“This is total bullshit! This is racism! I know my rights. How dare you shoot at me on my own property?” said the large and broad-shouldered al Gharsi as he glared hatefully at me in the back of his crumbling farmhouse a tense twenty minutes later.
“Hey, I’m not the daring one, Al,” I said, kicking a cardboard box of double-aught shotgun shells across his dirty, scuffed floor. “Running a jihadist camp in New York State sixty miles from Ground Zero? Talk about chutzpah.”
And talk about living off the grid, I thought, shaking my head at the surroundings. The house was barely habitable. There was no phone, and what little electricity there was, was provided by a small propane generator. I couldn’t decide which part of the decor was more charming—the little room off the kitchen, where a roughly butchered deer lay on a homemade plywood table, or the upstairs bedrooms, where Arabic graffiti covered the walls above sleeping bags.
Handcuffed behind his back, al Gharsi shifted uncomfortably on a ratty, faded orange couch, where he sat bookended by two standing FBI commandos. The only other furniture was a massive green metal gun locker in a far corner and twelve pale immaculate prayer mats set in a disturbingly precise four-by-three rectangle in the center of the room.
The locker had kicked out some good news for a change. Several of the semiautomatic AK-47s inside had been illegally converted to fully automatic. A felony federal weapons violation would be a good start at gaining some leverage to find out just what in the hell was going on.
“This is not a jihadist camp,” al Gharsi said through yellow gritted teeth. “We are woodsmen, hunters.”
“Woodsmen,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that Arabic on the walls up there says, ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.’ You’re not woodsmen, but I’ll concede that you are hunters. It’s what you’re hunting that’s the problem.”
I walked behind al Gharsi and took the photographs Emily was holding. The black-and-white blown-up stills showed the two men from the subway tunnel bombing.
“Who are they?” I said, flapping the photographs in front of al Gharsi’s face.
He shrugged as he studiously refused to look at them.
“Who are they?” I said again, patiently.
“Wait. I know them. Yes,” he said, nodding, as he finally glanced at the pictures. “The one on the left, his name is…let’s see…Fuck. That’s it. His name is Fuck, and the one on the right is…um…You, I believe. There they are together, Fuck and You, my dear old friends.”
“That’s pretty good, Al. Your delivery needs a little work, but it’s almost happily surprising to see that you have any sense of humor at all.”
That’s when I walked behind him again and took a document and another picture from Emily. I showed him the PayPal stuff along with a photo of him sending funds from the nearby library.
“Last Thursday at three o’clock, you sent money to these two different accounts. I want to know why.”
“What?” he said, peering at the photo.
“You sent money. Why?”
There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.
“I want my lawyer,” he said.
I smiled back.
“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”
He started laughing then.
“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”
“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”
“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”
“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”
Al started chuckling again.
“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”
A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.
In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed black-clad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”