Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Jack’s mind suddenly flashed on that afternoon at Pagliaci’s, when Danny Pescatori gave Tony a VIP invitation to the museum gala. He’d forgotten about it until now.

And it was scheduled for this Saturday night.

“My God,” he said, his heart kicking up a notch as the realization sank in like a depth charge to the brain. “They’re going after the President.”

San Francisco, California

Talia “Tally” Griffin was convinced that this time she’d struck gold.

After years of dating all the wrong guys, winding up in relationships that went absolutely nowhere, she was certain that she had finally found her Prince Charming.

His name was Victor Massri.

Tall. Handsome. With deep, dark eyes, smooth brown skin, and that exotic, wispy little black goatee.

Tally didn’t normally go for men with beards, but Victor was the exception to the rule, and from the right angle he reminded her of Johnny Depp.

He was Egyptian, he’d told her, born and raised in London, and ever since they’d started corresponding online-through the SF Singles Hotline dating service-she knew she’d found someone very special.

Until this moment, the only contact they’d had were e-mails and text messages, a few photos they’d exchanged, and several prolonged phone calls, but seeing him walk out of that airline terminal flashing those beautiful white teeth was everything she’d hoped for, and more.

He greeted her with a platonic hug. She wanted more but she also didn’t want to scare him. The man was not one of her local jerks, he was foreign. She didn’t know what his customs were.

“Just the one suitcase?” she asked.

“I always travel light,” he told her, tossing the bag into the backseat.

They stood there awkwardly for a moment until Tally said, “I can’t believe you’re finally here.”

“Nor can I,” he told her.

It wasn’t just Victor’s dark good looks, however, that got Tally’s engine running hot. The two had clicked the moment she answered his request for an online meet. He told her that he’d seen her photo and thought she was “lovely,” and was doubly pleased when he read her profile and discovered she was an urban explorer. Her exact words to him were, “I love all old buildings, especially ones that have all the original furniture and fixtures.”

Victor told her he was an architect who had a great love for history, and had done quite a bit of exploring himself. He said he’d been to many abandoned sites around the world, from the eerie, fortresslike apartments of Battleship Island, Japan, to the decrepit unused underground railway stations right in his own hometown.

“You’re even more lovely in person,” he told her, and Tally knew she had to get this guy alone, real soon. Whatever cultural reserve he might have, she was determined to bridge it.

They climbed into her Toyota and she took him straight to her apartment.

This was going to be a night to remember.

Hassan Haddad had never forgotten just how disturbingly aggressive American women could be. But if he were to judge by this one, he’d say they’d gotten even worse over the last decade.

The moment he set foot in her apartment and dropped his suitcase, this althletic blond, blue-eyed ex-hippie with the ridiculous name and the wild curly hair was already pulling his jacket away and, when he didn’t object-indeed, he forced himself to smile with encouragement-starting on the buttons on his shirt.

Before she had even finished that task, Tally was kissing his chest and somehow unbuckling his pants at the same time as the trail of her kisses moved down toward his abdomen. Then she was on her knees and had him in her mouth and, aggressive or not, Haddad found himself unable to resist.

He was suddenly swept back to those nights at Berkeley, when his two dorm mates would tend to him as if they were his personal sex slaves, their enthusiasm matched by their skills-which were considerable. He had a hard time now remembering their names. Sabrina… and Jennifer?

Yes, that was it.

They were wild women, almost as wild as this one, and they had been more than willing to share themselves with Haddad. While he preferred women who obeyed men and acted in the way Allah had intended, he found himself unable to resist the charms of Sabrina and Jennifer.

Most of the students and professors he encountered in those days were far to the left of the average American, and he had difficulty hiding his contempt for them. In fact, he despised everything about them but pretended to share their views in order to get to know them and understand their thinking. Most of these radical leftists were Jews, which reconfirmed his inherent beliefs about all Jews: they were “chosen” by God to spread disorder across the globe.

On occasion, however, he would notice the ultrareligious Lubavitch Chasidic Jews as they walked to prayer with their children on Saturdays. He couldn’t help but admire their family solidarity, their piety, but most significantly their dignity.

He hated to admit, even to himself, that they reminded him of his own people, especially the most pious. He could not afford to feel charity toward a people who were oppressing so many Muslims. He rejected the argument that the Jews were just protecting their homeland. All they had to do was return to the Diaspora that God had intended and all would be well He remembered the Friday night when his life’s work crystallized. Sabrina (or was it Jennifer?) took him to the Chabad house near the campus. She kept telling him how much he was going to love the people there because they reminded her of him.

How stupid could these American girls be, comparing him, a son of Allah, with these pathetic children of Yahweh? But he needed to play his role so he went. As he entered the room he was enveloped within the loud singing. He noticed the women were on one side of the room and on the other there was a large circle of men dancing, with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Some had their small children with their legs around their necks, riding their shoulders.

Haddad was stunned when a very tall man with red hair and a full red beard reached from the circle and pulled him in. He recalled the man’s piercing blue eyes as he was drawn into the whirl of dancing men. He was momentarily swept up in the intoxicating mixture of the loud voices singing in unison in the cousin-language of Hebrew, the feel of the old wooden floors swaying beneath his feet.

For a fleeting instant he felt he was back in Pakistan, among his own kind.

And then he remembered who he was, and who they were. He felt revulsion by their proximity, by their smiles, by their revelry. He wanted to transform it all to still, bloody sorrow. He endured their presence so he could study their weaknesses. So he could protect those Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere whom these “Chosen People” had chosen to persecute.

Haddad felt that same hatred now. For the Jews, for their American allies, for the sluts like Tally who corrupted all of womanhood.

She wanted to be used? Haddad would oblige. When the time was right he would show this aggressive bitch what few American men would ever dare. She would be tamed and dominated. She would understand what true aggression was.

But he had no time for such things right now. He needed her to be fully on his side until he got from her the information he needed, so he let her have her way with him, right there on her living room floor.

It wasn’t, he supposed, the worst compromise he could make.

“You read all the newspaper columns I wrote,” Tally said, “but they really only touch on the surface of San Francisco’s underground.”