McConnell Air Force Base, outside Wichita, Kansas
For the record, this is Special Agent Jean Chandler, FBI, about to commence interrogation of Jared Akim, suspect in re triple homicide in Detroit, Michigan, affidavits on file, other charges also listed in affidavit. Also present is Agent Gershon Gold, of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, a contract advisor on terrorist matters by formal arrangement, documents also on file. Mr. Akim is without legal representation as per his signed agreement with the Drug Enforcement Agency, on file, reference C445-002. The session is being witnessed and videotaped.”
They were in a safe house DEA ran on the well-protected grounds of McConnell, four miles outside downtown Wichita. Now and then, F-18s howled into the air, and the place vibrated like a tuning fork. Bob and Nick and Neill watched the proceedings from behind a rather obvious one-way mirror into the squalid interrogation room. Outside, various DEA officials muttered and stewed, having lost sole custody of their prize, having lost the administrative war with the FBI, and having once again had their noses rubbed in their low status in the federal law enforcement pyramid.
The boy sat in orange scrubs, his head still bandaged. But he did not look groggy. Quite the contrary, his eyes glittered with wit and intelligence, and he seemed relaxed, even happy. He got that they were playing head games with him by putting a beautiful young woman in front of him—in real life, she’d never date him!—and a portly, scholarly Jew. They were supposedly the bête noirs of his fevered jihadi imagination, but he merely thought it was kind of funny. He liked pretty girls, and, actually—don’t tell anybody—he liked Jews. So the idea that a Jew and a babe would shake him was patently absurd! What, they thought he was an idiot?
“Mr. Akim, how do you feel today?” Chandler asked.
“I’m fine.”
“The head?”
“It hurts, even ten ibuprofens in, but if it hurts, that means I’m still breathing, which is good news.”
“You’re out of concussion protocols?”
“Yeah, but I still hear the sound of bad music.”
They spent a few minutes running through the mundane facts of Jared’s existence: age, place of birth, education, disposition, parents, family, intellectual journey into radicalism, anger at white girls, so on and so forth.
“For the record, please describe your current circumstances.”
“Okay, you don’t want the Marcel Proust version, you want the action-movie version?”
Chandler tilted her head, caught off guard by his wit. “That’s exactly what we want.”
“I got involved in some dope stuff. Stupid, but I needed money. One thing turned to another, and I’d partnered up with this heavy dude named Ali La Pointe. I had no idea how heavy. I thought we were going to this drug house to see The Man and buy a large chunk of product, which we were going to move in Grosse Pointe, where I have lots of connex. It was a very win-win deal.”
“It didn’t work out that way?”
“This guy Ali goes nuts when one of the dope guys pulls a shotgun on him. We were unarmed! But he’d made a kind of spear thing and got him in the eye. God, I was not ready for that. Squosh—like, that was the sound. He grabs the shotgun and goes all SEAL on the other guys. Boom-boom-boom, and he’s put them down. Some crazy woman comes downstairs, and I don’t remember the next part. Anyway, by the time I sort of get straight, we’re in a Benz S, heading out of town, with a pile of dough and a shotgun in a stolen car.”
“So you claim to be the victim of Ali La Pointe as much as the others?”
“Ma’am, if you’d seen what a guy looks like with six inches of stick in his eye, you’d have been an obedient pup too. Really, no way I was going to do anything he didn’t want me to do. I knew what he was capable of.”
“For the record, all the forensics indicate it was you who beat the woman.”
“I thought she was dead. She must have had a skull thick as the polar ice cap to survive that pounding. Yeah, well, as part of the deal, that’s sort of going to be dialed way, way down to second-degree assault, time served. So I’d rather not talk about it. I don’t think I have to, legally. Anyhow, this Ali La Pointe and I make a run for it. Again, he’s calling the shots, I’m the punk. Somehow he has a number for somebody big in the trade, and we arrange a pickup. We just make it out of a couple of bad situations by a hair, and we’re heading west. I had no idea we were even in Kansas.
“So, early in the morning, we pull into this abandoned farm. Another vehicle is waiting for us. The head guy is some silver-haired fox out of the Ricardo Montalbán school. He was all charm and smoothness, and he smelled like rich Corinthian leather. He welcomes us, he’s the boss, and as he leads us to his SUV—it was the size of a PT boat—he puts his arm around me like I’m his son or something, but he has a gun in it and shoots me in the head.”
“Why aren’t you dead?”
“Good question. Perhaps I am the chosen of Allah.”
“Perhaps you are a chronically immature delinquent from Grosse Pointe, high IQ, but still in so far over his head, he can’t see the surface,” said Chandler.
“Hmm, I wonder which one? Anyway, as they explain to me, it was dark, and maybe I lowered my head to see where I was stepping, and maybe he held the pistol slightly upward. It’s all about the angles. At ninety degrees, the bullet excavates the Lincoln Tunnel through my brain. At thirty degrees, it blows out a chunk of scalp and hair, bleeds like hell, and whacks me into total unconsciousness. I wake up—surprise, surprise—in a hospital guarded by the State Troopers who found me in the bushes. It’s three days later. They’ve got me on the Detroit thing. Since it’s drugs, another state, they turn me over to DEA. DEA interrogates me, and when we come to the silver-fox guy, their eyes turn to saucers. They don’t care about Ali La Pointe, he’s a low-level guy, and the system will eat him alive sooner or later. They want this Menendez, even if they can’t figure out what the hell he was doing riding shotgun in the pickup of a low-level dealer. But that’s not my department. A little of this, a little of that, my dad hires me a hotshot Kansas City lawyer, and a deal is struck. I ID Menendez and testify against him, they forget everything they have on me, and after he’s in, I go Witness Protection. I become Jerry Smith of Bone Fossil, Idaho, or something. But I’m alive, I’ve put the fox away, I’m a hero, I have a life, and I get to see my folks once in a while.”
“You’re a very lucky young man,” said the Jewish fellow.
“I owe it all to clean living and a fast outfield,” Jared said.
“If I may, one thing. This other man, Ali La Pointe. Interesting.”
“He’s out of the picture,” said Jared. “I mean officially, as per my agreement.”
“Yes. However, it is interesting that Ali La Pointe is the name of the charismatic and illiterate terrorist hero of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers.”
Was that a twitch engulfing the young man’s Adam’s apple? A swallow, a flick of dry tongue over dry lips?
“Now, that could mean three things,” said the man. “It could mean this chap was really named Ali La Pointe, after the movie role. Possible, perhaps. Or it could mean that an intellectually promiscuous, rather smart-ass young man decided to put one over on the dumb American police and use a name that every highbred radical Arab teenager in the world would recognize but no DEA functionary would. Or—and I believe this one, actually—as an inexperienced junior terrorist undergoing his first interrogation, he chose the first name that came to his mind, which was from his subconscious memory of that movie—it’s superb, by the way—and named the mystery figure in the narrative, Ali La Pointe. Later, he possibly regretted it but was stuck with it. This last possibility, I must say, seems more like you.”
“Who is this guy?” Jared asked Chandler.
“He is assisting us,” she said.
“Okay, who’s us?”
“Us is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You would know that if you’d been paying close attention.”
“Yeah, but my DEA deal still holds. I don’t know what you guys are here for, I really don’t. This is straight drug shit, I’m going to help them get Menendez; otherwise, I go into the general population at Kinross and last about six seconds before they kill me.”
“Actually, your deal is now off the table,” said Chandler. “It was conditional on your willingness to tell the truth. In all things. You rather artfully constructed a narrative that gave DEA what it wanted and yet you hid your real mission, which was to help Juba the Sniper. So your deal is undone, and off you go to Detroit and then Kinross. If you want, I can help you pick out panty hose for your new life as a bitch.”