Love Thy Neighbor Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Story Plant

  The Aronica-Miller Publishing Project, LLC

  P.O. Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gilleo

  Jacket design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-034-2

  E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-035-9

  Visit our website at www.thestoryplant.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except as provided by US Copyright Law.

  For information, address The Story Plant.

  First Story Plant Printing: March 2012

  Printed in The United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank more than a few people who supported me in this endeavor. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family and friends. I don’t recall a single incident when anyone told me that I was crazy (even if they were thinking it).

  In addition to the moral support of family and friends, in particular my wife Ivette, I would like to thank some people who took the time to read the manuscript for this novel, in its various forms, and to provide meaningful feedback.

  So for my A-team of readers I would like to thank: Jim Singleton, Fabio Assmann, Michele Gates, Claire Everett, Don Gilleo and Sue Fine. At the risk of missing some others, I would also like to thank the following people for their set of eyes: Ginny Donaldson, Debbie Ingel, Mary Weber, Jim Mockus, Michelle Couret, Ivonne Couret, Ray Rosson and Paula Willson.

  Finally, I would like to thank Lou Aronica for taking a chance on me and this book.

  Author’s Note

  (This part is true.)

  In late 1999 a woman from Vienna, Virginia, a suburb ten miles from the White House as the crow flies, called the CIA. The woman, a fifty-something mother of three, phoned to report what she referred to as potential terrorists living across the street from her middle-class home. She went on to explain what she had been seeing in her otherwise quiet neighborhood: Strange men of seemingly Middle-Eastern descent using their cell phones in the yard. Meetings in the middle of the night with bumper-to-bumper curbside parking, expensive cars rubbing ends with vans and common Japanese imports. A constant flow of young men, some who seemed to stay for long periods of time without introducing themselves to anyone in the neighborhood. The construction of a six-foot wooden fence to hide the backyard from the street only made the property more suspicious.

  Upon hearing a layperson’s description of suspicious behavior, the CIA promptly dismissed the woman and her phone call. (Ironically, the woman lived less than a quarter of a mile from a CIA installation, though it was not CIA headquarters as was later reported.)

  In the days and weeks following 9/11, the intelligence community in the U.S. began to learn the identities of the nineteen hijackers who had flown the planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. In the process of their investigation they discovered that two of the hijackers, one on each of the planes that hit the World Trade Towers, had listed a particular house in Vienna, Virginia as a place of residence.

  The FBI and various other agencies swooped in on the unassuming neighborhood and began knocking on doors. When they reached the house of a certain mother of three, she stopped them dead in their tracks. She was purported to have said, “I called the CIA two years ago to report that terrorists were living across the street and no one did anything.”

  The CIA claimed to have no record of a phone call.

  The news networks set up cameras and began broadcasting from the residential street. ABC, NBC, FOX. The FBI followed up with further inquiries. The woman’s story was later bounced around the various post 9/11 committees and intelligence hearings on Capitol Hill. (Incidentally, after 9/11, the CIA closed its multi-story facility in the neighborhood where the terrorist reportedly lived. In 2006 the empty building was finally torn down and, as of early 2011, was being replaced with another office building).

  There has been much speculation about what the government should have or could have known prior to 9/11. The answer is not simple. There have been anecdotal stories of people in Florida and elsewhere who claimed to have reported similar “terrorist” type activities by suspicious people prior to 9/11. None of these stories have been proven.

  What we do know is that with the exception of the flight school instructor in Minnesota who questioned the motive of a student who was interested in flying an aircraft without learning how to land, and an unheeded warning from actor James Woods who was on a plane from Boston with several of the purported terrorists while they were doing a trial run, the woman from Vienna, Virginia was the country’s best chance to prevent 9/11. To date, there has been no verification of any other pre-9/11 warnings from the general public so far in advance of that fateful day in September.

  For me, there is no doubt as to the validity of the claims of the woman in Vienna.

  She lived in the house where I grew up.

  She is my mother.

  Mark Gilleo. October, 2011.

  Washington DC.

  Chapter 1

  Present day

  It’s hard to remember the appropriate prayer when you’re running from an angry chef waving a meat cleaver. Hadar, sweat streaking down his dark skin, his thick black hair bouncing with every stride, recalled one verse and hoped it was enough. Allah, you have promised to help us in our time of trouble and need … For the fifteen year old, the need was now. As a newly discovered thief, he wished he knew a prayer for forgiveness. Between dodging a slow moving white two-door and stumbling through a small pothole in the roughly paved alley, he realized he had never learned one.

  And now was not the time to stop and ask.

  Hadar kept his thin arms pumping, his loose-fitting, long-sleeve shirt flapping. He went over the plan in his head and considered where it had gone wrong. He tried to ignore the obvious. Trouble had found him long before his busboy accomplice was spotted heading out the back door of the restaurant with a patron’s sports coat rolled up in a dirty tablecloth.

  Hadar looked back over his shoulder. The chef was still there, still charging. The obscenities had subsided, the chef’s yells replaced by the steady rhythm of feet pounding the ground. Hadar heard the meat cleaver smack the side of something metal. He didn’t look back to see if it was intentional. It didn’t matter. Either way, the result was the same. He was scared.

  As he ran, Hadar’s mind flashed back to the beginning. His recruitment to the dark side had been easy. A last minute errand to the market for his mother had been his first step down the wrong road. A dark road. With the daily bread in one hand and change from the purchase in the other, a deep voice had called out to Hadar from a dust covered Mercedes as he made his way home under a setting sun. Initially, Hadar had kept walking.

  Then his instincts failed him.

  When the same Mercedes pulled into the alley between Hadar and his family’s three-room apartment, he froze. He tightened his hand on the brown bag holding half of his family’s main course, and made the decision to walk past the car as quickly as he could. These were his alleys. If anyone tried to lay a hand on him, he would vanish like a ghost.

  Or so he had thought.

  As Hadar passed the car, the window of the Mercedes opened. Fighting to look away, he succumbed to curiosity and glanced into the abyss of the interior. A thousand rupees grabbed his attention and held it. The wad
of cash in the driver’s hand was more than his father made in a week of bloody-knuckle work as a construction expert in concrete. A thousand rupees. It was a lot of money for a well-worn, middle-aged man. For a fifteen-year-old boy it was a gold ticket on the Hell Express. Hadar took the money, listened to the instructions, and thanked the Devil. There were no rules to the agreement, save one: Don’t get caught.

  So far, Hadar hadn’t. The chef with the meat cleaver was looking to change that. Maybe change a few anatomical features while he was at it. The chef, blood and food stains on the front of his white apron, wasn’t giving up. He wasn’t fading. His pace was strong, steady. The chef knew the boy had expended his youthful burst. Now it was a matter of endurance, an issue of stamina.

  With every step the scale tilted in the chef’s favor. The man with the cleaver had been running since his stint with the other CIA. His first pair of running shoes was a twenty dollar knock-off brand from a hole-in-the-wall vendor in Manhattan’s Chinatown who offered no refunds and no returns. Three months later he ran through the treads. For a chef from the mountains of Pakistan, the running path along the Hudson was one of the main attractions near the campus of the greatest chef factory in North America: The Culinary Institute of America. Jogging was the only healthy hobby the chef ever had. He could run a 5k in less time than it took to gut and butcher a lamb.

  The cigarettes Hadar had started smoking with the money from his deliveries were taking their toll. Who knew the chef would follow his busboy down the alley and see him rifling through the pockets of the liberated jacket? Who knew the mad cook would take up chase? Who knew the chef could run like a Kenyan marathoner?

  Thoughts came to Hadar in a flood. He stumbled again as he turned into a slightly uphill alley. Oh, Allah! Help us to hold fast all together to your path, even in the shaky times. He took another quick right behind the back of the furniture shop, panting his way past two elderly men who were attaching fabric to a wooden frame. The two old men looked up moments later as six-inches of stainless steel swung by in the hand of the chef.

  Another day in Islamabad, another crime.

  The city was a perfect dichotomy. Next to the ancient town of Rawalpindi and its crowded hectic streets, downtown Islamabad stood as a modern example of the best and worst of the Middle East and the West. In the early 1960s, realizing it wasn’t strategically prudent to have the seat of government in the same proximity as the country’s economic center and largest port, the president of Pakistan decided to relocate the capital from Karachi to a swath of undeveloped land in the northern region.

  With a design from a Greek urban planner by the name of Doxidas, construction on Pakistan’s new capital began. The first government tenants moved in by the end of the decade and the northward surge of bureaucracy continued until the last politician completed his relocation in the early eighties.

  But Doxidas, the Greek god of development, was a visionary. He knew that once you moved the government, people and additional jobs would follow. So beyond the main district of Islamabad with its glass buildings and five star hotels, Doxidas had planned for expansion. Thanks to Greek foresight, unlike many burgeoning cities, Pakistan’s new capital expanded in controllable pre-planned chunks. Sector by sector downtown Islamabad merged into residential areas, tree-lined streets, and green parkland. Schools and small businesses sprouted up on secondary roads in neighborhoods where neighbors lived middle-class lives in the shadows of Western architectural influence.

  These were Hadar’s neighborhoods. Islamabad was Hadar’s city. His father had helped build it. Hadar had explored it on foot as a youngster, trailing his father to job sites on weekends, watching concrete buildings go up wall by wall. As he got older, he exchanged his sneakers for an old bike and expanded his scope. He knew more than the roads. He knew the alleys and the footpaths, the parks and the trails into the plains where opium and marijuana grew in unmarked fields. It was hard to beat the knowledge gained from the curiosity and natural energy of a teenage boy with an itch to travel to the edges of his world, as far as his body would take him.

  Perspiration dripped from Hadar, his shirt clinging to his torso as he closed in on the rendezvous point like a homing pigeon. Block by block he made his way to his personal ATM. For a second he thought about changing routes, making another lap around the neighborhood. His legs wouldn’t allow it. He took one final look back and for the first time in over twenty minutes he didn’t see the chef. Two more quick turns and he saw his finish line.

  The man in the dark shirt standing by the long car looked up as Hadar wheezed towards him. The man quickly shooed away two other boys near his vehicle and focused on Hadar who was staggering like something between a drunk and an out-of-shape fifteen year old who had asked too much from his body.

  “Did you get one?” the tall man in a dark button-up shirt and linen pants asked nonchalantly to the gasping teenager.

  “Yeah,” Hadar choked out.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Hadar shook his head.

  The man condescendingly put his hands on his knees and whispered straight into Hadar’s ear. “Do we have a problem?” he repeated, almost hissing. “You’re out of breath.”

  Hadar looked into the darkness of the man’s eyes and shivered. Hadar stood, reached in his pocket, and handed-over the phone. “My money,” Hadar said, still straining for air.

  The man opened the phone and saw that it was working. The signal strength was good. The battery was three-quarters charged. He reached into his own pocket and fished out a thousand rupees.

  “Give me the phone,” the chef said, slowly coming out of his jog as he rounded the corner.

  The man near the car looked at the chef. “Get lost.”

  The chef was armed. He had just run halfway across the city. He was not going home empty-handed. He knew that reasoning with the boy may not prove fruitful. Reasoning with an adult would be easier. He approached the man in the dark shirt and looked him in the eyes. They were both in their forties. They both had solid, natural builds. They both cut meat for a living.

  “He stole the phone from my restaurant, in front of my patrons. It’s the third time this year. I can’t have my restaurant known as a den of thieves.”

  “Which restaurant?”

  “The Kamran.”

  “You serve infidels?”

  “I serve everyone,” the chef answered. “Except thieves,” he added.

  The man in the dark shirt nodded. He looked at the phone in his hand, the last rays of the day’s sun bouncing off the silver casing.

  “OK,” the man in the dark shirt conceded. He extended his hand with the phone in his palm and the chef swiped it in one smooth motion.

  “What are you going to do with the boy?”

  The man in the dark shirt looked at Hadar who was regaining his breath.

  “He needs to be punished,” the chef added.

  “He will be.”

  Hadar’s eyes grew wide. He pulled his hands off his hips and stood straight.

  The chef looked at his prey and stepped towards Hadar for a final reprimand. He extended his hand, the small antenna from the phone protruding towards the boy. “If I see you near my restaurant again, I will cut off your hand myself.” The chef didn’t mean it, but hoped the boy believed he did.

  “Thank you,” the chef said to the man in the dark shirt. They nodded at each other, eyes locked. The chef turned slowly for his long walk back to the restaurant. He would make at least one patron happy. He would walk into the restaurant and return the phone to its rightful owner. And then he would have to throw away burnt food worth ten times the value of the phone. A good reputation doesn’t come cheap.

  “May Allah be with you,” the man in the dark shirt said to the chef.

  The chef turned to respond, only to hear the sound of his neck breaking and his favorite heavy blade hitting the ground.

  Hadar froze.

  The man stooped quickly and picked up the large blade by its wooden handle
. He looked down the quiet narrow street as he approached Hadar with the meat cleaver. “I told you, don’t get caught.” Hadar looked at the knife. Traces of blood ran down the blade next to dried slivers of animal fat.

  Hadar stammered. He took one step to the right and the man casually blocked his path. He tried to feign a direction change, but his rubbery legs gave him away. With his last bit of strength the fifteen year old tried to go over the hood of the car.

  The man caught Hadar by the hair, turned him around in mid-air, and drove him into the wall. He repeated the motion twice and on the third impact, Hadar’s skull cracked.

  The man left the boy on the ground, next to a pile of rubbish from an overflowing bin behind a printing shop. He casually walked over and grabbed the phone from the dead chef’s hand. “You won’t be needing this,” he said quietly, slipping the phone into his pocket. He dragged the body of the chef next to Hadar. The young man’s lungs were taking shallow, final breaths. As Hadar gasped, the man wiped the meat cleaver on the chef’s apron. “Good luck on your voyage, my friends,” the man in the dark shirt said in a soothing voice with spooky sincerity.

  The man took one last look down the narrow street and opened the door to his car. He started the sedan and checked the rear-view mirror. No one. He put the car into drive, looked up, and watched a metal door swing open. He kept his foot on the brake and eyed the meat cleaver lying amidst a half dozen cell phones on the seat next to him.

  An elderly lady with a small shopping bag exited the back of her one-story house a few yards away. She fiddled with the latch on the gate as the car moved slowly forward, small rocks crunching under the weight of its tires. As the car turned the corner out of sight, the driver heard the first scream. He remembered a prayer for forgiveness that Hadar had wished he had known. Allah, I seek refuge in You from any evil I have committed. I confess to Your blessings upon me, and I confess to You my sins, so forgive me. Verily none forgives sins except You.