Circle Around the Sun Read online

  “You know Weldon,” Emily continued, “Two years ago I was on the phone to my niece at the Home Office in London when a telephone booth blew up right in front of her office building. The IRA had struck again. It’s normal over there. Look at Palestine, for Christ’s sake. Every day children die and we support their execution one way or another. Is it any wonder that the Middle East is full of angry Islamists. And before you get started, I have as many Jewish friends as Arab ones. The entire world has gone mad!”

  “That’s why we’re here…to educate,” Jackson responded, asserting himself to his full height, “Maybe through our efforts we can redefine the boundaries. What was it Malcolm once said? ‘If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.’ But I gotta admit, last semester your lecture on Angela Davis even got me goin’. You know, we’re trying to get her down here.”

  “You know, Weldon, she just might come. Keep trying. As I told the class last year, she came to Europe thirty years ago, as did Kathleen Cleaver, to address the students and the system wouldn’t let them speak! As I remember; they couldn‘t get through immigration or customs in Germany and had to actually land in Paris. Didn’t phase us though, the Student Union picked them up there and smuggled them over the border. That ban on their speechmaking was the worst thing the authorities could have done. We went crazy. Students all over Europe took up the anti-Viet Nam war position, backed civil rights leaders and then left it to the rock stars to romanticize all our hard work.” She began singing, “We can change the world, it’s dying and if you believe in justice...” Good old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, she thought to herself.

  A brief knock, the door opened, and Dana Johnson, an international legal expert and Annapolis attorney entered the room. A striking African American woman, she wore traditional Ghanaian dress, the dramatic colors of which highlighted her ebony skin, African features and closely cropped “natural” hair. Johnson was responsible for programs involving forensic investigation. An international lawyer who frequently consulted to the government, she was a fine teacher and an ardent supporter of the college. Rumor had it that her relationship with Jackson was something more than cordial or professional. Her dark eyes flashed anxiously toward Emily. “Hey lady! I didn’t know you were still here. We’re going to “Fratelli’s”. Want to join us for Soul Food, Italian style?”

  “Absolutely, but let me call home first.”

  “Checking up on that fine looking man of yours?”

  “Dana, after all these years, I don’t have to, but I do want them to know where I am. Besides that, Harrison’s away and Mason is due home tonight”.

  “Mason is due home? After all the trouble I took to fake an emergency just to see that boy. Tell him to come as well!”

  After making arrangements to meet the pair at the small Italian restaurant, which they assured her stayed open for late night students, Emily finally left the darkened building.

  Heading toward the parking lot where her vintage Spitfire was parked, she was aware of being followed. “Hold up, Professor, I’ll walk you to your car.” It was the young man with the buzz haircut from her class. “I’m Tedeuz Michalak,” he said with a grin.

  “Do I detect a slight accent, Mr. Michalak?”

  “Yes. I’m Polish,” he replied

  “In a police academy t-shirt?” she asked.

  “I’m waiting on citizenship,” he said proudly. “I’m getting some courses over with now. I’ve wanted to be cop since we got here. It’s like, you know, my way of giving back, so I volunteer there. Dr. Jackson has been a real help with the paperwork and recommendations.” Choosing his words carefully, as one who spoke English as a second language, he smiled. “In fact, I’m on my way to meet him and a few others for pizza.”

  “Yes, me too.”

  “Great,” he replied. “Where are you parked?”

  They walked across the parking lot and waved as two college security officers drove past. She got into her car and rolled down the window to let in some fresh air. “Damn, Anne Arundel County is worse than Washington in the fall, it’s so hot and humid,” she moaned.

  “It’s still better than communist Poland. Before I forget Professor, I won’t be at the Tuesday night class. I’m going to New York to see my sister. She’s an investment banker at the World Trade Center. I won’t get back until Wednesday, but I’ll be there Thursday for the last session,” and with that, he turned towards his car in the next lot.

  “Thanks for staying awake. I know I went on a little long,” she called after him. “See you at Fratelli’s.”

  She slipped a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan CD into the player her son bought her earlier in the year and listened as the devotional Sufi music known as Qawwali filled the car. ‘Mustt Mustt’, which translated to ‘Lost in his work’ was a song was about a Sufi saint. She swayed rhythmically as she drove down Route 2, making a right into the shopping center before the narrow road leading to the waterfront community she called home. She was mentally miles away from the Chesapeake Bay driving by instinct alone. “The car drove itself,” she often said, and she was now beginning to believe it was true.

  Her car may have been on St. Andrew’s Road heading toward the community’s Italian Restaurant, but she was mentally somewhere long ago in another hot and humid climate. In that country the night turned suddenly cold enough to make your teeth chatter. Unprotected, sandstorms could ravage your body, stick to your skin and burn your eyes out. Emily was suddenly transported to a place where her head throbbed from being screamed at, and her ears popped in retaliation to the sound of gunshots while her fingers, wrists and elbows hurt from the pressure of firing her weapon. “Where are you now, Ghulam Ansari? Afghanistan, Saudi, or Chechnya, Mr. God almighty revolutionary? Do you ever wonder what became of your son?” she thought aloud.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The others had already ordered pizza and were sitting at a long table in the smaller of the restaurant’s two dining rooms. Unlike the room next door, this one had no bar or television. Instead it had a glass wall that looked onto the Magothy River over a dock and a pier. The view at night was spectacular and this was a night full of stars. She had learned long ago to read the stars for direction and as she left her car to enter ‘Amerigo Fratelli’s’, she found herself instinctively looking upward to get her bearings.

  Inside the cozy Italian restaurant, she found her colleagues waiting with several vegetable pizzas, platters of antipasto and cold drinks. Feeling nostalgic, she ordered Chianti.

  “So now you can answer my question, Professor Cowan,” began Ted Michalak. “How come you focus more on bin Laden than anyone else? I mean, you never hear about the guy that much in the media. Even after the bombing of the USS Cole last year, no one claimed the attack but everyone hinted that it was Osama bin Laden who masterminded it. Why can’t anyone find him?’

  “Tedeuz, if I may call you by your first name,” Emily answered politely, “Osama bin Laden is somewhat of an enigma. Wouldn’t you say so, Dr. Jackson?” He nodded his agreement. “In the next few weeks,” she went on, “I will break down the myth into a more human form. You will know as much if not more about bin Laden than the entire intelligence community. As for his whereabouts, Afghanistan is virtually all mountains and caves. Its villages are feudal, they are friendly territory for him and he can easily hide for years. For the people there, he’s a legend and an escape artist and that’s what he feeds on. But you see, for me bin Laden is not a mythic figure. I know him inside and out. I’ve studied the man for twenty years, and while he wouldn’t know me now, we have in fact met. He was a perhaps angry, much troubled, and somewhat sad young man even then. I have heard his views on the world. Some say he had a spiritual vision and became truly committed to Islam when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in the late seventies. He was, at that point, a contemporary of my former missing, hopefully late husband in some ways. As I understand it,” she said with a sigh, “they may have later become friends. Perhaps that’s why the son-of-a-bitc
h dropped off the face of the earth about two decades ago.”

  The table consisting of four students from her lecture, Dr. Jackson and his muse, the attractive and generally talkative Professor Dana Johnson fell into stunned silence.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. 8.00 a.m.

  “Morning, Mother,” Mason Desai, M.D. patted Emily’s shoulder and began to spoon finely ground Arabic coffee into a small blue enamel coffee pot. He poured in water, held the pot over the burner, spooned in sugar and added two cardamom pods. As the water slowly came to a boil he took the pot by its long handle and gently swished the coffee around. Placing it back on the burner, then swishing it two more times, he finally declared it perfect and poured the thick aromatic mixture into two demitasse cups, exactly measuring the contents of each. “Where’s Harrison?” he asked as he handed her one of the tiny cups. “I thought he was off today.”

  “Harrison Evil, as you inappropriately call your stepfather, met with a client late last night and was going to leave the hotel early this morning to avoid the last of the beach crowd returning over the bridge. He should be here anytime,” she replied, holding the fragile demitasse with one hand as she ruffled the hair of the first-born child she loved so dearly.

  “Well I’m off for two days. I’ve only grabbed about ten hours shut-eye since Sunday. The walking wounded can do without me for a day or two.” He picked up his cup and headed from the kitchen into the small office at the other end of the ancient beach house his mother and stepfather owned at the mouth of the Little Magothy River.

  Mason Desai was just thirty-one years old, slightly over six feet tall, slim but of muscular proportion. A full head of black hair curling rebelliously around his shirt collar gave him the look of an ancient Greek statue. His ancestry was, however, not Greek but Afghani and Anglo-Arab, and the plurality of his heritage was plain in his olive skin, prominent nose, dark brows and sensual mouth, offset by sad dark eyes which flashed from hazel to brown depending on his level of concentration.

  Mason was ending his first year of residency in the Emergency Medicine department of the Annapolis City Hospital. His own small apartment was in Annapolis proper. However, on his days off he usually returned to his parent’s home in Cape St. Andrew, where he could unwind and forget the emergency room by taking out his boat and heading toward the Chesapeake Bay.

  The handsome young man had inherited his love of the sea as well as his nearly English accent and speech patterns from his mother, the former Emily Byron Desai. The only child of a wealthy Middle Eastern father and an English mother, Emily was the product of English private schools and she had provided no less for her two children. Mason, who was named Masud at birth and Hallah, his younger sister now known as Haley spent their formulative years between three homes. The first in historic Chester, a city complete with its surviving Roman wall and winding roads built by the marauding conquerors and the second in Heidelberg, but it was this house in Cape St. Andrew facing Maryland’s Little Magothy River where it joined the Chesapeake Bay that they, along with Emily’s second husband Harrison Cowan felt completely safe and relaxed.

  Cowan, an expert on computers and bio-security was in great demand. A Scots ex-patriot who had lived in the United States for several decades, he inherited the waterfront property from his uncle who married into an old Annapolis family just after World War II. The large, comfortable beach house set well back on the banks of the river was conveniently close to colonial Annapolis and its U.S. Naval Academy as well as being less than an hour from both Washington D.C. and Baltimore. It was their piece of heaven, well hidden from prying eyes, spacious yet informal. Here they could walk along the beach, watch the sunset and forget world affairs. It was also a place where dignitaries, presidents, prime ministers, and members of various and sundry intelligence services regularly dropped by for “a brief word” with the couple, knowing fully well that their secrets were safe.

  “So how did the lecture go last night?” Mason shouted from their home office back into the kitchen where Emily had commandeered the large antique walnut table for her reports on al-Qaeda and textbooks on terrorism.

  “Funny you should ask. Someone asked me if I knew bin Laden personally.”

  “No shit? What did you say?” putting his long slim feet on his step-father’s mahogany desk.

  “Have you lost your mind, Mason? Get your bloody feet off that desk!” his mother shouted, entering the office and shoving his feet off of the desk. “I just told the truth. I met bin Laden in a bar in Beirut in the early seventies with an undercover agent! How should I have answered him, I wonder?”

  “Sorry I asked. You’re certainly uptight this morning.”

  “Mason, this is a very sensitive issue for me. I am convinced that Osama bin Laden, charismatic leader or otherwise is going to push us all into World War III, and frankly no one gives a shit. Every intelligence person I have talked to, British and American gives me the same enigmatic smile and deftly gets off the subject. They’re all ignoring his existence. I just don’t understand it. In my opinion he’s public enemy number one. Everything I’ve researched for the past twenty years points to disaster. This man is a time bomb waiting to go off.” She turned back toward the kitchen.

  “Fair assessment Mother, but you’re a civilian. Get used to it. That’s the Boy’s Club at work for you.”

  Mason turned on the tiny television in Emily’s office. It was 8.49 a.m. He changed channels and found himself looking at flames shooting out of New York City’s World Trade Center. Bryant Gumble, appearing stunned, was chattering somewhat senselessly.

  Mason yelled for his mother to come back to her office. The network replayed the shot of the Twin Towers, this time a small black object could be seen hitting the building. It was a jetliner! Four or five floors, three-quarters of the way up were in flames. Within minutes a second plane struck People were jumping out of the windows. Emily, astonished, turned to her son. “We’re under attack! This is al-Qaeda! Call your sister!” Emma yelled at her son as she rang her husband’s office.

  “Where is she?” he asked, dialing Haley’s cell phone from his.

  “At a conference in the Pentagon,” his mother replied, with dread creeping into her heart.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hallah Desai, now known as Haley Agar was twenty-nine years old and celebrating her recent divorce. A federal government lawyer working for the National Transportation Safety Board, on this day, September 11th, 2001 she was on assignment to the Pentagon in order to attend a conference at the Navy Command Center. The conference was scheduled to begin at 10.30 a.m. Haley Agar had decided to arrive early, unafraid of calories and with a longing for chicken fried steak and hash browns, she planned to eat a hearty breakfast and later head to the conference room. Her family would later claim that her voracious appetite saved her life.

  At precisely 9.37 a.m. Haley’s cell phone rang. It was her brother, her best friend and protector. He rapidly explained what he had seen. “Tell the old girl I’m OK. I don’t know what the fuck is happening,” she said with a note of alarm, looking at the people running past her, “but this place is going crazy as well. I’ll try and get back to you later.” Pushing her cell phone back into the side of her briefcase, Haley, thanking her common sense for wearing flat heeled shoes, began to run in the direction of the crowds.

  Two minutes later, a 757 jet hit the first floor of the command center. Haley estimated she was about two hundred feet away. From a window, the plane’s tail was fully visible to her. She saw the American Airlines logo. It looked at first as though it was going to try to land. Haley would report later that no landing gear was visible to her. She watched, horrified, as it headed directly towards the center. Its impact decimated the support columns of the building. She was so close that she could see the plane’s logo, the eagle burning fire red. Her eyes stung with dust, jet fuel and burning rubber. The cloying odor of both fear and death filled her lungs and made her heart race. The plane, sh
e understood later, exploded, with fireballs of jet fuel spreading into the hallways of the Command Center’s E and D rings. Flames erupted everywhere, followed almost immediately by the sounds of sirens. Two of Fairfax County’s specially trained Urban Search and Rescue Units were on their way with teams of emergency personnel following right behind them. Together they converged on the rubble of what had minutes earlier been an operations center in the nucleus of the nation’s defense.

  As two ten-person squads began their search for survivors, firefighters battled flames and medics treated the wounded. Haley Agar watched in silence from a safe vantage point on a hill, along with some evacuated service personnel. Above them rescue helicopters whirred loudly as they surveyed the damage. It was unreal. Like a Hollywood movie. This could not be happening! Not here in America, she thought in panic. Not the Pentagon. Jesus Christ, not the Pentagon! That’s where everything is!

  The military personnel next to her were talking about New York being hit as well. The World Trade Center was on fire. A terrorist attack! Haley had a nagging suspicion and could not help wondering if this had all been somehow anticipated. Everyone was too prepared. Then again, she thought, this was the Pentagon. They should be prepared. That’s what they do.

  She reached in her pocket for her cell phone and called home once again. “Mace, it’s me. I’m ok. This place is a mess, there’s no way I can get home anytime soon. The Feds will close down everything and I’ll never get out of Arlington. I’ll try to get back to my car and check into the nearest hotel.” She laughed wryly, “It’s not like this place is going to be a tourist attraction for a bit, right?” Promising to call again within the hour she hung up and along with hundreds of people sharing same desire for safety, ran hurriedly away from the debris.