by Ben Shapiro
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“And what was I? The sucker?”
“No. You were the bad cop. And I was the good cop. That’s how the game is played. You’re too young to remember Marion Barry. Now that was a professional. Played the game to perfection, man. He told the Black Panthers that they ought to make a little trouble in town. Then he played the moderate, told the white folks that he could calm them down if they just signed a few checks. One time he told me, ‘I know for a fact that white people get scared of the Panthers, and they might give money to somebody a little more moderate.’ You, Levon, are the new Panthers. And I’m the moderate.”
“So what did you get out of the deal? A big donation to the action fund?”
The reverend grimaced. “What’s so wrong with that? Every dollar in is a dollar we can use to fight the system. And don’t worry. Everybody has to play bad cop sometimes. I did it back in the day. Now it’s your turn.”
Levon hesitated. Then he slowly clenched his fist. “And what if there’s no room for good cop? What if the time for the good cop is over?”
Big Jim actually laughed. “You think you’re the first one ever to feel that way, don’t you? Boy, you don’t know shit. This ain’t slavery. This ain’t Jim Crow. This is just the ghetto. I’ve seen ’em all over, and I’ll tell you what: burning the ghetto down doesn’t do anything but make room for people like me to clean up. You’ll know that some day.”
Levon went quiet. Then, after a long pause, he spoke. “Reverend, opportunities like this come along once in a lifetime.”
“No, boy, they come along once every three weeks or so. I know. I’ve mapped it out.” He stood, then put his heavy hand on Levon’s shoulder. “Now, Levon, if you think I’m gonna leave you hanging like this, that’s where you’re wrong. See, I’ve got a proposition. Here’s what I’m gonna propose. The mayor needs a community group to give him the green light for his activities, lend him political cover. I’m not going to be in town long enough to carry that forward. But you can. You’ll be a big man in this city, Levon. Go mainstream.”
Levon stood up, peered down at Big Jim. “There’s only one issue, Reverend. You said that the white cop might be indicted. What if he isn’t?”
Big Jim looked straight at Levon. “Well, that’s why we’ve got a system, right? Get your boys off the street. They’re making us look bad.”
Levon shook his head. “System. Sorry, Reverend. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t get my boys off the street. And I’m sorry if they’re making you look bad. See, it turns out, I have some bad cops, too.”
Big Jim grit his teeth. “Fast learner, kid. Fast learner.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting with the mayor.”
“I’ll come along.”
He shook his head. “No, kid, you won’t. You’ll do what you’re told. Remember, you were nobody before I got here. And I can put you right back there with just a snap. After all, I’m the man who saved Detroit. You said so yourself. But don’t worry. You’ve got spunk. I’ll keep you in the loop, give you a call when we’re done.”
But he didn’t.
As the hours passed, Levon began pacing the hotel conference room. Then he called one of his deputies, took the elevator down to the parking lot, got in his car, and headed back to the barbershop.
It was already packed when he pulled up. In the shop sat a slightly overweight black woman. Regina Malone clutched a handkerchief to her face; her heavy makeup was streaked with tears. She looked like she hadn’t stopped crying since she found out about her son, Kendrick, and the truth was, she hadn’t. Kendrick had been her youngest boy, a good boy, she told the media, shot to death because of police racism. The president had called her, offered his condolences, told her he’d stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the case.
The Wayne County prosecutor hadn’t been as forthcoming. She’d been elected through a fluke—the entire government in Wayne County sprang from the Democratic Party, but Kim Donahue had lucked into her job, running at the same time that the Democratic candidate stumbled into jail over a sex and corruption scandal. She’d effectively been appointed to office with no opposition. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Donahue had thrown her hat into the ring almost as a lark—there was no other reason for a white Republican to run for county prosecutor in a 52 percent black district, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by near-Cuban-election margins. When she found herself in office, she’d been faced with a massive backlog of unresolved cases, including murder and rape cases. She’d quickly developed a close relationship with the beleaguered police department.
Now the prosecution of Ricky O’Sullivan lay in Kim Donahue’s hands.
Regina Malone, standing next to Big Jim, had called a press conference at which she asked Donahue to recuse herself, given her ties to the police department. Donahue had refused, stating that she would ensure that justice was served, and that if anyone implied her skin color meant she couldn’t be objective, they were racist. The line made national headlines, turned Kim Donahue into one of the most polarizing political figures in America.
Levon got out of his car, and Regina Malone clutched at his arm like a drowning woman clutching at a life jacket. “Levon, you gotta see this.” She dragged him, her grip iron, into the barbershop, where the crowd had gathered around the lone flat-screen television in the place.
There, on the television, stood Kim Donahue. The chyron read: “DA ANNOUNCES NO CHARGES AGAINST POLICE OFFICER RICKY O’SULLIVAN.” She looked directly into the camera, her blonde hair shining softly in the sun. Levon thought he detected a hint of a smirk on her face. “No matter what the media may think, no matter the pressures brought to bear, I have only one agenda: the people’s agenda. And that agenda is not the agenda of the mob. It is the agenda of justice under our state and federal constitutions. Ricky O’Sullivan was entitled to due process. The evidence does not support manslaughter; it does not support murder in the first or second degree. We all grieve with the Malone family. But we must not pile a miscarriage of justice on top of a terrible tragedy.”
Levon grabbed the remote off the counter, hurled it at the screen. The screen cracked. “Bullshit. This is bullshit.”
Through the cracked glass of the television, the picture shifted. Now, the mayor stood next to Big Jim. Mayor Burns spoke first. “We may not all agree with the decision of Prosecutor Donahue,” he said. “I promise you that the Justice Department will engage in its own investigation. But we ask that everyone please remain calm, allow justice to take its course.” Big Jim stood next to him, nodding at every word. Then Big Jim stepped to the microphone. “We will not stop here to ensure that justice is done. Rioting, looting, violence will not help anything. We heard your call, ‘No justice, no peace,’ and I join that call—let us have peace so that we may have justice.”
The black female news anchor appeared in studio, well-coiffed and manicured, tears in her eyes: “Officer Ricky O’Sullivan is due to be released today from prison; the time and location of his release have not yet been given, due to safety concerns.” Then, unable to hold herself back, she muttered, “Awful, just awful.”
Levon turned off the television and turned to face the crowd in his barbershop. For the first time, he noticed the news cameras all around him. And he realized that, suddenly, he had the advantage: Big Jim was standing next to the mayor of the most racist city in America, and he was standing next to the black mother of a black child who had just been shot by a white cop—and that white cop had just been allowed to walk by a white DA.
The camera zoomed in on Levon. He forced himself to cry, just a tear; he looked up at the browning tiles of the ceiling. Then, he exhaled slowly and looked directly into the camera. “Enough dead children. It stops today.” And he silently led the crowd from his barbershop, walking the long miles toward the criminal justice center, picking up stragglers, then groups, then dozens, then hundreds a
long the way, a sea of faces, a sea of enraged faces, all of them with the pain of centuries written on them, each burning with an ember that Levon fully intended to stoke into an open fire.
New York City
Brett surveyed the damage from the top of a nearby parking lot. It stretched before him like a diorama: unreal, in miniature, too dramatic for life. Since the attacks, all commercial air travel had been shut down, thanks to warnings from the Department of Homeland Security. The terror chatter had actually elevated after the attack. DHS thought the airlines could be targeted again, given the focus on the destruction of the bridge.
Brett’s homecoming hadn’t been much of one. By the time he landed, his rescue, if you could call it that, had been blown off the front pages by the terror attack. His flight back to Texas had been canceled, and he’d been stashed at a local hotel, with guards on him at nearly all times—the president was obviously worried he’d talk to the media without handlers nearby. Ellen had hinted via phone that some big move was imminent in Texas from the governor, but he hadn’t had time to focus on that: he’d been more focused on helping out Bill Collier. Collier’s wife, Jennifer, had been on the bridge. They still hadn’t dredged up her body.
The day after his arrival, Bill had met Brett at his hotel. He’d dismissed the security for a few minutes. Brett could see that his friend had aged a century in a day—his face looked craggy, his eyes sunken. Bill had been married to Jennifer for a long time. He’d also lost his daughter in the attack, an eight-year-old he’d called his Little Trooper.
But Bill Collier would have no time to grieve until the cleanup was handled. Bill told him that National Guard units from across the country had been activated, ordered to New York to assist with the national crisis. He told him that the president would use the opportunity to call for a massive spending package on infrastructure, urge further cuts to the military to “build up on the home front.”
Then he told Brett that he’d be personally ordering him to New York City.
“The president won’t like that,” Brett had said.
“Tough. My patience for bullshit goes out the window after I watch them search on television for my daughter’s body,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I’ll make whatever excuses I have to make. I want to know who is responsible for this. And right now, you’re my best lead. You’re the only person who’s seen this Mohammed. I think Ashammi’s behind it. So does intelligence. He hasn’t taken credit yet, but I want you to track down whoever it is you think you saw.”
“You said it yourself: it’s a needle in a haystack.”
“We might have a lead. But I need your eyes on it. I’m sending you to New York on the next military flight. I’ll make excuses to the president. But I’ll need your word that you stay away from the media. That’s the only thing Prescott cares about.”
Brett nodded. Then, slowly, he said, “I’m sorry about your family, Bill.”
Collier grimaced. “Yeah, me too,” he said. “Me too. Now go get the pieces of shit who did this so I can bomb them back into the sixth century.”
The next morning, Brett had flown to New York.
Now, looking at the damage, Brett punished himself for not having been able to warn intelligence sooner. If only he’d used the Morse code to tell them something was coming from Ashammi. If only he’d blinked the name Mohammed. In his heart, he knew it wouldn’t have helped. America had blinded itself in the name of peace—and Brett knew that hope wouldn’t buy peace anyway.
He turned his back on the Hudson, where the sunken bridge still lay slumbering under acres of water, the calm of the surface masking the graves of thousands of Americans. The American public had called the Iraq War too bloody, the Afghanistan War too costly; combined, America had lost fewer than seven thousand people. Now, on one day, they’d lost far more than that.
His cell phone rang. It was Collier. “Get over to JFK,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for you.”
The airport felt like a mausoleum, completely empty, completely deserted, utterly quiet. The planes sat at their terminals like sleeping grasshoppers. Abandoned vehicles dotted the tarmac. Brett sat in a secure room, flanked by two members of the Port Authority security team. Before him, on a cheap plastic table, sat a laptop, spreadsheets of flight manifests open. Brett quickly narrowed down the location of the flights—there were obviously no direct flights from the Islamic Republic to New York. Most stopped in Frankfurt or Munich or Dubai. There was no guarantee Mohammed had flown into New York, either—he could have flown into Newark, or even Boston Logan or any nearby area airport.
After realizing that there were simply too many combinations of flights to check every itinerary and every manifest, Brett finally dispensed with the politically correct pleasantries. “Jim,” he’d said to one of the officials, “I want access to the customs files.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” murmured the official, “is there somebody we’re looking for particularly?”
Brett said, “Yes. An Arabic-looking young man.”
The official hemmed and hawed. “I’m uncomfortable with that, sir. That’s racial profiling.”
“You’re not doing the profiling. I am.”
“Well, now I’m a party to it.”
Brett stared into his face. “I. Don’t. Care. Just do it.”
“Sir, it’s against regulations, though.”
“Look,” Brett burst out, losing his patience, “I don’t give a rat’s ass at this point whether it’s racial profiling or not. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Mohammed is a light-skinned Norwegian woman or a Cherokee elder. Or maybe he’s a Persian or Arabic-looking son of a bitch who hangs out with other Persian or Arabic-looking sons of bitches who look like Ibrahim Ashammi. If I end up being wrong, and he looks like Helen Mirren, feel free to tell The New York Times editorial board about it.”
The official scurried out of the room. Brett turned back to the manifests. There would be hundreds, maybe thousands of possible leads, men who had flown from the Middle East through some midpoint in the days between Brett’s capture and the bridge attack. With just a name, Mohammed, he wouldn’t have enough.
He picked up his cell phone, tapped it against his wrist. Then he scrolled through his contacts. When he reached the name “Hassan Abdul,” he dialed.
The café was virtually empty. That would have been odd on a normal day, but with the entire city under virtual military occupation, it somehow felt normal. Brett had been in war zones before, and this felt like a war zone. The smell of ash still hung over the city days later. Every so often, a military convoy would pass down Fifth Avenue, or the occasional ambulance, siren blaring. Brett had seen the real-time coverage of the September 11 attacks. This felt bigger in every way.
The man across the table from Brett had grown since high school. He wore a short-cropped beard now, as well as a taquiyah. He’d also taken to wearing a pair of rimless round glasses, which he wore perched on the tip of his nose. Behind those glasses, though, it was still Derek, smiling eyes, the kid who’d once sung “Ebony and Ivory” to get him out of a confrontation with a mammoth named Yard. Brett and Derek had kept in touch after high school; Derek had gone on to the University of Illinois. There, he’d become enamored of Islam, in particular the later teachings of Malcolm X—the ones, Derek said, that Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan ignored. “They didn’t shoot Malcolm for being a racial radical, or for yelling about the white man,” Derek said. “They shot him because he taught true Islam. The Islam of peace. They didn’t kill him until he changed his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and started talking about how Islam taught tolerance for religious plurality and political differences and racial diversity.” Derek’s own brand of Christianity, he’d told Brett, had seemed washed out and pale next to this broader religion; his mother had taken him to church once in a while and given him a whupping if he’d been caught skipping Sunday school, bu
t he didn’t know much about Jesus other than the pictures of the white man on the wall. He’d found his peace in Islam, changed his name to Hassan Abdul—“Beautiful Servant” in Arabic.
Hassan had gotten active at his local mosque, gone on hajj, experienced the magic Malcolm X had talked about. He’d also experienced something else: the perversion of what he believed his religion to be. In Saudi Arabia, he’d seen corporal punishment taking place. He’d seen the repression of the regime, and he’d heard the complaints of citizens whispering about the corruption of the monarchy, the loose talk about religiously purer heroes, men like Osama bin Laden. Upon his return to the United States, he’d moved to Virginia for work, attended mosque at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center near Washington, DC.
There, he’d met Anwar al-Awlaki. Charismatic, scholarly, soft-spoken, brilliant, al-Awlaki quickly built a following in the mosque. His classes were deeply conspiratorial, charismatically magnetic. The Zionist entity, he said, was responsible for Muslim suffering the world over, an outpost of Western colonialism and racism; groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda were fighting for a stronger Islam. Hassan Abdul said nothing. He did nothing. He thought perhaps this was just another strain of Islam. After all, Malcolm X had spoken in favor of ideological diversity.
Then, on September 11, he’d seen al-Awlaki’s impact. The government linked al-Awlaki to two of the hijackers. And the Saudi government had backed the mosque because so long as outrage was focused without rather than within, it served their purposes.
After September 11, Hassan spoke to Brett, and Brett set up a covert meeting with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hassan Abdul became a mole. His jobs changed over the years, as did his location. His responsibility under the Bush administration had been to provide leads on possible terror suspects attending mosques in prominent urban areas. For the past several years, he had been stationed in New York City. At the mosque, he posed as a borderline radical—he spoke regularly about the injustices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—but during his off-hours, he spoke frequently with a connection at the FBI. When al-Awlaki made contact with the treasurer of a local mosque via e-mail, the FBI found out, because that treasurer was Hassan Abdul.