Root and Branch

by Preston Fleming

  Amjad and Anita exchanged troubled looks. Neither dared utter the term that was on both their minds.

  “Listen, Imran, if you don’t care about material possessions, that’s fine,” Anita addressed her son in a soothing voice. “In this country, you can become anything you want! You can study to be a doctor, an engineer, a scientist, a lawyer, or even a musician or an artist, if that’s what makes you happy. There’s no limit to how far you can go with a little talent and a lot of hard work. That’s what they mean by the American Dream. And it’s all yours for the taking! You just have to make up your mind and exert yourself.”

  Imran maintained a respectful silence but kept looking down at his feet.

  “Get a life, Imran!” his father joined in. “Figure it out! Don’t make trouble for yourself by hanging out with people who hate this country and only want to stir trouble. Look at the mess the Islamists have made wherever they take power! I grew up in a Muslim country. And believe me, it was no paradise.”

  But the father’s admonition seemed to fall on deaf ears. Without a word, the teen turned on his heel and stalked off to his bedroom. Both parents followed him with their eyes until he was out of sight. Neither knew what to say.

  Imran’s sister’s face darkened and her lower lip quavered, as if she knew the depth of her brother’s inner turmoil but dared not acknowledge it. Instead, she picked her backpack off the floor and carried it to the far end of the family room, as if to lose herself in her homework until summoned for dinner.

  Amjad stepped closer to his wife and reached around her waist to switch on the radio. Then he set the volume high enough that their daughter wouldn’t be able to overhear.

  “Damned if I know what’s gotten into him, Anita. We certainly didn’t raise him to be this way,” Amjad said of his son. “And there’s a very good reason I never took him to the mosque, except for funerals. I wanted him to grow up American and not be infected by all that Salafist3 nonsense! And now look what we get for our pains!”

  Anita didn’t raise her eyes from the stove when she responded.

  “It’s got to be those people he met online last fall before he traveled to Dhaka. They must have led him astray. Do you think it would help if we took away his cell phone and internet privileges for a while, until he straightens out?”

  Amjad shook his head and let out a deep breath.

  “I think it may be too late for that, Anita. Yesterday I walked into Imran’s room without knocking and caught him watching jihadi recruitment videos. So gruesome! All manner of shootings, slashings and explosions! I caught only a few images but it was enough to make a person vomit. Then I checked out his laptop while he was away. It seems he’s installed a Tor browser for surfing the Dark Web. That’s not good. Not good at all.”

  “Why? What’s the Dark Web?”

  “It’s where the jihadis post their anonymous videos and bomb-making recipes. And trade things like weapons, illegal drugs, child porn, stolen passwords, phony IDs…”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Anita winced, still looking down at her cooking. “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m at my wit’s end over that boy. Lately I’ve been thinking about gathering all the people who care about him to persuade him to stop.”

  “An intervention?” Anita turned her head to meet her husband’s gaze.

  Amjad nodded.

  “Or maybe we could send him to one of those places where they deprogram young people from cults like Hare Krishna and Scientology,” he suggested. “I hear they even have deprogramming for Salafists now.”

  But despite the pain visible in her husband’s eyes, Anita could see that he didn’t consider deprogramming a viable option. She turned off the gas under the frying pan and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

  “I would try anything at all if I thought it would bring Imran back,” Amjad went on. “But I fear that whatever we try will make matters worse. We probably should have stepped in last December, when he said he wanted to fly to Dhaka to meet my extended family. Or when he came home a week after the start of classes wearing throat whiskers and baggy pants.”

  “I suppose you’re right in hindsight,” Anita mused.

  Amjad peeled away from his wife to fetch a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator.

  “Maybe if we’d cracked down then, made him shave and throw away the tribal outfits, he might have listened,” Amjad continued. “Maybe our mistake was to let him wear us down. We were both so hopeful he would grow out of it.”

  Amjad twisted the screw top off the wine bottle and poured out two generous glasses, handing one to his wife and waiting for her to drink before he did.

  “Thank you, it’s delicious,” she said without taking time to judge the wine, a supermarket chardonnay. “You know, I never thought I’d say this, but maybe it’s a good thing that Mona never took an interest in religion. Maybe she’s better off just going through the motions. Let her believe in science. Or socialism, even.”

  Anita took another sip of wine, and then another, before speaking again.

  “I wish Mona had warned us about Imran. I’m sure she saw the signs long before we did. But that’s just the way Mona is—too loyal to her brother to tell us anything negative about him. And now we may have missed our best chance to get him back.”

  Amjad drank again before glancing across the room at his daughter. Then he turned his back to her and lowered his voice further so that Mona could neither see nor hear see what he was about to say.

  “I’m afraid it’s even worse than that, Anita. I was talking yesterday to some Muslim dads I know, most of them other engineers. They’re good, solid guys, but a couple of them have kids who’ve been radicalized. What they told me is that the government is cracking down on Muslims who have even the slightest connection to radical Islam. Once someone lands on the terrorist watch list, the entire family risks having their visas or green cards revoked—even their naturalization—and being deported without so much as a hearing.”

  “That can’t be true, Amjad. I’ve never heard such a thing. There are laws…”

  “Laws or no laws, these guys told me the names of some local Muslims they claim have disappeared. I knew a couple of them, so I tried to contact them to see if it was true.”

  He paused as their son returned from his bedroom and took a seat next to his sister in the family room, cell phone in hand. Amjad dropped his voice to a whisper.

  “It’s as if they vanished into thin air. A few of the dads I talked to are considering leaving the country until the storm blows over. They say that, even if we denounced our son to the FBI, you and I and Mona still wouldn’t be in the clear.”

  Anita cast a furtive glance toward her teenage son, who was absorbed in his cell phone. Then she picked up her glass of chardonnay once again.

  “We all have American passports,” Amjad went on in a voice that didn’t sound at all like his own. “Why not go somewhere safe: Canada, Europe, Australia, even. We could find temporary work until things cool down.”

  “But what about our careers here? And the house? And the kids’ education?”

  “We could sell the house. The cars, too. And put into storage whatever we don’t sell or give away. We could tell people that one of us got a fabulous job overseas that we couldn’t refuse.”

  “I can’t even imagine doing such a thing!” Anita’s voice shook.

  “I did some research on the web,” Amjad interrupted, his dark eyes blazing. “I found some reporting about the new emergency security measures that just went into effect. At the very least, I think we should consider sending Imran out of the country right away. Then, in another day or two, you and Mona should go. I’ll leave last, once I’ve put the house on the market and sell the cars. That means we would have to give notice to our employers immediately. Like tomorrow.”

  His breathing turned shallow as he awaited his wife’s response.

  “It’s too much for me to think about right now,” Anita answered, her face
gone pale. “Mona and I leave tomorrow afternoon for an indoor soccer tournament in Milwaukee. Can’t this wait till we get back on Sunday?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it can,” he replied warily, downing the last of his wine. “But by Sunday night let’s make a firm decision, okay?”

  Without giving her husband so much as a glance, Anita Ibrahim lifted the frying pan from the stove and emptied its contents onto four preheated plates. Hearing the sound of the metal spatula against the frying pan, Mona and Imran rose silently to take their seats at the kitchen table.

  At four o’clock Friday morning, Hennepin County police officers smashed through the front and rear doors of Amjad Ibrahim’s suburban house with battering rams. Before the homeowner could roll out of bed in his ground-floor master bedroom, a S.W.A.T. team swarmed in, pistols drawn and submachine guns held at the ready. The policemen wore bulky body armor over black fatigues, along with black tactical boots and black Kevlar helmets. Separate squads went for Amjad and his son, binding the suspects’ wrists and ankles with plastic cable ties and holding them at gunpoint while federal agents searched the house. Meanwhile, female officers took Anita and Mona outside to a waiting squad car.

  A shout went up from Imran’s room when a team member struck pay dirt in the bottom drawer of the teenager’s desk, under a pile of old Hustler and Maxim girlie magazines. In a metal tin that once held shortbread cookies, the officers found printouts of jihadist propaganda magazines, weapons training manuals, and bomb-making instructions, along with a box of .22 caliber target ammunition, a handful of computer thumb drives and a sinister-looking tactical knife. In the teen’s dresser, they found jihadi-style clothing and an Arab headdress of the kind made familiar by Palestinian terrorists. An entire shelf in his bookcase held Quranic literature translated into English. Federal agents placed each item in a neatly labeled evidence bag and moved on to the next room.

  Once the initial phase of the search was complete, the police dragged Amjad outside to a waiting police car in time to see his son, still dressed in pajamas and flip-flops, shivering in the bitter cold but not resisting the pair of policemen holding him. Upon noticing his father being led outside, Imran bit his lower lip and his brown eyes filled with tears. Amjad gazed back at the boy with an expression of loving kindness, but before he could blurt out a message to his son, Imran was hustled into the sedan’s back seat and the doors slammed shut. Anita and Mona watched it all from behind their squad car’s tinted glass but no one outside heard their impassioned wails.

  Chapter Five: Triage

  “If you are victorious, the people will always judge the means you used to have been appropriate.”

  –Niccolo Machiavelli

  MARCH, MINNEAPOLIS

  When the DHS’s Dash-8 turboprop aircraft rolled to a stop at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on an icy late March morning, three black SUVs pulled up alongside on the tarmac. Roger Zorn, Patrick Craven and Brandon Choe waited for the other passengers to leave the plane. Then they headed for the last of the three waiting SUVs, where they introduced themselves to their iron-faced driver and accompanying bodyguard: two tall, well-built men who stood with chest thrust out and legs wide apart, as if immovable.

  “We ought to be there in about half an hour, gentlemen, depending on traffic,” the driver announced once his passengers had climbed in.

  “How’s the security situation this morning?” Craven asked. “The local news showed some street battles downtown last night.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” the bodyguard replied. “The shabab raises hell by night and sleeps it off all day. They ought to have quieted down by this time.”

  The driver pulled onto the freeway and, for about twenty minutes, nothing was unusual about the slow morning commute into the city.

  To pass the time during the stop-and-go traffic, Zorn pulled out his cell phone and clicked onto his preferred internet news site. The lead story, as it had been nearly all week, was the ongoing evacuation of EMP-stricken New England. From the Canadian border to Connecticut, the region’s cities, towns and rural areas had no electricity, and as a result no natural gas, no drinking water and no sewage treatment. And since the electromagnetic pulse weapon had also impaired telephone circuits, cellphone towers, computers, and the electronics of most cars and trucks, there was no food in the stores, no fuel at the pumps, no cash in the ATMS, and no meds at the hospitals, even where emergency generators had allowed well-equipped facilities to go on operating for a few days.

  Now crippled vehicles blocked nearly every major road in New England. And those evacuees who were fit enough to flee on foot, shown in video footage pulling wheeled luggage or pushing shopping carts and baby strollers before them, looked ready to expire. Many lay collapsed at roadside aid stations set up to provide emergency food and water. What the cameras didn’t show, and what the newscaster only hinted at, was the looting, the rioting, the home invasions, the gun battles between criminals and neighborhood militias, and the total breakdown of social order. The prosperous and well-ordered society that hardy New Englanders had developed over four centuries was crumbling before Zorn’s eyes. And not at the hands of a rival superpower like Russia or Communist China, but by three failing Third World dictatorships: Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.

  Zorn quit the news app in disgust and put away his phone as the driver slowed the SUV to take the next exit ramp. But a few blocks after leaving the freeway just south of the Minneapolis business district, the surroundings changed. Suddenly the streets were empty, the sidewalks strewn with litter, and graffiti in Somali and Arabic covered the walls of shuttered buildings. Tenement roofs bristled with a forest of satellite dishes.

  “What does that one say?” Craven asked, pointing to a slogan written in Latin letters.

  “I have no idea,” the bodyguard replied. “Probably something like the ones across the street.”

  Zorn looked out the other side of the SUV and read in English, “No justice, no peace,” “Death to the infidel,” and “Behead those who insult the Prophet.” This was no longer a mixed neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification, as some had called it before the intifada. It had become a “no-go zone” in the fullest sense of the term. Here was an area where sharia law seemed to be strictly enforced. No bars, no liquor stores, no representational artwork on billboards, no lottery signs in bodega windows, no stray dogs, no hipster youths with tattoos or piercings, no cross-dressers. And the only pedestrians to be seen were bearded men dressed in flowing robes or short-legged trousers, or women swathed in black from head to toe.

  “Hey, doesn’t your GPS have a routing option to avoid no-go zones?” Choe quipped to the driver.

  “We’re working on it.”

  “A city detective told me that more kids in this neighborhood have fought overseas for ISIS and Al-Qaeda than have joined the U.S. military or law enforcement,” the bodyguard added. “Social workers and utility repair people won’t set foot here. And police can’t send in a lone squad car, as they do in most places. Here they send three: one to answer the call, one for backup, and one to protect the others from being stolen or torched.”

  A few minutes later, the SUV reached its destination, a decommissioned middle school serving as a joint DHS-Minneapolis Police Department annex. Its asphalt playground now did duty as a parking lot while a cinderblock wall topped with razor wire surrounded the compound. Zorn had been here once before, shortly after the site was set up, and had followed its progress closely ever since. Choe had also made an inspection visit the week before and had assured Zorn that the visiting delegation would come away highly impressed from today’s Triage demonstration.

  As the other two SUVs arrived, the bodyguard led Zorn and the other two men to a second-floor room where a dozen theater-style seats faced a one-way observation mirror that looked onto a police interrogation room. That room was empty except for a stainless steel table and three armless metal chairs.

  Inside the observation room, the visitors from Washington huddl
ed around a coffee cart. Apart from Pat Craven and Choe, the only person Zorn recognized was Margaret Slattery, the redheaded attorney from the White House Counsel’s office. According to the meeting roster, the others included a woman from the Justice Department, another representing the Director of National Intelligence, and men from the FBI and ICE1.

  A balding fellow of about forty with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard entered the observation room dressed in gray flannel slacks and a V-neck sweater over a white shirt. This, Zorn expected, would be the Triage site supervisor, a Zorn USA employee who had managed the Triage pilot program in Minneapolis for nearly a year. Although he and Zorn had not met, Choe had informed him that the CEO would be in the audience.

  “I’m so pleased you could join us today,” the supervisor began in an upper Midwest accent, whose rounded o’s and flattened a’s sounded almost Canadian. “We have quite a varied set of interviews for you today, so I’d like to get us off to a prompt start. But first, do any of you have questions about what we do here, or about the Triage technology itself?”

  A short, plump, fiftyish woman still wearing an elegant camel’s hair overcoat in the overheated room raised her hand. Based on an earlier remark from Craven, Zorn placed her as being from the Justice Department and noted that her name was Audrey Lamb. Aboard the plane, she had sat beside Margaret Slattery.

  “Could you give us a brief description of how the system works?” Lamb asked.

  “Certainly,” the supervisor replied. “In a remote control room, our Triage operator will be at his computer, monitoring the subject’s reactions to the interviewer’s questions. Those reactions are gathered via hidden video cameras and microphones designed to monitor voice stress, micro-expressions and body language. Various other sensors record respiration rate, heart function, brain waves, and galvanic skin response, all without the subject knowing what is being collected. Meanwhile, the Triage algorithm compares the subject’s response patterns to those of known criminals and terrorists so as to assess the chances of the subject committing violent acts.”