Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “In five years Arnie will be gone, either in the statehouse where he wants to be or in some big firm, where he’s more likely to be. You won’t be doing what you are doing now. That lawsuit would kill your career. And all for what? What damages could you expect? You aren’t out of pocket a nickel. I assume you didn’t have any nervous breakdown and wind up committed to McLean Hospital. That’s what it takes to get big bucks for emotional distress. You could win and get twenty-five grand, and I’d get an award of attorney’s fees and make ten times what you get from the case, and neither of us would see a penny of that for five years. I wouldn’t do it if I were you, and I won’t do it myself.”

  She sighed. “How did I know you were going to say that?”

  “Because you’re a trial lawyer yourself,” he said. “A real trial lawyer.”

  “So, I’ll quit then,” she said suddenly, waiting for him to tell her how wrong a move that would be.

  “I would if I were you,” he answered, surprising her. “I’d quit any government job these days. This is not a government a Jew should be affiliated with. I’m fighting against this government. That’s what you should be doing, too.”

  Shapiro paused, rubbing his chin and looking at Katz carefully. Then he smiled at her.

  “So, Judy, how are you fixed for money?”

  “I’m comfortable,” Katz said. “I sure haven’t spent much over the years, and my parents left me, well, something. They had life insurance. It paid into a trust fund—not a real huge trust fund, but enough to live on, the way I live. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment,” Shapiro replied. “One more question. Do you have a security clearance?”

  “You’ll have to explain what significance that has before I answer,” she said, a tinge of coldness coming into her expression.

  “Ok, fair enough,” Shapiro said, smiling at her, encouraged by her caution. This woman is the kind of lawyer I like, he thought. “I know an organization looking for a good trial lawyer. I don’t know how much it pays or even if it pays at all. The ADL, Anti-Defamation League. I’m working with them, along with what seems to be half the Jewish lawyers in town, on habe petitions for the people being held on the cape. It’s already out of control. There could be four thousand separate lawsuits the way it’s shaping up. We need somebody to coordinate it all.

  “I’m in charge of the committee that is supposed to be running the whole show. About two minutes ago I appointed myself head of the hiring subcommittee. In that position, I’m offering you the job of head coordinator of the habeas corpus litigation team. What do you say?”

  “Whoa, let me catch my breath here,” she replied. “There are going to be petitions for writs of habeas corpus filed for all the people, Jews, held at that Army base, or whatever it is, on the cape. The argument is that they are being illegally detained because of their religion. On the other side the government would be defended by”—a smile crossed her face—“by the United States Attorney for the district in which they are detained, which would be Massachusetts. Arnie Anderson. Is that right, Mr. Shapiro?”

  “Ben.”

  “Yes, of course, Ben. That sounds an awful lot like what I wanted to talk with you about in the first place. I’ll do it. And I’ll enjoy doing it.”

  Shapiro thrust his hand across the table. She placed her hand in his and squeezed, firmly. He was slow to let go. She was even slower. The tips of their fingers dragged against one another as they withdrew their hands.

  This is going to be interesting, Shapiro thought.

  “I’ll resign this afternoon,” Katz said. “I don’t feel like I’ve got to give Arnie more notice than that. He’s already told me in the best way he can he doesn’t want me working for him. So, what happens next?”

  “Come to my office at eight tomorrow morning. You’ll work from there. I’ll find a space for you,” Shapiro said. “We’ll try to get something done tomorrow. I leave for Washington pretty soon after that. I can’t miss the march.”

  “You’re going to that big march in Washington,” she said, laughing. “Of course you would go. You’re one of those 1960s-wannabe guys, aren’t you, civil rights and marches and all that.” She looked him in the eye and spread a mile-wide smile at him. “I just love ’60s guys.”

  This woman is so young, Shapiro thought.

  “Are you planning on going?” he asked.

  “My grandmother asked me to go with her. Her entire canasta club is going; actually I suspect her entire congregation is going. Nana told me to go. You have to fight the Nazis, she told me. Even should they kill you, you fight them, she said. I was shocked. My nana telling me to fight. I didn’t know how to respond. I told her I couldn’t go, blamed my job.”

  Her next words chilled the smile from Shapiro’s face.

  “She was in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Katz said, surprised at the pride in her voice. “She escaped. Her husband, my grandfather, died fighting.”

  Shapiro did not know what to say. Judy continued.

  “I hadn’t even thought about going. Didn’t seem like a good career move for an Assistant United States Attorney, but that isn’t my career anymore. I suppose the head habeas coordinator really should be there. Sure, why not? Sure, I’ll go. I’ll make reservations this afternoon.”

  Shapiro shook his head. “I’m pleased you’re going, but there are no reservations to be made. Every flight is booked. The trains are booked. I even heard the Greyhound buses are booked. Most people are going on charter buses. Do you belong to a synagogue? I’m sure it has a bus or two going.”

  “No, I’m not much of a joiner,” she said sheepishly. “How are you getting there?”

  “I waited too long, too. That’s how I know there are no reservations. I’m driving, although I don’t know what I’ll do with the car when I get there, or where I’ll be staying. I expect all those details will work out. The important thing is being there.”

  “Could you fit a passenger?” Katz asked, looking him in the eyes.

  “Sure,” he said softly. “Big car, lots of room.”

  “And if we can’t find a place to stay we can always camp out in the car,” Katz said. “Your car has a back seat, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure does,” Shapiro answered. “A big soft one.”

  “Great,” she answered enthusiastically. “One thing, though. What was that about a security clearance?”

  “Just the Justice Department jerking us around,” he said. “You know how that’s done, I’m sure.”

  She nodded. “I wrote the memo on jerking around defense counsel.”

  “They’ve told us no lawyer goes to Edwards unless he’s got a top secret security clearance, just like at Guantanamo,” Shapiro said. “And the screening process takes six months. I’ll pay a bonus on top of the pro bono salary you won’t be getting if you’ve got a security clearance.”

  She nodded. “No problem on that. Let’s just say,” she said, glancing at his left hand, “the United States government certifies that I can keep a secret.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The Jewish March on Washington was all over the news. Boston stations reported that local synagogues had chartered virtually every available bus. Sam Abdullah and Alfred Farouk watched the news in Sam’s room, when Al supposedly came over to work on a history project.

  The ABC News reporter described the security precautions in Washington as “unprecedented.”

  “The FBI is saying that as many as a million American Jews are expected to descend on the city this weekend,” the carefully coifed reporter said with a concerned expression. “And other law enforcement sources predict that several hundred thousand counter-demonstrators may attend, angry that there have been no prosecutions for the murders of ten Coast Guard officers and two FBI agents by Jewish terrorists in the Boston area. The law enforcement presence here is overwhelming.”

  Al jammed his thumb on the remote control to turn the television off.

  “A million Jews all in one place,” he said. �
��Imagine what a little bit of bomb would do there. There’d be Jew-meat splattered all over the place.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like there’s any chance that’s gonna happen,” Sam responded. “It looks like every cop in the world is gonna be there to protect the Jews. Wouldn’t you know it, they’re the ones who killed people and yet it’s our taxpayers’dollars that keep anybody from getting back at them. It shows that no matter what the Jews do, they get away with it, no matter how bad it is. They can do anything.”

  “You’re right, man,” Al said. “Just let some Muslim set off a bomb or highjack a plane and they get the Special Forces and all after them. Jews set off an atom bomb in the middle of a Muslim city and we still let them all get together for the biggest picnic in the world on the front lawn of the fucking White House. What does it take before this country gets pissed off at Jews for a change?”

  The two young men sat in silence for several minutes, infuriated at the waste of their tax dollars, neither acknowledging that they had yet to actually earn enough money to have to pay any taxes.

  Sam spoke first.

  “What if the Jews did something bad this week, just before their big march, something that really got the government down on them? Wouldn’t that screw up their march?”

  “Probably. Maybe,” Al responded cautiously. “But that would be pretty dumb of them, right before they hold what they say is gonna be a super peaceful demonstration, to do something that would get people pissed at them. One thing everybody knows is that Jews are smart. It would be dumb to fuck around right before they go to beg the government for sympathy. They’re not that stupid, man. But it would be cool if they were.”

  “It sure would be cool. It would be better than cool,” Sam said. “It would totally mess up their peaceful giant march. Mess up that march, man, and there’s no way even that Jew-lover Quaid is gonna go into Palestine and bail them out.”

  “Yeah, yeah, man, but like I said, Jews are smart. They aren’t gonna do anything like that, not now,” Al said.

  Again, the two sat in silence. Again, Sam broke the silence.

  “What if people thought it was Jews who did something really bad? Wouldn’t that do the same thing? It doesn’t really have to be Jews who do it, not as long as everybody thinks it was. Am I right or am I right?”

  “I guess you’re right.” Al Farouk sensed, again, that his friend was serious; this was more than playing fantasy games. “Man, are you, like, for real about this, about doing something, and not just talking about how cool it would be to do something?”

  Sam paced the room. He pointed toward the computer on which they’d spent so many hours visiting the American Mujahidin website.

  “Serious?” he asked. “Of course I’m serious. Don’t you think those guys we read about in Palestine, all those martyrs, were serious? Not just guys. Girls. Girl martyrs over there, man. They aren’t any better than us—no older, no smarter, no braver. If they could do it, why can’t we? If they can die for Allah, why can’t we do it, too?

  “Just think what a difference we could make. We stop the United States from bailing out the Jews in Palestine and the whole world is different. If we could do that, just us, a couple of ordinary guys here in Massachusetts, if we do that, they’ll write poems about us around the world, sing songs about us. How cool would that be?”

  “Yeah, that would be pretty cool,” Al replied. He was catching his friend’s enthusiasm. “Yeah, pretty fucking cool. Heroes around the world. Pretty cool. I could get into that. So we die. Big fucking deal. We know what happens to martyrs when they die. I could dig that.”

  He was talking more to himself than to his friend—talking himself into doing something he would not do but for all the hours of listening to Mullah Abu Hamzah, months of discussions with his best friend about martyrs in Palestine, young men who looked not unlike the two Americans, young men who were also in high school, who also left family behind. Talking himself into something that without that preparation he would view as just plain stupid.

  Now, though, watching the news, listening to Jewish leaders predict they would get all the support they asked for from Washington, now it sounded more like a spectacular way to pole-vault himself into history.

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked Sam. “Because whatever it is, I’m in it with you.”

  “We do something big, really big. Lots of people die. And we do it so people think it was Jews who did it. They blame the Jews for it. Cool, right? Right before their big peace march the Jews kill a shitload of Americans. Make killing those Coast Guard guys seem like pissing in public.”

  “Yeah, I see it, man. People are pissed off at the Jews enough for killing the Coast Guard guys, and that girl Coast Guard, too. And the FBI guys.” Al was getting excited. “So what are you thinking?”

  “We can’t do it in DC,” Sam said. “Every cop in the world is gonna be there, and besides, we don’t want to kill Jews with this.”

  “Well, duh, we do want to kill Jews,” Al interrupted, then thought for a moment. “Just not this time around.” He paused again. “Oops,” he continued. “Guess this thing will be our only thing. Guess somebody else will have to kill Jews. Our thing is to kill Americans and make everybody think the Jews did it. Right? That’s the game plan?”

  “That’s the game plan,” Sam said. “Okay, we gotta get that TNT from your dad’s shed. You sure were right about the combination. So what do we do with it? Blow up a school like those Chechen guys did in Russia? That got people pissed off.”

  “I don’t know if I want to kill kids,” Alfred said. “How about if we do grownups, adults? Kids is pretty heavy duty. Besides, it could be hard to get into a school if you don’t go there.”

  “We could do our own schools,” Sam speculated, then backed away. “No. Don’t want to do our own friends. Some of those kids are okay. Besides, that might seem like a Florida kinda thing—what was that school?”

  “Parkland,” Al said.

  “Right, Parkland. They’d probably make us seem like loser types doing our own school. Okay, not a school. How about some sports event? Too bad it isn’t Super Bowl time.”

  “Think, man, that doesn’t work. We’ve gotta do it this week. There won’t be any big sports events this week. Besides, there’s security at those things. I saw it on TV. They check everybody coming in and they’ve got dogs and sniffer machines and shit. No, man, it’s gotta be someplace where lots of people go all the time, even during the week. Someplace where there’s shit for security.”

  “But there’s gotta be cameras, security cameras so everybody knows it was Jews that did it, right? Where do people hang out all the time, with no security except cameras?”

  They thought for no more than thirty seconds before Al smiled broadly.

  “The mall, man. The fucking mall. It’s perfect.”

  “Fucking A, you’re right,” Sam said. “But not one mall. There’s two of us. We’ll do two malls.”

  “Two malls. Okay. Let’s make a pact, a pact before Allah.” Al Farouk’s tone of voice changed from the near hilarity with which he and his friend were speaking as they exchanged ideas. Now, he was on board, committed. Neither of them spoke about Allah in jest.

  “I vow before Allah that I will do this deed,” Al said. He looked at Sam.

  “And I vow before Allah that I, too, will do this deed.”

  “Good,” Sam continued. “Let’s go to your dad’s place tonight and get the TNT.”

  “And the blasting caps,” Al added. “We need the blasting caps and the six-volt batteries there. We can skip the fancy box they use to set it off. Just touch the two wires together and boom. That’s all it will take.”

  “Boom. That’s all it will take,” Sam echoed. “We skip school tomorrow and put the belts together. Nothing to it. Just duct-tape the TNT around us, hook up the wires and the blasting caps, connect it to the battery and boom when the wires get touched together. Right?”

  “Right,” Al said. “We do
it tomorrow night, three days before the big Jew march on Washington. So, man, what’s your favorite mall?”

  Sam thought for a moment. “North Shore. The food court. Love that Japanese chicken thing they sell there. And you?”

  “Burlington Mall,” Al replied. “Yeah, the food court is the place to do it. It’ll be packed around, say, six thirty, everybody eating their mall food.”

  Sam looked at his friend.

  “We are going to do this, right? We vowed before Allah. No backing out?”

  “Hey, we vowed. We can’t back out now,” Al said. “Tomorrow night. I’ll meet you in Paradise.”

  “Yeah, Paradise,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Do you suppose that shit with the virgins and all really happens when you die a martyr’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” Al said. He smiled at his friend. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow night.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Robert Jordan was head of the White House Secret Service detail. Unlike two other presidents he’d guarded, Jordan both liked and respected President Quaid. Jordan’s job was protecting his boss from physical threats. And because he liked President Quaid, he thought it proper to tip him off to a political threat, too.

  “Mr. President. I just spoke with Joe Bergantina. Joe’s in charge of the First Lady’s detail. Joe wanted to brief me about the First Lady’s travel plans for tomorrow, sir.”

  “I appreciate the call, Bob,” President Quaid replied. “But the First Lady makes her own travel plans these days. In fact, she makes her own plans for pretty much everything these days. We’ve decided not to coordinate our schedules anymore.”

  There were no secrets from the Secret Service. The First Lady was referred to in the Secret Service radio code as “Fox,” a corollary to her husband’s code name of “Wolf,” which he claimed derived from the way he could make a roast beef sandwich disappear in fifteen seconds. Agent Jordan knew Fox had not spent a single night in what the detail referred to as the Wolf’s Den in several weeks. The Lincoln bedroom was no longer available for overnight guests because Mrs. Quaid claimed it for herself.