The man laughed. “You already found trouble.” He moved toward Khalid as one of his buddies appeared from a different direction.
Khalid considered his options. There was a car parked directly in front of his. Within seconds, a pickup driven by the third man came screeching around the parking lot and stopped sideways behind Khalid’s vehicle, pinning him in.
“Call 9-1-1,” he said to Ghaniyah. “And lock the doors.”
He kicked his door shut and took a step toward the first man in front of him. “This is the part where you walk away quietly before the police get here,” Khalid said.
“No, this is the part where I kick your butt,” the man said. He was about six-two and easily weighed more than two hundred pounds. He waited while the third man climbed out of the truck and joined the first two.
“Why don’t you just go back to Afghanistan with the other towelheads?”
The man on Khalid’s right took a jab step at him, and Khalid jumped back. All three of Khalid’s tormentors laughed and spread out around him, forming a semicircle. Other customers in the parking lot watched but kept their distance.
“We ought to put him in Abu Ghraib so a female guard can strip him down and lead him around on a leash like the other dogs,” one of the men said.
Hearing no sirens, Khalid decided he had no choice. As the men taunted him, Khalid planned his move. He would go after the man on his right first-the smallest of the three. A quick blow to the crotch, and then whirl around toward the big guy in the middle.
“Yeah, get down on your knees and bark,” the guy on Khalid’s left said.
Khalid pivoted quickly and kicked the man on his right, bringing him to his knees. He spun toward the attacker in the middle, but the man was quicker than Khalid had expected. He caught Khalid with a hard right that cracked against Khalid’s cheekbone just as the third man came in with a flying tackle that drove Khalid to the pavement. Instantly all three men were on him, slamming their fists into his face and body. Khalid tried to curl into a fetal position for protection, but one man knelt over him and pounded Khalid while the others kicked the imam. He tasted blood and felt himself losing consciousness.
“What the-?” His attacker’s words were lost in a squeal of tires and the crash of metal. Khalid looked up. Ghaniyah had backed their car into the men’s truck.
“Are you crazy?” one of them yelled. The guy on top of Khalid jumped up just as Ghaniyah slammed the car into drive, pulled forward a few feet, then slammed it into reverse and floored it again. She crashed into the truck a second time, bending more metal and breaking more glass. The truck bounced back.
She had the full attention of Khalid’s attackers now. The driver of the truck scrambled toward it. “You freakin’ idiot!” he yelled.
Before he could get there to move it, Ghaniyah slammed into the truck a third time, pushing it out of the way. She jumped out of the car and started cursing at the men like a possessed woman. They gaped at her, astonished by her brazenness.
“Look what you’ve done!” she screamed, pointing to Khalid. “May your souls burn in hell forever!”
None of the men seemed to know what to do with a woman who was certifiably nuts.
“Get out of here!” she shreiked, taking a menacing step at one of the men. He held his ground but didn’t argue. The look in her eyes said Ghaniyah was ready to kill. She had always been intense before the accident, but Khalid hadn’t seen her show this much emotion since.
Khalid struggled to his feet and moved next to Ghaniyah. “C’mon,” he said. “They’re not worth it.”
Khalid could hear the sirens coming in the distance. “Look at my truck!” the biggest man yelled. “I’ll sue you for every dime.”
Only in America, thought Khalid, can you get beat up by someone who then threatens to sue you.
One of the attackers picked up his hat, dusted it off, and put it back on. “You’re quite the man,” he said to Khalid. “Had to have the old lady bail you out.”
The sirens were getting closer. The men glanced around and yelled at the people in the parking lot who had stopped to stare. “Show’s over, people! Get back to your pitiful lives!”
All three climbed into the truck. The man on the passenger side leaned out the window and promised Khalid that he had not seen the last of them. Then the driver squealed the tires, and the truck pulled away.
As the adrenaline began to fade, Khalid started feeling the intense pain in his face and ribs. “You’re going to the hospital,” Ghaniyah said.
He didn’t even try to argue.
55
Alex waited several days while Khalid mended before asking his client to meet with his lawyers and provide answers to most of the questions they had been asking. The imam brought Nara with him to the conference room at Madison and Associates.
For Alex, Khalid’s appearance was a grim reminder of how dangerous this case had become. The imam’s right eye was swollen nearly shut with a large half-moon of black-and-blue bruises around the outside and four stitches just above the eyebrow. His right upper lip was twice its normal size. Khalid winced when he took his seat and shifted around a little until he got comfortable. “It only hurts when I breathe,” he quipped. Fortunately, the X-rays had shown no broken bones.
By contrast, Nara looked composed and well rested. She wore a light blue blouse with a matching skirt and heels that accentuated her long, slim figure. She had used just the right touch of makeup to highlight her alluring eyes and full lips. Alex caught himself staring at her as she talked. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see that Shannon was giving him a disapproving look. Jealous?
He had to admit that having Nara around had become less of a burden after their talk on Sunday. Now, sitting in the same room with her, he had to force himself to concentrate on the case.
There had been no further developments in the tepid investigation of Khalid’s beatdown. Alex’s firm had issued a press release explaining that Khalid had been assaulted in the parking lot of his local Harris Teeter. Neither the press nor the police seemed to care very much.
Once Alex and Shannon convinced Khalid that the conference room was not bugged, he agreed to detail the connections between the Islamic Learning Center, the Islamic Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.
The mosque in Norfolk was part of a grand strategy to build at least one flagship mosque in every major American city. According to Khalid, the Islamic Brotherhood had helped fund the mosque through a spiderweb of charitable organizations and NGOs it secretly controlled. Though Khalid didn’t know for sure, there were rumors that the Brotherhood received much of its funding through a maze of international NGOs that could be traced to various donors in Saudi Arabia and certain terrorist groups. You can’t build a $13-million mosque in Norfolk, Virginia, without some outside funding, Khalid explained.
Khalid had been asked to help lead the mosque because he was a prestigious professor at Old Dominion University and because he had been a high-profile leader in Lebanon. In the beginning, the Islamic Brotherhood also paid a stipend to other mosque leaders such as Fatih Mahdi.
Shortly after the mosque was completed, Khalid had a falling-out with the Islamic Brotherhood. The Brotherhood wanted to grow the attendance by using the tactics they had used in other cities, the same tactics used by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Brotherhood members would go door-to-door in the inner city and find families in need. They would provide groceries and assistance with rent. They would claim that Allah had sent them to bless the family. They would say that Christians, Jews, and Muslims were all pretty much the same theologically, all people of the Book, all worshiping the same God. They would tell single moms that Islam would teach their sons discipline and help them stay out of trouble in school.