True Allegiance

The next morning, Brett had flown to New York.

Now, looking at the damage, Brett punished himself for not having been able to warn intelligence sooner. If only he’d used the Morse code to tell them something was coming from Ashammi. If only he’d blinked the name Mohammed. In his heart, he knew it wouldn’t have helped. America had blinded itself in the name of peace—and Brett knew that hope wouldn’t buy peace anyway.

He turned his back on the Hudson, where the sunken bridge still lay slumbering under acres of water, the calm of the surface masking the graves of thousands of Americans. The American public had called the Iraq War too bloody, the Afghanistan War too costly; combined, America had lost fewer than seven thousand people. Now, on one day, they’d lost far more than that.

His cell phone rang. It was Collier. “Get over to JFK,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for you.”

The airport felt like a mausoleum, completely empty, completely deserted, utterly quiet. The planes sat at their terminals like sleeping grasshoppers. Abandoned vehicles dotted the tarmac. Brett sat in a secure room, flanked by two members of the Port Authority security team. Before him, on a cheap plastic table, sat a laptop, spreadsheets of flight manifests open. Brett quickly narrowed down the location of the flights—there were obviously no direct flights from the Islamic Republic to New York. Most stopped in Frankfurt or Munich or Dubai. There was no guarantee Mohammed had flown into New York, either—he could have flown into Newark, or even Boston Logan or any nearby area airport.

After realizing that there were simply too many combinations of flights to check every itinerary and every manifest, Brett finally dispensed with the politically correct pleasantries. “Jim,” he’d said to one of the officials, “I want access to the customs files.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” murmured the official, “is there somebody we’re looking for particularly?”

Brett said, “Yes. An Arabic-looking young man.”

The official hemmed and hawed. “I’m uncomfortable with that, sir. That’s racial profiling.”

“You’re not doing the profiling. I am.”

“Well, now I’m a party to it.”

Brett stared into his face. “I. Don’t. Care. Just do it.”

“Sir, it’s against regulations, though.”

“Look,” Brett burst out, losing his patience, “I don’t give a rat’s ass at this point whether it’s racial profiling or not. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Mohammed is a light-skinned Norwegian woman or a Cherokee elder. Or maybe he’s a Persian or Arabic-looking son of a bitch who hangs out with other Persian or Arabic-looking sons of bitches who look like Ibrahim Ashammi. If I end up being wrong, and he looks like Helen Mirren, feel free to tell The New York Times editorial board about it.”

The official scurried out of the room. Brett turned back to the manifests. There would be hundreds, maybe thousands of possible leads, men who had flown from the Middle East through some midpoint in the days between Brett’s capture and the bridge attack. With just a name, Mohammed, he wouldn’t have enough.

He picked up his cell phone, tapped it against his wrist. Then he scrolled through his contacts. When he reached the name “Hassan Abdul,” he dialed.

The café was virtually empty. That would have been odd on a normal day, but with the entire city under virtual military occupation, it somehow felt normal. Brett had been in war zones before, and this felt like a war zone. The smell of ash still hung over the city days later. Every so often, a military convoy would pass down Fifth Avenue, or the occasional ambulance, siren blaring. Brett had seen the real-time coverage of the September 11 attacks. This felt bigger in every way.