The Sixth Station Read online

  My heart started pounding. What did Dickie really want?

  Please let this be the break I need. I swear this time I’ll do it their way. Please tell me something good. Tell me I’m gonna cover …

  All Dickie would give me, though, was, “Un-freakin’-believable!”

  The man all these people had come to see was Demiel ben Yusef, a known terrorist who was believed by most of the reasonable people on the planet, as well as a worldwide coalition of governments who’d hunted him and finally captured him, to be the one responsible for terrorist bombings around the world. These terrorist acts had left death and mayhem from capital cities to historic and religious sites—with thousands of people dead or maimed not just from the bombings themselves but from the violence and turmoil that too often followed.

  Today would mark the opening day of the trial of the millennium, the ben Yusef terrorist tribunal.

  On the other side of the law (and not necessarily the world any longer, since his believers were multiplying) were those who had been burning up the Internet with bullshit about how ben Yusef was actually a great prophet, a man they believed was—yes—the second Son of God.

  Or maybe even the Second Coming of Jesus Christ himself. The U.S. government, the CIA, MI5, the Russian FSB, Mossad, the UN, the Vatican, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, the oil companies, al-Qaeda—you name it and they were the ones who had really committed the atrocities.

  Everyone but Demiel ben Yusef was responsible for the massive death and destruction. Sure.

  Conspiracy-theory Web sites posted daily warnings and updates. None of them, however, ever explained how all of these governments and all of these people—who hadn’t gotten along for thousands of years—were suddenly all allied for the sole purpose of destroying one ragtag prophet / alleged terrorist.

  The conspiracy theorists postulated that all the terrorist attacks were carefully planned (pick any of the above) simply to generate hatred of Demiel ben Yusef.

  Yes, they said that this international cabal backed by the United Nations was actually responsible for blowing up buildings, marketplaces, houses of worship, nightclubs, passenger planes, and even cruise ships filled with innocent people—simply to make one man look bad.

  Thousands of videos and postings portrayed ben Yusef as a prince of peace. They’d show him preaching to the masses, very Jesus-like. If you watched the videos as carefully as I had, and as many times as I had, you could, of course, begin to have your doubts.

  Yes, he was a very compelling speaker, and no, he never preached violence. His voice was at once soothing and fiery, if that makes sense. His accent was universal—not American, not European, not Middle Eastern.

  “Everyone is the Son of God,” he famously said in his “Perfect Order” sermon given on a hill to thousands of followers somewhere in Israel two years earlier. All that was missing were some loaves and fishes.

  The universe is in perfect order. Everything, everyone, is simply a part of God’s whole. The moon directs the tides; the earthworms in the Amazon aerate the ground so that we all have oxygen. Every creature is as important as every other to that perfect order. The only time the order is disrupted, upended, thrown into chaos is when human beings—the only creatures on earth with free will—step in. Other creatures do not kill just for the bloodlust love of killing.

  But every religion that preaches that they are the only ones who know the true words of God, demands just this of their followers: “Kill in His name,” they say. I say, “Do not kill in God’s name. Or my name. Or anyone’s name. Defy those leaders who urge you to kill to preserve what you have.” What they mean is “Kill to preserve what I have.” They are false prophets, false leaders.

  Ben Yusef was, if you watched often enough, incredibly charismatic—for an unattractive, skinny guy, that is; for someone who preached peace and practiced terrorism, that is.

  Ben Yusef had become the rock star of terrorists.

  Second Coming, my ass.

  “This is some mess,” Dickie yelled, pulling me out of my reverie. Without waiting for my response he blared, “You got credentialed in case—right?”

  I, along with half the staff at The New York Standard, had indeed been “credentialed” by the United Nations Press Office earlier in the week, by submitting birth certificates, passports, and NYPD press credentials in person. We were fingerprinted and interviewed. No electronic applications were accepted because of the volatility of the situation.

  “Yeah, a week ago,” I answered. I had already been assigned backup in case the first string—the macho male columnists who were treated like gods by guys like little Dickie Smalls—couldn’t for some reason (which never happened) show up. I knew, or believed at any rate, that there would be no screwups today, because, after all, this was nothing less than the most important trial of the millennium. The current millennium, that is.

  “Good,” he screeched. “Frankie, that putz, is stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s at a standstill.” So the impossible had happened after all.

  “Get your ass outta bed, Russo.…”

  “I’m not in bed,” I lied, my heart racing like I’d been shot up with adrenaline. I was back in the game!

  “Whatever. Get your ass outta bed, and get over to the UN. It’s right outside your door, so make it fast. You caught the winning lotto number.”

  You mean the one dropped by Frankie, that putz, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Frankie was golden, and I was still—what?—tarnished. At forty-two, I was, yes, a known front-page-breaking reporter, but one who had a real talent for running afoul of the powers-that-be wherever I worked. Rebel or maybe just too bullheaded to play the boys’ game, I always bucked whenever they wanted to saddle me, tame me, and teach me to behave.

  I’d been given a second chance at The Standard when they hired me following nine long months of unemployment. I’d been “laid off” at my last job—a political Web site—after uncovering the fact that the editor’s best pal, a supermarket mogul slash movie producer, had a penchant for Filipino midget hookers. The mogul, in addition to supping once a month at Rao’s with the publisher, had also been, up to that point, the Web site’s biggest advertiser. Oops.

  Editorial differences, they called it.

  Bottom line: I wouldn’t protect the editor’s friends when it came to voicing my opinion, and they didn’t protect me when I stood my ground.

  So when I was offered the gig at The Standard, I grabbed it in hopes of one day getting a column again. I was back to general assignment reporting, and I’d been behaving.

  “The kid whazzizname is already at the UN Press Office making the switch,” Dickie continued. “We want you to file throughout the day and final copy half hour after the close. Got it? Good.”

  “Do I get to column on it?” I asked.

  “Depends on what you get,” he said, and with that he hung up—and I found myself out of bed and under a hot shower in less than sixty seconds.

  A column possibility on the biggest story of the decade? Oh, baby! I said a quick prayer to whatever god might be listening at that moment that I’d somehow score an exclusive “get” despite being a pool reporter heading into a venue that was as tightly orchestrated as any in recorded history.

  I had been out of work two years earlier when taxicab bombs had detonated simultaneously outside St. Pat’s, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, the Synagogue Adath Israel in Riverdale, the Light of God Tabernacle on Staten Island, and the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center Benevolent Foundation in Jamaica, Queens. The terrorist attacks, dubbed the “Unholy Day Bombings,” killed almost two hundred innocent people. I started a blog, but it was just one of thousands, perhaps millions of blogs out there. It wasn’t the same; it was too crowded. Cyberspace had evolved into a worldwide public-announcement system for ill-informed windbags with too little knowledge and too much time on their hands.

  And now? If I had believed in God I would have prayed for a break like this—a chance to not just cover but possibly voic
e my opinion on the ben Yusef tribunal for a mainstream news outlet. Yes, I was unprepared, bleary-eyed, and retaining water. But still …

  I hadn’t done serious prep work, because I’d been told earlier in the week that I was to cover “color” only—getting reactions from local parish priests, imams, and rabbis.

  But I was never better than when I was under pressure.

  I picked up the same white T-shirt that had looked so good when it was still clean the night before. I sniffed it. Clean enough. I pulled on a pair of black jeans, my beat-up brown leather jacket, and Frye boots. Then I looked down. Damn! Dead center on the T was a moderate-to-terrible chicken-scarpiello stain from the night before. With no time to change, I grabbed the white gauze Gap scarf hanging on my doorknob, looped it long around my neck, and—voilà—instant stain repair. Good enough.

  I hauled my red leather satchel that held my iPad holographic tablet, cell phone, four reporter’s pads (I still take notes the old-fashioned way), pens, wallet, keys, lipstick, and under-eye concealer, which I buy by the kilo, onto my shoulder and started out of my apartment.

  A quick look in the mirror revealed that my formerly chic bob had frizzed and I now looked like I’d stolen Eleanor Roosevelt’s head.

  Whatever.

  I hung my press credentials—three plastic cards with my photo—on a cheap hardware-store drain chain around my neck and checked that my passport was in the zipper compartment of my bag for backup ID just in case. Then I took the elevator down the twenty-four flights and walked out of my apartment building into the gorgeous spring day and into the end of my life as I knew it.

  2

  Outside I became part of a sea of people filling Forty-eighth Street, busting out from the police barricades erected to keep them in. Parking was suspended and traffic banned on the avenues, with the exception of single lanes for emergency vehicles between Twenty-third and Fifty-seventh Streets, to discourage the protestors from coming in.

  Right, good luck with that.

  There were countless protestors even on my street, which is several blocks from the United Nations. It looked like pickpocket paradise—more crowded than Times Square on New Year’s Eve, suffocating even on this crisp day.

  The NYPD had recruited cops from all over as well as whatever U.S. soldiers could be spared from fighting on the fronts in the endless wars on terrorism. They were manning the metal detectors set up all over the city.

  The plan had been to keep demonstrators at the west side docks (ben Yusef’s supporters up toward the Intrepid Museum, and his detractors downtown at Chelsea Piers) and, failing that, on Tenth and Eleventh Avenues—twelve full blocks away from the UN. When the crowd projection swelled to millions, that plan went out the window and U.S. President Lydia Wallingford-Hudson decided that the best course of action was for the cops, soldiers, and security forces to take a Gandhian approach of passive resistance—unless and until the paid troublemakers and rabble-rousers acted up.

  That didn’t stop the crowds from pushing, yelling, and smelling, however. It just stopped the uniforms from pushing back. The cops and soldiers were so polite, I noticed that they were saying things like, “Excuse me sir, but I would appreciate it if you’d put your backpack on this screening device, please.” What city was I in?

  Not known for my patience, I didn’t even attempt to get into the passive resistance groove. In fact, I felt trapped inside the rudeness, the pushing, the incessant pressing against my body, the constant shoving of my bag against my side; the arms, the legs that were everywhere, refusing to allow for any kind of personal space. I could smell the onions on the fat lady’s breath next to me. Somewhere cigar breath; elsewhere the unavoidable body odors from a thousand different cultures—curry seeping from the pores of some, garlic oozing out of others, and everyone was sweating despite the sixty-eight-degree temperature.

  With an unbelievable effort, I pushed and shoved like all the other people who had to be there that day for whatever reasons, and managed to skirt over to the outer edge of the street on the south side.

  Being on that side, albeit shoved up against the barricades, gave me a good view of the sidewalk, where the vendors were hawking everything from T-shirts with ben Yusef’s picture emblazoned on the front baring slogans like “King of the Terrorists” and “King of the News,” to the obscene, “He Made a Killing in New York!” Others were selling flags, balloons, and other totally inappropriate items for an occasion that was supposed to be so solemn.

  It seemed like foods from every nation were being sold from carts whose smells assaulted and invigorated my senses: Thai satay, peppers-sausage-onions, steaming hot dogs, and toasted soft pretzels that could always bring me back to my first autumn in New York as cub reporter, when I’d left the comfort of my parents’ Long Island row house to make it “on my own” all of thirty-five miles away.

  Despite being 1960s hippies who were still true believers in peace, love, and granola, they acted like overly protective suburbanites when it came to my brother and me, as they went about saving the world—my dad as head of a NYC homeless organization, and my mom as a pediatrician in a clinic.

  When I moved out of the first apartment I’d had with roommates in the city and took a studio in the Village on my own, they worried I’d be lonely and alone at best, and murdered by an intruder at worst.

  Despite their terror, I had not been murdered by a crazed serial killer/intruder, nor had “alone” ever been my problem. Except for when I was out of work, I always felt, if anything, that my life was too crowded. There was always another story, never a shortage of interesting friends and interested men. No one like Donald, of course, but I suspected that he was my excuse for not getting involved with anyone who might actually be available. I wanted my freedom to rush to a story wherever there was one.

  Now I was in it again full force—in a massive mess of humanity. And I loved it.

  But even more overwhelming than the smell and sight and push of the crowd was the din. The Super Bowl, the World Series, and the World Cup at the same time. It seemed that the very air had turned solid with sound—filled with deafening chants, curses, and complaints.

  Over all of that was the ever-present blast of police-car sirens, ear-shattering blasts when they were near you. I made a mental note to never have a drink again as long as I lived.

  “SOS. Save our Savior!” “Kill the pig! Kill him dead!” “Kid killer!” the protestors screamed, trying to out-decibel each other.

  Crazy, I thought, that there hasn’t yet been an incident. Incredible, actually. But that day there weren’t any—unless you count the personally earth-shattering incident that awaited me not half an hour later.

  The angry people, I understood—but it was the others, the terrorist’s so-called “followers” and “believers,” that I didn’t understand—or want to.

  Crazy conspiracy-theorist morons, I thought. I wished the damned Internet had never been invented. It alone had made the mass-murdering “prophet,” whom we’d all nonetheless come to see that day, possible.

  To millions he was the Savior; to others, Hitler reincarnated—and they were all out here yelling.

  It had taken just four years for ben Yusef to rise, via cyberspace, from just another tweeting YouTube ranter to a man known throughout the world.

  By the time the mainstream media paid attention, it was almost too late. They filled their editorial pages with fire and filled their airspaces with TV talking heads gasbagging about how such a terrorist monster was loved and slavishly followed by the loonies, the lonely, the desperate, “the fringers”—in other words, people for whom life hadn’t been good.

  For everyone else—including me—for whom life had been good, he was a terrorist.

  As I continued to try to make my way, I thought about the first time I’d ever heard of Demiel ben Yusef—maybe three or four years earlier. He was first identified as part of a terrorist cell based somewhere in or around Ankara, Turkey, which had allegedly planted a bomb in a market
place full of citizens and tourists in the resort town of Bodrum.

  Almost immediately after that bombing, credit had been taken by a renegade cell (is there any other kind?) of al-Qaeda, a cell that no one had ever heard of, called Al Okhowa Al Hamima, roughly translated to mean “Beloved Brotherhood.”

  Nobody thought much about him or the group. I mean, how much more harm could a young, uneducated dirty desert rat (granted, a very angry rat) hiding out with other filthy desert rats do on the lam? It would be, they thought, a matter of days before they were caught. They were wrong.

  To deny that group’s involvement in the marketplace carnage, the group’s spokesperson, a woman who called herself il Vettore (Italian for “the Vector”), appeared in podcasts from places even the most sophisticated spy satellites couldn’t recognize. Their beloved leader, Demiel ben Yusef, il Vettore proclaimed in perfect English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, was not a man of violence but a man of peace, the embodiment of the Living Christ. Right. Christ with a car bomb.

  As I was remembering all of this, I felt someone grab my shoulder from behind and heard a familiar voice scream, “Ali! Hey, Russo!”

  I turned, as much as I could in that sea of humans, and saw that it was my friend Dona Grimm, whom I’d known forever. “Going to Holy Family to interview a priest?” she asked, squeezing up alongside me. Since I stand all of five feet four, I normally had to double-step to keep up with all six feet of her, but today it was so crowded we were moving like slugs, and it only got worse when we hit the sidewalk skirting the outer edges of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza.

  “Frankie-the-genius Donahue, who is too good for public transportation, is stuck on the bridge. So I got the gig.”

  “This sucks,” Dona said, referring to the crowd, and we both simultaneously held our UN credentials, newspaper credentials, and all-access NYPD “Permitted to Cross Police Barricades” press passes aloft, as she started pushing and calling, “Press coming through.… Excuse us.… Let us in and see yourself on TV tonight,” she yelled.