The interview with Allen Lamar’s high school teacher took less than twenty minutes — but it had scared the hell out of FBI Special Agent Joel Johnson.
Now, as he slammed the door to his forest green Dodge Durango and ran across the rapidly filling parking lot toward a packed football stadium, he wondered if five agents were going to be enough. The brassy blare of two high school bands greeted him on the crisp air of the Texas evening.
One of the two supervisors assigned to the Dallas Area Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, Special Agent Johnson had done time in Pakistan, Central America, and a couple of refugee camps in Europe. He’d seen enough despair, madness, and evil that he was not an easy man to scare. Social media would have everyone believe that armed terrorists were lurking behind every rock and tree — a fact of life that only made it difficult to root out the real threats. But the teacher who called in the tip wasn’t some paranoid conspiracy theorist. Sixteen-year-old Allen Lamar appeared to be the real deal.
The teacher had recounted the cold hard facts of the boy’s downward spiral, how she’d watched Lamar change from an introverted math genius with few friends to a popular thug, disdainful and threatening to everyone in the school who wasn’t a member of his select group of acolytes. Allen’s new friends called him Tariq Mohammed — and he made it clear that this was his war name.
Allen’s teacher had seen this sort of behavior before — youth finding themselves, experimenting with boundaries and new sets of friends. She’d been ready to write the behaviors off as teenage angst — difficult to watch, but not out of the norm.
And then she’d found the manifesto. Her jittery principal, fearful of another “Clock Kid” scenario and the legal battles that went with it, was furious when she’d contacted the FBI directly instead of the boy’s parents. Agent Johnson felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding when he’d read the letter. Peppered with the hateful regurgitated spewage of at least three well-known Internet Imams who had close ties to the Islamic State, Lamar/Mohammed detailed, in his awkward handwriting, his fervent wish to kill as many infidels as possible.
The JTTF was comprised of representatives from federal, state, and local agencies and ordinarily capable of standing up a large surveillance operation at a moment’s notice. But late afternoon on “Federal Friday,” when agents tended to disappear early from the office, were problematic, even when stopping a suspected terrorist. Most of the agents, troopers, deputies, and detectives who made up the task force had families and all the attendant commitments that went along with them.
Countless high school kids followed the Hate-America crap that slimed the feeds of a dozen social media sites. Standing up a rolling surveillance on one of them at the last minute seemed a futile waste of a weekend. It was all too easy for otherwise good people to become cynical under the constant barrage of reports regarding sleeper cells of bearded men, strange women wearing hijabs at Walmart, and radicalized teens about to ship off to join the Islamic State. Johnson was on constant guard to make sure the bona fide threats didn’t get buried in the noise.
To make matters worse, Lamar was already on the move by the time the teacher called in with the tip, giving Johnson zero opportunity to brief his team — or put a real team together. It was like some unwinnable test scenario from the Bureau’s supervisory selection process. Everything had to be done on the fly, utilizing agents who were available rather than those who were chosen for their superior abilities. Johnson had been lucky to find five warm bodies who would answer their cellphones.
Nearing the stadium, Johnson stepped from the asphalt parking lot to the concrete sidewalk that led to the long bank of ticket booths. He lived just five minutes away from this very field, but his boys were too young to play football so he’d never been inside. A pressing crowd teemed like thousands of salmon trying to swim up four narrow streams. Static crackled in the tiny, flesh-colored bud in Johnson’s ear as he slowed with the crowd to funnel through the stadium gates. Hidden by shaggy blond hair, a clear plastic “pigtail” ran from the earbud and disappeared into the collar of the agent’s black leather jacket and the neck of a burnt orange University of Texas sweatshirt. The shirt was a size too large but covered the Glock .40 on his hip should he need to loose the jacket. A voice-activated microphone, sensitive enough to pick up his mumbling curses, was pinned inside that same collar, also out of sight. This surveillance kit negated the need to go all Hollywood and lift a hand to his lips each time he needed to communicate or, worst of all, touch a finger to his ear. A cellphone would have been even less conspicuous, but encrypted radios allowed each member of the team to hear the conversation of all parties in real time.
“I got eyes on,” Andrea Lopez said, sounding breathless and a little too eager over the radio. She was fresh meat, just four months on the job and still covered with the entire can of whoopass they poured on new agents before they left Quantico. Her training report noted that one of the male agents in her class had made the mistake of calling her Betty Bureau Blue Suit during defensive tactics training and earned himself an “accidental” elbow to the jaw. She could handle herself but she was a hair too aggressive for Johnson’s taste. Blind aggression combined with inexperience was a good way to get hurt in this line of work.
“He’s inside the ticket gate,” Agent Lopez continued. “A second male just walked up to him. Olive skinned, wearing a red hoodie. I’m moving closer so I can try to identify him.”
“Negative,” Johnson snapped, drawing a wide eye from the blue-haired grandmother who happened to be walking next to him. He lowered his voice. “Just keep your distance for now.”
“Welcome to the party, Joel,” a second female said over the radio. This one was much calmer, more seasoned. At fifty, Angie James had recently become a grandmother while working undercover inside a violent splinter group of the Black Israelites in Harlem. Fifty was the new thirty, she often said, and where Angie James was concerned, Johnson was inclined to agree. It was she who had guessed Allen Lamar was going to a football game after he’d left his house. She’d been ahead of the game since Johnson had given her a thumbnail brief and made it to the stadium less than two minutes after the boy pulled up in his mom’s Corolla.
“Our rabbit’s walking toward the concession stand,” James said. Rabbit might sound odd to anyone who overheard the conversation, but it was much less prone to inducing fear than target.
“Concessions under the grandstands?” Johnson’s New York accent made him immediately identifiable to his team on the radio. He shoved a twenty-dollar bill under the glass at the ticket booth and shuffled impatiently while he waited for his change.
“That’s negative, sir,” Andrea Lopez stepped on Agent James as both women tried to broadcast at the same time, sending a garbled mess across the air.
“Talk to me, Angie,” Johnson said, calling the agent he wanted by name, and at the same time shutting down the jittery Lopez. He used plain talk instead of radio codes, so the two guys from Dallas PD assigned to the JTTF who were already inside would be on the same sheet of music.
“West end of the field,” Angie James came back. “Concession stand is a series of trailers, located just past where the band lines up to go through the gate at halftime.”
“Copy that,” Johnson said, falling in with a river of football fans streaming toward the bleachers on the home-team side.
The smell of popcorn and chili warmed the crisp Texas breeze. Parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, church leaders, scoutmasters — all wearing jackets and sweaters of bright red, the color of the Fighting Rams of Reavis, Texas. A larger-than-normal press gaggle milled along the track — four from local news affiliates and at least two from major cable networks. It seemed like a lot for a local high school football game, even in Texas.