Ben Shapiro - True Allegiance

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.

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 apartment 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.”

“So what do you know about my man Mohammed?”

“Not much. I know that he has a close relationship with Omari.”

“Where does Omari live?”

Hassan laughed. “You can’t be serious. You want me to go over there and talk with him? It puts my entire operation at risk.”

“No,” said Brett slowly. “ I want to go and talk with him.”

Hassan laughed even harder. Finally, he began coughing, pounded his chest until it subsided. “White boy, you’re out of your mind. You don’t know the first thing about him. Did you know he’s tight with Prescott? That he’s given opening prayers at the New York Stock Exchange? He’s high profile. And you think you’re just going to waltz over there and ask him some questions, and that he’ll answer you?”