5

By the fifth day I was hearing from sources that people inside the White House were panicking. Immediately following the attacks, the entire nation had gone into shock. By the second day, that shock had given way to a morbid acceptance and even fascination. As the bodies continued to pile up and the funerals began on the third day, the horror turned to white anger. On the fourth day, fear set in.

But for the administration, it was the fifth day that proved to be the most dangerous. That was the day people began deciding who was to blame. A New York Times political cartoon by Witte showed a caricature of Wrightman sitting behind a large desk on which sat a small sign reading, “The 63,000,000,000 bucks stop here!” That number being the estimated budget of our intelligence agencies, although in actuality it was considerably more than that. When I was mean and green, we referred to it as the three-step: first, real sorrow for the victim; second, gratitude it wasn’t us; and third, the realization the bad guys were still out there.

There was a growing consensus that the administration was fucked. It seemed like every social media post was anti-Wrightman. He was photoshopped water-skiing in the Morgan City flood. His face was superimposed on the classic monkeys seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing. Another cartoon depicted him being lectured by a furious Uncle Sam, who was berating him, “You had only one job…”

“Well,” Jenny the eternal optimist said when I reached her midmorning, “at least there’s one little ray of sunshine.”

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t seen one post calling for Trump to come back.”

Supposedly Wrightman was on the warpath in the White House, although we weren’t allowed to describe it that way, as that phrase was now perceived as being politically incorrect. Instead I wrote that “Sources close to the president apparently are staying as far away as possible from the president…”

For the administration this was becoming far worse than an American tragedy, it was becoming a serious political liability. Wrightman had run on the promise that he would restore order—and in exchange we would voluntarily give up a little bit more of our personal freedoms.

The irony was so obvious even a Trump voter could understand it. We had surrendered some constitutionally guaranteed rights to make it easier for the government to protect our constitutionally guaranteed rights. For example, large solidarity marches had been planned for the following weekend in major cities; but citing safety concerns, Homeland Security had prohibited any demonstrations of more than two hundred people. To protect our right of privacy, the government found it necessary to tap into the phone calls and texts of anyone it decided was a risk.

It didn’t change the key equation: As long as people had no one to blame, they were going to blame the president. Immediately following the attacks, the president’s approval numbers actually went up, as Americans rallied around the flag. But as a day passed, then two, without the terrorists being identified, those polls dropped faster than a politician’s promise the day after an election. The president was pissed and getting pissier by the hour. Apparently it was getting ugly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I was angry too. I needed so much coffee to keep me going that I’d knocked over my tower at twenty-four. I hadn’t even threatened the record. And worse, young reporter Jeannie Lee was at a solid seventeen and looking way too confident. I was working on a feature about people who had narrowly avoided being at one of the sites for some insignificant reason, the standard “fate is the hunter” piece, when Cher interrupted. “Boss, there’s a red call for you.” Red calls are those people calling on the very private number I give only to my best burrowed sources.

It was a former future brother-in-law currently working on the U.S. Marshals Service New York/New Jersey Joint Fugitive Task Force. I had dated this man’s sister when she and I were stationed in Europe. We’d sung a lot of songs together. Deep Quote, as I referred to him, had been Air Force, then signed up with the feds. “Hey, good buddy,” I said. “How’s the captain?” His sister.

“Big news. She’s promoted and pregnant.”

“Whoa.” That set me back for an instant. Andie was tough and beautiful. She had been sitting by my bed when I’d come out of an induced coma in Landstuhl. She had stayed there through as much of my rehab as her duties allowed. But when shove came to push, literally, my first chair proved too much for her. I couldn’t keep up where she intended to go. She was honest about it. No hard feelings. I think her brother has always felt more guilty about it than either one of us, and these occasional calls were his way of expressing that.

“They got something,” he said in the requisite whisper, snapping me back.

I turned on Chair’s built-in recorder. “Who’s got what?”

“The FBI lab. Nobody’s saying if it’s anything yet. But about twenty minutes ago Justice issued an official warning telling us not to say anything.” They had something.

“About?”

“One of our people bagged part of a hand in the tunnel last night. He picked it up a few feet away from an automatic weapon that was used in the attack.”

“You guys are fucking amazing,” I said, and meant it. These people are incredible. The FBI had broken the Lockerbie bombing after finding a piece of a timer about the size of a thumbnail in a fifty-mile crime scene. As I listened, I sent Howie a text telling him we had a break. I saw him in his office reading the text, then turning and looking at me quizzically. I nodded.

The recovered body part consisted of most of a right palm from the wrist, three complete fingers, and one partial. The partial was the trigger finger. The thumb was gone. It had tested positive for gunshot residue, indicating that this hand had been in close proximity when the gun was fired. They had run prints from the remaining fingers through AFIS, the bureau’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System. He paused, waiting for me to ask.

I asked, “And?”

“They got a hit,” he said.

A chill ran down my back. Literally, a chill.

Howie came out of his office. He waved his hands to quiet the office, then pointed at me. The place went dead quiet. Until recently, my source continued, that hand had been attached to an American citizen of Middle Eastern descent. “A guy from Michigan. Detroit area. The only thing we know so far is that he traveled to Egypt twice last year.”

As I listened, one question plagued me: Would I have to wear a tie to the Pulitzers next year? “What’s going on now?”

“Rainbows and lollipops.” The opposite of a shitstorm. “Soon as we got the ID, our guys began tracking his phone records. We’ll find out who he’s been talking to. Some people from the Detroit task force are going out to take a look right now. But they don’t want to shake the tree yet.”

“So whatta you think?” I actually wasn’t surprised. As hard as it was to accept, domestic always made more sense to me than international. Everybody in law enforcement knows there is a layer of bad guys moving undetected around the country, like the cave snakes in Raiders; nobody talks about it because there is nothing they can do about it. The people I know had always believed domestic terrorism was a far greater danger to this country than an away team. And the level of coordination necessary to pull this off without attracting attention required an understanding of this country beyond the capabilities of foreign terrorists.

“I like it,” he decided. “We been tracking a thousand leads. Ten thousand. A bunch of them looked good for a while. This is the one that’s panned out. This guy was in the tunnel, we know that for sure.”

“You got a name?”

I waited through a long silence. Qui tacet consentit. Silence gives consent. He had the name, he was just connecting neurons, trying to figure out if it could be traced back to him. Slug that I am sometimes, I debated asking him about his sister again, just slightly ginning up his guilt.

It wasn’t necessary. “Be careful how you use this, huh. It could cause me a lot of problems.”

“I know that.”

“Caleb Hassan.” He spelled it for me.

I repeated it letter for letter as if I was writing it down. “Anything else?”

I could tell he was reading Hassan’s sheet, probably off a computer, creating a portrait for me. Home address. His birth date making him twenty-nine years old. “Let’s just see what we got here. He did thirty months at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Center.” He hesitated, verbally shaking his head. “Rings no bells. For assault. He must not have been carrying. It would have been a lot longer than that if he’d had a gun. What else? He got his GED while he was in, and it looks like that helped him get an early release.”

Deep Quote was a big burly guy in a perennial battle with his weight. I could imagine him sitting at his desk looking over the top of his glasses, scrolling down this guy’s record. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Finished parole ’20. Current employment unknown. No tax returns last year. Owns a two-year-old BMW 5 Series.” An aside, a knowing chuckle. “Wonder where the money for that came from? Nothing. Nothing.” Another thoughtful pause, then, “Okay, here’s something, there’s nine unpaid parking tickets been issued to that car within the last year, all of them on the same block, but a different block from his home address. He got the tickets on Stratford Road. His address is Belmont Circle.”

“Which means?”

“Who the fuck knows. Maybe that home address is a phony. Maybe this place is his hangout, gang headquarters, local drop, maybe that’s where his squeeze lives, could be anything.” I heard a series of puffing sounds as he continued looking over the sheet. “That’s pretty much it, bro.”

“You hear anything, you know who loves you most, right?”

He chuckled. “Just be smart with this. This’d get me fried.”

A few years earlier I would have been taking notes. Instead, soon as he clicked off, I ordered, “Cher, transcribe and print it, please.”

“Yes, boss.” I hate a wiseass computer.

Howie made a soft landing in my chair. “And?”

I clasped my hands, put them behind my head, and leaned back with a smile. “Who’s your favorite reporter?”

“Depends. Downhill, there’s nobody can keep up with you.”

I told him we had a possible. A name, a background that sounded right. Howie started chewing on one of those green plastic flossers, saving his cigar for the victory. “What do you want to do?”

Before I could respond, Frankie B. Goode shouted, “Listen up, everybody. Something’s going on at the White Castle. Lots of smiles. Do some checking, please.”

Howie continued, “You ready to go with it?”

“We can’t name the guy.” The risk of identifying a suspect on such flimsy evidence was much too great. “But we can break it: ‘Authorities have identified a person or persons of interest in the 7/11 attack on the Lincoln Tunnel yada, yada, yada…’ Nothing wrong with that. If we’re wrong, so what, we had a solid tip from a trusted source, no one’s gonna remember.” Besides, truckloads of bullshit were being published. On the other hand, if we were right, if we were right and first, we would attract a lot of attention. Either way, the story was going to get reposted on the major sites, which would have to credit us. Long term, a break like this could even make the difference between the Pro suriviving or going belly-up. Even with his ethics, Howie always reminded us there was a reason it was called the news business. Too often the bottom line was the bottom line.

“Okay.” Howie nodded his approval and pushed himself up. “Okay,” he repeated with a little more decisiveness, “let’s go with it.” He stood in front of the room like a slightly deranged teacher, put two fingers in the corners of his mouth, and whistled the room silent. Everyone paused and gave him their attention. “Listen up, people.” He was standing in front of the office, his stomach flowing gently over his belt like the intermediate slope in Vail. He pointed at me. “Big Wheels here just got a heads-up. It looks like the feds got a name out of New York that they’re spritzing over. See what you can find out.” He scanned the room. “Who’s from Michigan again? Anybody?”

Jimmy Klurfeld raised his hand. “I am.”

“Right. Our guy is from somewhere around Detroit. See if the Detroit PD knows anything.” The noise level in the room started rising, but he raised his voice even louder to shut it down. “People. People, here’s the thing. Do. Not. Tell anyone what we got. Let me repeat that for the kiddies in the back row. We have a source who we’re going to protect. The suspect gets spooked and it’s our fault, by next week we’ll all be asking people if they want to supersize that.” He clapped twice and reminded us what we do. “All right, let’s do some journalism.”

In a different situation I would have called Eunie Kaufman’s office or Danny Ricciardi over at Justice to get an official denial I could quote—“A Justice Department spokesperson told me he would beat the shit out of me if I ran this story,” or something like that—to prove that I had tried to investigate further before going with a single-sourced story. But I had no time for that. This was a shape-shifting story. Even in these days of cyber-journalism, breaking a big story in DigiWorld made a difference. Besides, if the White House learned we had this information, it might well try to prevent us from posting it. National security, blah, blah, blah. And the reality was the enlarged eleven-person Supreme Court would probably back them up.

Less than an hour later, after a little editing by Frankie and a quick legal read, I attached the appropriate capital N logo to my story, took a deep and satisfied breath, and posted it. “The Pro has learned exclusively that a suspect has been identified in the attack on the Lincoln Tunnel.” Then I clanged my cowbell. The cowbell was another Howie innovation; to create a team spirit each of us had our own device to ring or bang or shake when we posted an important story. (It also allowed Howie, on those occasions when he was pushing us to dig deeper, to shout out his favorite SNL line, “More cowbell!”) I got the usual response—several way-to-go’s, a couple of hurrahs, and a few lonely claps. Then back to work.

Few things are more exhilarating than a newsroom working at warp speed. There’s a physical high you want to grab on to and ride wherever it takes you. Piece by disparate piece, reaching out to sources throughout government and law enforcement, adding reports from other outlets, we began knitting together a scenario. There definitely was serious stirring. The mood inside the White House was described as “borderline euphoric.” We learned from a Defense Department source that a combined federal force, consisting of Homeland Security and regular army troops, had been sent to Detroit. A stringer from WWJ, 950 AM on your radio dial, told Klurfeld that the Detroit PD had been ordered to establish a six-block perimeter around a low-income area known to be a center of the drug trade; that area had been quarantined, meaning no one—including police officers, but especially media—was allowed inside that perimeter. The FAA issued a notice temporarily prohibiting helicopters, drones, and probably paper airplanes from being flown in or around that designated area. No pictures, please. Howie had two people researching the suspect, but they came up with nothing more than we had.

I had a pretty good sense of what was going on. I’d been there. I’d been there a lot of times. The procedure was pretty much the same whether it was Fallujah or Detroit. Isolate the neighborhood. Nobody in and nobody out without an escort. I didn’t know for sure, but I would have bet undercovers were knocking on doors, quietly moving civilians out of the area. Somewhere, the D-unit, the designated soldiers going in, were saddling up—putting on equipment; testing night vision, cleaning weapons, checking battle buddies, looking at sector maps, reviewing intel, going over their plan, then going over it again. Lock and load, then go to that quiet place in your mind free of all ordinary concerns; then focus, focus so completely on the mission that nothing else exists.

Been there, done that. I knew exactly what those guys were feeling. I could close my eyes and channel those feelings: the anticipation, the excitement, the confidence; that little dash of doubt.

I wondered who they were sending in; and then it hit me. Hello. Mouth to brain, where have you been? About a year earlier I’d heard scuttlebutt that Homeland Security was positioning small self-contained antiterrorist units in waiting stations at heliports around the country. My contacts in the Special Ops community have always been solid, and became even more so after I went down. We help our own. The story was accurate, I was told; there were thirty-five such units, each of them consisting of twenty-five special operators. They were designed to move fast; they carried light weapons and used troop carriers with remote firing cannon. Their mission was to put boots on the ground on any populated site in the continental US of A within thirty minutes following the identification of a terrorist cell. Of course. I’d wondered how any army unit could have gotten to the Lincoln Tunnel so quickly after the attack had begun. Bing-go!

Detroit, with its large Muslim population, would have been an obvious choice to station one of those units. Who would know, I wondered? I mentally flipped through my contacts, going from A to Z. I got to M. “Cher,” I said, “call Oley Masterson.” Command Sgt. Major Masterson had been in it with me. He’d retired, but no one I knew was plugged in better than him.

He answered his cell on the second ring. “Oley Masterson.” Polite but inquisitive.

“Bucky Dent.”

“Fuck you.” Oley was a die-hard Red Sox fan; when he was in the soup, he’d carried Carlton Fisk’s autographed baseball card in his top hat for good luck. We exchanged the usual affectionate insults until he asked the usual “What can I do you for?”

I told him what I needed. Oley and I had been together when it counted; that was forever trust. He knew I would never use information for my own benefit if it might put people at risk. He didn’t know the answer offhand, he said, but he would make some calls. Twenty minutes later he called back, “It’s the 8th ATM,” Advanced Tactical Mobile unit. On the TOE, the official Table of Organization and Equipment, it was designated as a Quartermaster unit. And yes, the 8th was on the move. It had mounted up three hours earlier. Full gear. “I’ll tell Derek Jeter you send your regards,” I said, my attempt at a thank-you.

“Fuck Aaron Judge.”

By this time my story had splashed down. Within minutes it had spread virally across the country. Almost instantly I had been hit by a social media tsunami that had washed over me and was done within an hour as other outlets added to it with their own reporting. I was still getting the last trickle of response; CNN wanted me to do a Zoom interview, but I turned it down. This was a developing story and we had a piece of it.

We were chasing at least twenty different threads. My story had led to a string of tips; from experience I knew that most of them would be worthless, the usual people next door with iridescent tattoos sitting in the dark playing Gothic rap while they barbecued rats, but we still checked out the most likely. Sitting in Mighty Chair at the front of the office, working my phones and computer, I felt a little like a buccaneer on the bow of his ship, one foot on the bowsprit, cutlass extended defiantly, ready to buckle some swash.

But I was in control. At least I was until Jeannie Lee shouted, “Check out six, everybody.”

I swiveled. In all caps, CNN was promising BREAKING NEWS (although in truth this time they might have added, “and this time we mean it!”). I dialed it up. Wolf Blitzer was holding a stack of loose papers. He reported with a tinge of excitement in his voice, “CNN has just learned that at this moment a joint task force of heavily armed state and federal officers have isolated a neighborhood in suburban Detroit. An unknown number of people suspected of having a connection to the recent attacks are believed to be inside a house in that area. No one in the White House will comment for the record, but sources have told CNN’s Jim Acosta that President Wrightman…”—Wolf glanced at the paper in his hands—“appeared to be ‘positively gleeful.’

“The entire area has been blockaded, no one is being allowed inside the perimeter, and residents are being escorted out and held for identification. People on the ground there describe the situation as a ‘lockdown.’ Stay tuned, and as soon as we can get our people near the site, we will take you there…”

I could visualize the chaos in newsrooms throughout the country as everybody scrambled to keep up. Within minutes, one by one other outlets began reporting their version of the story. Bits of new information leaked out drop by drop. We did our best to keep up. When a Detroit outlet, NewDetroit.org, reported the exact address of the house, 149 Stratford Road, I went on Google Earth to take a look at it.

It was a two-story stucco house. It looked like every other one of the twenty million affordable bungalows built in the 1950s for GIs coming home. This one had deteriorated. It was a chalk-white stucco with a green-shingled roof; several shingles were missing. There were faded red shutters on either side of two large front windows, separated by a two-level brick step. The front windows were partially obscured by bushes. One shutter was hanging askew. The stucco walls appeared pocked and rust-stained in places. A low white picket fence ran the entire length of the front yard, which was mostly dirt and weeds. The gate was closed. What I guessed were two or three motorcycles covered by an oil-stained tarp were parked in the yard. But the money that hadn’t been spent on repairs had been invested in security: I counted four surveillance cameras mounted along the front roof gutter. There also were several spotlights. But what caught my attention was the front door.

In contrast to the rest of the house, the front door had been recently painted a high gloss white and was secured with several high-tech locks. (I knew front doors. I’d spent a lot of time staring at front doors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I went through a lot of them. It was easy to figure out who most wanted to keep you out.) Oddly, though, a Christmas wreath was still hanging on it. Well, there’s a nice sentimental touch, I thought.

There also was a steel storm door. The kind with scrolled-steel bars in the frame. I enlarged that door and saw that an additional lock had been added. If I were betting, I’d place my money on the possibility that this door bolted into the frame.

Given those precautions, it did not surprise me that there was no welcome mat.

Frankie was leaning over my shoulder, one arm balanced on Mighty Chair’s arm. “It’d take a pretty tough Girl Scout to sell cookies at that house. What do you think?”

Frankie had been a great street reporter at the Chicago Trib. He knew how the world worked. I shrugged. “It doesn’t shout terrorist to me.”

“No,” he agreed, shaking his head. He tapped his finger on the door. “See that?”

I enlarged the image and began moving the cursor. I saw what he was talking about, barely visible lines outlining a flap in the front door. I twisted and looked at him. “Isn’t that interesting?” It was a drug door; money goes in, drugs come out. Nobody sees nobody.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” He stood up and indicated the house with a nod. “Maybe some of these guys stayed there. But that, that’s a drug drop. See what Zillow has to say about it.”

I typed the address into Zillow. Zillow told me it was a four-bedroom house with a finished basement. It had been built in 1952, sold in 1985 for $46,500. No transactions after that. It had a current value of $0. I pulled back on the satellite image and the rest of the block came into view, then the several surrounding blocks, several of the homes of equal value. $0. A couple of them, it appeared, had holes in the roof. This was a dying neighborhood.

“Squats,” Frankie explained. “That’s what happened out there. Middle-class jobs went south with the auto industry. Without the tax base, the whole neighborhood collapsed. People just took midnight moving vans and left the banks holding shit. The banks didn’t care, they just packaged them up with decent mortgages and sold them for Christ knows how much. People like these guys…”—he nodded at the screen— “… squatters, they just moved in. They hooked up to lampposts for power. Then the gangs came in and took over the best places. Dave Bing, the basketball player, when he was mayor, he contracted the whole city. He cut off public services to those neighborhoods.”

“So nobody knows who’s there?”

“Let’s say they won’t be filling out census forms.”

“This is possible, then. It could be outsiders. They’d be under the radar.”

Frankie considered that. “Doubtful. I’ll bet Detroit PD has eyes in there. They bust a guy carrying a light load, make a deal, give him a few bucks, and he keeps you up-to-date on anything unusual going on.”

Suddenly Rod Stewart sang, “You’re in my heart, you’re in my soooooollll,” Jenny’s ring. Cher confirmed she was calling. “Cher, tell Jenny I’ll call her back, please.”

Frankie laughed lightly. “You are something else, Wheels.”

I ignored him. “You know what,” I decided, tapping the monitor, “I’m going to do a quick piece about the house. About the drugs. The whole shebang.”

“The administration isn’t going to like that.” He turned, then reminded me, “Make sure you classify it O.”