indication of liability on their part. Rather, in the interest of being a good corporate citizen, Yellow want to help in the investigation in any way it could.

  Davidson gave them a list of things he wanted, and within the hour he and Vaughan left Yellow Cab not only with Nasiri’s personnel file, but also with the dispatch logs and GPS coordinates that placed his cab right in the vicinity of the accident that evening.

  They were golden. Now all they needed to do was collar Nasiri. Vaughan didn’t need to subpoena the phone records of the three stooges at the Crescent Garage, as he had taken to referring to Fahad, Jamal, and Ali Masud, to know that Nasiri had already been tipped off. If they were willing to fabricate a new logbook to protect him, there was no question that they would call and warn him that the police were closing in.

  The question at this point was whether Nasiri was still in Chicago. For all they knew, he had hotfooted it back to Pakistan. And if that was the case, their investigation was as good as dead.

  With his address in hand, they drove to Nasiri’s heavily Pakistani Devon Avenue neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. As it was Saturday, the sidewalks and streets were crowded with people doing their shopping. Cars were double-parked and those that were moving were committing so many traffic violations, Vaughan and Davidson could have handed out tickets all day long.

  As a car blew a stop sign and almost hit them, Davidson commented, “Some day, I’m going to read the Qur’an. But if I’ve learned anything in the Public Vehicles Division it’s that it doesn’t contain anything about the proper operation of a motor vehicle.”

  Vaughan chuckled and kept his eyes peeled for Nasiri’s cab. The neighborhood looked like any other immigrant neighborhood in the city. People dressed differently and he couldn’t read any of the signs. He didn’t feel here the way he did in other immigrant neighborhoods. He was an obvious outsider. He could read that in the people’s faces and it was more than just about being a cop. This world was alien to him, much the way Iraq had been. The culture couldn’t have been any more different from his own. It wasn’t like driving through Chicago’s Polish or Mexican neighborhoods. This one put him on edge and he didn’t like it. It was how he had felt when they operated outside the wire in Iraq. He wasn’t supposed to feel like that here in America. The little voice inside his head, the same one that had told him something wasn’t right on that assignment in Tikrit, was trying to tell him something again. But it wasn’t clear enough for him to understand. He wondered if maybe he was just being stupid. This wasn’t Iraq, after all. This was Chicago.

  Shaking it off, he refocused on the search for Nasiri’s vehicle. Two blocks later, they found it.

  “This means he’s gotta be close, right?” said Davidson as he pulled over to the curb. “Should we hit the apartment now?”

  “First things first,” replied Vaughan as he reached into the bag he’d brought along and removed two black triangles about five inches long and three inches high.

  “What are those?”

  “SWAT chocks,” he said, pulling back the tented part to show the Public Vehicles officer the spikes underneath. “If we miss him or he tries to run, he won’t get very far with a flat tire.”

  Davidson laughed. “Did they teach you that little trick in the organized Crime Division?”

  “I was on SWAT before I landed at OC.”

  “I heard you did intel work in Iraq. Why aren’t you in the Intelligence Division here?”

  Vaughan shrugged. “You know how things work. A, there’s got to be a slot and B, you have to have impressed someone enough that they’ll go to bat for you.”

  “So in other words, ass-kissing isn’t your forte?”

  “Not exactly. No.”

  “You just don’t try hard enough. All you have to do is put your lips together and—”

  Davidson closed his eyes to demonstrate and Vaughan held up his hand to stop him. “I get it,” he said as he zipped up his bag and reached for the door handle.

  “I’ll keep the car running. Just in case he comes out before you’re done and you have to chase him.”

  Vaughan was tempted to flip the man the finger, but he didn’t think he knew him well enough yet. “Let’s get a patrol car to back us up on the arrest.”

  Davidson nodded and picked up his radio.

  “I also want to impound the cab, so let’s get a flatbed too. Once we have it impounded, we can have forensics go to work on it.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Vaughan walked back to the cab and did a slow loop around it. The bodywork was pristine, right down to the shiny new rivet holding the medallion in place on the hood. The interior was clean and contained no items of any personal nature other than a beaded seat cover. He placed his chocks. One went in front of the rear passenger tire and another behind the front passenger tire. This way, whether Nasiri pulled straight out or backed out of his space, they’d be covered.

  The chocks set, he walked back up to Davidson’s Bronco and got back in. “What’s the ETA on the patrol unit?”

  “They’re about two blocks away,” replied the Public Vehicles officer. “Where do you want them?”

  “Somewhere in front of the building, but not directly in front. Let’s not tip our hand until we have to.”

  Davidson radioed the instructions to the patrol unit.

  “He’s in the third-floor rear apartment,” said Vaughan as he checked the file once more. “We’ll go through the alley.”

  Davidson moved his truck to a better spot and then the two men climbed out. They were both wearing plain clothes and tried to act natural, but they stood out like a couple of sore thumbs in Chicago’s de facto Little Pakistan.

  “Man, I must look really good today,” quipped Davidson as he noticed people staring at him. “What do you think? Do I have my mojo working or what? This has got to be what it’s like for Brad Pitt when he goes out, huh?”

  Vaughan wasn’t paying attention to his colleague. As a cop, he was always careful, always aware of his surroundings, but there was something about Nasiri and this neighborhood that put him on edge. He knew these were Pakistanis and not Iraqis, but nevertheless, he had clicked into his Iraq mode. It was a heightened sense of awareness and almost hypervigilance. It bordered on paralyzing.

  He moved slower than he normally would. Davidson noticed and shortened up his stride to keep next to him. “You all right?” he asked.

  Vaughan nodded. He scanned apartment windows for spotters and checked the rooftops for kids who might give away their approach via cell phones. He looked for the LOPs—the little old people who were always used as watchdogs. Thank goodness there were no shops along this street. Shopkeepers in Iraq were notorious spies.

  It was all stupid and he knew it, yet he couldn’t stop himself. Every day in Iraq he had honed the skills that had kept him alive while other men had been killed and had come home in boxes. Once developed, those instincts don’t disappear. But why were they flooding back now? My God, he thought. I’ve got PTSD.

  “You still want to do this?” asked Davidson as they reached the alley and Vaughan stood still on the sidewalk.

  He coughed and shook it off. “I’m good to go. Let’s do it.”

  The men entered the alley and came up
behind Nasiri’s residence. It was a four-story brick building with a wooden set of stairs. There was a chain-link fence separating the property from the alley. Its gate was unlocked.

  “So far so good,” said Davidson as he pushed it open and walked down the narrow gangway toward the stairs.

  As they climbed, Vaughan had an inexplicable urge to pull out his gun. He didn’t. Nasiri was the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident. They weren’t about to pop Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, his hands were sweaty and his heart was pumping harder than it should have been. PTSD, anxiety attack, or whatever this feeling was, he didn’t like it.

  The open-air, third-floor landing outside Nasiri’s apartment contained a couple of rusting lawn chairs and some empty cardboard boxes. Vaughan looked out across the alley with its asphalt-shingled garages at the apartment buildings on the other side. In one of them, he could see someone watching them. Somewhere close by Pakistani music was playing.

  A large window with its drapes drawn stood next to Nasiri’s back door. “I guess we knock,” offered Davidson.

  “Of course we knock. The only time you don’t knock is when you have a no-knock warrant. Besides, I think we may have an audience.”

  “Lawyers,” said Davidson, rolling his eyes. “No wonder you haven’t impressed anyone in the Intelligence Division.”

  “There’s someone watching us from the building across the alley.”

  Davidson turned, but didn’t see anything. “Don’t worry. You’re just paranoid.”

  This time, Vaughan didn’t hesitate to give the man the finger.

  The Public Vehicles officer knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. “Police. Open up.” There was still no response.

  Davidson tried the door handle, but it was locked. “You’re right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder and gesturing across the alley with his chin. “We are being watched. I think it’s a Scumbagasaurus.”

  “A what?”

  “You know what those are,” he said as he bent closer to the door handle and slipped something from his pocket. “They suck blood and feed on bribes. Normally you don’t see them this far from a government building. Politicus assholus is the correct Latin term, I believe.”

  Vaughan knew what the man was doing, but before he could stop him, the lock was picked and the door was open. “That’s breaking and entering.”

  “The door was open. In fact, I think I hear someone calling for help,” he replied, closing his mouth and trying to throw his voice like a ventriloquist. “Help me. Help me.”

  The Organized Crime cop wasn’t impressed.

  “Allah akabar?” Davidson asked.

  Vaughan still wasn’t buying it.

  “Allah snack bar?”

  “Paul, we’re not authorized to—” Vaughan began, when he saw Davidson raise his radio to his mouth, announce his intent to the patrol officers outside, and step into the apartment.

  “Are you coming?” he asked.

  This wasn’t the first time Vaughan had broken the law, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Nevertheless, he wasn’t proud of himself. Shaking his head, he followed the other cop inside.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was a dump. They entered through the door into the kitchen. A plate of food sat half-eaten on a folding table covered with a vinyl table cloth.

  “Somebody left in a hurry,” said Vaughan. He touched the food to test its temperature and then walked over to the stove and reached for the teapot. Both were cold. He shook his head at Davidson.

  The fridge contained very little. There was nothing in the freezer. As they made their way further into the apartment, Davidson pulled his weapon and Vaughan followed suit.

  They cleared the bedroom, living room, and bathroom. No one was there. Davidson reholstered his weapon. “Well, seeing as how we’ve already crossed the Rubicon, do you want to take a more in-depth look around?”

  Neither the cop nor the lawyer in him wanted to make an already bad, and unquestionably illegal, situation worse by turning Nasiri’s apartment inside out. But it wasn’t the cop or the lawyer inside him that won out.

  There was no question that what he was doing was wrong. He couldn’t moralize it, rationalize it, or loophole his way out of it. But he didn’t feel guilty about it.

  Mohammed Nasiri had run down a woman and had fled the scene. People from his village then tried to cover up for him. Whether he asked them to or not made no difference. Judging from what he saw in the apartment and what his gut had told him, Nasiri had been tipped that the police were on his trail.

  Cops were not bad people. In fact for the most part, cops were one of the best classes of people Vaughan had ever known. They were the good guys. They stood on the side of law and order and civilization. They manned the wall that protected everyday, good, hard-working Americans. They were the sheepdogs, and beyond that wall there were the wolves.

  At times, the wolves could be smart; very smart. A few knew just how much rope the people had given their sheepdogs and they operated just beyond it. They were constantly coming up with new ways to stay one step ahead of the law. Luckily enough for the people, the majority of the wolves were stupid. When they were caught, it was not always because of great police work, but because of some colossally stupid mistake.

  It bothered John Vaughan that while the wolves were constantly evolving and finding new ways to commit crimes and horrible acts of violence, the sheepdogs remained bound by the same rules of engagement. The courts seemed more disposed to protect the criminals before their victims and that was wrong. But so was breaking into an apartment and searching it without a warrant. Vaughan knew that, but he didn’t care; not right now. In fact, he had been slowly caring less and less the longer he stayed on the job. Did that make him a bad person? Maybe, maybe not. What he knew was that if he had to bend, and sometimes break, the rules to bring the guilty to justice, he was willing to consider it. He’d seen far too much suffering and far too many bad guys escape answering for their crimes to completely ignore the fact that sometimes the ends do justify the means.

  “Which room do you want?” asked Davidson, halfway into the bedroom already.

  “All of them.”

  “All of them?”

  “That’s right,” said Vaughan as he pushed past him into the bedroom. “Now watch the back door and make sure we don’t get ambushed.”

  He worked quickly and methodically. Nasiri had a lot of books and not much else. Almost all of them were in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. It was a language Vaughan couldn’t read, so he took a picture of the books with his camera phone. He had a friend in Marine Intelligence he could send it to for translation, though he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like what he heard back.

  His feeling was based on Nasiri’s other books, the ones he had in English. They had all been penned by the same author, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was the intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism, and his teachings were at the very core of Muslim justification for violence and jihad in the name of Islam. Two of his biggest fans were Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  Vaughan had read an interesting compendium of Qutb’s work while he was in Iraq called The Sayyid Qutb Reader by Albert Bergesen. It was his gateway into the mind of Islamic terrorism, and the fact that Mohammed Nasiri had several titles by Qutb only reinforced the unease he was feeling.

  He continued to search the apartment, hoping to find something that would tell him where Nasiri had gone or what he was planning to do. There was nothing. No personal letters, no laptop, no cell phone. The man didn’t even have a landline, but those were growing less and less popular these days.

  In short, he and Davidson had taken a huge risk, had broken several laws, and had come up with nothing. Even Nasiri’s shirts, trousers, and jackets were clean. What pocket litter there was, wasn’t helpful. The whole place looked more like a movie set than the apartment of an actual human being.

  Vaughan walked back into the kitchen. Davidson was sit
ting at the table and looked up. “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” replied Vaughan.

  “Do you mind if I take a look around now that you’re done?”

  Vaughan grabbed a towel off the counter and threw it to him. “Go ahead. Just make sure you wipe everything down. I don’t want to leave any prints behind.”

  “Cautious motherfucker, aren’t you?”

  “Ten minutes,” he replied, “and then we’re out of here.”

  Davidson nodded and headed toward the bedroom.

  Opening up the double doors beneath the sink with the toe of his shoe, Vaughan bent down and looked for another towel or a rag of his own. There were certain places you didn’t want to be linked to. An apartment you broke into without a warrant was definitely one of them, followed closely by a residence belonging to a Muslim cab driver who had a fondness for Sayyid Qutb. Nothing but trouble could come from being connected to this place.

  Under the sink, he found a white plastic grocery bag stuffed with more of the same white plastic bags. In the center was what looked like a pink towel. He emptied the lot of them onto the kitchen floor only to realize that the pink mass in the center wasn’t a towel but a folded shopping bag from a beauty supply store.

  It was an odd item for Nasiri to have. Maybe someone had left it in his cab. Or maybe Nasiri had a girlfriend. If they could locate a girlfriend, they might be able to locate him.

  Vaughan unfolded the bag. There was a silhouette of a woman with perfectly coifed hair and the name, address, and phone number of the store. Vaughan opened the bag and looked inside. He found a receipt dated two days before the accident. Nasiri had purchased only one item, but multiple bottles of it.

  Vaughan began going through the other bags looking for receipts. He didn’t find a ton, but he found enough and they were very interesting.

  In addition to purchasing hydrogen peroxide at the beauty supply store, he had also bought more of the same, along with drain cleaner, at grocery stores and pharmacies. He included other odds and ends to try to mask what he was doing, but Vaughan knew what he was up to. Nasiri wasn’t giving out dye jobs and throwing drain-cleaning parties for his friends.