True Allegiance

He gunned the engine, rammed his foot to the floorboard. “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch,” he muttered. The motorcyclists gunned their own engines, zooming right at the front of the truck. They didn’t have much control over their aim, but they fired anyway; the glass cracked as a few shots landed square on the windshield.

Aiden saw their plan before it materialized. They would separate, come around the back of the van, and follow; they would then pick up more and more of their crew, and the whole thing would turn into a running gun battle.

As they began to split, Aiden braked hard, turning the wheel 90 degrees. The van swung around, doughnutting—he heard a satisfying smash as the side of the van swung into one of the motorcyclists. The other motorcyclist was now directly in front of him. He got off the bike and ran as Aiden drove the SWAT vehicle directly over the cycle, crushing it beneath the wheels.

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.

Part 3 THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Brett

New York City

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.