Game of Snipers

15

Dearborn’s a bitch,” said the special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, Ronald Houston. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody talks to everybody. Everybody listens to everybody. The radicals are buried in the general population but operate with the general population’s tacit support — and, in emergencies, active support. And Arabs — not to stereotype — being volatile, bristly, highly verbal, crafted by a millennium in the marketplace, haggling about everything, haggling for the sheer love of haggling, get lawyered up, are smart about politics, understand leverage and patronage and election support, so the local judiciary has been penetrated and subverted. It’s really hard to get a subpoena for a wiretap, and if you do get it, the folks who are the subject will hear of it before you. To get a warrant is even harder, and to serve it by force — that is, to raid — is almost a legal impossibility. No midnight door-busting in Dearborn. So you can’t tap, you can’t raid. I suppose you could surveil, but the community is wired so tight that any vans or teams in apartments or street-level retail are blown before they’re even inserted. On top of that, if you do make some kind of initiative, it better be executed perfectly, because, if not, you will be sued, your litigants will be all over the tube, claiming harassment and bias and anti-Islamic prejudice, the academics at Ann Arbor will join the hallelujah chorus, the protestors, with their genocide signs, will be out in the hundreds, and suddenly you’re teaching at a junior college in Tennessee for the rest of your life. That leaves snitches. Please note, I do not say ‘our’ snitches, because although we have a lot of them, we’re never quite sure who they’re working for. They are expert at playing both ends against the middle, can switch allegiances in midsentence and switch back again before the punctuation at the end. Can they be trusted? Yes, no, and maybe. Penetration? Forget it. You’ll never get a double into the cells. They know each other too well, and have for a thousand years. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Egyptian, or whatever, them-against-us will always trump them-against-them. Shiite or Sunni — whatever — makes no difference. That’s the realpolitik of the situation, gentlemen. You’re up against a system that is thirteen hundred years old and has stood against opponents for twelve hundred of those years. They know the ropes. They invented the ropes.”

“Thanks, Ron,” said Nick Memphis. “At least we know where we are. Mr. Gold, with your experience in that part of the world — I can’t help thinking the situation sounds a lot like Tel Aviv’s problems in Gaza City — I wonder if you have any suggestions or observations.”

The briefing was not being held in the FBI Detroit Field Office. It probably hadn’t been penetrated, but both Gold and the SAIC, the special agent in charge, agreed that you couldn’t be too sure. So it took place in an Ann Arbor library conference room, forty miles northwest of Dearborn. The SAIC came in one car — his own — after hours, his assistant in another. The entire MARJORIE DAW working group, a co-FBI/Mossad task force consisting of Nick Memphis, Gershon Gold, and consultant Bob Lee Swagger, who shared the room with the federals, assembled itself.

It had been a crazy couple of days, way too full of meetings for anyone’s pleasure, but you couldn’t put stuff together like this without suits sitting around tables in fluorescent-lit rooms, making decisions. The most important had already been made, however, and that was to grade MARJORIE DAW priority one, and Nick, dragged out of retirement because he knew and was trusted by Swagger, reported directly to Ward Taylor, the Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, with copies to the Director himself. What was the budget? Priority one essentially meant there was no budget. At the same time, it was to be separated and shielded from Taylor’s same Counterterrorism Division, at least for the immediate time being, on the idea that the fewer people that knew about it, the more likely it was to stay secure. It’s not that Counterterrorism had been penetrated; it’s that it was big, too big to control and monitor, and things always squiggled out of it, and if anyone was watching, those squiggles could be assembled into information.

“It sounds a lot like Gaza City,” said Gold in response to Nick’s question. “I agree on penetration agents. No luck with that in Gaza City either, and too many have died trying. I could suggest observation by drone, with a small team examining the photographic evidence, but, again, drones are cumbersome to administer in any number without ample notice being given, and surely word would quickly reach the ears of exactly those whom we wish it not to. Thus, I’m afraid we’re left with our eyeballs, and again I concur with Special Agent Houston. The more eyeballs, the better. But also, the more eyeballs, the worse. More eyeballs means more chances of a leak. So I would restrict our observer corps to those in this room. I would obtain a variety of utility vehicles — mail trucks, UPS vans, television repair vans, telephone company units — and I would invest the hours it takes to move about the city in irregular intervals, from target to target, looking for anomalies.”

“How would you prioritize the targets?” asked Nick.

“Surely Special Agent Houston has an idea of which mosques are home to radicalized imams and which are not. I would take that list and invert it. I think it far more likely, given the expense and effort they — whoever ‘they’ are — have taken with this operation, that they would prevail on a mosque known for its docility to harbor Juba.”

“Are we so sure he’s going to be in a mosque?” asked Swagger. “Thinking like a sniper, I’d go for the best hide, but certainly not one that’s already on a list.”

“Very good point, which gets at a congenital operational weakness among the brotherhood. As leaders of a theocracy, the mullahs and imams will always want control. We have found that although operational assembly points might not actually be within the mosque itself, they will always be near it. The leaders want close-by fellows as their assault troops, men they know from families they know. We have found, furthermore, that they tend to administer all ops from within the mosque — meaning that if food or other kinds of support are necessary, it will come from the mosque. Though, I might add, there aren’t so many pizza delivery shops in Gaza City as in Dearborn.”

“If we had time, we could open a pizza shop,” said Nick. “That’d get us into places we might not otherwise get into. But we don’t have time.”

“Counterterror can get you three or four clean agents,” said Ron Houston, “to help with the outside surveillance. When I say ‘clean,’ I mean they are new to my office and haven’t yet interfaced with any Dearborn customers. They can take up the slack. I’m seeing a patrol pattern, driving by each of five mosques once an hour, changing vehicles frequently. I see walkers-by too, again nonchalant, no observational tells, just ambling, spelling the vehicular orbiting. Standard anti-mob procedure. Never stopping, but eyeballing on the move. We’re pretty good at it by now, all the energy and time we’ve put into working the dope trade. I can arrange to borrow at least a U.S. Mail van and a UPS truck. Detroit Metro has a surveillance van dressed up as a plumber’s truck. I know people there, and I could get it discreetly and unofficially.”

“It has always helped,” said Gold, “if we have very specific behaviors for the observers to focus on. I would like to see each of us, and each of the new recruits, given a list. If they know what they’re looking for, they may see it. If they’re, generally, just staring, the chance is less likely.”

“Such as?” asked Houston.

“Groups of unknown men entering and exiting. Certain entrances blocked off. Hyperactivity among security personnel. Upgrades in countersurveillance. Men in groups leaving with packages or groceries.”

“Another thing,” said Swagger. “Remember, Juba ain’t no cosmopolitan world traveler. So one of the things he’ll do here is go out with a group of guys to get acclimated to America. They’ll take him places, brief him on public transportation, taxis, Uber, anything practical that’ll prepare him for movement in America as he manipulates his way closer to his target.”

“That’s good,” said Nick.

“Swagger has gifts for this game,” said Gold.

“Hey!” Swagger said, looking at Houston. “You said getting an agent in was impossible? I know an agent who could get in.”

All eyes came to him.

“This person knows the routines. This person has passed among them before. This person has the clothes. This person knows the prayers, the ranks in the mosque, the literature, the culture. This person has done undercover. This person is brave, speaks the language, and is highly motivated. This person has a very low profile.”

“Sergeant Swagger,” said Gold, “I don’t think we could ask—”

“No, she’d do it in a second. They took her son.”

16

His name was Jared Akim. He was twenty-four. He was from Grosse Pointe, and his father was a periodontist.

“Are you blooded?” asked Juba.

“No. I’m not a fighter. Look how thin my arms are.”

“It’s not the arms, it’s the spirit.”

“Brother, I have the spirit. No arms, plenty of spirit.”

“I would like a man who is blooded,” said Juba to the imam.

But he got Jared instead.

“Brother,” said Jared, “if I were blooded, I would be on somebody’s list. The FBI would be watching me. I would have no freedom of movement. I would lead them straight to you. Unblooded, they have never noticed me. Even with two years in university in Cairo, they did not pay me any attention. I am a virgin in this business, and I am told of your importance, so I infer that you need a virgin as your assistant. I speak English as well as I speak Arabic. I’m cute, so people like me. But I am ready to fight, willing to die, and I will get the job done.”

Juba appraised him. Skinny, tousle-headed, lithe, quick, beautiful, earnest, a smiler and a charmer, a boy full of words. He didn’t care for men full of words, as they were often too clever and saw through everything and believed in nothing, but he had no real choice in the matter.

“If I sense weakness, I will dispense with you quickly. You understand that?”

“I do.”

“Then proceed.”

Jared learned quickly. He never forgot. Once spoken to him, it became a part of his mind-set. Currency was first, and after absorbing the values of American coins and bills, it moved swiftly to the culture of the exchange.

“You must be facile with the money. Americans notice very little, but if one is clumsy at the paying, they will notice that.”

No haggling. If that’s what it says, that’s what it costs.

No looking disappointed at a price.

No counting coins or bills out one at a time as if they were being torn from your flesh.

“They have so much money, they don’t care about it at all. Only another Arab or a Jew makes something of pennies. Most Americans don’t bother to pick up pennies or nickels anymore. Money is shit. Pay it no heed. That’s what they expect. That’s what lulls them to nothingness.”

Transportation: elemental, necessary, difficult.

“Cab is best. Pay in cash, no records. Your driver will be a Russian, another Arab, some sort of black fellow or other. He will pay you no attention. He will read you for threat before he picks you up, and seeing none — make certain you look forlorn and defeated, your body sags with melancholy, your cheeks are hollow — he will pick you up, take you, and forget you.”

Public transportation is slow but generally anonymous. Best to understand the payment system up front, however, so as not to struggle awkwardly trying to fit the right number of nickels and quarters into the hopper. This new thing — private cabs contacted by iPhone, Uber, Lyft — is useful, in that it picks you up where you are and it leaves you where you want to be. But as it’s all done via credit card and the Internet, records are kept. If unobserved and working with a card that has been validated, it’s okay, but the card should never be used operationally.

On to peoples. Jared was not kind in his evocation of various ethnic groups. To him, stereotypes were market research, the accumulated wisdom of millions of transactions between tribe members, and he brought a certain bourgeois zest to profiling those he considered inferior, which was pretty much everyone who hadn’t attended prep school. In political correctness, he was well schooled, but he did not care to burden Juba with its precepts. He knew it could get him killed.

Then on to the police, any race.

“Give them no attitude. They are not clever men or they’d be making some more money elsewhere. They are usually big; they like to hurt people and are always looking for an excuse to do so. But their obsession is with their local area, and they rarely see a bigger picture. They pay more attention to paper than to people, so keep your documents up to date and learn your story forwards and backwards.”

“My name is Awari el-Baqua, as the papers say. I am in the country on a six-month visa, legally admitted. I have some education, but I am here as a laborer to work construction for my uncle, who is a builder. I hope to raise enough money to continue my education back in Syria. I have three brothers. Do you want the names?”

“No policeman will ask you that. A federal agent might. But if the papers are good, you should be all right.”

“The papers are good. They had been produced by the best forgers in Chechnya.

“Also, smile a lot. They like smiling.”

“I can do that.”

“They say you’re obsessed with rifles. Bury that part of your personality. Never mention a weapon, never look at one, never ask about one. Many people are frightened of them and consider them evidence of malice. Don’t read magazines about them or go to where they are sold and talk to people who own them. A brown man with an interest in guns is a problem.”

“I understand.”

They went over it, over and over, on their walks. At first, they walked on Warren Street and the streets just off it, which felt like his own culture to Juba. But, each day, the young man took him in a new direction, and he visited the large city of Detroit, he visited malls where the Americans consumed out of any possible proportion to whatever needs they could have, he went to a famous university town and felt its absence of fear, in stark contrast to the city itself. They took every form of transportation. They visited museums, restaurants, hospitals, office buildings, schools, pizza parlors. They dressed casually, in jeans and running shoes and T-shirts and the kind of sweatshirt with a hood that zipped up the front. They wore sunglasses. They admired monuments and went to the lakefront. They went to the stadium and watched the crowds file in, though Jared could not get Juba to actually attend.

“I won’t try to convert you to the religion of baseball. But it will be a sad day when Allah wipes it from the earth. This, alone, I do not like about jihad.”

“You are a blasphemer,” said Juba. “It is only because you are so negligible that Allah does not punish you. But you have been very good to me, so I forgive you. I will pray for you tonight, and perhaps Allah will extend your time.”

Jared’s phone rang.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Only the mosque has my number, and only for emergencies.”

He took it out, put it to his ear, and listened. Then he returned it to his pocket.

“They caught a spy,” he said. “A woman. Probably FBI. We’d better get back there.”

17

No heroics, Janet. You understand that?” said Nick Memphis.

“I do.”

She sat in a rented suite of offices in a low-intensity industrial zone just outside of Dearborn, where the MARJORIE DAW working group had rented a building in a warehouse complex by the railroad tracks. All were present, also some technicians and some SWAT officers on loan from the State Police. But they were casually dressed, simply there for the briefing. They wouldn’t go hot until she was in play.

“Mrs. McDowell, can you go over it one more time?” asked Agent Chandler. Chandler, whose cuteness had evolved into serious beauty in the time since she’d worked with Swagger, even if she tried to pretend such a thing could never happen, had been flown in to relate to Mrs. McDowell when all agreed — finally — that Mrs. McDowell was the best option. But it hadn’t been an easy sell for Swagger.

“She’s untrained. You can’t put a civilian in this kind of situation without formal training, and if she slips up, the whole thing goes down,” argued Nick. “On top of that, this is the most highly graded top secret operation we have going. She is not cleared for it and can’t be vetted in time. On top of even that, if the CIA finds out we’re using someone on their nutcase list, they’ll become highly interested, by which I mean irritated, and all sorts of political ramifications could come onto the board that we cannot control.”

Swagger said, “I don’t know nothing about the politics. There shouldn’t be any in this situation, but if there are, let’s pretend there aren’t. It seems to me she can be brought in on the statement that an action against Juba the Sniper is under way, no further details available to her. She will accept that. She wants to be a part of this.”

“You’re not just sentimentalizing things? You’re moved by her, you feel sorry for her — so do I, and who wouldn’t? — but you want to improve her mental health by bringing her in on this and feeling like part of the solution when it is explicitly her amateur status that risks it?”

“Maybe I am. But trying to take my feelings out of it, we’re not sending her in to get the plans for the X11 bomber or to blow up a bridge. She knows mosques, she’s been visiting them for fourteen years. Her job is to determine, as casually as possible, if anything seems out of the ordinary. There are too many mosques, and we do not have enough time to run deeper hunts of each of them. She can save days, maybe weeks, and if we can nail this bird here, think what it’ll mean.”

Gold was agnostic. “I’ve seen cases where passionate amateurs have performed brilliantly. I’ve seen them where they’ve turned triumph into catastrophe. As she’s an American citizen, I will not take a position.”

“These people are not amateurs,” said Nick. “They are ruthless and violent and do not believe that killing an infidel is a sin. We could get this poor woman’s throat cut.”

“We can cover her the whole way,” said Swagger. “Do we need a warrant if an undercover’s life is in jeopardy?”

“Houston?” asked Nick.

The Detroit SAIC answered. “We can get an emergency verbal warrant. It’s rare, but it can happen. But suppose we need it, and the one judge likely to provide it has gone to the movies?”

“It’s too damned dangerous,” Nick said. “And getting a civilian killed could be a bigger scandal than letting Juba proceed. And if we go without it, nothing we acquire will be usable in court.”

“No, but Israel can extradite because of the bus. His number is fixed if we nab him.”

On and on it went, according to the immutable law that the human factor is more responsible for administrative inaction than any failure of policy, plan, or hardware. Finally, the need for speed became the decisive factor. If Juba was here, it wouldn’t be for long.

Nick said, “We have to cover her. Let’s figure out how.”

So Agent Chandler had to make sure Janet was locked in on security.

Janet said, “I check into the Dearborn Holiday Inn tomorrow afternoon under the name Susan Abdullah. My story: I married Saleem Abdullah, an Iraqi psychiatrist, thirty years ago. We lived in Baltimore, Maryland, where he had a private practice. I converted to Islam shortly before the marriage. I learned my pidgin Arabic from him. He was radicalized after nine/eleven. He went to Baghdad in 2012 as a volunteer aid worker for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and was killed in an American air strike. I have come to Dearborn to worship at the big mosque at the American Muslim Center because I’ll never be able to get to Mecca. The big mosque is as close as I can get. I will embrace Dearborn because it is as close to my husband’s native Iraq as I can get. That will be my first mosque. Then I am to enter five mosques, as listed, and attempt to ascertain if anything is subtly amiss. But I am to be strictly observational — no eye contact, no questions, no opening closet doors or going down hallways or trying to get into the basement. Just what I pick up in an informal way. Sewn into the hem of my hijab is a small bead containing a GPS transmitter. If my life should be in danger, I am to crush it through the material. When it stops transmitting, that will be the signal that something is amiss, and the SWAT team, orbiting outside, will hit the mosque under the doctrine of police endangerment.”

“Good, good,” said Chandler.

“Thank you so much for this opportunity,” Mrs. McDowell said. “I know you can’t tell me what this is about, but I presume it’s something important, and I am so pleased to play a part in it.”

Of course, she violated every admonition within minutes. She looked aggressively into the mosques. After ablutions and prayer from the carefully delineated women’s section, she rose and wandered. She tried closets and stairways. She peeked in men’s rooms. She went into offices, recreation centers, basketball courts, weight rooms — all the appurtenances of the modern American house of worship, as much community center as prayer platform. Her hijab made her bold in this world, as it always did. She looked for burly security types, and, with the first four mosques, found none. She asked other women worshippers about changes in mosque operating procedures, or evidence of heavy traffic or other business at night, when all was supposed to be quiet. She wondered if the calls to prayer were on time. She wondered about strange deliveries. In all places, the women were eager to gossip, and she had no problem. The fact that no one paid her any attention she took as the ultimate indication that nothing was amiss or held in secret in each building. Twice she spoke to an imam and found both to be charming, educated men, eager to make conversation with an American convert and sympathetic to the tragic death in Baghdad of Saleem Abdullah, M.D., at American hands.

She came to the last mosque on the list, another domed building with administrative wings off of it. It was far from majestic, but, at the same time, far from shabby. It was no storefront, with an angry young imam in blue jeans and teenagers hanging about, talking of jihad. It looked sedate, unlit, almost slumbering. But even though the last evening prayer was done and darkness was falling on Dearborn, she entered the dim space and quickly noted three women performing ablutions. She joined them and started to chat them up, and it seemed to be going quite well, when one said to her, “Sister, you have many questions.”

“As a visitor,” she said, “I like to learn of new places. This city is almost a shrine in itself. To walk the streets, to buy from the shops, to hear the calls to prayer, it’s like the trip to the homeland I’ll never make.”

“Many of the men here are suspicious. My suggestion is, enjoy the closeness of Allah but not the closeness of men. It seems Imam el-Tariq has surrounded himself with some tough ones. I tell you this only for your own good. I should not even be seen talking to you. But God be with you, sister.”

With that, Janet was abandoned.

She waited a bit, put her socks back on, and turned to the domed prayer chamber. A few prostrated solitaries were there, but none paid her any attention. It was as if the place were deserted.

She went to an outer circle of the chamber and went to the mat herself before Allah, His name be praised, and she praised it aggressively. No watcher, if there were any, could doubt her ardency. She prayed hard, believing if her goals were not the goals of her coreligionists, they were still the goals that the true Allah would find virtuous. When she had been there for some minutes, she felt safe, under His protection.

She rose and made as if she was headed for the door but diverted to the women’s restroom instead, went in, washed, calmed herself, again absorbed the silence of the place, listening for signs of habitation but heard none. She exited the room, but instead of turning left, to the door, to escape, she turned right and came to a corridor. It was empty.

She turned down it and made her way tentatively as if lost. She peeked in each door, finding an office of some sort, nothing of any ramification. Finally, she came to a stairwell.

Don’t do this, Janet, she told herself. Don’t.

But she did it anyway.

Courageous or not, she learned nothing on the second floor. It was just another office corridor, with doors along each side, from where the imam ran his enterprise, made plans to visit the sick and the lame, gave comfort, supervised goods for the bake sale, coached his basketball team, and raised money, much as any other clergyman did in any other house of worship in America. She turned, started back down the hall, when a flash of movement jerked her out of serenity, and, in a second, she realized that she was confronting a man with a strange package in his hand.

It was a pizza.

“Mogdushani?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody up here now. Maybe downstairs.”

“Thanks, lady,” he said.

He was young and black, and he turned and bounded down the steps. Someone working late wanted a pizza, the universal snack. Yet… it did seem odd. Why would someone in a mosque order a pizza, especially long after the hours of administration. Who but her would be here so late?

She followed her nose. Tomato, cheese. Terrorists? Juba the Sniper? To the main floor, then a quick look in the stairwell, darting down it just to make sure, then a quick turn, another corridor — nothing — another turn and—

“May I help you, sister?”

The man was Arabic, dressed casually.

“I just got confused,” she said. “I’m just trying to find the way out.”

“This way. I’ll show you.”

“Praise be His name.”

“Praise be.”

He led her back to the upstairs, where they ran into the pizza man.

“Hey, thanks,” he said again, and departed.

“You were here before?” asked her escort, pausing a second.

“Ah, I blundered about, in my confusion. I ran into that young man. I didn’t really help him, I only told him to go downstairs.”

“But what were you doing upstairs?”

“As I say, I was confused.”

He thought about this intently for a bit, decided it was problematical, and said, “I think you should see the imam.”

“Oh, I hate to bother him. I’m just a visitor. I’ll leave now, and that’ll be that.”

Again, concern clouded his face, and he said, “I do not wish to offend, but something here is amiss. I must ask you to accompany me. I just want to make sure he’s comfortable with this.”

“Why, there is nothing to be comfortable with. I tell you, I merely lost my way and—”

“Please, madam,” he said, and took her elbow, “humor me, or I will make the imam mad at me.”

Not force, exactly, was applied against her, but strength, communicating his need to fulfill his instructions versus her feeble explanations, and he took her this way and that and into an office of no particular significance, no RPGs or sniper rifles lying about, just desks, one messy, one not so much, and asked her to sit. He vanished. Was the door locked? Was she a prisoner? But to investigate would be suspicious, the actions of a spy, so she simply sat, waiting, feeling her heartbeat increase.

He returned.

“This way, please,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, and followed him into the well-appointed office of Imam Imir el-Tariq, who was sitting behind his desk, in his robes but with his hair uncovered. A handsome, bearded man in his forties, as befit his rank, with the face of the earnest and the committed, but with brown eyes that were not the sort to be found in zealots.

“Madam, please,” he said, gesturing to a chair. “We’re not comfortable with strangers wandering about. We have no secrets, of course, but, alas, we do have enemies, and many nonbelievers hold us responsible for things over which we have no control.”

“I assure you, Imam, I have no agenda save the faith.”

“May I ask for credentials of some sort.”

She handed her purse over.

“Here, examine the whole thing. I have no secrets either, and I hope I have not given offense.”

He looked at her driver’s license.

“Mrs. Abdullah. Yet you are not Arabic.”

“My husband was. And, under his auspices, I joined the faith.”

She told her story.

“I am sorry for your husband, sister. Many have died unjustly. The pox of our times.”

“If I enter the houses of worship, great or small, it helps me find peace,” she said. “I am content here, and the emptiness in my heart is not so severe.”

“Allah, His name be praised, is merciful.”

“His name be praised, He is always merciful.”

“I hope you will not mind if I give your license to an assistant to run a check.”

This was the best news. Her legend had been constructed by professionals of the highest quality, and she was assured that it was invulnerable to scrutiny.

“Of course. I should have offered it to you earlier to save time, Imam.”

He touched a button, the assistant entered, took the license, and departed.

Simple chitchat followed.

First time in Dearborn?

What did you think of the Great Mosque?

I hope you will wisely stay out of the bigger city. It can be dangerous.

It went on for a bit, seemingly untethered in time, and she kept up with the insignificant patter easily, fully confident that, as promised, her license would check out, the backstory would stand up to vetting, and she’d be on her way in a bit.

The assistant returned and whispered to the imam.

The iman nodded and turned back to her. She heard three more men enter.

“I am confused,” said the imam. “Indeed, your husband’s name is carried on the Maryland Board of Psychologists, as is the date of his death. All seemed perfect. But then—”

“Is there a problem?”

“I have a very good assistant on the computer. We try to stay up to date. In any event, he was able to get into the Social Security database, and though we found over forty Susan Abdullahs, we were unable to find one living in the Baltimore area. Are you new to the city?”

“No, no. Actually, I think my Social Security number might be listed under my maiden name. I never worked again after I married my husband. I tried to be a good Islamic wife, you see.”

“Impressive. You will not mind if we run that name?”

“Isn’t the Social Security database off-limits? Aren’t you hacking something illegally? I’d hate to get you in trouble. My thought is, perhaps you could call the police. Surely their techniques surpass yours, and they could verify me. I am a little hesitant about my Social Security number. That, actually, was something my husband was adamant about. It’s not to be trifled with.”

“I can’t help but notice that while you’re not seeming to evade, you are, in fact, evading.”

“I want to cooperate, but you don’t have any right to hold me against my will. You can call the police, and if you are not satisfied with their explanation, you can bring charges against me for trespassing. It would be a waste of everybody’s time, but I do understand your anxiety about the mosque’s security and will happily wait until the police arrive. Perhaps we can continue our conversation about Dear—”

“You see, you could be a scout for some kind of guerrilla attack. Someone wants to bomb the mosque, but they want to know where to place the bomb. This is information you now have, and it appears to be information you’ve gone to some trouble to obtain.”

A cold breeze of fear swept through Janet. She had been in these situations before and each time the results had been disastrous: forceful hostility, beatings, rapes, hatred at its most naked.

“Sir, please, I beg you. I am no bomber, no fanatic, I am just an American woman who has seen the way to the faith and is still in grief over her husband’s death. The worst you can say of me is, I sometimes act irrationally. I know that. It gets me in trouble all the time. Perhaps my need to go to mosques for the therapeutic value makes no sense, but I can’t really seem to help it.”

The imam considered for a bit.

“I am in an unfortunate position, Mrs. Abdullah. Alas, I owe more to the mosque and its followers than I do to you. You understand, no? Now, let’s start over at the beginning. Please give me facts — facts than can be checked. This may take some time, but I would like you to stay until I am satisfied that you are of no danger to us. Or, perhaps admit that you are an FBI agent seeking to penetrate our security based on some intelligence you may have. Then we could easily disprove that intelligence — many false things are said of Moslems in the United States, many false conclusions are drawn — and you could go on your way. Would that not be the simplest?”

“But it would not be true. There is no FBI, there is no intelligence, I am merely—”

“Enough,” said the imam. “I want this to be pleasant, but you’re provoking me to behavior that I find abhorrent. I ask again, please do not make such a provocation.”

Janet thought of something to put between herself and them, something that would baffle, slow, confuse them. Nothing occurred. She felt her fear rise, and the urge to beg for mercy came over her hard. She couldn’t go through another beating. The last one had almost killed her. But when she opened her mouth, she said something that surprised even her.

“Please,” said Mrs. McDowell. “Torture me.”

Swagger stared at the blip. It had not moved in an hour.

“Okay,” he said, “maybe we have a complication.”

“Maybe she’s helping put up decorations for a dance,” said Nick.

They stared at the screen of the monitor that was receiving the signal from McDowell’s GPS.

“Where’s the team?” said Swagger.

“They’re in orbit around the building,” said Chandler. “They can pop the raid in a minute if I send them the go.”

“Hold on,” said Nick. “Folks, we have nothing here to go on.”

“A, she’s been in that building for over two hours,” said Swagger. “B, she’s in a room in the administrative section, not in the prayer center, so she’s obviously either imprisoned or undergoing interrogation.”

“Maybe she’s watching a ball game with some of the kids in hopes of overhearing something.”

“I just don’t like it.”

“We are on very thin ice here,” said Nick. “This is not the vacuum of combat where the only criterion is taking the objective. It is Main Street America 2018, and the rules are different. We cannot raid an innocent mosque with guys in Kevlar and carrying HKs. These folks are savvy, they’re on the phone in seconds, lawyers are there in a few more seconds, and, in minutes, TV is there and the Free Press, and we have a major administrative fuckup. MARJORIE DAW is disgraced and closed down.”

“None of that has anything to do with a woman’s life in danger.”

“What do you think, Houston?” he asked the Detroit guy.

“In this town, it’s always better to take it easy. You do not know the can of shit you are opening if you do something wrong. It will land all over everybody in this room and never go away.”

“I would add,” said Nick to Bob, “that maybe your read is that she’s in danger because you’re overcommitted to her, and maybe you’ve seen so much combat that everything is always combat. I’d hate to have to testify to a condition of ‘danger’ on such flimsy evidence at my board hearing.”

“Fair enough, and always a possibility.”

“Chandler?”

“Not fair to put her on the spot,” said Nick. “She’s junior and under Bureau discipline. Chandler, you don’t have to answer.”

“Yes, sir, but I will. Mr. Swagger, I’m FBI all the way. If the agent in charge — that is, Agent Memphis — makes a decision, I will obey it. Period, end of message.”

“Okay, she’s a good marine,” said Swagger. “We knew that.”

“Mr. Gold,” said Nick, “you’ve got more experience than any of us. Please jump in here, tell us what you think.”

“It would be different in Israel, where the courts and the media favor the government in its anti-terrorist efforts. So I cannot advise, because your context and nuances are so unique.”

“You have to say something,” said Nick. “Sorry, but you are here to advise, and it’s no help at all if you don’t.”

“Then I would say cock the hammer, point the gun, but don’t pull the trigger.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “Houston, you call that U.S. Attorney for a verbal warrant, so that if it does come to a raid, the State boys can hit the door in a second.”

“I’m going to move them across the street,” said Chandler. “That’ll shave even more time off their reaction interval.”

“Good move,” said Swagger, hearing in his mind the slide and click of MP5 bolts setting up for action.

Sister Abdullah, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I am not. I want you to be comfortable with me, and the fastest way I can do that is endure a great deal of pain. I am not afraid of pain. My faith will enable me to forget it quickly. And if I am beaten to a point where you believe I could no longer lie and would say anything to avoid further pain and I do not deviate in my story, I will have proved by ordeal its authenticity.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I give you permission. I see it from your point of view. I will not file charges. I will go back to my room and heal and then go back to Baltimore, proud that I have served my faith.”

“You may give me permission, but the state of Michigan does not. I could end up in prison for ten years.”

“The state will never find out.”

“A guarantee you cannot possibly make.”

“Perhaps you should think this through a little more clearly. FBI agents are young women, athletic. I have varicose veins, and I haven’t seen the inside of a gym since high school. Would the FBI employ an old thing like me?”

“Young and beautiful FBI agents exist only in the movies. Who’s to say one couldn’t look like you?”

“So what do you recommend, the towels with water? I will undergo that. Many of the faith have.”

“I can only recommend what I’ve initiated, which is a detailed interrogation session, and these men will vet each answer on the Internet. It will be a long night. There will be great psychological pressure on you, if you are a spy, to avoid a mistake. We will see if you can stand up to it. When your story collapses, we will deal with what remains.”

She didn’t know if she could do this. The slow grind of it all, the utter concentration it would take to keep her details in trim, the mental effort against the deep fatigue — it would be too much.

Crack the button, she thought. Get the cops in here. Shake this place down, see what’s cooking. Smack el-Tariq and his pals around. Get them to talk. Get Juba that way. Find him, get him, kill him. You killed my Tom, and I turned into a different woman and I tracked you down and I killed you dead.

But — if she pushed the button, and they found nothing, the word would get out that the FBI was hunting a certain terrorist in Dearborn, and, if he were here, he’d know and vanish. Instead of hurting him, she’d have helped him.

“Mrs. Abdullah, you blacked out there.”

“I took a little nap,” she said.

The door opened. A man came in and set something on the desk. It was a file. He leaned and whispered to the imam, who listened intently, nodding.

“All right,” said the imam. “Perhaps this may move things along.”

He pulled out a picture.

A knife cut into her heart. How had they gotten it?

It was taken on November 12, 2002. Boys’ Latin had just beaten Gilman in football, and Tom, a tight end, had made a spectacular catch, late, to keep the drive going, to keep the ball away from Gilman’s offense. There was Tom, his helmet under his arm, his arm around her, on the happiest day of his life. His radiance was like the blaze of the setting sun at the end of a stormy day, promising much for tomorrow.

How had they gotten it?

“A handsome boy, Mrs. McDowell,” said the imam. “It’s a shame what happened to him. But perhaps we will now proceed with the truth.”

She cracked the GPS bead in her hijab.

18

We’d better get back there,” said Jared.

“Give me your phone,” said Juba.

He took the thing from the young man, set it on the pavement, and crushed it with the heel of his shoe. He removed the SIM card and put it in his pocket for later disposal in river or fire.

“Wh-what are you doing? How can I call my mom?”

“We will not go back there. Ever. It no longer exists for us. That phase is ended and must not be revisited. It is compromised, everything in it is tainted and potentially of lethal danger. We must think clearly and move quickly. How much money do you have?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy.

They stood on a street corner somewhere in the revitalized Tomorrowland of downtown, so sleek that it was devoid of human beings. A few retail outlets remained open — a Subway, a McDonald’s, an old auto-themed pub, a late-night Sprint — hopeful of snagging a few late customers. The glow of each establishment spilled out onto the dark sidewalks, while mute monoliths that by day were full of suburbanites loomed blankly overhead.

Jared pulled out his wallet, checked the cash, and saw that he had about thirty-five dollars in bills.

“But I have this,” he said, pulling out a red Bank of America card. “I have a thousand in my checking account. We can get eight hundred dollars out tonight, from an ATM machine, the other two hundred tomorrow.”

“Get the eight hundred now. Then the card is to be destroyed. It may have GPS. Our goal is to leave Detroit as quickly as possible.”

“To go where?”

“Away. We will need money and an automobile.”

“I can’t just walk out of my life. I have to call my folks, I have people I have to say good-bye to. I suppose I could borrow some money, but we’ve got to get a car, and that will take some time. I have contacts, and—”

“You’re an idiot child. Assume that in a short while they will know everything about you. Your picture will be flashed to every policeman in the state. They will net you by noon tomorrow. You will talk, giving them explicit description of me and an account of our conversations. You will cooperate with an artist, and a drawing will emerge. I will be the most famous man in America by five-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”

“I don’t—”

“Assume and operate on the principle of the worst of all possibilities. No other course is safe but immediate escape and evasion. Now, where can we get a car and ten thousand dollars?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Well, I know. In this city, in certain areas, there are many drug transactions. We will rob one of them. Do you understand? They will not go to the police. Eventually the police will hear, but by that time we will be long gone.”

Jared could not keep the look of fright off his face, or the series of dry gulps coming out of his throat or the clumsiness overcoming his limbs.

“Those guys are really tough. They will not take any shit lying down. It’s well known in the community that you do not fuck with them. Fuck with anybody, but do not fuck with dope guys.”

“Little American boy, you say you are a jihadist. This is jihad. It is about action, commitment, discomfort. It is about will. Your faith should give you that. You cannot talk and posture and affect any longer. You must become my right hand — and, thus, Allah’s right hand. You have been chosen. Now you must contribute.”

Oh, fuck, thought Jared.

The car was not a problem. Juba selected a ’13 Taurus out of a parking lot, jimmied the lock with his knife, ripped the plastic shielding off the keyhole, did some fast wire twisting, and the thing came to life.

The car led to the ATM, which led to eight hundred dollars in crisp twenties. Next stop: Drugland.

“You’re sure this eight hundred dollars isn’t enough? We can get a long way—”

“Suppose we need to bribe? Suppose we need a new vehicle? We will need new clothes, we will need money for motels. The one thing necessary for surviving on the run is cash. I know, I have been on the run many times. Do not think of your old life and how things used to be. You have given your life to Allah. He will do with it as He chooses.”

Great, thought Jared, who was finding transfiguration from the theoretical to the actual more troublesome than he ever imagined.

His mood was not improved by the ghastly terrain south of Seven Mile Road. Abandoned crumbling houses, lawns overgrown, the stiff grass blowing in the wind off the lake. Now and then, the fluorescent, dead-bone illumination of a late-night mart or liquor store turning anyone caught in it into a zombie. Abandoned cars, broken toys, gardens that looked jungly and foreboding. About a tenth of the houses were occupied.

You didn’t want to be out here if you weren’t really good at the game. This was the big league. Predators or guppies, nothing in between. You could tell the whores from the dealers easily: the dealers looked better. They were everywhere, like specters, standing in the wind, oblivious to its chill. A hoodie over a T-shirt, baggy jeans, big white sneakers off some astronaut’s moonwalk, ball caps worn backwards.

“These guys?” he asked Juba. “They look uncooperative to me.”

They discussed strategy, Jared smiled and licked his dry lips, and, in time, they found their mark. Jared rolled out.

“Yo, little A-rab boy,” said the dealer. “Whatcha yo’ wanna be here fo’? You wanna score? If not, git yo’ ass outta here or some brothahs gonna turn yo’ shit to hurt.”

“Ah, actually,” said Jared, fighting a rise of phlegm in his throat, “I wanted to hook up with some stuff. Hard, you call it, right? Got some pals, we want to try it. That’s what I’m here for.”

The dealer sized him up. “Think yo’ know some shit cuz yo’ calls it hard, just like a bro wif two nines and a mouf-ful of gold and a shiny diamond? What yo’ know? Yo’ don’t know shit.”

Jared shrugged. “But the money is green. That should count for something.”

“Gots to try the ride? Yeah, man, dis shit give yo’ the ride. Yo’ show me the green — or is dis some bullshit fraternity test, see how long yo’ last on Seven Mile?”

“No, no, I have the money,” he said, pulling out his roll. The dealer looked at the thickness of the wad.

“Yo’ heavy, man.”

“Eight hundred, man. I want to buy that much.”

“Yo’ don’t know nuffin’! Yo’ think I got that much? I do nickel and dime bags, man. And it’s late, I done most of my business. Got two nickels and a dime left. My man be comin’ by soon. I got to put in a request, and he go load up. Then yo’ git yo’ eight dimes and go off to yo’ white-boy A-rab par-tay with all dem Beckys.”

“Shit,” said Jared. “How long do I have to stand here?”

“Yo’ come south of Seven Mile, that’s what happens, man. Okay, go ’way. Go back to that car wif yo’ friend. My man be by in a bit.”

“Do I give you money now?”

“Give me two hundred, down payment. That’s so’s I know yo’ come back, and also yo’ don’t go to no other dealers. I’m Ginger. Yo’ come back to Ginger, yo’ don’t go no other dealer or yo’ lose your two hundred dollars, get it?”

“Yeah.”

“Go ’way, come back in forty minutes, ’kay? He come, I tells him, we go load up, yo’ pay up. Yo’ gits yo’ bags and yo’ gets yo’ scared little Peter Pan ass outta here.”

They drove around the block and parked. Juba slipped out. He slid through the overgrown yard of one house, across an alley mainly used by rats, and through another yard, until he had a good vantage on the dealer.

Nothing happened for a time — no traffic, no pedestrians, no whores, no cops — but then a black SUV pulled up, and the dealer man went around to him. Juba watched as they exchanged words through the window and, finally, some cash and a plastic bag with new, but short, replenishment.

Juba turned, raced back the way he came, and jumped into the car. He pulled down the street, screamed around the corner, hit the street where the drama had played out, and turned. A couple of blocks ahead, they could make out the taillights of what could only be the SUV.

They rolled through back streets, closing the distance. Juba was counting on poor security from the runner. He wouldn’t be alert. Under normal circumstances, Juba would have followed at an eight-block increment, pulled off, waited for the next run, then eight more blocks, finally arriving near morning. But time was short. The only thing he did was turn his lights off, keeping eye contact with the taillights ahead. They turned, he turned, and when he got to Seven Mile, he had to guess which way the supplier had turned because he hadn’t made it to the street in time to see. He guessed left, put his lights back on, and pressed pedal to floor. Ah, yes, there it was, a black Jeep Cherokee, well-polished, glittering in the more vivid light of Seven Mile. He fell into place six car lengths behind, careful to keep a regular interval, low profile, nothing aggressive or hostile.

At least one person was impressed.

“Wow,” said Jared, “you’re on this guy’s tail like glue.”

“Concentrate. Eyes on the car. When it turns, I’ll go straight ahead. It’s your job to see if it turns left or right the next street over or continues.”

Jared nodded, swallowing.

The game played itself out for another three-quarters of a mile. Then, helpfully, the driver ahead signaled, slowed, and took a right.

Jared saw, from the vantage point of his own car, the SUV slow down in the middle of the intersection, saw the taillight signal, saw the vehicle swing around.

“He went left,” he said.

Juba accelerated through his block, took the right on two wheels, and pulled up at the corner, waiting for the SUV to pass him and for the chase to begin again. But it didn’t come, and he got out, ran to the corner, and saw the SUV parked in the road half a block down. A sudden shear of light signified the opening of the stash house door as the driver was admitted.

“Okay, that’s it,” he said as he got back. “Now we check it out.”

Slowly, they drove by the house. It was dilapidated, like all the others, but three lights burned in various windows. Otherwise, it was quiet.

They pulled around the corner, parked, and, catty-cornered, observed, sheltering in the lee of an abandoned place across the street.

In time, the dealer came out. He had a large paper bag with him.

“Okay, he’s loaded up, headed back with your eight dime bags,” said Juba. “We’ll give it a few minutes and then we’ll hit them.”

“Hit them? With what?” said the boy.

19

The interrogation of the Imam Imir el-Tariq didn’t take place until nearly 5 a.m., after various administrative tasks had been completed. The imam’s lawyer had to arrive and meet with his client, the relevant federal attorney had to be roused from bed and brought on scene, the FBI evidence retrieval had to work the room found in the basement in which a single man had lived for a week, Mrs. McDowell had to be medically attended to, cleared, debriefed, and her testimony integrated into the strategy Nick would take, the evidence collated and mastered — all of these activities backed by paperwork and cyberwork.

Finally, Nick, SAIC Houston of the Detroit Field Office, and the sleepy federal prosecutor, who was instructed to keep his mouth shut since he knew nothing, sat across from the imam and his lawyer, a well-known firebrand named Kasim. Swagger, Gold, and Chandler observed via closed-circuit TV.

Nick began by speaking into the recording device, identifying each participant and his allegiances, the date, the circumstances. Then he began in earnest.

“Imam el-Tariq, as your lawyer has undoubtedly told you, the government will indict you on the following counts: detaining a federal agent against her will, use of force against a federal agent, conspiracy to assault a federal agent, and, if necessary, kidnapping a federal agent or conspiracy to kidnap a federal agent. This could amount to a federal prison sentence of more than fifteen years. And please note that we do not anticipate filing state charges, so that the cases will not be tried in the somewhat dubious Dearborn judicial system. Hard time is a distinct possibility.”

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

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.

Jared heard an unprecedented sound. It had both the qualities of crunch and slurp to it, something cracking, something squirting, and the stick disappeared as whoever now received it surrendered to gravity. Juba, fast as a snake, reared back and drove the sole of his right foot at high velocity into the door, just above the lock, and the wood splintered as if it were balsa. The impact sprang the door, ripping splinters and chunks with it, as bolts and chains clanked with their sudden release, and Juba was in, followed by Jared, who got just a brief look at the guard. He lay against the wall, about six inches of raw stick protruding vertically from his left eye socket, a torrent of blood washing down his slack face and running onto his black satin shirt. Jared had never before seen the devastation to flesh that violence brings, and it froze him solid for a second.

Juba had no time for coaching. He snatched up the man’s weapon, a short-barreled semi-automatic shotgun, pivoted, throwing its bolt even as he lifted it to his shoulder, and stormed down the hall. Another figure, in the full animation of urgency, appeared, Glock in hand. But he was way behind the action curve, and Juba put what had to be six gallons of buckshot into his center chest, shredding it, and him, lifting him off his feet, where he bounced against the doorframe and went to the floor like a shock of wheat.

The ear-stabbing blast of the gun, and the acrid smell of burnt powder, snapped Jared free of his trance, but also set his ears to ringing like all the alarms in the world. Following Juba, he raced down the hallway, while struggling to get his hoodie wrapped around his skull, and he ended up looking more like a bedraggled mummy than Juba, whose wrapping was tight and efficient.

Juba reached the doorway out of which the man had come. Instead of bursting through it, he went prone and snaked around it low. Whoever was in there expected no such move; for his misinterpretation, he got his own six gallons of buckshot in the knee. He went down, tried to rise on his one good leg, and Juba sent buckshot in an angry cloud into his genitals. Juba rose, strode in, and Jared heard the headshot.

But he became aware of scurrying upstairs. He had paused halfway down the hall at the foot of the stairway.

“Stop!” he screamed in English. “If you come down, we’ll kill you. Stay upstairs and hide until we’re gone.”

But suddenly a large woman materialized at the head of the stairs, her face bulging out with fury, and she came leaping down the stairs at Jared. She was immense and full of adrenaline. He swallowed as she launched from five steps up and filled the sky like a crashing dirigible, huge enough to squash him. But some instinct caused his legs to spring, and he jumped to the right. She thundered past and landed with what sounded like meat smashing into wood at three hundred miles an hour. He knew if she got her hands on him, it was all over, so his cowardice poked him into action, and he kicked her, hard, in the face. And then he kicked her again.

She went prone, but was still breathing and struggling to move, rolling over like a large farm animal caught in the muck, and, the next thing he knew, he was using her face as a trampoline — up, down, up, down. And then Juba pulled him back.

“Good,” Juba said, “you are warrior now. Allahu Akbar! God is great! Now, come on, we have to get the fuck out of here.”

Jared looked at the carnage he had unleashed. The woman’s face was pulped, and squalid splatters of blood reflected greasily in the yellow hallway lighting. Her wounds had swollen so quickly that she looked as if tumors had overtaken and eaten her features. Her immensity made her stillness even more apparent.

Hideous detail, never to be unseen: a dental bridge, with two gold teeth and one white one, all twisted and bent, sitting in the puddle of blood that was oozing across the floor.

21

A few hours of sleep, a shower, then back in to file reports, read the wires, scan the incoming reports, Nick on the phone with D.C., everyone busy.

They finally got together at 4.

“Hope you all appreciate the lie I told Mrs. McDowell yesterday. In fact, not picking up Juba at the mosque, alerting him and letting him fly the coop, was a total catastrophe. They are not happy in D.C. Don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around.”

“If you go, I go,” said Swagger.

“Appreciated, but not helpful,” said Nick. “Anyhow, in this room, we all understand that, but once it’s been acknowledged, we have to forget it and move on. So if anybody has any bitches — complaints, recriminations, bitterness — now’s the time to let fly, because after today it’s a closed file.”

Gold said, “It does no good to compare to Israeli methods. I feel, however, that psychologically your people — I don’t mean anyone in here, but more generally — have not made the kind of commitment that is necessary to deal with this sort of existential threat. I hope I am wrong.”

“You probably are not,” said Nick. “Passive-aggression haunts our every move, even in the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. We haven’t committed as yet to the path of total destruction. Many still believe some sort of rapprochement is necessary.”

“Do you yourself, Agent Memphis?”

“Tough question, soft answer. I hope so. Deep down, however, nobody wants to go full theater. It’s not in our character. Look at our wars and how equivocal we’ve been, at least since 1945, and the two months immediately after nine/eleven.”

“Then your task will be harder.”

“I understand that. I will help in any way I can, as I have an intense investment in seeing Juba eliminated.”

“Anything else?” Nick said.

There were no murmurs.

“And we did gain,” said Nick. “A, we confirmed that he’s here. B, he’s supported by an expensive maintenance system of unknown provenance and sophisticated capabilities. C, he’s unsure of his ability to maneuver here in America. And, D, he’s with this Jared Akim, whom we can track. Now, Chandler, update us.”

“Got over a dozen responses from the wired picture of the Akim kid, but, in all cases, they’re outside the cone of possibility. He couldn’t have gotten there that fast by car. So I low-prioritize them. There are many reports of stolen cars, but nothing unusual in them, no way of knowing if one of them was taken by Juba and Akim. We have upgraded priorities on the license numbers of those taken after Imam el-Tariq put in his call to Akim and warned him of the spy. El-Tariq said that was about six p.m., and on his phone there indeed was a call to a number at six-oh-seven p.m. confirmed as Jared Akim’s.”

“And I’m guessing there’s no further intercept data on that phone. Surely Juba would be smart enough to destroy it.”

“That’s correct.”

“And there’s no intercept intelligence from the phones or emails to Akim’s parents or any of the seven friends we’ve identified?”

“Nothing, chief.”

“Mr. Gold, do you think he’ll split up from the kid? He’s used to operating alone.”

“He’s used to shooting alone. He’s used to escaping alone. But in all his operations, even going back to his housecleaning for Assam’s henchmen, he was serviced, transported, and sustained by an in-place network. He is used to having a chaperone. He is a star, in other words, and is used to people doing things for him. He’s the artist, he has to be free to create.”

“He sounds more like a director than a sniper,” said Nick, but ‘Director’ had a different meaning to the staff than to movie-crazed Nick, so nobody laughed.

“I believe he already has a new network in place and will work quickly to find it,” continued Gold. “This situation would be among the eventualities he planned for. As I see this, I think he has to go from network to network to keep advancing. Might I suggest you assign someone to find organizations capable of sustaining him over the next month or two, getting him what he needs, transporting him, assisting him in his movements and his logistical needs. I could guess, furthermore, that it will be a criminal organization, but it won’t be radically Islamic in tone or tendency.”

“Yeah, good,” said Nick. “And that’s also more indication of the money behind this op. If he’s got a criminal organization helping him, that kind of work doesn’t come cheap.”

Gold nodded.

“I’ll forward a memo to our gang intelligence people to be on the lookout for any kind of pattern of unusual activity.”

“I agree.”

“Meanwhile, we wait. But we have to anticipate. Mr. Swagger, what’re your thoughts?”

“Well, gun stuff, for one,” said Swagger. “I believe he’s prepping up a .338 Lapua Magnum shot. Those rifles are damned expensive, and they’re prized by people with passionate urges to shoot from a long way out. It’s a small community. Someone — me, I guess — ought to canvass it and see if anything has happened and left tracks in that community.

“I also — not sure of the legality here — but it’s a community serviced by just a few retail outfits, some mail order only, some brick-and-mortar, and the gear is very specific, very well made, very expensive, mostly from specialized machine shops. He — or somebody — would have to make some purchases to get him set up. Can we monitor or question those limited outlets, again looking for unusual patterns? Also, there’s a series of competitions where fellows shoot over a mile. I don’t think he’ll be competing, but those boys might have picked something up — rumors, odd patterns of purchase, questions coming in from an odd source, stuff like that. It could all lead us to Juba through a different route.”

“That’s good. Don’t you think that’s good, Mr. Gold?”

“I do, yes.”

“Other than that,” Swagger continued, “I remember that Mrs. McDowell said he was not a great one for improvising. So I think it’s fair to assume that now that he’s on the run, he’ll try to get back to his plan as quickly as possible. He only knows we know about him, but he has no idea the extent to which we’ve penetrated. He will get back on schedule.”

“Okay, lay out the schedule. As you see it.”

“I believe he has to find an area with at least a mile of clear space to get zeroed in. He has to work with his reloading program until he’s satisfied he’s found a load that will get him on target from the appropriate distance with the appropriate killing velocity still left in the bullet. He’s got to shoot and score five hundred times so he’s comfortable. I also think at a certain point he’ll move on to living targets. He’ll want to see what the bullet does. He might find an accurate load and bullet, but not be pleased with its penetration and expansion powers, and know, from that, that if he don’t hit heart or lung, the boy he’s shooting at will probably survive. So he’s got to have a bullet that deforms or mushrooms or bursts into splinters and cuts everything to ribbons. No point coming all this way, spending all this money, time, and energy, only to knock whoever-it-is down for a two-day stay in the hospital. He’s got to know he’s got a one-shot kill package. So he’ll shoot at something alive from this distance, and somehow we might be able to connect by finding such a site.”

“Satellite recon, as with Mr. Gold’s operation in Israel, would seem in order,” said Nick. “Unfortunately, the United States is a lot bigger than southern Syria, so we can’t just send the drones and satellites out. Can you put together for me a profile of what he’d need? Then we can task a recon satellite to look for it. Or maybe we have computer programs that can do such a thing.”

“Yep.”

“I’m going to hook you up with a Cyber Division hotshot we have named Jeff Neill. Lots of big-case experience. Maybe if you tell him what you need, he’ll be able to put something together that could facilitate finding it fast.”

“Now we’re perking,” said Swagger.

“Chandler?”

“Well, we’re not all drones and boy-genius hackers. Manhunt principles: flood the world with photos of quarry, run commo intercepts on likely allies, find a track, then raid. That’s how they’ve done it since Rome, and it’s worked before.”

“Sure, I agree, bu—”

Her phone rang.

“Detroit Metro, Homicide,” she said, looking at the dial.

“Take it,” said Nick.

The crime scene was indeed a crime scene: standard urban tragedy, case number 1,708,887. Bodies, blood in lakes and tributaries, the shooter’s progress written in the trail of shotgun shells he left as he took out all living things that crossed his path. Style points for the guy with the stick in his eye — the cops had never seen that and thought it was pretty funny — and the poor woman, so pulped her face looked like it had been taken over by malignancy. That, under the mashed and merged features, she still breathed lowered the score a bit, but a special bonus had to be awarded for the twisted false teeth in the blood.

“You’ve seen this shit before?” Nick asked the boss detective. “What are you getting?”

“Out-of-towners. No Detroit crew would hit this house. It’s a Black Pagans franchise, and the Pagans are the biggest, toughest gang in the city. They’ve got about eighty percent of the hard trade. Hard being Motownese for heroin. So if you hit them, they will go medieval on your ass and wipe out all the living generations of your family. If your parents are dead, they’ll dig them up and kill them all over again. Whoever did this didn’t give a shit about the Pagans.”

“What do you make of the shooting?” Bob asked the detective.

“It got the job done.”

“No, I mean as skill.”

“High-quality. The Pagans and their competitors, all four of them still alive, aren’t known for their finesse. That’s why so many innocent bystanders go down when they’re settling scores. But this shooter put all his blasts into kill zones. The first shot was about forty feet, dead center to the chest, and it had to be made fast. He came around the door low on Reggie, put one into his knee, to bring him under the table, then the other into his balls. A fourth shot, close-range, finished him. Muzzle distance: zero feet. Ejected shells were all twelve-gauge double-aught Remington. We also found an empty box of shells in Reggie’s room, so presumably one of the bad guys filled his pockets.”

“Anything on the gun?”

“Probably stolen. That’s where the Pagans strap up, mostly. By the spray pattern, I’d say a shorty, sixteen inches. As I say, well-shot. He hit what he was shooting at dead solid perfect. The guy knew what he was doing.”

“How much do you think they clipped?”

“Plenty. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five thousand, small bills. On a weekend, much bigger, so if the point was to hit a stash house, they would have waited till Saturday night. Hitting one on a weeknight doesn’t make any sense robbery-wise.”

“They needed the dough to get out of town,” said Nick. “Strictly travel money. What about the woman?”

“Different guy. Unarmed. Theola was a formidable woman; she’d been shot three times, and we believe she had at least four kills on her, two bare-handed, but nobody would think of snitching her out. Anyhow, this was amateur hour. He kicks her in the head after she fell down, jumps on her face like it’s a pogo stick. You can see his tracks in the blood. Size: about ten and a half. I’ve seen plenty of those tread marks, they’re Vans, a shoe suburban kids think is cool. It’s not a ghetto icon. The other guy was in size eleven cross-trainers, probably New Balance or Nike. So it’s an odd combo of a pro and someone suburban with zero experience.”

“But they knew where to hit. How’d they know where the stash was?”

“Followed the runner’s car, I’d guess. He’d been out servicing the street pushers.”

“So I think we’d like to talk to the street pushers. They might have something.”

“Sure, so would I, but I can’t do that right away. After something like this, they’ll all go to ground, because they don’t know how it’s going to come down from here. They don’t want to be standing on their corner when the retaliation starts turning the air blue.”

“Got it.”

“And one more thing. See that fat guy with his balls splattered on the wall? His name was Reggie ‘Candy’ Peppers. A legend in this town. Anyhow, he had a 2017 Mercedes S, jet-black, shiny as sin. His pride and joy. We found two cars out back registered to the two other vics, but Candy’s was missing. I’m thinking your boys not only ripped off money and guns and ammo but the car as well. We can put out a statewide on the license plate and a descript of the bad guys. Maybe tighten it up with street pusher info to be collected later.”

“Do that, please, Lieutenant. But as you say, the main guy is a pro, and he’ll be good at evasion. He may have dumped it for another car by this time. It’s been, what, twelve hours since all this occurred?”

“Get right on it, sir.”

“So they needed dough and a car to travel,” said Nick to Bob. “Best way to get each fast is to hit a place like this. That we’re on it so fast is a break for us, thanks to a cop’s sharp eyes. Still, they’re out and on the road.”

“Fuck,” said Bob.

“Yeah, and for someone who hates to improvise, he’s doing it pretty goddamned well.”

Next day, nothing, no reports of an abandoned Mercedes S, Michigan 4C55 409, jet-black. A few replies to Jared’s photo, but all useless. Another Assistant Director showed up to sit with Nick in his office. No comment on the subject of the chat. Bad news from latent prints: nothing for Juba. A few that presumably belonged to Jared Akim, but since he’d never been fingerprinted, that couldn’t be confirmed. Bob on the phone to the long-range retail shops of America, to the president of the Mile Benchrest Club in Pennsylvania, to MidwayUSA and Brownells, which owned Sinclair International. Nothing tangible. The .338 Lapua Magnum was mainstream enough that no unusual activity on behalf of its sustenance could be identified. A few hours for nap breaks, but nothing else.

The day after was going the same way, until Nick hung up his phone with a crack.

“Okay, let’s jump,” he said. “Get that State Police chopper over here, Chandler. Email intercept from Jared Akim to a pal, asking him to tell the folks he was all right, would be home soon — this was the coolest thing.”

“Did they get a locality on it?” Swagger asked.

“Yeah, the GPS record puts it at a Kmart in Germantown, Ohio. About one hundred and fifty miles south of here, right on the state line.”

“Let’s go to Ohio,” said Bob.

22

The Mercedes-Benz was a sweet ride. But at a small-town strip mall two hours out of Detroit, by way of Ann Arbor on 127, Juba slipped out of it, popped the lock and the ignition of a dark blue Chevy Impala, sitting in the neon wash of a coffee shop, and drove away. Another hour, and he spotted a low creek, shrouded in bushes, and directed Jared, who’d been following him in the Benz, to pull off. It took some arranging, but once they’d removed the shotgun — a Remington 1100 Auto-Tactical — and the canvas sack containing $23,650 in small bills from the Mercedes, Juba sent it through the bushes and into the water. It sank low, until only the roof was showing. Nobody would notice it, at least not routinely.

They drove on in the Impala, and finally Jared said, “Man, I am almost dead.”

“All right. Small motel, you go in and rent a room, pay with cash. Make sure you know this license number so you don’t struggle.”

This proved within Jared’s range of abilities, and soon he was zzzzed out.

He woke at 4 in the afternoon, suddenly disconsolate. What would his parents say? God, he’d been such a disappointment to them. They’d given him everything, he’d given them nothing. Now his mother was battered by tears and pain, his formidable father was being bedeviled by FBI agents, black cars were parked all around the block.

But maybe his friends thought he was cool.

Someone knocked.

“Yeah.”

“Come on, time to go.”

“Let me grab a shower.”

“Hurry.”

He cleaned himself but climbed into stinking clothes.

“You drive,” said Juba, his eyes everywhere.

“I think we’re okay,” said Jared. “I signed with a false name.”

“Oh, what a clever boy,” said Juba. “He knows all the tricks.”

They drove on, staying off the interstates, which were patrolled by more vigilant Highway Patrolmen, confident that they could outsmart small-town cops. Soon enough, they came to a Kmart, mooring some other stores in a downscale strip mall. Juba pulled in.

“Okay,” he said. “You go in. Buy some underwear. Me too. Also buy me a heavy file — a carpenter’s file, no fingernail stuff. And a light jacket, any kind, size fifty-two. But, most important, you buy a disposable phone. You know how they work?”

“Yeah, you buy a card with minutes on it, she activates it at the register, and we’re all set.”

“Yes. Don’t buy anything unusual, like toothpaste and a toothbrush, along with underpants. We’ll buy that some other place.”

“Shall I wear my sunglasses?”

“No. It’s dark out. You don’t want to be noticed. Tell yourself: I am nobody.”

“I am nobody.”

He got out and entered the bright zone of the store. It was sparsely populated, every clerk a composition in disinterest, and he got his stuff together in a short time, stopped for some Milky Ways and some protein bars, and got through the line quickly.

But it was too much. The melancholia broke over him quickly. Sitting on a stool at the hot dog counter in the front of the store, he quickly activated his phone and dialed the number of a pal back in Grosse Pointe.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Jar—”

“Holy Christ, man, what are you up to? The FBI has been here, and everything.”

“I can’t explain now. It’ll be okay. Look — real quick, just send my mom an email to Shareen at AOL-dot-com. Say you heard from me, I’m fine, I’ll be in touch in a bit. That’s all.”

“Where are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Okay, I’ll send the message.”

“Great. And thanks, man. When I get out of this, we’ll have a good laugh.”

“You got it.”

He rose, put the phone in a trash can. He went back to the store proper, got another one off the shelf, and bought it, feeling very Secret Agent Man. He’d be able to present an unopened plastic-sealed phone to Juba, who’d never know he’d made a call. What were the odds that the feds were intercepting his parents’ emails?

Are we going anywhere? Or are we just going away?”

Juba looked at his watch, pulled over to the edge of the highway.

“Okay, little boy,” he said. “I need to make contact. Phone?”

Juba took it, ripped it from its plastic packaging, which he threw out the window, scraped clear the code of the calling card, tapped it into the phone. He had fifteen minutes.

He dialed a number.

“Yes, I am fine. I need a new pickup. Tell them I am on U.S. Route 127, just past the border of Michigan. I will stay on 127. How much time will it take to intercept?”

He paused. A car passed, then a van.

“Okay. Yes, we are in a dark blue Impala. License: Michigan L11 245. Thank you.”

He turned to Jared.

“Okay, a town called Greenville, about three hours ahead. We will go to a shopping mall on the south side of town — Walmart, not Sears. We are looking for a van, a Chevy, tan, license 276 RC678. Can you remember that?”

“No.”

“276 RC678. Pay attention.”

“What state?”

“Ohio.”

“How did they know we’d be in Ohio?”

“They know everything. Now, get rid of that phone. Sink it in water.”

Jared did as he was told. The phone went into a stream he found about fifty yards in. It occurred to him that this would be a great time for Juba to dump him. Or, he could dump Juba. He could take off now, disappear for a day or so in the Ohio farm wilderness. Then he could turn himself in. The best criminal lawyer in Michigan, whom his dad would hire, would get him a deal. He’d snitch out Juba, and they’d drop whatever thought they had about putting him away for mashing Mrs. Potato Head.

But he knew he couldn’t do that. He’d crossed the line. No matter how much he missed the easy pleasures of his old, meaningless life, he could never go back to it. He was jihadi now.

And, of course, Juba had not left.

About an hour further on, Juba, confident they were not under observation, ordered Jared to pull over. He reached into the Kmart bag, pulled out the plastic-wrapped file, and climbed into the backseat.

“Continue to drive. Eyes open, under the speed limit, nothing stupid.”

“Got it.”

Jared drove on, as one of the drearier sections of rural Ohio, its northwest corner, rolled by monotonously, but it wasn’t long until he heard some — well, what? Grinding? Sawing? Some kind of mechanistic sound. The rearview revealed nothing, but he managed a quick look-see on a smooth section of road and saw Juba, hunched over in concentration, his arm like a piston as it plunged ahead, was withdrawn, and plunged ahead again. In a few seconds, Jared realize what he was doing: shortening the shotgun stock.

Juba looked up.

“I cut it down. Easier to hide, and I can cover it with a jacket.”

Jared gulped. He did it again when the filing stopped, and he heard the weird thunk-thunk of Juba inserting more shells into the extended magazine of the shotgun.

23

At the Ohio Highway Patrol station on U.S. 75 outside Dayton, Nick stood at a much abused lectern and addressed the troops.

“You need to be very careful. We think this guy popped three drug dealers in Detroit. He will shoot. Big, tough Arab guy, we don’t know what name he’s operating under, but over there, where he got his start, he was called Juba. He may be with a kid, early twenties, slight, American citizen of Arabic heritage, sort of his interpreter and facilitator. But he may have dumped the kid, as he knows we’re all in on the two of them.”

The guys on the folding chairs were police-appropriate: crew-cut, gym-big, crisp as Honor Guard Company in their immaculate uniforms, seeming to share a single expression of wary attentiveness. They had faces built for Ray-Ban Aviators and flat-brims, and they all carried plastic Glock .40s on their patent leather Sam Browne belts. They were duty guys, and what more could you ask for?

“Sir,” someone said, “a triple first-degree is big-time. But we know you got here by emergency chopper from Detroit. You’re FBI, but not out of the Detroit Office, and that fellow with you is a ‘consultant,’ meaning a guy who knows a lot about a certain thing. So I’d like just to ask, politely, what’s going on?”

“As some of you may have surmised, there is a national security connection, but I am not at liberty to divulge it. The Detroit thing is a helpful pretext to get me troops without having to explain things. Let me just say this guy is thought to be very dangerous in ways not connected with Detroit, and that it is in the highest national interest — and urgency — to take him off the page right now.”

He watched them watching him. Like most State cop shops, it was a shabby installation off the highway, innocuous except for the OHP shield on a sign outside and the two dozen black-and-whites outside.

“Why here, why now?”

He backgrounded them, finishing on, “We’re working on the theory they stole the Impala in Hudson — blue, plates Alpha-Four-Five-Five-Charlie — and dumped the Benz outside of Hudson. So they’re headed south on 127. Since they’d been going forty-eight straight, I think they bunked somewhere and got on the road again maybe late last night. Still heading south. Don’t know if it’s random or they’re aiming toward a certain destination.”

“But you see it as this part of Ohio?”

“Yeah, and so far they’ve shown a tendency to stay off the interstates, because they know that’s where you guys are and they fear you guys. They know you pay attention. So my bet is, they’re still on 127 headed toward Greenville. So our target would be a dark blue ’13 Impala.”

Nick had more.

“Really, guys, do not go all heroic on me and try for a one-man intercept. This guy has tons of combat experience in the sandbox and he is a world-class shot. He’s got a twelve-gauge semi-auto and a box of double-aughts, stolen from the drug stash. With that gun, he’s too good to go man on man against. He will not miss. He will not go down to .40, unless it clips the central nervous system. Are you that good while taking incoming double-aught? I didn’t think so.

“So, note road and direction and pass on by. Don’t even pursue at a distance. You’ve done your job. Last thing we want is a rolling-felony-stop massacre as in Dade County. We can’t catch him, we’ve got to ambush him. We’ve got to be there in force or we’re looking at a shooting event like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t survive. If we get the ID, we’ll go to helicopter then, airborne, try and monitor them while we throw together some kind of roadblock, way overgunned for the occasion. I’ve got SWAT people coming in from Lansing and Columbus and Dayton; they’ll do the rough stuff, if it comes to that. They like rough stuff.”

Nick turned to Swagger.

“Can you think of anything?” Nick asked Swagger, standing just off to the side of the lectern. He turned back to the men before Bob could answer and said, “My associate here has been in more gunfights than probably anyone this side of Frank Hamer, and, as you can see, he’s more or less alive.”

There was some laughter.

Bob just said, “As Nick has said, I have been in many shooting events and had to put some folks down. This guy scares the hell out of me. I’m supposed to be brave, but I would run like hell until I had twenty guns backing me up. So bear that in mind if you get bitten by the hero bug. Your widow gets a folded flag, your kids get nothing, and you get dead.”

The accoutrements of the wait: cold, stale coffee made slick by degrading Styrofoam, intense cigarette hunger even for those who shook the monkey years ago, finger-drumming jazz variations, playing games on the iPhone with half an ear toward the cop-talk frags that come over the loudspeaker.

“Hector, this is Lima Five, just swept up through and past Greenville on 127, no contact.”

“Continue your route, Lima Five.”

“Hector, Lima Nineteen, am on binocs at Walmart parking lot, looked at a lot of cars, but no ’13 dark blue Impala.”

Nick said to the supervisor, “You know what, another tell might be a bad spray-paint job. And yet another is a different license plate. He might have changed.”

“Also, one of the guys might have gone flat in the backseat, or been dumped, so there won’t be two profiles,” said Chandler.

“Good on that, Chandler.”

The supervisor put that out, said, “They’ll find him.”

“If he’s there.”

Swagger stretched, yawned. Another headquarters day: a room decorated with radio shit and maps, with chalkboards all over the place, the radio people being mostly dowdy civilians, because why tie up a trained State cop sitting at a mic? Pictures of the governor, the president, the vice president, and various officials of meaningless rank. Fluorescent light pouring down, turning everything pale ghost gray even if outside it was a sunny midwestern day and prosperity’s engines were turning smoothly, except where they weren’t. Seemed odd to be hunting a shotgun-armed jihadi in Yourtown, U.S.A., and Swagger worried that if Juba saw what was ongoing, he might divert to the nearest mall and start blasting citizens until someone brought him down. He’d go out the obsessed, mercy-free jihadi way. Whatever you could say about these guys, they were hard men, in it to the end, willing to back it up with guts and fast to offer their own lives in the transaction.

Crackly noise.

“Hector, Lima Seven, have a possible Impala, no matching tag, maybe a ’13, tan, but the tan looked ragged to me.”

“Identify location, Seven.”

“Greenville. I’m north on Oakton, he’s south, just past Miller, inside speed limit. I haven’t turned on him.”

“Nearest unit — ah, let’s see — can you get to Oakton and Biddle, park, hide behind your vehicle, get an eyeball on this guy as he passes, but stay low.”

“This is Lima Nine, Hector, wilco that.”

It was silent except for the gravy train of static, amplified so much that it became especially irritating to those who hadn’t made peace with it.

“Go to chopper?” asked Bob.

“Not yet. Maybe it’s a no-go.”

Then, “Hector, Lima Nine, tan Impala just passed, black woman, three kids in backseat.”

“Got it. Good try, Lima Seven. Everybody stand down and—”

“Hector, Hector, Lima Nineteen, now at Walmart Plaza. There he is, parked near the store entrance. Sorry, can’t see if car is occupied, but it’s still dark blue and it’s got the Michael Charlie plates.”

Nick said to the supervisor, “Get your people on the south side, out of sight. Get ’em to assemble — I don’t know — close by, no sirens, no squealing brakes. We’ll take a look-see from up top and issue procedures at that time.”

“Got it.”

Nick turned to Swagger.

“Let’s go,” he said.

From above, the small city of Greenville was mostly elm canopy, pierced here and there by church spires. At the edges, a few industrial tanks stood out like white mushrooms. Nick had instructed the chopper pilot to orbit from a mile out, never coming directly over the Walmart and its wing of the mall. Nick and Bob worked their binoculars carefully.

“Okay, I got it,” Bob said. “Dark blue sedan, south entrance, in the row up from the main entrance on the east side, no action, no motion.”

Nick found it and focused, and there was the car, a long way away. Given the vibrations of the chopper, it was hard to hold it clearly for more than a few seconds.

“Yeah, I see. Looks empty to me.”

“Sure, they’re probably in the mall, getting a burger. But they could also be hiding on the floor, waiting for something, ready to roll when the time comes.”

Nick went to SEND mode.

“Hector, this is Fed One, you getting me?”

“Yes, I am,” came the voice, now clearly an older man’s, probably the State Police commanding officer, over from Columbus a few minutes ago.

“Sitrep, please,” said Nick. “What assets on the ground?”

“I’ve got my own SWAT in an armored vehicle, I’ve got twenty black-and-whites, we’re about a block away holding in the parking lot of First Methodist. All my people are armored up, cocked and locked. I’ve got an auxiliary SWAT unit from your office in Columbus, but they don’t have any armored assault car. I’ve got Greenville P.D. ready to take over traffic and isolate the mall from civilian ingress quick-time. And we’ve got the vehicle identified and are ready to launch.”

“Real good. Colonel, what’s your thought?”

“You don’t know if they’re in the car or the mall, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Okay, my call would be to move five black-and-whites in through the five entrances on two streets to the mall. I have my SWAT people in an armored vehicle, ready to hit the site and deploy. I will move Columbus and Dayton SWAT around the back of the mall as primary assaulters in phase two. On my go, the armored SWAT vehicle and the five squad cars hit the pedal and race to the car, establishing a perimeter and firebase if they’re there.”

“And the guys in the squad cars, all in body armor?”

“As per instructions.”

“Good. One call to surrender, then you can shoot,” said Nick.

“Got that. But if they’re not there, those officers fan to the east-side mall entrances and, once deployed, the SWAT mall assaulters hit from the two northernmost entrances and begin to sweep through. Your up-armored FBI team hits from the southern entrance, their job is the Walmart itself. Meanwhile, I’m blocking all mall exits with troopers, who, when signaled, will move in to coordinate with the mall teams. Encountering fire, all will rally to that point. How does that sound?”

Nick turned to Bob, putting his hand over the throat mic.

“You’re supposed to be a consultant. So consult.”

“It’s good,” Bob said. “Two targets, the car, then the mall sweep. He’s got his priorities right, it’s straight-ahead, no fancy timing or tricky feints and bluffs. Plus, these guys will feel better taking instructions from him rather than some out-of-state FBI guy. And these are supposed to be the best guys in the state, so I believe in ’em.”

Nick took his hand away from the mic.

“Real good,” he said to the colonel. “As soon as you hit the vehicle, my pilot will land and drop me off, and I’ll come to you.”

“My Command Center will be with SWAT at the car. I will move in with them if the car is empty. Y’all have raid jackets?”

“We’re in ’em. Ball caps too. Please don’t shoot us.”

“Haven’t shot an FBI agent in years,” said the colonel.

“Okay, give your guys a few more minutes to get settled, then we go. You call it, Hector, you’re on the ground.”

“Roger that, Fed One.”

They could see the squad cars converging on what had to be the target car.

“Take us in,” said Nick to the pilot. With the zooming rotors’ angles shifting, the helicopter banked left like a fighter jet and began the long swoop in, leaving stomachs far behind.

Swagger thought of his last helicopter adventure, which ended with second-degree burns on arm, shoulder, neck, and face.

“Reminds me I hate helicopters,” he said to nobody but himself.

24

Juba wanted to destroy America but for one thing: the French fries.

“I like these,” he said.

“You’ve been all over the world, you’ve never had French fries?”

“I was not on tour. I was on jihad.”

“Yeah, busy, busy — I get it.”

They sat in a booth at a McDonald’s halfway down the mall’s hallway. To the right, the broad opening to the shiny paradise of Walmart beckoned. The hall itself was darker, a corridor of dying retail, with a cheesy plastic garden in the middle. A lot of mom-’n’-pop new-media stuff, DVDs and games and phones from obscure networks, a couple of other fast-food troughs, a shoe chain, an Old Navy, the whole place dying. The brick-and-mortar was losing to the ’Net, as Jared knew, but he thought this was not a topic that would fascinate Juba.

“No,” said Juba. “I’ve seen these places, you know? They’re everywhere.”

“I remember when they were just another snake cult,” said Jared.

“What?”

“Nothing. Bad joke.”

“Jihadis do not joke.”

“But they eat French fries?”

“I make the rules.”

“That is true,” said Jared.

Next to Juba on the seat was a hoodie wrapped tight to obscure fourteen inches or so of semi-automatic shotgun stoked to the gills on 12-gauge double-aughts. But the man carried it with such insouciant naturalism, it would never have occurred to anyone that such a package could conceal such a weapon. Juba was completely calm, at peace. He had prayed in the car, something Jared could not get himself to do even now, explaining to himself his attraction to the cause was more identity politics than faith.

They had made the drive down 127 to Greenville without trouble, skipped the Sears mall, found the Walmart mall with equal ease, and realized there was no time frame set up. Jared found a space, close to one entrance.

“Want me to get another phone?” he said. “Maybe they’re here already. Do you know where they were coming from?”

“Detroit, same as us. It’s where they were to pick me up. But then things went wrong.”

“Who are these guys, may I ask?”

“No. Suppose I get away and you get caught. You will give up all your secrets. So, the less you know, the better.”

“Okay, just asking… Do we wait in the car? That’s kind of suspicious.”

“I agree. Go inside, one at time, meet at… Where will we meet?”

“Hungry?”

“Yes.”

“I see by the sign, the golden arches, there’s a McDonald’s inside. Meet me there? Easy to find.”

“Fine.”

They left the car, each going a different way, eyes hunting the presence of the tan van, neither seeing it. The mall swallowed each and, in time, reunited them at the McDonald’s.

After the meal, Jared said, “So, now get new throwaway?”

“Yes, little boy.”

Juba sat, drinking coffee, appearing uninterested, as Jared went to run his errand. He was a good boy, it turned out, and his cheer and wit, something long missing from Juba’s life, paid off as a small pleasure. He trusted Jared enough at this point that he felt no anxiety as the boy disappeared — and no relief when he reappeared twenty minutes later.

“You get it?”

“Yes.”

“Powered up?”

“Yes. You want to make a call?”

“Not now. We go to the car, wait there. They drive by and we hop in. Who would notice?”

“Nobody.”

So they ambled out, headed down the mall amid strangers who paid them no attention at all, came to the entrance that yielded the car and headed out.

It was all fine — and then it wasn’t.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” said Jared, pulling the larger man back just inside the doors.

Juba wheeled on Jared, caught off guard by the physical contact.

“See out there,” Jared said quickly, “a mile out? That helicopter?”

He pointed. Above the trees, a speck moved horizontally through the air, its faintest of buzzes only barely reaching their ears.

“Yes…”

“I saw it fly by when we headed in a half hour ago. It’s still there. Farther out, but still. Could they have us?”

“Are you sure?” said Juba.

“Yes.”

“Go out, look about,” said Juba.

The boy sauntered out, pretending nonchalance, headed back.

“Okay,” he said. “I see the white roofs of police cars at major intersections. As if they’re… waiting for a signal.”

“How will they come?”

“God, I don’t know. Go to the car first, then sweep the mall.”

From far off, five squad cars punched out in a squeal and roar as they raced into the lot and blazed toward the sector where the Impala was parked, led by what looked like an Abrams tank but was some kind of black SWAT thing, moving too fast for its treads but clearly a war machine. All over the perimeter, gumballs lit up as officers moved to restrict access at intersections. The helicopter roared inbound.

“Okay,” said Juba, slipping his hand into the package he carried. “Little boy, you run away. When this is over, you surrender. You are no longer jihadi, you are kidnap victim.”

Jared was struck by this sudden mercy. The man had human graces after all and didn’t require of Jared his pointless death. But he knew it wouldn’t work.

“Not with my size tens on Oprah’s face. Come on, we can still make it out.”

He pulled the larger man to him, back to the main corridor, where they veered toward the Walmart at the end of the mall, while Jared said, “Call your friends, tell them we’ll be at the south end, down where the shopping carts are. The mall is hot, it’s about to be cop city.”

“No. I stay and fight. I take as many infidels—”

Jared saw his man walking down the corridor, methodically blowing up housewives and baby buggies and old guys with walkers until the State cops hosed him down with full auto. He’d have two hundred bullets in him.

“You don’t have to die today. Call them!”

As they moved, Juba dialed the number and spoke rapidly to the responder.

They reached the maw of the big store and plunged into Walmart, skidded past people loading up for the next seven months, past the Chinese menswear and the Filipino furniture and the Japanese electronics and the Brazilian shoes, turned hard, past many shoppers, skipped sideways and through the lines at the cash registers in front, hit the exit.

But instead of bulling his way directly out, Juba sidled up to a woman pushing a large shopping cart and said, in English, “I help,” and smiling, showed a crown of white teeth. It was there that Jared noticed something for the first time: Juba was a strikingly handsome man, square of face, strong of jaw, and regular of feature, and, with the baseball cap off, his shock of thick dark hair turned him almost debonaire.

The woman — she hadn’t been looked at by a man in decades, Jared guessed — lit up and instantly yielded to his charm. The two of them walked out into chaos, Jared a little behind but clearly a part of the same triad.

Sirens. Rushing, careening squad cars. Jared glanced northward, observed the Impala, surrounded by ninjas in black armor with subguns who’d just poured from a giant black armored truck, while squad cars with flashers and shotgun cops set up at every entrance.

They turned right, unconfronted, because as a self-contained, inward-directed family unit, they were off the cops’ radar. They went to the curb, the feds too forward-oriented to look peripherally, too busy setting up exactly as ordered, too hungry for a genuine terrorist to notice them.

It would be seconds before more cops flooded the area, and now the olive chopper took over the auditory universe as its rotors beat the air on the descent. Risking a peek back, Jared saw it land two hundred feet from the Impala, and two more men hurtled out of it.

They stood there, naked to all eyes yet rendered invisible by the beaming woman, who was having the time of her life.

A van materialized before them.

“My dear, I must leave,” crooned Juba, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She sighed, having had a wonderful date, if a bit of a truncated one.

Men pulled them in and flattened them out.

“Lie in here,” someone said, opening a hatch in the floor like the lid of a coffin, and they rolled in, seeing the light disappear as the hatch was closed behind them.

But Jared had gotten a glimpse of the save team.

They were Mexicans.

25

The sweep was done, and they had nothing.

“Fuck,” said Nick.

“This guy’s the best,” said Bob.

“I know my people were on plan,” said the colonel who supervised Ohio’s Highway Patrol and stood with them near the garden at the center of the mall under plastic palm fronds and next to gurgling toxic water in a filthy open sewer among the palms’ fake terra-cotta pots. “Nobody got out after we commenced our operation. There was just a few seconds there where the cars hadn’t quite gotten to all the exits.”

“Colonel, your people did fine, I’m sure,” said Nick. “And a nod to Greenville, they helped too. I’m just thinking I should have sent the cover cars in first, without siren and flashing lights. When they were in position, we hit the Impala with SWAT.”

“There was hardly time to consider everything,” the colonel said. “The doors were covered within two minutes, maybe one. I don’t know how anybody could have made it out.”

“Anybody couldn’t have. But this guy, he could have,” said Nick.

The search continued, but now at a slower pace. Closets opened by heavily armed police, civilians cleared and let go, aisles and bins explored and probed, storerooms and break rooms penetrated. It might, it could, maybe it would, yield something — but neither Nick nor Bob held out much hope.

Meanwhile, FBI techs dusted the car for prints and in a fast first pass had come up with two of Juba’s right thumb, and lots of others, which meant that one trophy of the operation — a consolation prize, to be sure — would be a whole set of prints. They also noted a pile of plastic grit in the well of the backseat and half the butt of a shotgun.

“He’s cut it down for practicality,” said Bob. “He can hide it better, pull it out fast.”

Nick nodded, then he had to go back to the phone for the tenth time. This round, he was on it with D.C. for a long time, explaining, taking responsibility, offering his resignation twice, both times turned down, because the people there only were interested in one thing: what does Swagger think?

“They think you’re a god. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them the truth. Anyway, talk to them.” He handed the phone over.

“Swagger.”

“You’re on speakerphone with the Director and four Assistant Directors and the head of the Counterterrorism Division,” said the voice.

“What can I do?” said Swagger.

“Your read, please, Mr. Swagger.”

“We almost got him. We know he was there. In my humble, Director, Memphis put together a brilliant plan on the fly and—”

“Swagger, no, leave that for later. Tell us where you think we are and what you think is next.”

“I would just add that we have consistently underestimated this guy.” Oops, maybe that was selling out Nick. Can’t do that. “I mean, I have continually underestimated this guy. Everything we throw at him is nothing new. He’s done it before. He doesn’t panic, he doesn’t quit, he improvises. He’s a pro’s pro.”

“Your next move would be…?”

“Well, I wouldn’t set up roadblocks. He’ll never give in to that. On top of that, we don’t know who helped him split, and in what vehicle. He may be with another cell — four guys with light machine guns and RPGs, and if some country cops out in the haystacks bounce them, it could go to guns in a bad way, with a lot of people — cops and civilians — going down. The one thing we know is, he’s got a cut-down Remington 1100 on him, and that’s a big, bad toy. You don’t want him going Remington on you, which is what he’ll do if you corner him. You have to ambush him. You have to be there first, and let him walk into it, and take him hard, with overwhelming force. Still dangerous, but maybe one degree less so. So I’d go back to the brainiac stuff.”

“Our analysts?”

“I think some hard thinking by your top people should come up with some possibilities that would narrow the search areas. Given what we think he’s going to do, he’s got to have certain things. We have to anticipate him. Along those lines, Nick wants to set me up with a computer genius. I think that’s a good idea. I have a series of attributes he will need to have at his disposal to move on to the next step, maybe you could use that as some kind of index or filter, or something.”

“All right, taken into consideration. Put Memphis back on.”

So Nick talked to them for a few more minutes, and then a Greenville detective came up, whispered to a sergeant, who whispered to the colonel, who indicated something to Nick.

Nick ended the call.

“We’ve got them on surveillance footage from McDonald’s. You guys want to take a look?”

It was him, no doubt. Not in the center of the frame, not in the cone of focus, but definitely a man of intimidation and danger. He sat in a booth just off the cash register and delivery counter and, by a twist of fate, facing toward the camera, while his companion, sitting across from him, was just the back of the head.

He wolfed down two burgers and a soft drink, seemed to savor the French fries, and looked to be engaging in conversation with the boy. Meanwhile, in a box in the corner of the frame, integers raced by that indicated number of frames and time of day.

“Looks like McDonald’s has a fan,” said Nick.

“Nobody don’t like them fries,” said Bob. “Freeze it, please.”

They were in the mall security office, amid a bank of video screens, all of them recording and feeding from various key spots around the installation. The McDonald’s had three cameras, because ruckuses were most likely to start in spots where teenagers gathered. Thus, all things considered, it was a pretty good show.

“We’ll need to ASAP this to D.C. Our labs can enhance. Maybe we’ll get a clearer picture, something we can put out. That would cut way down on his maneuverability and operational freedom.”

Bob looked at the blurred image.

“Can you bring it up?”

“No, sir,” said the mall security boss. “It’s mainly meant for figuring out what kid hit what other kid.”

“Got it,” said Bob.

He stared at the image, but the more he bored into it, the more incoherent it became, until it was just a fuzzy mess of pixels, losing all form and content. What he saw was what he expected, but nothing actionable. His head was big; it went with his big frame and big hands, which were seen dwarfing the individual French fries as he ate them. He was clearly in command, but, in actual point of fact, he didn’t look particularly fierce: a big guy, but no different than a million other men in other malls. Not bad-looking. Baseball cap — black, no insignia — a hoodie, jeans, the shoes not visible. Clean-shaven, not that fake tough look movie stars and podiatrists affected these days. Everybody wanted to look tough, while this guy, and all true tough guys, just wanted to blend in.

At one point, he sent the boy on an errand, got himself a cup of coffee, returned to the table, and just sat. He didn’t appear to be unusually wary or agitated. It was clear he trusted the kid, who, after all, could have sold him out as a way of walking away from flattening Theola Peppers’s face. But the kid was back, and the sack revealed — another freeze, thank you — that he’d bought a phone.

“Disposable,” said Nick. “One call, then into the river. If we track the phone, the GPS signal just takes us to the river. Standard operating procedure.”

The two rose to leave. Upright, Juba was large for his ethnic grouping, with that linebacker’s body and the sparkle, the large and powerful muscles evident with each step, even though he was slightly pigeon-toed. He and the boy ambled out of Mickey D’s, back into the world, all proteined-up for fresh outrage.

“Is that it?” Nick asked.

“One more segment we think is them. Another camera, looking down the hall toward the west parking lot exit, number 2B.”

“Please,” said Nick.

This one, at least, explained something. The two were shuffling nonchalantly to the doors, Juba with fourteen inches of sawed-off shotgun wrapped in what appeared to be a hoodie. They opened the doors, stepped out, the doors closed behind them, and—

A second later, they were back, their postures changed radically. Now their faces were clenched, in fear or anger, clearly alarmed, bursting with a palpable need to move or flee or pull guns on something.

“Freeze it,” said Nick. “He saw us. The kid, I mean. Mr. Supervisor, as far as I can make out, that entrance looks directly east?”

“Yes, sir,” said the security chief.

“That’s exactly where we were laying off, goddammit. So the kid sees the chopper, and the plan is shot. Little fucker. Look at the time.”

According to the data window, it was 16:13:34 p.m., thirty-seven seconds before the moment the SWAT truck and its five wingmen began to rush the Impala.

“Okay,” said Nick.

The images started moving again. Juba was speaking urgently to the boy and seemed to reach into his package as if to unlimber the Remington and get ready to go to war. But the kid grabbed him and began to pull him. They advanced toward the camera — another freeze, unfortunately, didn’t provide a better facial of either — and disappeared, clearly to exit, one way or the other, off camera.

“So the kid talked him out of going jihad on Greenville, Ohio,” said Bob. “Saved a lot of folks from getting whacked.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it to his parole officer… Mr. Supervisor, that’s it? You don’t have any exteriors of these guys pulling away in the seconds before the squad cars arrived?”

“Nothing my people could see,” said the supervisor.

Nick gestured to Chandler, who’d made it down by car and joined the party a few minutes earlier.

“Jean, I want people to go to every retail outlet on every street surrounding the mall and check the security cameras. Maybe somewhere there’s coverage on who picked them up and in what kind of vehicle. Meanwhile, arrange for our tech people to get the stuff Supervisor Gray’s cameras covered back to D.C. for analysis.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nick’s phone rang. It was D.C.

“Fuck, not again,” he said. “How many times can I resign?”

He slid it on, ID’d himself, said, “Yes,” and listened, nodding. It was a detailed conversation, perhaps three minutes long. “Yeah,” he finally said, “good. Late but good. But it points the way.”

He hung up and turned to Bob and Chandler.

“It was Cyber Division. The kid emailed his buddy. Fifteen fifty-nine. Off a disposable. Juba sends him to buy a disposable, he does, but he sneaks in a quick update to Johnny Jones, to give his mom a heads-up. They just accessed the GPS to give us the location, which, unfortunately, is where we’re standing right now.”

“The jihadi who missed his mom,” Swagger said.

“Yeah, but it’s the pattern. Whenever Juba needs to make contact with whoever, he sends Jared out to buy a disposable. One call, then into the river. But Jared sneaks in an email or a call to his pal, to reach his mom, and we’re on that. See, if we can nail the area, get our reaction team in place, ready to chopper to the site, we can nail him. That’s how we’ve got to do it.”

“So we’ve got to anticipate where he’ll be,” said Bob. “We get the area tight enough, everything falls into place.”

“He’ll do it again. He misses Mom. He’ll always miss Mom. So you’ll work with the computers to come up with a filter to pinpoint the area, we’ll scour the wires for reports, and also look at it from the weapons acquisition point of view, all of which will point us to an area. The kid is the key to the whole thing.”

26

The dream again. Now, after so long.

In this version, he is trapped. He is unarmed. He cannot move his arms. The American sniper smiles, fiddles, takes his time, locks himself into the weapon skillfully, slowly. He peeks up from the scope just for the pleasure of seeing it all laid out before him.

The flash.

Juba awoke. Where was he? It was dark, someone was near to him, he felt the closeness, the movement in and out of the other’s lungs, their limbs tangled, the sourness, the vibration, the motion, they couldn’t move, they were oppressed under some kind of lid. The coffin’s?

“You are awake?” asked the boy.

“I am. We are still in the truck?”

“It’s been so long, I hardly remember. I’m numb. I’m also very hungry.”

“I’ll tell them to stop for more French frieds,” said Juba.

“French fries,” the boy corrected.

At that point, at last, the lid above them raised.

Three men peered down at them, the silhouettes of their cowboy hats showing against the highway illumination.

“All right, my friends,” said one in Arabic, “it’s time to come out.”

Slowly, hands helped Juba unwrap himself from the boy, supported him as he searched for power in his legs and arms, hoisted him clear so that he could almost stand, though his legs were soft and weak, and one momentarily gave out.

“Where are we?” he said.

The vehicle sped through the night. Outside, an occasional light slid by, nothing prominent, merely a sign of human habitation. He looked forward, saw nothing but the cone of headlights illuminating a road with a pair of lines down the middle of it. The lines flashed by like tracers. The beat of the engine came through to him, concealed under every surface he touched.

“We’re going west,” said the Arabic voice. It seemed one of the Mexicans was along as translator, for he had Arabic skills, and even in the dark, squinting, confused, Juba could tell that his face had significantly different features. He was some kind of transplanted Syrian, judging from the accent.

Next, they pulled the boy out.

“About time,” said the kid. “I am so thirsty. Got anything to drink?”

“Who is this?” said the Syrian. “We were told only one.”

“He is with me,” said Juba. “He is fine.”

Jared jumped in with, “I’m his go-between. I’m the guy who introduced him to America. I happened to be with him when the shit hit the fan, that’s why I’m here.”

“He is jihadi,” said Juba, in English.

It was the best thing anyone had ever said about Jared.

They stopped, and a man ran in an outlet for food. Burger King, not McDonald’s. Better hamburger, French frieds not so good.

They drove again, through the night.

The Syrian caught them up.

“We got you guys out just in time. How’d they know? Is there a leak?”

“This is what they do,” said Juba. “It is their job. No leak, just them reading the signs.”

“Maybe so,” said the Syrian. “Anyway, we were stuck at a roadblock for a while, they were doing a search of vehicles headed out of Greenville onto the interstate. We thought we might have to use this.”

He patted something on the floor covered with a tarpaulin, pulled the canvas back, exposing a Russian PK on a bipod, its long belt of 7.62 RPD gathered in a heap under the receiver.

“Bad news, but then a few car lengths before we got there, they tore it up and pulled out. I don’t know why.”

“The hand of Allah?” said the boy.

“Possibly they didn’t want a gun battle on the highway,” said Juba.

“Ever since, we’ve been driving without incident. The radio says something about murders in Detroit, three dealers.”

“It was necessary,” said Juba.

“It’s of no importance. All the same, I wouldn’t return to Detroit anytime soon.”

“Who are you guys?” asked Jared.

“Cartel,” Juba said. “They have the capacity to support my enterprise. They have been paid a great deal for their interest.”

“You will meet Señor Menendez shortly,” said the Syrian. “He is a great and powerful man. A visionary. With his might behind you, you cannot fail. We will also abandon this rattletrap van and continue our journey in comfort.”

“Where are we going?” asked Jared.

“Little boy,” said Juba, “you do not ask men like these such questions. They are professionals. You show them respect by allowing them to do their jobs.”

“Anyway,” said the Syrian, “you should know that all items you requested have been acquired and are where they need to be. Your rifle came in from Mexico with a recent large shipment and awaits for your hands to assemble it. You will not be bothered at the shooting range we have for you. All things will happen as they have been planned.”

Juba sat back. He settled into the seat. He seemed, for the first time, without tension. The van rolled through the dark.

Dawn cracked the eastern horizon behind them. Gray light spilled from the sky. They shared the road with semi-trailers, a few SUVS, all of which flew by them in the left lane. Lights came and went, and the only sound was of men breathing. Jared was full of questions, but he asked none. Cartel? That bothered him. They were ruthless, had no ideology except greed, and became allies only via payment. But Juba clearly trusted them, and without them, he’d be sitting in a Greenville cell, waiting for his father’s lawyer to arrive, wondering if he had the guts to take the fall for the woman or sell out Juba for less jail time. He hoped he never had to discover the answer.

They slowed, the blinker was activated, and the van left the highway, taking an exit, somewhere in the vastness of rural America. He wanted to ask, “Are we there?” but thought it a bad idea.

The van pulled into a farm, drove around the back of the house to the barnyard, where a large black SUV awaited. The van came to a halt.

The Syrian said, “Sir, that package still in the compartment, that is a weapon, no?”

“It is,” said Juba.

“You must leave it there. You must not be armed in the presence of Señor Menendez.”

“I understand. I have no other weapons.”

“And you?” he asked Jared.

“No, of course not.”

“All right, out. Enjoy the fresh air.”

They climbed from the van, and indeed the fresh air seemed like a reward. Jared inhaled, almost becoming dizzy from the pleasure of it. He was still ticking, despite it all.

A man got out of the SUV and opened the back door. Another man got out, thin, handsome, Hispanic, of grandee heritage, in a well-tailored blue suit and black loafers. His Rolex was gold as were his tie clip and his cuff links. His teeth were white and perfect, his hair thick and well cut, his manner smoothly aristocratic.

“Sir,” he said, “I welcome you. I am Menendez.”

The Syrian translated from the English to the Arabic.

“It is an honor, señor,” replied Juba.

“As you have been told, all is in waiting. From here on, things will go smoothly. Your visit is much anticipated.”

“Excellent,” said Juba.

“And this young man?”

“He is my assistant. Young but eager. Has proven himself in action twice during the past few days. Jihadi to the core.”

“I am Menendez,” said the grandee. “Welcome, and congratulations on your accomplishments. If you have impressed the great Juba, you have impressed me.”

“Thank you,” said Jared.

“You are a very brave young man,” said Menendez. “And you are safe now.”

He clapped him on the shoulder to point him on the path to deliverance, but the hand had a gun in it, and he shot the boy in the back of the head.