Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

Her gaze was unwavering, as if she wanted to find something suspicious-was just looking for an excuse to pull him into a back room somewhere and have him more thoroughly interrogated.

“And your luggage. Has it left your side today?”

“No.”

She stared at him a moment longer, Jack imagining the worst, then she suddenly handed him his documents.

“Have a pleasant trip,” she said with a warm smile.

When she moved on to the next person in line, Jack felt relief wash through him. There was still baggage screening and other checkpoints to get through, but the toughest test had been passed.

Now, if only he could get his chin to stop itching.

London, England

The flight to Bristol was mercifully uneventful.

Except for a moment prior to takeoff, when his fellow Lubavitchers started to pray together, there was nothing unusual about it. Jack had been warned of this and had joined in as instructed. As he genuflected and bobbed in prayer with the others, he felt out of place, like a conservative at Harvard.

After they landed, the group sailed through customs and immigration without a snag. Jack bid his escorts farewell, then traded dollars for pounds at the airport exchange and caught a cab to the Bristol Temple Meads railway station. He had a flashback to a story he’d once reported on about an undercover cop in San Francisco posing as a Chasid. The guy was spying on Israelis who were spying on us when he was assaulted by skinheads in a hate crime. His beard came off and his attackers were so stunned he was able to take them out with ease. There was no avoiding the publicity, which the SFPD used to its advantage: they said the guy was working to secure the safety of the Jewish community. He even got a citation from the Israeli ambassador.

In the men’s room, Jack stuffed the hat and the beard in his small carry-on, happy to finally wash the residue of the glue off his face, then smoothed back his hair, went to the ticket window, and bought passage to London.

Three hours later, as the train rolled into Westminster, Jack’s mind flashed memories of his week here with Rachel. They both thought they were in love at the time-who knows, maybe they were-and had wandered the streets of central London for hours, absorbing the sights and sounds, hitting all the usual tourist spots: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and of course, Trafalgar Square, with its beautiful fountains and majestic mid-nineteenth-century architecture. London had a unique vibrancy to it that was exhilarating, and it pained Jack to know that he was no longer welcome here.

Jack hired a cab and took a short ride to the Beresford Hotel. As they rumbled along Rochester Row, Jack looked up at Big Ben towering over the city and marveled at its overpowering beauty. Its movement was famous for its reliability, but when he checked it against the Hamilton Gilbert on his wrist-which he flawlessly maintained-he was surprised to discover that the great clock was off by a minute.

Jack suddenly felt uneasy. It was strange how psychological triggers worked. The need for order flared up inside him, and he realized he had been so focused on his mission, so alert, that he had neglected to maintain balance. He should have grabbed some sleep on the train. He should have given himself some downtime. Being so deep in something made you question the instincts you were trusting, made you second-guess your actions, made you wonder if you’d thought the whole thing through enough.

He had been so thoroughly guided by Bob Copeland’s sensible one-line mantra that he never thought that the trip to London might be too impulsive.

Listening to the hum of the engine, he closed his eyes and imagined the perfect mechanism of the watch on his wrist, or the Berliner on the wall in his apartment, letting the tick-tick-tick in his mind center him. It had been a long and stressful day and his first order of business had to be to get some rest.

The Beresford Hotel was an old redbrick monstrosity that had once been a school dormitory and looked it. Jack knew he wouldn’t be spending much time here, but he needed a base of operations that would take cash for a couple nights and ask no questions.

The room he rented wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a lumpy twin bed and a rattling radiator, and the only plumbing available in the room itself was a dingy sink with rusty fixtures.

Throwing his suitcase on the bed, he peeled off his clothes, wrapped a large but rather gray-looking towel around his waist, then went down the hall to the communal bath and took a scalding hot shower to wash away the day.

Fifteen minutes later, he climbed onto the bed and slid between the sheets, letting the last of the tension drain from his body, the tick-tick-tick still in his mind as he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

It was dark outside when Jack hired another cab to take him across the Thames to East London. According to Abdal al-Fida’s personnel file, he lived in the Forest Gate section of the borough of Newham, an area known for its ethnic diversity and high concentration of Muslims.

Isaiah once again came to mind: “They come from a far country, from the end of Heaven… to destroy the whole Earth…”

Jack had no way of knowing if al-Fida still lived there, or was even alive at this point. This entire enterprise was a huge gamble. But he had to try, for the sake of Bob Copeland. And Tom Drabinsky. And Jamal Thomas.

But most of all, he was here for his own sake. For that burning need-to-know that had consumed him ever since Drabinsky went up in that blast.

Jack hadn’t called his show Truth Tellers simply because it sounded good. Truth was the fire that fueled him. He’d spent his entire career cutting through the layers of horse manure that people often used to hide or deflect responsibility for their actions, always searching for the truth they were trying to hide. His interviewing style was direct and sometimes confrontational, but never without empathy, and he often thought of himself as “good cop/bad cop” rolled up into one. He believed truth was liberty’s Siamese twin, not her cousin. When truth was absent, liberty followed.

Jack suspected that Adam Swain’s cover story about al-Fida being an MI6 mole was yet another layer he had to cut through. And the only way he knew to do that was to confront al-Fida himself.

He had the cab driver drop him off in front of a small pub on St. George Road, which was sandwiched between a Laundromat and a Classic Kitchens store. He went inside and ordered a pale lager, taking a few minutes to again center himself and weigh his options.

According to Google Maps, al-Fida’s flat was located about two blocks down, in a modest Victorian-style building across from St. Angela’s Ursuline School. Deciding the direct approach was probably best-just knock on the door and start asking questions-Jack drank his lager in three quick gulps, then threw some money on the table and went back outside.

As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he nearly collided with an olive-skinned man with a wispy goatee. The man was moving briskly, obviously in too much of a hurry to see Jack coming. For a moment Jack thought it might be al-Fida himself.

But no-this man’s face was older and more angular than the one in the personnel photograph, and Jack dismissed him as just another resident of the area. He muttered a quick apology that got no response, then crossed the street and headed in the direction the man had just come from.

Less than five minutes later he found al-Fida’s building and stood in the shadow of a large oak tree, next to the beige brick wall that bordered St. Angela’s.

He knew that al-Fida lived in Unit 2, which faced the street, but the window was dark now and it looked as if no one were home.