We Are Holding the President Hostage Read online

  At thirty-five he had become a veteran of urban warfare, skilled in hostage-taking and violent harassment. As he evolved into a professional, the need for his services had grown considerably in this long winter of discontent.

  Indeed, he had never known any other season. Born in southern Lebanon of a poor Shiite family, he was barely able to read before he found himself in a PLO training camp learning the rudiments of killing. He had joined a tiny Shiite militia recruited by the PLO as an ally against Israeli attempts to control southern Lebanon. In those days, he believed the political rhetoric. He could be stirred by the rousing call of Jihad, Holy War. The lure of paradise was tantalizing.

  Then the Shiites in Lebanon, buoyed by the remarkable revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini, switched gears and the political logic was recalibrated. Paranoid over any kind of domination and authority, they began to fight the PLO. Survival considerably enhanced Ahmed’s professional credentials. Soon he was fighting the hated Christians, then the Druse, then recalcitrant Shiites, depending on the ebb and flow of politics, clashing egos among the leadership, and the latest betrayal and double double cross.

  Because of these spinning changes and floating alliances, Ahmed, like many others before him, concluded that the only sure loyalty was to himself. The Jihad, the driving force of Holy War, had become a matter of dubious fervor. The prospect of paradise was now seen more as a lure for young chickens than a possibility for an old fox like himself. He had discovered profit in terror.

  But killing and kidnapping for profit alone, given the absence of ideology, possessed the stigma of shame. Ahmed was a man who needed the anchor of honorable intentions. He had obeyed earlier familial injunctions, had taken a wife and fathered a child. He was eighteen then and had not yet come to grips with the true nature of his sexuality. The child, who had nearly died at birth, was afflicted with a congenital heart disorder.

  It was only a short journey for Ahmed to reorient his commitments. He had a new justification. Something to kill for. He had purchased the boy and his wife a villa in Jordan, with servants and the best medical care available. He did not visit him more than once or twice a year. Often, he assured himself, the boy was the only thing he truly loved. Such thoughts left him cleansed and justified.

  Three scrawny men, their beards replicas of Arafat’s, sat tense in the back seat of the Mercedes. The metal of their AK47’s glistened with their sweat. Ahmed sat between the driver and the clean-shaven Jaber. He turned in his seat, patted his head, and gave him a reassuring wink. Sweet Jaber. A tingle in his crotch reminded him of the boy’s ivory smooth body. Another easy conquest made possible by the knowledge of Arafat’s predilections. A pederast, the man remained, whatever the whim of the moment, the enduring role model for disenfranchised Arab youth.

  He would not, of course, have picked Jaber to be with them if he had not been absolutely assured of both his skill and his commitment. It could be said that he had handpicked the five of them primarily for their blindness, their absolute faith in the joys of martyrdom.

  For this mission, the planning had been impeccable. Bigelow was an Assistant Secretary of State for the American Government, a troubleshooter on the Middle East, an emissary of the American President. The purpose of the mission, Ahmed knew, was to embarrass the Egyptian Government and its so-called moderate lackeys and illustrate its unreliability to the Americans, to move the prisoner to Lebanon and parade him in front of the cameras with all the hoopla of the usual media circus.

  There was no sign of movement among the chauffeurs chatting together outside the three official limousines. The boy squatted by his ice-cream cart, looking lost in kayf. Ahmed knew that he was tense and alert. He would have only a minisecond to place the bomb under the rear fender of the lead car and less than that to duck away, an impossibility that had been carefully calculated. The boy’s ticket to paradise was all but assured, Ahmed reflected.

  The woman’s annoying persistence had very nearly triggered a compulsive reaction in the men. They were also edgy with heat and expectation, their inner springs taut, which was only natural prior to an operation.

  “Hide those weapons,” Ahmed had snapped in time to inhibit their movement.

  “Bitch,” one of the men had mumbled.

  “Don’t open the window,” Ahmed had warned.

  But the woman, obviously an American, had been tenacious. Her tapping on the window had made a racket. One of the chauffeurs had squinted curiously in their direction. As Ahmed had determined by careful rehearsal, the sun’s reflection on the automobile’s windshield rendered them invisible from the chauffeurs’ vantage. But he had not reckoned on sound.

  “The ball is under your car,” the woman had said, pointing. A small boy stood beside her, peering into the car.

  “Better move it,” Ahmed finally had ordered. The car rolled forward. The ball retrieved, the woman and her son moved back to what was undoubtedly her own car at the edge of the parking lot.

  “You think she saw something?” the young man behind the wheel asked.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Ahmed said, looking at his watch.

  “Why are they this late?” Jaber whispered. Ahmed felt his sweet breath sail past his ear.

  “Maybe he is making love to a mummy,” Ahmed said, deliberately facetious. These young men reveled in facetiousness. It was reassuring to them. Ahmed was getting edgy too.

  He turned and looked behind him. No sign of anything amiss in the parking lot. Only the woman and her boy. Holding the boy’s hand, she had begun to move toward the museum’s entrance.

  “What is it?” Jaber asked. “I see nothing.”

  Following his lead, the others had uncovered their weapons. He heard the familiar click of the AK47’s safety mechanism, the prelude to death. It was now a matter of experienced judgment. Would the woman accost the chauffeurs, point to their car? He followed her with his gaze, finger on the trigger of his weapon.

  She and the boy passed the chauffeurs without a word and walked quickly up the front steps. But he was not relieved. It was unusual for him to doubt his instincts, which were now giving him mixed signals.

  To chase the idea of the woman from his mind, he went over the details once again. Bigelow in a phalanx of security men would proceed down the steps of the museum. As he reached the midway point, the boy would set his fuse and roll the bomb under the lead limousine. At the same time, the driver would move forward. Jaber and the others would step out of the car and spray everyone but Bigelow, who would have ducked to the ground. Then Jaber and one of the men would pick him up, throw him in the rear of their car while the other two continued to fire away. They would disable the remaining limousines and dash back into the car, which would already have begun to move. In rehearsal they could do it in twenty seconds.

  In a narrow, seldom-used alley one block from the museum, behind an abandoned half-finished building, another car would be waiting. Bigelow would be transferred to the other car along with Ahmed, Jaber, and the driver. Their present car would be abandoned under the half-finished building and the others would disappear in the maze of Cairo street traffic. Quick, simple, and thorough.

  At that moment the ornate doors of the museum opened. Adrenaline shot through him. But it was only the woman and the boy emerging. They started down the stairs. She was holding the boy’s hand and he was jumping beside her one step at a time, a laborious process in which she indulged him with motherly patience.

  Suddenly Ahmed realized that she had waylaid his attention. His concentration had strayed. Precious seconds had been lost. The phalanx had come out of the museum and was already moving swiftly down the stairs. But the boy beside his ice-cream cart had been alert. The bomb was placed.

  “Now,” Ahmed cried, punching the driver’s upper arm. In miniseconds the car moved forward, the rear doors opened, and the AK47’s were sending their lethal message simultaneously with the blast. The lead car of the limousine caravan rose like a feather in the wind, bursting into flames.


  Unfortunately, their split second of hesitation pushed the schedule awry. As expected, Bigelow was flung to the ground in a reflex action by one of his guards. But unexpectedly, he had the presence of mind to roll toward the site of the blast instead of away from it, causing the two men who were to pick him up and throw him into the rear of their car to hesitate another split second. This was just enough time for one of the dying guards to get off a round of his automatic pistol. It caught Jaber’s companion in the head, spilling his brains on Jaber’s shirt.

  Jaber struggled for a moment trying to get a good grip on Bigelow, but Bigelow was not cooperating. And with good reason. He had been caught in the cross fire. Another man stepped forward to help Jaber, but he, too, was cut down by the guns of a surviving guard. When the last man attempted to grab Bigelow, he was blown away.

  A botch, Ahmed knew almost from the first. He looked at Jaber, still struggling to bring Bigelow into their car. Suddenly the boy looked up. It was futile. Briefly their eyes met. Ahmed saw the panic and knew what it meant. Jaber, if he was not killed, would break under interrogation. Ahmed lifted the muzzle of his automatic pistol and raked the boy across the chest.

  “Go,” he shouted to his driver, jabbing the pistol muzzle in his ribs. The driver jammed his foot on the accelerator and the car shot forward. Then it stalled. The driver reached for the ignition key, turned it. The motor coughed hesitantly, sputtered, but did not catch. It was in that interval that Ahmed once again saw the woman and the boy. The stalled car had apparently cut off their flight to another part of the parking lot. They stood, apparently rooted to the ground by fear.

  “Hello, my lovelies,” Ahmed said calmly as he jumped out of the car. At that moment the sweating driver started the motor. Ahmed grabbed the woman and the boy and pulled them into the rear seat. Then calmly, as if this exhibition of his courage was necessary, he stepped slowly into the seat beside the driver. As the car disappeared around the corner, he turned to the woman and shrugged.

  “An American is an American,” he said.

  The woman looked at him coldly. She had, he noted, recovered her arrogance.

  “You won’t get away with this,” the woman hissed as her arm shot out. Her fist glanced off the side of his head. Calmly, he directed the pistol toward the boy’s crotch.

  “He’d be such a pretty little soprano,” Ahmed said, watching the woman as the blood drained from her face. After a moment, she expelled a word. It sounded very much like “Daddy.”

  “Daddy,” he said with a chuckle. “No Daddy can help you now.”

  3

  AS HE HAD DONE with religious punctuality for more than a quarter of a century, Salvatore Padronelli, the Padre as he was called, planted his black Thom McAn shoes beneath the table of the private back room of Luigi’s Trattoria on Mulberry Street. It was located one block from his modest two-story house in which he had resided for forty years. As always, the table was covered with a crisp checkered tablecloth. On it was the usual basketed bottle of Chianti, a container of standing breadsticks, and a half dozen small tumblers. The table was round. It could seat six comfortably.

  The Padre always sat with his elbows on the table, and when he was not drinking or eating, he clasped gnarled stubby fingers. His face was thin, but he was not hollow-cheeked and he did not shave more than three times a week. It was not uncommon to see his chin stubbled with spiky gray hairs. His head was bald except for wisps of fine hair that lay helter-skelter on his pate. He wore dress shirts, old white-on-white designs, the cuffs frayed, button closed to the neck, but no tie. For some reason, he rarely wore jackets that matched his pants, much to the despair of his housekeeper, Mrs. Santos.

  Rosa, his late wife, had kept him neater, well-shaven and well-groomed. Yet no amount of carelessness or lack of grooming could detract from the alertness of his green eyes, penetrating and predatory. The Padre was sixty-nine years old.

  Another man sat at the table with the Padre. Angelo Petinno, a narrow, small-boned man with a thin mustache and a head of thick silvery hair. He had the look of a man who eschewed sunshine and fresh air. His skin was dead white. In bygone days he would have been referred to as the Consigliari, but the Padre had decreed that such nomenclature should be avoided wherever possible. This was America. The Padre was American-born. The time had come for the organization to disassociate itself from media clichés.

  As leader, a kind of chairman of the board, the Padre, of course, demanded respect, but he drew the line on reverence. He knew that his power and his ability to delegate it were essential to the organization’s health. He felt uncomfortable and distrusting when people treated him like some sainted Godfather of movie legend.

  Angelo Petinno, his companion at the back-room table, was known as “the Pencil.” He was called that not because of his mustache but because he was always making notes in pencil on little scraps of paper. The notes were indecipherable to anyone but himself and they reflected the various decisions and decrees handed down by the Padre.

  These decisions were always scrupulously carried out by the Pencil through a network of underlings. The Pencil was an organizational genius. When he wrote something down on the Padre’s orders, the Padre always considered it done.

  No telephone calls were ever taken in the back room of Luigi’s, although there was a pay phone for private use, but only in extreme emergencies. When someone called the Padre on the pay phone, its very ring constituted a four-alarm alert. All “business” was conducted by the Pencil in a small building two blocks away on which was posted a battered sign. It read “Import-Export.” The phones there were swept three times a day for government taps, which meant a constant switching of lines.

  Near the back door, which Luigi had had installed on the Padre’s instructions, rested a little square table. When the Padre held court, two leathery-faced men of uncertain age sat at the little table. One was Vinnie Barboza. Only behind his back did they call him “the Prune” because of the peculiarity of his facial wrinkles, especially when angered.

  Seated with him was Carmine Giancana, “the Canary,” a nickname based upon his resemblance to the Italian fighter Primo Canero, for those who remembered. Often he was forced to dispel the confusion about the origin of his nickname, since Canary had other connotations.

  Beneath their somber suits both men carried an enforcing mechanism known as the Magnum. For nearly a decade they had had little use for them, although the weapons were always kept carefully cleaned and oiled just in case.

  At a table in the main room of Luigi’s sat two other men. One was Rocco Mondavano, known as “the Talker” for his penchant for silence. The Talker talked only when absolutely necessary. He was the keeper of the gate. No one could speak to the Padre without the Talker consulting first with the Padre. He was the intermediary, a good choice, since it was the economy of language that particularly endeared him to the Padre. That and his swift expertise with the razor.

  The other man was Benjy Mustoni, known since he was barely thirty as “the Kid.” He was the second son of the Padre’s lifetime friend Angelo Mustoni, deceased now for a dozen years.

  The Padre had made his friend a deathbed promise, a contract of binding significance, to take Benjy under his wing. He had obeyed the promise warily. He used Benjy to deal with the new blood, usually sons and nephews of the old faithful who were scrambling to become “made” in the organization. Unfortunately for these younger men, the Padre never fully trusted anyone more than ten years younger than himself, which meant that the men close to him grew considerably grayer as time progressed.

  This distrust of younger men had heightened after the death of his sons, Gino and Mario. They had been his blood heirs and they had died unnecessarily of the most potentially lethal of all terminal ailments—ambition. They had confused age with weakness, the old ways with stubbornness, the ancient methods with ignorance. Not that the Padre was an enemy of new ways of doing business.

  His father had warned him that he must move with the t
imes. This did not mean that to fulfill the terms of modernization he had to move out of his small house in Little Italy and live like a king in a palace on Park Avenue. The old neighborhood was a protected watershed where strangers came at their peril. These days he rarely went beyond its boundaries.

  Perhaps the outside world had simply grown too big to understand. Perhaps men felt a need to belong to something they could touch and feel in their hearts. Perhaps such things as honor, loyalty, adventure, rebellion, and danger were more important than mere survival and safety.

  The Padre’s love and respect for his father had been intense. Not a day went by, even now, thirty years after the old man had died, when he did not measure his decisions against his father’s. The man was, it was true, old country, his English poor, his dress sloppy, but his knowledge of men, his ability to lead and inspire were uncanny. To betray his father was inconceivable. Where had he gone wrong with his own sons?

  He had warned them about dealing with heroin. It destroyed a human being’s chance to survive, to fight back. Trafficking in these types of drugs went beyond the pale of legitimate plunder. His father had made that choice years before. He had reinforced these points to his sons again and again.

  They had been murdered through a contract put out jointly by the black gangs of Harlem, and he had been obliged, as a solemn duty, to extract his revenge. It had been a bloody business, necessary, preordained. Step on my foot and I will cut off your head. Cut off my head and I will cut off ten of yours. It was the lesson of punishment learned at his father’s knee.

  He drank the first drink of the day and felt the sweet and gentle Chianti warm against his palate. The Pencil did not drink anything stronger than iced tea. Luigi waddled in from the kitchen, as he had done for twenty-five years, perspiring, wiping his chapped chunky hands on his apron.