Then he told Brett that he’d be personally ordering him to New York City.
“The president won’t like that,” Brett had said.
“Tough. My patience for bullshit goes out the window after I watch them search on television for my daughter’s body,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I’ll make whatever excuses I have to make. I want to know who is responsible for this. And right now, you’re my best lead. You’re the only person who’s seen this Mohammed. I think Ashammi’s behind it. So does intelligence. He hasn’t taken credit yet, but I want you to track down whoever it is you think you saw.”
“You said it yourself: it’s a needle in a haystack.”
“We might have a lead. But I need your eyes on it. I’m sending you to New York on the next military flight. I’ll make excuses to the president. But I’ll need your word that you stay away from the media. That’s the only thing Prescott cares about.”
Brett nodded. Then, slowly, he said, “I’m sorry about your family, Bill.”
Collier grimaced. “Yeah, me too,” he said. “Me too. Now go get the pieces of shit who did this so I can bomb them back into the sixth century.”
The next morning, Brett had flown to New York.
Now, looking at the damage, Brett punished himself for not having been able to warn intelligence sooner. If only he’d used the Morse code to tell them something was coming from Ashammi. If only he’d blinked the name Mohammed. In his heart, he knew it wouldn’t have helped. America had blinded itself in the name of peace—and Brett knew that hope wouldn’t buy peace anyway.
He turned his back on the Hudson, where the sunken bridge still lay slumbering under acres of water, the calm of the surface masking the graves of thousands of Americans. The American public had called the Iraq War too bloody, the Afghanistan War too costly; combined, America had lost fewer than seven thousand people. Now, on one day, they’d lost far more than that.
His cell phone rang. It was Collier. “Get over to JFK,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for you.”
The airport felt like a mausoleum, completely empty, completely deserted, utterly quiet. The planes sat at their terminals like sleeping grasshoppers. Abandoned vehicles dotted the tarmac. Brett sat in a secure room, flanked by two members of the Port Authority security team. Before him, on a cheap plastic table, sat a laptop, spreadsheets of flight manifests open. Brett quickly narrowed down the location of the flights—there were obviously no direct flights from the Islamic Republic to New York. Most stopped in Frankfurt or Munich or Dubai. There was no guarantee Mohammed had flown into New York, either—he could have flown into Newark, or even Boston Logan or any nearby area airport.
After realizing that there were simply too many combinations of flights to check every itinerary and every manifest, Brett finally dispensed with the politically correct pleasantries. “Jim,” he’d said to one of the officials, “I want access to the customs files.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” murmured the official, “is there somebody we’re looking for particularly?”
Brett said, “Yes. An Arabic-looking young man.”
The official hemmed and hawed. “I’m uncomfortable with that, sir. That’s racial profiling.”
“You’re not doing the profiling. I am.”
“Well, now I’m a party to it.”
Brett stared into his face. “I. Don’t. Care. Just do it.”
“Sir, it’s against regulations, though.”
“Look,” Brett burst out, losing his patience, “I don’t give a rat’s ass at this point whether it’s racial profiling or not. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Mohammed is a light-skinned Norwegian woman or a Cherokee elder. Or maybe he’s a Persian or Arabic-looking son of a bitch who hangs out with other Persian or Arabic-looking sons of bitches who look like Ibrahim Ashammi. If I end up being wrong, and he looks like Helen Mirren, feel free to tell The New York Times editorial board about it.”
The official scurried out of the room. Brett turned back to the manifests. There would be hundreds, maybe thousands of possible leads, men who had flown from the Middle East through some midpoint in the days between Brett’s capture and the bridge attack. With just a name, Mohammed, he wouldn’t have enough.
He picked up his cell phone, tapped it against his wrist. Then he scrolled through his contacts. When he reached the name “Hassan Abdul,” he dialed.
The café was virtually empty. That would have been odd on a normal day, but with the entire city under virtual military occupation, it somehow felt normal. Brett had been in war zones before, and this felt like a war zone. The smell of ash still hung over the city days later. Every so often, a military convoy would pass down Fifth Avenue, or the occasional ambulance, siren blaring. Brett had seen the real-time coverage of the September 11 attacks. This felt bigger in every way.
The man across the table from Brett had grown since high school. He wore a short-cropped beard now, as well as a taquiyah. He’d also taken to wearing a pair of rimless round glasses, which he wore perched on the tip of his nose. Behind those glasses, though, it was still Derek, smiling eyes, the kid who’d once sung “Ebony and Ivory” to get him out of a confrontation with a mammoth named Yard. Brett and Derek had kept in touch after high school; Derek had gone on to the University of Illinois. There, he’d become enamored of Islam, in particular the later teachings of Malcolm X—the ones, Derek said, that Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan ignored. “They didn’t shoot Malcolm for being a racial radical, or for yelling about the white man,” Derek said. “They shot him because he taught true Islam. The Islam of peace. They didn’t kill him until he changed his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and started talking about how Islam taught tolerance for religious plurality and political differences and racial diversity.” Derek’s own brand of Christianity, he’d told Brett, had seemed washed out and pale next to this broader religion; his mother had taken him to church once in a while and given him a whupping if he’d been caught skipping Sunday school, but he didn’t know much about Jesus other than the pictures of the white man on the wall. He’d found his peace in Islam, changed his name to Hassan Abdul—“Beautiful Servant” in Arabic.
Hassan had gotten active at his local mosque, gone on hajj, experienced the magic Malcolm X had talked about. He’d also experienced something else: the perversion of what he believed his religion to be. In Saudi Arabia, he’d seen corporal punishment taking place. He’d seen the repression of the regime, and he’d heard the complaints of citizens whispering about the corruption of the monarchy, the loose talk about religiously purer heroes, men like Osama bin Laden. Upon his return to the United States, he’d moved to Virginia for work, attended mosque at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center near Washington, DC.
There, he’d met Anwar al-Awlaki. Charismatic, scholarly, soft-spoken, brilliant, al-Awlaki quickly built a following in the mosque. His classes were deeply conspiratorial, charismatically magnetic. The Zionist entity, he said, was responsible for Muslim suffering the world over, an outpost of Western colonialism and racism; groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda were fighting for a stronger Islam. Hassan Abdul said nothing. He did nothing. He thought perhaps this was just another strain of Islam. After all, Malcolm X had spoken in favor of ideological diversity.
Then, on September 11, he’d seen al-Awlaki’s impact. The government linked al-Awlaki to two of the hijackers. And the Saudi government had backed the mosque because so long as outrage was focused without rather than within, it served their purposes.