Kasim was fast on the reply.
“Special Agent Memphis, the government’s case is extremely weak. Your own officers will testify that no doors were locked between Mrs. McDowell and themselves. There were no firearms, nor weapons of any sort, found within, according to your own evidence team. No marks of bondage were discovered or documented. No bruises, no abrasions, no physical evidence of any kind of abuse has been documented, nor can it be. At no time did the woman merely say, ‘I wish to go home.’ Had she, compliance would have been immediate.”
“She tells a different story, and the situation as discovered by the SWAT team—four men grilling a single woman under harsh lighting—is itself prima facie evidence of most of the charges. Moreover, the courts have long held that psychological intimidation—the suggestion, the intimation, the subtle inference of force—is force. Bruises are not necessary, only witness testimony of intimidation as to direction.”
“Our position is unassailable: the woman discovered to be representing herself under false identification was asked to discuss her presence on private property after hours. She agreed to do so. That discussion was ongoing when the officers—well, we can’t say burst in, since no bursting was necessary through the unlocked doors—but they strolled in. That is all that happened.”
“If Mrs. McDowell represented a threat to you, you had recourse to the law: merely phone the police. She would have been taken into custody, examined, and her case processed as the law found. You had no right to take her captive, to threaten her—verbally or nonverbally—with violence, and to detain her. This is true whether she’s an FBI contract employee or not. It further seems that your true methodology here was deprivation, as you meant to wear her down by denying her sleep. That is torture, by any definition. It is actionable, if we deem it appropriate.”
Kasim replied that Mrs. McDowell was hardly irreproachable herself. “It turns out she had appointed herself a one-woman crusade and has bedeviled your security forces with paranoid conspiracy stories of Islamic evil for years. We are sympathetic, given the tragic loss of her son, but only to a point. The fact is, her irrationality has been long documented, I am learning, and more evidence will be forthcoming. That makes her an unreliable witness. On top of that, I can promise you adverse publicity, demonstrations and other sorts of highly unflattering and bothersome attention, if you proceed with this issue. I hope you do. I think the good people of the United States would be interested to learn their tax dollars were being spent on wild-goose chases of purely anti-Islamic hate under the aegis of a crazy woman. I’m sure allegations of an out-of-control Bureau would not be welcome, given the situation you find yourself in.”
“Publicity cuts two ways, Mr. Kasim. I’m told there are many wealthy, conservative donors who support this mosque. Those donations could dry up if it became public the imam was involved in possible terrorist activities, to say nothing of kidnapping, intimidation, and torture. Moreover, the three other men in the room are not members of the dance committee but members of mosques known in the area to be far more radical in orientation. Two of them have prison records. Does the imam want that to become public knowledge? Whatever good he hopes to do his cause he cannot do if his position is lost and his reputation is tarnished.”
“Since we both have much to lose,” said Kasim, “perhaps it is incumbent upon the government to consider a less dramatic course of action than a terrorist trial against a Dearborn imam, certain to stir controversy and attract national attention no matter the outcome. There is no reason this has to go any further, and if the TV cameras go away before the noon news tomorrow, few will remember in a couple of days. All will be restored.”
“Restoration might be possible, but only if the imam cooperates with us. Judging by the quality of the other men, he is the only one of sufficient intellect to explain what was going on and to identify the mysterious visitor sleeping in the building. We have to understand who he was and why he was here.”
“Let me confer with my client, please,” said Kasim. He and the imam rolled away on their chairs to a far corner and, there, chatted for a bit.
When they were done and had returned to the table, Kasim said, “He might be willing to acknowledge certain unusual occurrences within the mosque over the past week. No names can be given, nor any telephone numbers, and no computers will be turned over, but we will work to inform you of what little we know, and you will see how misplaced your apprehension is.”
But at that moment, Chandler entered. She walked over to Nick, whispered in his ear, and deposited a folder in front of him. He nodded, opened the folder, and read the first document.
* * *
• • •
Restoration is possible,” Nick was saying on the screen, and Bob, in the television room, turned to Chandler and said, “See, this is where I’d attach the electrodes to his ears.”
She didn’t laugh. She just shook her head sadly and leaned past Bob toward the third member of the audience and said, “Mr. Gold, can you control him?”
“I believe the record shows nobody can control Mr. Swagger,” said Gold.
“Chandler, it was a . . . Oh, you were joking too, now I get it. No, I didn’t really mean to electrify him, and, no, you didn’t mean for Mr. Gold to stuff a sock in my mouth.”
“I get your point,” she said. “It’s boring. Laborious exchange of legalisms. So let’s speed it up. It’s time for my cameo.”
She smiled and rose.
“Pay attention, boys, you’re gonna like this!”
* * *
• • •
Nick set the folder down.
“Hmm,” he said. “Seems like the stakes have changed.”
But to draw out the theater of the thing, he nodded to the prosecutor and Houston, and they rolled backwards and muttered among themselves, while the defense attorney and the imam watched without a lot of enthusiasm. Then the threesome returned to the table.
“This just in. Our evidence team managed to collect some latent prints from the faucet of the lavatory immediately adjacent to the basement bedroom, and two more from the leather straps inside the suitcase, which was otherwise packed with newly bought underwear and shirts of Canadian manufacture, as if someone were trying to hide his origin. But fingerprints don’t lie. We ran the prints against not only our own but the Interpol database, and one print, the right thumb, came up with a hit. That print belongs to a former sergeant in the Syrian army named Alamir Alaqua. It turns out Sergeant Alaqua has quite a record, much of it in Israel, where the same fingerprint was found at the site of an atrocity involving the shooting deaths of seventeen children. Sergeant Alaqua is known by his work name, Juba the Sniper.”
“We had no idea—” started Kasim, but Nick cut him off.
“Juba is on Interpol’s list of ten most wanted international fugitives. Specializes in long-range shooting. Blamed for killings in most of the known world, except, of course, in America. So right away the charge against the imam jumps up to aiding and abetting. That’s a big one.”
He let it sink in.
“Furthermore, if we are unsuccessful in stopping Juba from whatever his mission in America is, we could nail the imam on accessory before the act. That’s a real big one. Suddenly we’re looking at twenty-five years.”
“If Allah so wills,” said the imam, “then let it be so.”
“Yes, easy to say now. You tell him, Mr. Kasim, what twenty-five without parole can do to a man. You’ve seen it.”
The two men said nothing.
“And yet still another possibility is that the Israelis will file charges against you for aiding in the escape of a terrorist wanted by them. Possibly they’ll file to extradite, and, with nothing to lose, I think we’d almost certainly comply without demurral. Off you’d go to Tel Aviv. I don’t think you would enjoy a visit with some very angry Israelis. I suspect they would go after any information you have
a lot less civilly than we do. No friendly late-night chats in rooms with your lawyer present.”
Again, the two men were quiet.
* * *
• • •
The Israeli threat was enough to get el-Tariq’s mouth running,” said Nick to Mrs. McDowell in her hospital room the next day. “Now, I can’t tell you what the issue here is, as it’s classified, and you are not cleared. Sorry. But let me say again: we think you did a great job.”
“So—it was worth it?” she asked. “I didn’t pop the button too early?”
“These clowns could have turned ugly. If you waited, you might not have gotten a chance. You’re here, you did your duty.”
“I’m so happy to be of use.”
“Here’s what you got us: we confirmed that Juba is in America and that he sheltered at this mosque. That’s the first step of a long process. We didn’t get him, no, but that’s just the way the cards fell. He was out ‘learning’ and was smart enough to get away when he was alerted the imam had busted you. If the cards had been different, he would have been down there in that little basement room and it would have been game over.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Can’t be helped. Tell her, Mr. Gold.”
“Mrs. McDowell, the importunes of providence in these affairs are always puzzling. Enough to suggest that God’s favorite weapon is His sense of randomness, which keeps any of us from getting too smug.”
“But,” said Nick, “we also learned a lot. El-Tariq has connex with a previously unknown terrorist cell, which we’ll track and bring down. We learned that through these guys, el-Tariq had access to Dark Web intelligence penetrations, including the Social Security database and some kind of facial recognition technology. They got your face from your driver’s license, ran it, and came across the photo in The Baltimore Sun of Tommy and you, which ran with his obit. That’s big-time facial ID software, so it proved again there’s a lot of money and ambition behind this. But now we’ve got our computer people working on any leads that dope may run to.”
“And the kid,” said Swagger. “We got the kid.”
“Yes,” said Nick. “Potentially, the game winner. We’ve got a picture and other ID of the boy who’s running with Juba. We’ve got all his credit information, which has been flagged for instant law enforcement notification if accessed. And his picture has been sent to four thousand police agencies, so we think it’s only a matter of time.”
“What do you think, Mr. Swagger?”
“I’m surprised that Juba has hooked up with this kid. It’s not like him. I mean, look at him. He could be any kid at the mall.”
They had the file on Jared before them. He was Grosse Pointe all the way, his father being one of the most successful periodontists in the suburbs of the Motor City. Jared graduated from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, did two years at Princeton, followed by two years at the University of Cairo in Egypt, the site of his radicalization. Since then, he’d accomplished little of merit, just hanging around the fringes of the rad scene in Dearborn, threatening to go join the ISIS armed fighters in northern Syria, but not wanting to be too far from an ATM that delivers monthly support from his father. He liked being on the edge of the gulf between legal and illegal, as if he had the guts to cross it, but there was no evidence that he had—yet. One could easily see why the imam picked him as Juba’s tutor in the ways of America, for it would enable young Jared to indulge in his fantasy life, but safely. Except now he was on the run, stuck.
“Juba’s normally more self-reliant,” said Nick. “But remember, he’s a stranger in a strange land and probably paranoid and unarmed. He thinks, one mistake and I’m gone. He needs an enabler. Meanwhile, we’ve got legal intercepts on Jared’s parents’ and his friends’ phones, as well as emails. He’ll be the one that cracks. He’ll miss Ma and Pa. He’ll get lonely. He’ll sneak away, put in a phone call, and once we’ve got a heading on that, it’s over.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Janet said. “He’s young, he’s stupid, and people have always lied to him.”
No one had to ask how she knew.
20
South of Seven Mile Road
That same night
First rule of the raid: recon,” said Juba.
“Do you mind if I wait in the car?” said Jared.
“You follow on me and keep your mouth shut.”
The older man led the younger across the street, well down from the stash house. They waited in the alley, and when they heard nothing, they edged forward, surrounded on either side by the hulks of abandoned houses. The wind rushed, the stars were clearly visible, and their breath turned to vapor. Jared was already huffing.
They reached the property line, noting three gleaming vehicles parked in the alley: another SUV and two slick Mercedes S’s. All looked brand-new, freshly waxed, and preposterous here in the back alley of a rotting city. All three made the point that nobody fucked with these guys.
Juba crept through a fallen fence, edged through overgrown bushes, and shunted low across the yard, coming to rest in the lee of the house. Jared followed, a good deal less adeptly.
It was a prewar bungalow, brick, maybe prefab from Sears, Roebuck. Really, just a single story, with a few windows, probably a couple of small bedrooms off a hall, a living room, a dining room. There was a bit of an upstairs, under the eaves of the mansard roof. It looked like every other house in what had been an autoworkers’ neighborhood in the salad days before the Japanese attack—on Detroit, not Pearl Harbor. The house was old and sad and broken. It wanted to die.
“On your belly,” said Juba.
He crawled to the window, went still under its amber glow, waited for Jared to join him. Then he squirmed out and very slowly stood, surveyed, and ducked down.
“Three men, laughing. Lots of money. Lots of weapons—shotguns, mostly, and pistols. The windows are barred. A TV.”
“Must be the rec room,” said Jared.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“If it’s only three, we’re fine. Come.”
They repeated the drill at the next window, then slid around back. At each window, Juba took his recon, and in none did he find more men. Upstairs might be another matter, but he didn’t think so. He also stopped at the rear door. Leaving Jared behind, he squirmed around to the front, slid under the windows, showing nothing, and examined the door.
When he returned, he drew Jared back to the bushes and into the alley.
“Only the three. Maybe upstairs some women, but they’ll be no problem.”
“Maybe you underestimate women in the drug trade.”
“Okay, we kill them too.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Let’s not kill any women. Actually, I’d prefer if—”
“We follow Allah, little boy. We do what must be done.”
“I can’t kill a woman,” said Jared.
Juba looked at him squarely. “Are you jihadi?”
“I guess,” said Jared.
“Okay.”
He abandoned the boy and went into the bushes. After some effort, grunting and tugging, he emerged with a straight ten inches of branch, from which he was busily trimming smaller limbs and twigs. He turned to a patch of unruptured asphalt in the alley and set to sharpening one end by aggressively turning and grinding it at an angle and, in a bit of time, had manufactured a pointed tip that looked like the business end of a bayonet.
He turned to the boy.
“We go to front and—”
“Whoa! Wouldn’t it be better to go back? Nobody to see. Suppose a cop happens to drive by?”
“The back door swings outward on hinges. You can’t get through it. The front swings inward. Also, it’s a new hollow-core door and it doesn’t look very strong. Locks come out of the wood easily. Understand?”
“Yeah,” said Jared without
enthusiasm.
“Remember, you don’t touch, you don’t spit, you don’t rub. You don’t shed hair. Take off your sweatshirt and wrap your head to prevent hair from shedding. Also, cover your face, since if anybody sees it, they must die. If there are women there and they see your face, they must die. Or, maybe easier, I’ll kill you, let them live.”
“Ha ha,” said Jared. “Now you’re the funny one.”
“It’s time. Be a man.”
They crept to the lee of the house again, low-crawled down the side, turned the corner toward the front, and reached the front door.
“Go on,” said Juba. “Do it! Now!”
Jared swallowed and stood. More gracefully, more fluently, more practiced, Juba stood next to him, back against the door.
Jared pounded hard on its surface, feeling the rebound of the wood with each blow.
Nothing. He pounded again.
Sounds of scuttling inside.
Then the thump-thump of someone racing down the hall.
“Who the fuck is that?” came the call from the door.
“Ginger sent me. Man, he’s hurt bad. They jumped him, beat his ass, and took his shit. I think he’s going to die.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Ginger told me to come here. He may be dead by now.”
A view hole in the door opened, as whoever was in there had to check out the messenger before deciding what to do. Juba pivoted and without pause or hesitation, but with full strength, commitment, and great accuracy, jammed the sharpened stick through the hole.
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