Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [10]
The conclusion was obvious after a careful look at the street bum. Crusader Rabbit was some kind of undercover New York cop. He had to be some kind of cop on a stakeout …
His real name was Arch Carroll and he was on a stakeout a five-week one, with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, across the busy Brooklyn street, inside the Sinbad Star Restaurant two Iraqi men in their early thirties were sampling what they believed to be the finest Middle Eastern cooking available in New York City. They were the objects of Carroll’s long and painful stakeout.
The Iraqi men had chosen a rear alcove of the small, cozy restaurant, where they noisily slurped thick carob bean soup.
They gobbled up mint-flecked tabbouli, and cream-colored humus. They eagerly munched greasy mixtures of raisins, pine nuts, lamb, Moroccan olives, their favorite things to eat in the world life was good.
Chapter 8
BACK OUT ON Atlantic Avenue, Arch Carroll shivered unhappily in the probing icy-cold fingers of the rising night wind.
At times like these, Carroll sometimes wondered why it was that a reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old man, someone with decent enough prospects, someone with a law degree, could regularly be working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, invariably eating stone-cold pizza and Pepsi-Cola for dinner, was sitting outside a Middle Eastern restaurant on a Friday night stakeout?
Why was that?
Was it perhaps because his father and two uncles had been pavement-pounding city cops?
Was it because his grandfather had been a rough and tumble example of New York’s finest?
Or did it have to do with things he’d seen a decade and a half ago in Viet Nam?
Maybe he just wasn’t a reasonable, intelligent man, as he’d somehow always presumed? Maybe, if you got right down to it, there was some kind of obvious short-circuit in the wires of the old brain, some form of synaptic fuck-up.
As Arch Carroll pondered the tangible mistakes of his life, he noticed that his attention had begun to wander.
For several minutes at a clip, he’d stare at his sadly wiggling toes, at the equally fascinating burning ember of his cigarette, at almost anything mildly distracting.
Five-week-long stakeouts weren’t exactly recommended for their entertainment value. That was exactly how long he’d been watching Anton and Wadih Rashid.
Now Carroll’s attention had suddenly snapped back …
“What the …” he mumbled out loud as he stared down the congested street. Is that who it looks like? … Can’t be … I think it is … but it can’t be.
Carroll had suddenly noticed a skinny, frazzle-haired man coming directly his way from the Frente Unido Bar and Data Indonesia. The man was scurrying up Atlantic Avenue, periodically looking back over his right shoulder.
At a distance, he looked like a baggy coat walking on a stick.
Carroll slowly pushed himself up out of his half-frozen lounging position against the restaurant wall.
He squinted his eyes tight for a better look at the figure approaching from down the street.
He couldn’t believe it!
He stared down the street, his eyes smarting from the’ bite of the wind. He had to make sure.
Jesus. He was sure.
The fast-walking man had a huge puffy burr of bushy, very wiry black hair. The greasy hair was combed straight back; it hung like a limp sack over the collar of his black cloth jacket.
Carroll knew the man by two names: one was Hussein, Moussa; the other was the Lebanese Butcher. A decade before, Moussa had been recruited by the Russians; he’d been trained at their famed Third World school in Tripoli.
Since then Moussa had been busily free-lancing terror and sophisticated murder techniques all over the world: in Paris, Rome, Zaire, New York, in Lebanon for Colonel Qadaffi. Recently, he’d worked for Francois Monserrat, who had taken over not only Juan Carlos’s European terrorist cell, but South America, and now the United States as well.
Hussein Moussa halted in front of the Sinbad Star restaurant. Like a very careful driver at a tricky intersection, he looked both ways.
Twice more he