by Ben Shapiro
Big Jim Crawford lounged in the marble shower of the luxury suite at the MGM, enjoying the feeling of the dual rain heads slapping him with their steady stream. He’d been penning an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, and the steam of the shower cleared his senses, helped him think. He’d get what he wanted, he knew.
He always did.
The game had become almost too easy. Big Jim didn’t think of himself as a con artist or a shakedown expert. He thought of himself as a leader in need of resources to bring change. If that meant skimping on taxes, what of it? Who hadn’t cheated in the United States? Who had clean hands? So long as he spent his days fighting for social justice, why shouldn’t he enjoy the benefits of a nice house, the ministrations of a young mistress? Martin Luther King Jr. had been sainted for his civil rights work, and nobody looked twice at his various financial and personal improprieties. The cause cleansed him, as it should have. History eventually deemed everyone either a saint or a sinner, no in-between.
The next step in Detroit, Big Jim knew, would be to give Levon an option for withdrawal with some grace. He’d already pressed Levon, and he knew Levon was waiting, hoping for something big to happen, but that seemed unlikely with the nation’s attention riveted elsewhere.
Big Jim climbed out of the shower, reached for his towel, wrapped it around his bulk, and gazed at himself in the mirror. He needed to lose some weight, and he sucked in his gut. When he got back to New York, he told himself, he’d start the diet.
Suddenly, he felt out of breath.
He plunged forward, grabbing the sink with both hands, but he could feel the strength in those hands weakening. He tried to push his fingertips into the marble, but they wouldn’t grip; for some reason, a desperate need to hold himself up rushed over him, and as he felt his bulk dragged toward the cool floor, away from the fogged-up mirror, he had the odd thought that the floor was red.
Then he realized it was. It was red and slippery with his blood.
He lost his grip, and his face hit the oozing puddle hard.
He never saw the man who fired the second round into his head.
Levon had his men watching Soledad’s men for any concerted movement. The T-shirted motorcycle gang seemed too professional for Levon’s taste; he’d originally thought them a group of overwrought, racist kooks, but they always seemed to encamp at the inflection points in the crowd—bottlenecks, thin spaces. They met up at night in one of the tents, but kept a guard stationed outside, armed.
Now, Levon’s men told him, the T-shirt gang was on the move.
There were eight of them, all told. Four had their hogs planted in the corners of the street, ready to move off at the first sign of trouble. Three of the other four planted themselves near the front of the crowd, near the steps to the detention center.
The lone remaining man, a white-bearded, big-bellied bear in his mid-sixties, stood near the center of the crowd. A group of young protesters screamed obscenities at him; he stood his ground placidly.
A buzz built at the back of the crowd.
More white men, all wearing the same T-shirts, pulling up on motorcycles. Silent. Saying nothing. The crowd of protesters moved up on them, expecting a confrontation.
That’s when Levon’s phone rang.
He picked up, heard the crying. He hung up without saying a word. His gut churned. Then he set his teeth.
He raised his right arm, his fist clenched.
“THEY KILLED BIG JIM!” he screamed. Then, again, this time for the cameras, which he knew would be zooming in on him: “THEY KILLED BIG JIM! TEAR IT ALL DOWN! TEAR DOWN THIS CORRUPT SYSTEM!”
Wailing and screaming broke out on the street. Women sobbed. Young men shouted, tore at their clothes. “THEY KILLED BIG JIM! THEY KILLED BIG JIM!” Media members, most of them white, stepped back a few feet from the seething crowd. A few lone police officers at the front of the crowd—Levon hadn’t even noticed police officers on the street at all—stepped backward quickly, moving into the detention center for protection as their compatriots opened the doors for them.
One of Levon’s men, a teenager carrying a tire iron, sprinted through the crowd until he was right in the face of the big-bellied white man. He grabbed him by the beard, twisted it until the man fell to the ground. Then he screamed, raised the tire iron, and brought it down with a sickening thunk into the man’s belly. Levon’s men pushed forward against the glass doors of the detention center; Levon could see the cops cowering inside.
“GIVE US O’SULLIVAN!” Levon screamed as he climbed the steps to the detention center. “GIVE US THE CHILD MURDERER!” A member of his entourage handed him a brick as he made his way forward.
He strode up the steps, the cameras catching him from behind, his huge back framed against the lights inside the detention center. Then he reared back and hurled the brick, spiderwebbing the plexiglass door.
Behind Levon, the street exploded into chaos, protesters and rioters merging into one throng. The bearded white bear had disappeared into the center of the crowd, his body trampled, kicked, stomped, spit on. Hundreds of people gathered in a circle to watch, to participate.
On the outskirts of the riot, the motorcyclists revved their engines, fending off rocks and bottles. One motorcyclist pulled out a handgun and fired it into the air, scattering the crowd near him, but drawing a fusillade of debris from all quarters. The street broke up into a series of running battles, bikers leveling their weapons, avoiding firing into the crowd directly. One biker revved his engine and then plunged it directly into the center of the crowd, screaming, trying to reach his bearded comrade, who by now was lying motionless, blood streaming from his ear.
Someone handed Levon a crowbar, and he raised his powerfully muscled arms, then brought the crowbar down with brute force against the windows. After a few blows, they shattered, and he made his way inside.
The room was empty.
“Find O’Sullivan,” he growled as six of his men sprinted down the halls.
The detention officer unlocked the cell holding Ricky O’Sullivan, and it creaked back on its hinges. O’Sullivan backed up quickly into the corner, his bulk filling it.
“You leave me alone,” he said to the masked woman in the police uniform. She wore a bandanna over her face, and her gun was pointed directly at the head of the detention officer.
“Follow me,” Soledad said, the mask muffling her consonants. “We don’t have time to argue. You either come now, or you come later in a body bag. Can you hear that upstairs?” She motioned toward the ceiling, where the pounding thumps of running feet were clearly audible. “They’re coming for you. Aren’t they, kid?” The detention officer nodded. “And I don’t think they want to play patty-cake. Jim Crawford’s dead.”
For the first time, panic came over O’Sullivan’s face. “Who killed him?” he asked.
“Do you want to play twenty questions, or do you want to leave this building alive? Get your ass in gear.”
Soledad lowered her weapon. “No threats. Aiden said you don’t respond to threats. Silly me.”
At Aiden’s name, Ricky brightened. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
Soledad forced the detention officer into the cell. “Hide under the bunk,” she said. “Hopefully they won’t have a key.”
Then she and Ricky took off down the hall.
“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” O’Sullivan asked.
“Motor pool,” she said. “We’re gonna get ourselves a vehicle.”
Behind them, at the other end of the hall, Soledad could hear the pounding footsteps nearing, the shouting, then a gunshot and more running feet, nearing. She and O’Sullivan crashed through the door to the stairs, sprinting, lungs burning, toward the basement.
Aiden was waiting for them in the covered garage, behind the steering wheel of a SWAT van. The back doors to the van were open, only about thirty feet fr
om the stairwell. Soledad and O’Sullivan jumped in, slammed the doors closed, just as four young black men burst into the garage behind them. Two ran at the van; two more ran for motorcycles, searching for the keys.
Soledad pounded on the barrier to the van’s driver’s compartment. “Go!” she screamed. “Go! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“Not without Ezekiel,” Aiden replied.
“What? He’s not here?!”
“He’ll be here any moment.”
Now two of Levon’s men had reached the van; one began slamming on Aiden’s window, while the other tried to pry open the back of the van. “Hold on!” Aiden shouted, throwing the van into reverse. The man at the back of the van shrieked as his head banged against the iron of the door; Soledad felt sick to her stomach at the bump as the wheels hit him. But Aiden kept backing up until there were just a few inches of room between the rear doors and the elevator next to the stairwell.
“Ezekiel’s coming,” Aiden said. “Any second.”
Now the man at the driver’s side window started pounding at the glass again, cracking it. Aiden calmly pulled out a .22 handgun, rolled down the window slightly, and fired. The bullet hit the man in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. “Stay down,” Aiden said quietly. “You’ll be fine.”
The elevator doors pinged, opened. Inside, Ezekiel sat on the floor, his mouth open, breathing hard—blood ran down the side of his police uniform. Soledad leapt out of the back doors, grabbed him by the arm. “Stay with me, Ezekiel,” she said. “We’re almost out. Almost free.” He grunted, threw his arm over her shoulder; O’Sullivan grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him into the van.
In front of the van, the two would-be motorcyclists had found keys somehow and swerved their motorcycles to block the exit. To get out, Aiden would have to go right through them. And they held handguns.
“Damn it,” said Aiden. Then he sighed. “No use for it, I suppose.”
He gunned the engine, rammed his foot to the floorboard. “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch,” he muttered. The motorcyclists gunned their own engines, zooming right at the front of the truck. They didn’t have much control over their aim, but they fired anyway; the glass cracked as a few shots landed square on the windshield.
Aiden saw their plan before it materialized. They would separate, come around the back of the van, and follow; they would then pick up more and more of their crew, and the whole thing would turn into a running gun battle.
As they began to split, Aiden braked hard, turning the wheel 90 degrees. The van swung around, doughnutting—he heard a satisfying smash as the side of the van swung into one of the motorcyclists. The other motorcyclist was now directly in front of him. He got off the bike and ran as Aiden drove the SWAT vehicle directly over the cycle, crushing it beneath the wheels.
Aiden turned again and drove up the ramp into the night.
In the back of the van, Soledad looked at Ezekiel. “You gonna be all right?”
“I’ll be okay,” he grimaced.
She smiled ruefully. “You did guarantee blood. You weren’t lying.”
He laughed, coughed blood into his mouth, and spat it out. “Didn’t think it would be my own.”
“You never do,” Ricky O’Sullivan said into the dark warmth of the night. “You never do.”
They told Levon about O’Sullivan’s escape about an hour later. By then, the street fights had died down—the motorcyclists were gone. The police had fled the detention center. Now Levon stood on the steps, overlooking the smoking street. A few bodies lay out there, bleeding. It looked like a war zone.
He turned to face the reporter, the camera directly in his face. She’d asked him a question before he found out O’Sullivan was gone; he’d completely forgotten it. “What did you ask again?” he murmured.
“What comes next?” she asked. “The mayor is vowing to keep order.”
Levon looked out over his burning city. His burning city. “We don’t need the mayor to keep order,” Levon said. “He’s just as corrupt as the rest. We’re in a war now. You saw them out here, on their motorcycles, with their racist T-shirts. White supremacists killed Reverend Jim Crawford tonight. No pretty words are going to bring him back.
“So here’s what America needs to know: Detroit is now in our hands. We will have justice. And it starts with the mayor. But that’s not where it ends. We want to work with the police officers who will serve justice. If they won’t, we will have our own forces of justice. Brothers will not burn down brothers’ businesses. There will be no looting. No violence. That’s not what Big Jim would have wanted.
“We’re going to build something new in this city. Something better on these ashes. Wherever Ricky O’Sullivan is, we will bring him back to justice, too. This is the beginning of a new era.”
Levon gestured at the street. “The blood you see here tonight, that will be repaid in freedom. So tonight, I call for the people of my city to join me. It is time to rise up and claim our freedom.”
In the distance, the sun began to rise.
Part 3
New York City
The call from Hassan came in the middle of the night.
“I think I have something,” Hassan said. Brett could hear the fear in his voice. “It could be nothing, or it could be something.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Rumors, I thought. But they’re not rumors. How fast can you get over here?”
“Fast.”
Hassan gave Brett his address. Brett threw on his clothes, picked up his service weapon, and slid it in the small of his back. Hassan had sounded worried enough for that.
Closing the door to the hotel room, he glanced down the hall stealthily. Nobody who wasn’t drunk or having an affair would be coming down the hall at 2:00 a.m., he figured, but better to be paranoid than blithe.
Sure enough, a buzz-cut man in a black suit waited at the elevator. Federal, thought Brett. There was only one reason for him to be waiting: the president wanted to see General Brett Hawthorne. And there was only one reason the president would want to see General Brett Hawthorne: to stop his investigation. The meet-up at the airport had been too high profile. He’d been too cavalier with his agenda, and the president had other priorities. The last thing Mark Prescott wanted, Brett figured, was bad publicity right after a terror attack. “Islamophobia in the Top Ranks.” That’s how the headlines in the Nation would read. And Prescott read the Nation.
The man in the black suit locked eyes with Brett, began walking toward him.
After years of riding the bureaucratic bull, Brett had one key rule: better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission. Which is why he was relieved to see a door to the stairs on the other end of the hallway. And fortunately, he was on the second floor.
He turned his back on the suit and walked toward the door. He heard the padding steps behind him, opened the door, closed it, and then took the stairs half a flight at a time, his knees throbbing. Behind him, he heard the door slam open, and then the man’s voice: “He’s running. We’ll grab him in the lobby.”
Brett had no such intention.
Instead of exiting at the lobby level, he continued sprinting down into the basement area. He’d planned for this eventuality ever since he arrived at the hotel; in Afghanistan he’d acquired the useful habit of locating exits and scoping out his location. He knew the maze of hallways and doors in the hotel basement, and he quickly navigated them, waiting long enough to ensure he’d lost his pursuers. When he emerged onto the street, he found himself alone.
Nice try, suckers, Brett thought with a grim smile.
Hassan lived in the Washington Heights area of New York—the area nobody wanted to walk at night. He’d taken a small second-floor flat near the 168th Street subway station, an old building refurbished with cheap appliances and cheaper flooring. He’d furnished the apartmen
t sparingly, except for a pair of floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with religious tomes. When Brett arrived, sweating, Hassan nodded silently, then ushered him to a beat-up leather couch.
“Tea?”
“No, thank you,” Brett replied.
Hassan walked over to the bookcases, slid aside some of the volumes. Then he pushed one of the panels on the rear wall of the bookcase. It opened quietly. Hassan slid out a thumb drive, loaded it into his laptop, sat the machine on the coffee table before Brett.
“Do you know this man?”
A video file popped open. It showed a young, slim Muslim man, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, shaking hands with another thawb-wearing man at the mosque. Hassan hit pause.
“Do you recognize him?”
Brett nodded. It was Mohammed. “How did you find him?”
“You weren’t followed, of course?”
“Of course.”
He hesitated. “I have backdoor access to most of the security cameras in the New York mosques. It has taken me years.”
“How much of that is legal?”
“Under this president? Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.”
Brett sighed. “So tell me when that footage was taken.”
“It was taken four days ago.” Hassan anticipated Brett’s disappointment. “I know. Too long. But finding a man named Mohammed in a mosque in New York is like finding a Jew named Goldstein in a synagogue here. You’re bound to find some false positives. But this one stood out. That imam he is talking to—Anjem Omari—is trouble. He’s been under FBI surveillance on and off for years. Right now, off.”
