“Come home with me,” Morris said, exasperated. “Forget this Islamic stuff. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were brain washed.”
Jennifer scowled and shook her head. “You just don’t understand. This is what I want. This is me now.”
Morris blamed it all on Jennifer’s roommate, Aliyah Muhadi, the bright young woman from that Iranian family. Aliyah’s father was a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory. Morris had met the man and liked him.
Jennifer’s embrace of Islam began innocently enough. When Aliyah became involved in the university’s Muslim Student Association, Jennifer had tagged along. The two girls had protested the bombing of children by the al-Assad regime in Syria. Then Aliyah and Jennifer had joined the Students for Justice in Palestine and they’d clashed with some aggressive members of Hillel, the Jewish student group. Chants were met by taunts and shoves. The campus police were called. When bystanders began throwing bottles at the campus cops, students were detained, including Aliyah and Jennifer.
Morris had written it off as springtime on campus.
But it wasn’t just Jennifer and Aliyah. Their boyfriends were involved, a couple of boys named Carlito Mondragon and Miguel Garcia. Morris had learned this after he made the trip to Albuquerque to secure Jennifer’s release from jail. Like Jennifer and Aliyah, Carlito and Miguel were roommates.
Aliyah had flawless olive skin and large dark eyes, made even larger with eye-liner, and Morris understood why Miguel Garcia had been enthralled with her. It verged on devotion. Jennifer and Carlito had introduced Aliyah to Miguel and they quickly became a foursome.
Jennifer had known Carlito from years earlier, although the two had never dated until they met again at UNM. That, too, had begun innocently. It was shortly after his wife had died and Morris and Jennifer were returning from a hiking trip to Wheeler Peak near Taos. They stopped for something to eat just south of Abiquiu, and on a whim, Morris took her to a store that featured handwoven wool products made from locally grown wool.
Jennifer had selected a serape from a young man who worked in the store and introduced himself as Carlito. He had flirted as he helped slip the serape over her shoulders and she had smiled and spun like the ballet dancer for him, the serape flying out to her side. She enthused about homespun wool and later had returned for weaving workshops taught by Carlito’s mother. But that had been the extent of it. Jennifer had forgotten the store and Carlito-- or so Morris thought.
Palestine had been the trigger. One evening over dinner at the Frontier restaurant on Central Avenue, as she devoured a Duke City burger and Morris dug into red chili enchiladas, Jennifer explained how the Palestinians had suffered at the hands of the Israelis, going back to the loss of their lands during the 1967 six-day Arab-Israeli war.
Morris tried to convince her there was much more to the problem and that some Islamic nations had vowed to destroy Israel. It was only natural that the Israelis would aggressively defend themselves. Didn’t the Israelis have a right to an historic homeland and to live free from the threat of imminent destruction?
“That’s not what this is about!” Jennifer said, as if he was clueless.
The conversation had gone nowhere, with Jennifer refusing to admit she was wrong. Morris let the issue drop, hoping she’d soon come to her senses. He did not press her further, fearing he’d lose her. Instead of fading, however, Jennifer’s interest in Islam had deepened as she and Aliyah became ever closer. His attempts to draw her away from Islam only drove her deeper into it. She grew irate when he criticized Islam as a religion that advocated and condoned violence against non-Muslims. She shouted about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children who had died during America’s war and on-going presence in Iraq, a war based on the lie Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Now she was living in this mosque in in the hills outside of Abiquiu. Morris clenched his jaw and drew a nasally breath. All four of them, Aliyah, Jennifer, Carlito and Miguel, had been attending weekend retreats at the mosque to learn the truth about Islam, she said. . And now, she was spending the summer there. Morris’ stomach churned as he silently waited for her response.
Jennifer stood still, immobile, as if weighting her options. After what seemed to him like an eternity, the only sound being the wind moving through the stubby piñon pines, he reached out to take her hand. “Please, Jennifer,” he said. “Come home.”
Jennifer yanked her hand away and stepped back. “My name is Halima.”
Morris’s heart sank. He swallowed hard, struggling to make sense of it all as he fought to restrain his anger. The mosque billed itself as a center for Islamic studies. A place of peace, she had said. But Morris wondered. Northern New Mexico has been home to various cults in the past. High, dry, and remote, it was home for more than a few fringe characters, a place where a person or group could be easily ignored and largely forgotten.
“Your mother, God rest her soul, gave you a beautiful name,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Honor her by using it.”
“Honor me by using my new name,” she replied.
Morris glared. “Please come home, Jennifer. You’re all that I have left.”
“Why can’t you accept that I’ve become a Muslim?”
“You’re not a Muslim, that’s why.”
Jennifer’s face darkened, her mouth dropping into a frown, and she shook her head slowly in disgust. She turned and walked away. Pausing at the double wooden doors of the entrance, she spun around to confront her father from a distance. Her face contorted with anger, her fists balled, and she shouted, “Go away and leave me alone! Just leave … me … alone!”
Morris sprang forward and grabbed her by the arms. “Enough of this stupid nonsense! You’re not a Muslim! Don’t try to tell me you are!”
Jennifer twisted free of her father’s grasp, yanked the door open, and darted inside, slamming the door shut behind her.
Morris stared at the closed door, his heart pounding, his breath heavy. He shook his head in disgust, his shoulders slumped in defeat, and strode back to his car. It’s Aliyah’s fault, and that boy Carlito, he told himself. How could this have happened?
***
The air inside the al-Salam mosque was still and cool. Tariq sat on a rug with several of his jihadis, all facing the elderly mullah, a man with a gray beard, his mustache shaved clean and head topped with white skull cap. “Who was that man?” Tariq asked.
“Didn’t you see?” the elderly mullah asked. “He is the father of Halima.”
“The American convert?”
“She’s very devout. Not like her friend, Aliyah.”
“Tell me about her father.”
“He’s a scientist at the Los Alamos laboratory.”
“A nuclear scientist?”
“Aren’t they all? They design and make bombs there.”
Tariq smiled and gently scratched his thin beard, lost in thought.
Chapter 9
The marked-up manuscript, its pages looking like they’d been lacerated with a red pen, sat beside Kyle’s laptop. Months earlier, he’d settled into a guesthouse in Santa Fe’s upscale Acequia Madre neighborhood, just steps from Canyon Road’s celebrated cafés, shops, and restaurants. A fifteen minute walk put him on the Santa Fe Plaza.
Portions of the sprawling adobe house dated from the late 1600s, long before the American colonies declared themselves an independent country. At the time, Santa Fe had been a lonely outpost in the northern territories of Spain’s new world colonies.
Kyle’s presence there was due to Seamus McGregor, the publisher of his first and only book, who lived in the property’s sprawling main house. The scion of a wealthy east coast family, he was a fine-art photographer of some repute, specializing in dramatic and large format black-and-white desert landscapes. McGregor had formed a publishing company so he could sell his photographic work in the form o
f coffee-table books. He’d been successful.
McGregor was soon publishing books on various Southwestern topics that intrigued him. At the time, Kyle had been writing news stories about the federal government’s controversial nuclear waste dump in southern New Mexico. McGregor called Kyle and asked if he’d like to write a book about a related topic, something much more dire: the death and environmental devastation caused by uranium mining on and around the Navajo Reservation. Kyle had readily agreed.
That was years earlier, but Kyle remembered it well as he massaged his aching left knee, bashed by a cartel boss during the chaotic and violent end of the extended true crime exposé he was now writing. Kyle contemplated the stack of paper on the desk in front of him, each page detailing the sordid events that had taken his father’s life and nearly cost him his own. He thought about the day he had stood in the cold and dismal rain on the sidewalk in the Georgetown neighbor of Washington, DC. He hadn’t felt the satisfaction he expected as he faced the large, brick home of former US Senator Micah Madsen, who walked out the front door and through a gauntlet of journalists, his hands cuffed, accompanied by stoic FBI agents, who stuffed Madsen into the backseat of gray sedan and drove away.
Madsen and his closest aides had lorded over a secret drug-running operation with rogue agents working under the protection of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Infiltrating the Mexican drug cartels was why the DEA black ops team had been formed, but as the committee chair that oversaw the so-called War on Drugs, Madsen realized there was money to be made. He went into business with one of the largest and most vicious of Mexico’s drug cartels.
When his father was shot and killed in the desert west of El Paso, Kyle had followed a trail that led him to Madsen’s doorstep. Kyle had lived to write about it, despite being nearly beaten to death by Marco Borrego, the next generation leader of the Borrego Cartel, who was smarter and more vicious than his father had been. Kyle had the scars to prove it. Madsen was serving a five-year sentence in La Tuna, the minimum security federal prison north of El Paso, Texas. Not a bad place to spend prison time, Kyle thought. It was a Spanish mission styled prison on the banks of the Rio Grande and topped with a gleaming white stucco bell tower. Madsen was one of about a thousand inmates who had committed nonviolent crimes. They included people like the man convicted of producing the anti-Islamic film that the US State Department wrongly said triggered the attack on the US consulate offices in Benghazi, Libya. Another was a former Navy SEAL who tried to get rich by smuggling US weapons from Iraq and Afghanistan back to the US and into Mexico where he sold them to the Mexican drug cartels.
Feeling exhausted, Kyle gazed at the manuscript pages, but lacking the energy to make any further edits, he put off further work until the next morning when he’d hopefully be fresh. He pushed the manuscript aside, rose, and stepped across the polished brick floor to his kitchen. He gurgled three fingers’ worth of his favorite añejo mescal into a glass just as he heard the melodic sound of an incoming Skype phone call on his laptop.
Drink in hand, Kyle clicked on the flashing icon to accept the call. The face of his former boss, Ed Frankel, filled the screen. It was nearly 9 p.m. in Washington, and Kyle wondered why Frankel was still at the office. The man looked tired and drawn, more tired than Kyle had ever seen him. Stocky, with a white moustache that matched his thinning hair, Frankel was past retirement age. The thought occurred to him that Frankel might die at his desk.
“When are you going to retire?” Kyle asked.
Frankel gazed at him guiltily, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. He nodded. “Good idea in theory. I ought to write a memoir, I suppose.”
Frankel had plenty of stories to tell from his days as a reporter. He’d humped the boonies in Vietnam, tromped through the Central American jungles with the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, and had helped expose the details of President Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal. Kyle and Frankel were of like minds, separated by a generation.
“Why don’t you?” Kyle asked.
“I’d drive Dorothy nuts.”
Kyle smiled. “You do have a way of doing that.”
“If I’m not facing down a daily deadline, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Give Dorothy my regards,” Kyle said. “You need to learn to relax.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“What happened to the beach house you bought in Belize all those years ago?”
Frankel shook his head in disgust. “Still there. Only go there for a couple of weeks each year.”
“Change of scenery might do you good,” Kyle said. “Help you transition into retirement.”
Frankel grunted a reply, then asked, “How’s your book coming?”
“Almost finished with the hard copy edits. With the freelance assignments you keep handing me, it’s a wonder I have time to work on it.”
“That was a good story you wrote on the border agents being murdered,” Frankel said. “It’s a no man’s land down there.”
“The Border Patrol is still reeling.”
“Have they found the killers?”
“No, and I don’t think they will. But they did find that suspicious body. Not a Mexican, but they couldn’t identify it, however.”
“How could they not know where the killers went?”
Kyle shrugged. “They vanished.”
“People don’t vanish, Kyle. There must be some clues. What about fingerprints? DNA?”
Kyle sipped his mescal. “They torched the vehicles, like I wrote. When I saw them, the charred metal still reeked of burned rubber and plastic.”
Frankel rubbed his face to wake himself up, then groaned. “So the killers could be anywhere?”
“Yep,” Kyle said. “Speaking of killers, whatever happened to Jihadi John, the ISIS executioner of Nate Kennard and those others? Anyone found him?”
Frankel shuffled papers on his desk. “We have people working on a series of stories about the kidnapping and killing of foreigners, especially journalists.”
“Nate and I went through some shit together.”
Frankel dropped his gaze, then looked out his darkened office window. “Yeah, I know you did. Why don’t you write a column about Kennard? About the need for journalists who are willing to risk their lives to find and deliver the truth.”
“Especially since we’re now being called the enemies of the people?” Kyle said.
“Yes, especially because of that.” Frankel paused, then cleared his throat. “But that’s not why I called.”
“I didn’t think this was a social call.” Kyle drew a breath and waited.
“I have another assignment for you, closer to home,” Frankel said. “I think you’ll like it.”
“This better be good because I have a book deadline.”
“It is,” Frankel said. “We’ve gotten word that President Harris and the conservative leadership in Congress have arranged a hush-hush meeting away from Washington DC.”
“They’ve been at each other’s throats for the past three years,” Kyle said. “Now they want to get chummy?”
“It’s a huge turnaround,” Frankel said. “Historic, actually. That’s why I need you there.”
“What’s behind it?” Kyle asked. “It’s not because anyone has had a change of heart.”
“The conservatives control Congress,” Frankel said. “They want to take the White House in the coming election.”
“Of course they do,” Kyle said.
“The conservatives are desperate to show they have a viable political agenda,” Frankel said.
“You mean other than voting down each and every Harris proposal without debate?”
“But to do that, they need President Harris to sign some of their bills.”
“Which he refuses to do.”
“Exactly,” Frankel said, rubbing his eyes. He yaw
ned noisily. “They want to work out a compromise.”
“Shocking, actually,” Kyle said. “Where are they meeting?”
“In your backyard,” Frankel said.
“Santa Fe?”
“Nope. A private ranch resort there in the mountains of northern New Mexico.”
“The Vista Verde Ranch?” Kyle asked.
“You know it?”
“Yeah, I do,” Kyle said. “It’s got a long and tangled history. Currently it’s owned by the billionaire media mogul, David Benedict, the man who owns Wolfe News Network.”
“Yep. That’s him,” Frankel said. “Benedict owns high-end properties all over the world. He’s hosting the event.”
“The ranch is set in the middle of one of the most pristine pieces of wilderness in the West,” Kyle said. “From what I understand, Benedict uses it to wine and dine congressmen, his friends and their girlfriends, and even a Supreme Court judge or two. They brag about the ranch’s trophy elk, bear, and trout fishing. It’s all on Benedict’s tab. But of course he denies he’s trying to influence government decisions.”
Frankel laughed. “Gee, that would be politics-as-usual, wouldn’t it? And Benedict complains about the need to drain the Washington swamp. Go figure.”
“Remember Supreme Court Justice Scarlotti, the one who died recently?” Kyle asked.
“Of course,” Frankel said. “The Senate has refused to consider a replacement until after the next election.”
“Yeah, well, Scarlotti was at Benedict’s mountain ranch when he had his heart attack.”
“I’d forgotten that,” Frankel said.
“It was not widely reported,” Kyle said. “He was at the ranch because a couple of cases were coming before the court that affected Benedict’s companies.”
“We all know the judicial branch is supposed to be above that kind of thing,” Frankel said with a cynical chuckle.
Enemy of the People Page 5
