The Global War on Morris

by Steve Israel

  Probably not. It would be his bust, but everyone else would try to take credit. Elbowing him out of the camera angles, pushing him back to anonymity. Where they thought he belonged.

  Not this time. This time, Tom Fairbanks would rescue America from its enemy. And liberate Tom Fairbanks from his own career.

  In the years that followed, Morris Feldstein would have plenty of time to reconstruct the most bizarre day of his previously blasé life. And the precise moment, at one twenty in the afternoon, when everything crashed.

  It began after he showered and shaved and put on his beige Van Heusen wool trousers and the navy blue blazer from Macy’s, and approached Rona in the kitchen for their perfunctory have-a-good-day-Rona-yes-you-too-Morris peck on the cheek. Only this one tasted of the coffee she had been nursing over an unfolded Newsday on the kitchen table and maybe a trace of guilt for all the problems he had caused since that night at the Bayview Motor Inn. And just as he started down the long dark hall to the front door, he heard Rona ask “Morris, are you watching the Mets game tonight?”

  He turned back toward the kitchen, swallowed hard, and thought, Tsuris ahead.

  Actually, not just tsuris. This day would bring a tsuris tsunami.

  “Is there something you want to watch, Rona?” He studied her. But this time, there was only this matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I’m watching the presidential debate.” Settled with a clasp of both hands on the table.

  Since the Mets were off that night, and since Turner Classic Movies was showing a colorized film (which defeated the whole purpose of showing classic movies, Morris thought), and since he was in no position to assert his television-program preferences Morris nodded and said, “Yes, the presidential debate should be very interesting,” in a tone of voice that masked Morris’s belief that nothing—nothing—could be less interesting, except, maybe, the vice-presidential debate.

  There was that slow shuffle to his car and the standard peek inside the trunk to make sure all his Celfex samples were there. He had that sensation of being watched, just like the other morning. There was the drone of a helicopter that seemed to hover over only his house, the curious glances of the utility workers and gardeners, the home improvement contractors and road crews who mobilized on Soundview Avenue. Morris was reminded of that episode of the Twilight Zone, the one when Earl Holliman finds himself secluded in a small town, yet can’t “shake that crazy feeling of being watched.” Only now, instead of viewing Earl Holliman in black and white from the safety of his RoyaLounger 8000, Morris felt that he was the star of this show, live and in color.

  Across the street, Agent Russell peered through the McCords’ living room blinds, a cell phone attached to his ear, and Colonel McCord almost attached to his hip. Crouching next to him, as if they were in a foxhole rather than on a faux suede couch, both men surveilled Morris and watched those who watched him as well.

  “How much company do we have?” Fairbanks asked from the phone in his Melville office.

  “Sir, it’s quite a crowd,” Russell replied. “Plainclothes county police, NYPD, New York State, a guy I recognize from the FDA. Hold on . . . There’s a guy standing by a landscape truck with a weed-whacker. I think that might be Miller. From DHS!”

  “We are DHS, Agent Russell!”

  “Yes, sir. But Miller is DHS Counterintel. Not Intel and Analysis.”

  Fairbanks hissed: “Spy versus spy and we’re the same goddamn spies. Jesus H!”

  All these federal assets watching Feldstein while watching one another.

  Morris pulled out of his driveway and crept down Soundview Avenue, listening to WFAN lament the Mets’ 6–3 loss to the Braves the night before. He noticed a helicopter that seemed to ride just above him and the cars that seemed to follow his every turn.

  Something is happening, he thought. But he kept driving.

  As the morning and the miles passed, Morris grew more nervous. Dark vehicles pulled close behind him. Additional helicopters seemed to accompany him everywhere. The doctors’ offices he visited were unusually crowded, as if there were a sudden virus that only attacked well-groomed men in sunglasses, who tapped impatiently at their knees and peered suspiciously over magazines.

  And as Morris continued to ply his sales territory, with each tick of the odometer in his car, the Feldstein Anxiety Anticipation Index nudged up. His fingers were moist around the steering wheel and Morris noticed his knuckles were pale. But even when he sensed that some uncontrollable wave was building against him, about to knock him off his feet and sweep him into the unknown, he did nothing. Even against a big wave Morris would not make waves. Not until it was too late.

  And so he pushed on.

  Promptly at noon, Morris led a caravan of sedans into the parking lot of Antonio’s Pizzeria of Glen Cove. It seemed as if the entire federal government had a craving for a chicken Parm. And as Morris sat at a wobbly table, nibbling at his meal, he sensed that everyone around him was assessing every queasy nibble. Which made him particularly self-conscious about leaving crumbs on his face.

  Morris stood, brought his tray to an array of trash bins, and, as the signs instructed, deposited his plastics in the recycling bin and his unfinished meal in the food waste bin.

  Outside, as he entered his car, he heard a dozen echoes of doors closing and engines starting.

  Gottenyu, he thought.

  It’s a case of mistaken identity. Like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. I’m Roger Thornhill! Being chased by spies across the country and not knowing why! Only, instead of running away from planes and hanging on the edge of Mount Rushmore, like Cary Grant, I’m being surrounded at Antonio’s Pizzeria in Glen Cove! Gottenyu! Glen Cove! That’s where North by Northwest begins! Maybe this isn’t a nightmare! Maybe it’s a sequel! But why me? I didn’t do anything!

  Morris reached for his cell phone. His fingers fumbled across the keypad. The sound of Rona’s voicemail message comforted him—the sound of normalcy in this horrifically abnormal day. After the beep, he said, “Rona, this is Morris. I’m just . . . I’m checking to make sure everything is okay over there . . . It’s the strangest thing, Rona . . . I’m sure it’s just my imagination . . . But . . . You know what? I think I may call in sick and come home. Just a little rest . . . Okay. So I’ll see you soon, Rona. We’ll watch the debate tonight. Good-bye.”

  He called his district manager, and got her voice mail. “Hello, Laurie,” he said, his voice dry and scratchy. “This is Morris Feldstein. I’m not really feeling very well. It’s nothing serious. Just—” he looked at all the cars in the lot, engines humming, stiff figures behind windshields. “Just some kind of bug, I think. So I’m going to go home, if that’s okay. To rest up. And I’ll be back at work tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Thank you. Good-bye.”

  In his many years at Celfex Pharmaceuticals, Morris had called in sick only twice. The first was to make that fateful trip to the Paradise Hotel and Residences at Boca. This was the second.

  There would be no more.

  After Morris’s phone messages had become one of the highest-rated broadcasts in the metropolitan area that morning, Tom Fairbanks proclaimed: “Jesus H! Feldstein’s coming home early!” He sat in the McCords’ dining room, which he commandeered earlier, sipping his fifth cup of coffee. It was cold and bitter and made him scowl, which was just the way he liked it. Coffee mugs, cell phones, and a tattered Hagstrom’s map of Nassau County, marked with Morris’s route that morning, cluttered the table. A set of car keys was within arm’s reach of Fairbanks.

  McCord and Russell were still at their post, peering through the large bay window.

  “Oh-oh,” McCord warned from behind a pair of binoculars. “Lots of sudden movement at Feldstein’s house. Numerous vehicles repositioning.”

  Everyone’s waiting for the worm to slither home, Fairbanks thought. Jockeying for position in what was now a game of inches. Ready to grab Feldstein. And take all
the credit.

  He scooped up the car keys and leaned toward the map.

  “Soundview Avenue is the only route Feldstein can take home?”

  “Affirmative,” McCord responded. “The LIE to Lakeville. Lakeville to Middle Neck. Middle Neck to Soundview.”

  And Soundview to Guantánamo! thought Fairbanks as he hurried from the room.

  In the FDA control room, Bill Sully stared into a screen at the grainy image of a man racing toward a car in the McCords’ driveway. “Who the hell is that?” he asked.

  A metallic voice transmitted from Soundview Avenue: “Uhhhhh . . . Name’s Fairbanks. DHS agent on Long Island. He’s been trolling on this case for weeks.”

  Sully nodded his head unhappily. “Well he’s fishing in my waters! This is an active FDA case! And where’s he rushing to, by the way?”

  “Maybe to beat us to the punch?”

  “Morris Feldstein is a counterfeit drug criminal. We get him first! Follow Fairbanks!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And so it went. The FDA following Fairbanks who was intercepting Feldstein. Other Feds following the FDA following Fairbanks to meet Feldstein, being followed by still other Feds.

  The race was on.

  The sign arched across the Long Island Expressway, reflective white letters that glittered against a green background:

  GREAT NECK

  NEXT EXIT

  Morris tightened his grip on the steering wheel. One more exit to the comfort of his RoyaLounger 8000 and Turner Classic Movies, where he followed the Mets and no one followed him. One more exit to the safe intersection of anonymity and conformity. He pressed on the gas.

  For a man who spent his entire life safely at fifty-five miles an hour, Morris didn’t even notice that his speedometer was nudging above seventy. He did, however, notice that he was about to race right past his exit, into Queens. He tugged hard at the steering wheel. So hard that his car swerved out of the center lane, almost clipping the vehicle that had been pacing him in the right lane. The driver of that car, a special investigator from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reflexively pounded on his horn and slammed hard on his brakes, triggering a twelve unmarked-car pileup. A literal bureaucratic clash.

  As he careened onto the exit ramp, bouncing in his seat and clutching the steering wheel, Morris didn’t hear what he had left behind on the Long Island Expressway. The screeching brakes, the blaring horns, the sound of metal against metal. He didn’t smell the odor of burnt rubber on the pavement. That was all behind him now. He was alone on the expressway’s service road. For the moment.

  “Subject’s driving erratically!” someone transmitted breathlessly. “All units proceed with caution.”

  Morris made a hard right onto Lakeville Road. The urgent wail of police sirens grew closer. He cut across a major intersection to a chorus of horns and obscenities. Now his heart pounded against his chest and his stomach twisted in excruciating knots. His eyes darted from side to side.

  He looked in the rearview mirror, hoping he would see Hillel. Or Assistant Rabbi Kaplan. But all he could see was the frantic swirl of police lights growing closer.

  Morris made this ride countless times, but never at seventy miles an hour in a chase scene right out of The French Connection. Storefront facades whizzed by: white-brick yogurt shops and bakeries, clothing stores and restaurants. All a blur through the car’s windows. Morris Feldstein’s past life in Great Neck, passing by at breakneck speed.

  Then, he saw it. The weathered street sign that said SOUNDVIEW AVENUE.

  “I’m coming, Rona!” he yelled, and aimed the car straight for the corner of his street. His foot pressed on the brake pedal as he began turning right. But, being unpracticed at such maneuvers, he felt the car veer out of control, tires on the left side seeming to lift off the pavement. Morris felt the steering wheel slip from his perspiring fingers. His body strained against the seat belt.

  “Gottenyu!” he cried. And just as the steering wheel turned naturally back and the car balanced itself, just at the moment where Morris could see his house down the block and the RONA FELDSTEIN CSW sign on the lawn, Morris realized something.

  In addition to the many traffic laws he had just broken between the Long Island Expressway and here, he had just violated a precious section of the Great Neck Village motor vehicle code.

  He had just made a right on red. Just under the sign that said NO RIGHT ON RED.

  He stopped. Sedans and panel trucks converged on him from all directions. Helicopters hovered so low that Morris’s car shook and autumn leaves spun around him. Car doors swung open and Morris saw a wave of people rushing toward him, wearing windbreakers stenciled with acronyms. The windbreakers flapped like capes around the runners as they charged. Racing to be the first to reach Morris.

  Thrusting elbows and arms and feet and legs. A forty-yard dash for the gold medal in the global War on Terror.

  The wave of windbreakers broke around Morris’s car. He sat still, almost paralyzed, hands resting on the steering wheel.

  A face appeared at Morris’s window.

  “Get out of the car with your hands up!” Tom Fairbanks commanded.

  Morris knew what to do. He had seen it in countless movies. He pushed open the door, raised his hands, and stepped out gingerly. Dozens of guns appeared, trained on him.

  “It’s all a case of mistaken identity. Like Cary Grant, in North By Northwe—”

  Fairbanks grabbed Morris’s arm, spun him around, and shoved him against the hood so hard that Morris grunted. Then there was a blow to his upper back. His face landed with a thud against the hood. He felt a foot kicking between both of his own, forcing them apart. Hands worked over Morris’s body. Yanking his arms so far behind him that pain streaked across his shoulders.

  “I can explain. I met a woman. We went to lunch . . . .” But Morris’s words were lost under the drone of the helicopters, the screams of sirens. And the shouting of police—at one another. Something about whether he was entitled to be read his Miranda rights or whether, as an “NEN—native enemy noncombatant,” he had involuntarily waived those rights.

  Native enemy noncombatant! Morris thought. That’s a far cry from second vice president at the Temple Beth Torah Men’s Club!

  As the constitutional debate raged, Morris’s neighbors gathered on their lawns, pointing in disbelief at the quiet man who never bothered anyone, now surrounded at gunpoint by twenty-seven separate law enforcement agencies.

  When the officials finally agreed that Morris had forfeited his Miranda rights, Tom Fairbanks grabbed him by the elbows and spun him around so they were face-to-face.

  “You’re under arrest, Mr. Feldstein! What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Morris thought. But all he could come up with was this: “I’m sorry I cheated on my expense account.”

  “Hey, Dark Side, does this look funny to you?”

  In a green room behind the stage at the University of Miami, President Bush gazed in a mirror, tugged the bottom of his jacket, and noticed the slight bulge in his shoulders. It was bad enough he had to go on stage in minutes to debate John Kerry. But the high-tech body armor the Secret Service asked him to wear looked like a prop from Star Trek; it scratched uncomfortably against his torso and bunched up under his suit.

  Karl Rove rubbed his thumb under his chin. “It’s for your own protection, Mr. President,” he answered.

  “People are going to think it’s some kind of device to cheat. Like you’re transmitting answers to me during the debate or something.” The President chuckled.

  I wish, thought Rove. But he said, “No one will even notice, sir.”

  Rove’s cell phone rang. He walked to a corner of the room and cupped his hand over the phone.

  “It’s Scooter,” he heard. “I have an update on that, uhhhh, traffic infraction in New York.”
>
  Rove thought, Is that what we’re calling it? Traffic infraction? Morris Feldstein committed treason against his country and it’s considered a traffic infraction? Driving under the influence of terrorists?

  Scooter Libby continued. “I just spoke to VPOTUS. He does not want the President mentioning today’s arrest.”

  In the background, Rove heard Bush rehearsing his lines: “September the eleventh changed how America must look at the world. . . . If you harbor a terrorist, you’re equally as guilty as the terrorist. September the eleventh changed how America must look at the world. . . . If you harbor a terrorist, you’re equally as guilty as the terrorist. . . .”

  “Why not?” Rove snapped.

  “Two reasons. Number one, the Bureau of Bleeding Hearts at DOJ is still concerned there’s no case against our guy. Other than speeding, reckless endangerment, and making an illegal right on red, his record is ridiculously clean.”

  “Which is exactly why the terrorists recruited him!” Rove replied, annoyed.

  “I agree. But if somehow our bad guy turns out not so bad, VPOTUS doesn’t want the President’s fingerprints on it.”

  He heard Bush repeat: “We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace. . . . We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.”

  “Okay,” Rove sighed. “What’s the second reason?”

  “The FBI thinks making this a high-visibility case is not in the best interests of national security at this time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, if we are right, if our friend is one of the bad guys, we need to . . . uuuhhh, encourage him to cooperate. You know . . . uuuhhh, incentivize him to give us information. We need time and space for that. Without nosey lawyers, talk show producers, or ACLU rallies. So far the media has been cooperating and we’ve contained the story. For at least a few weeks, we need to keep our friend the best kept secret in town.”