THE SKY WAS OVERCAST AND THREATENING MORE SNOW ON Christmas morning as the three-car motorcade pulled out from the garage beneath the Varick Federal Detention Center at Foley Square in lower downtown Manhattan. The armored sedans turned left onto Centre Street and headed north, leaving a cyclone of flakes in their wake.
New Yorkers who had hoped for a white Christmas had had their prayers answered during the night. It was as pretty as the city got in the winter; the four-inch blanket of white covering the sidewalks, streets, and buildings was still pristine and virtually untrammeled, as traffic was light and most citizens were home with their families.
Christmas decorations hung from streetlights and overhanging wires or blinked with holiday cheer from shop windows and restaurants as the convoy passed through Chinatown. It wasn’t as hip or ostentatious as the displays uptown at Saks, Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or Bergdorf Goodman, but the neon Buon Natale hanging above the door of the Italian restaurant at the corner of White and Centre and the electric menorah in the window above the shoe-repair shop across the street were more quintessentially New York.
Only a few pedestrians trudged along the sidewalks, huddled against the cold, their breath puffing from their mouths like old locomotives, as the sedans plowed forward as fast as traffic and road conditions would allow. At the corner of Centre and Canal, a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit, talking on a cell phone, waved merrily as the convoy turned left again and rolled west.
In the second car, a skinny black man stretched out his long, lanky frame and smirked at the decorations, sentiments, and Santa. Good riddance, New York. Allah curses the air you breathe. We tried to ruin Christmas for you this year, but it was not his will. So enjoy your false religions and peaceful streets a little while longer, but we’ll be back.
Spotting a sign for the Holland Tunnel ahead, Sharif Jabbar licked his thick purple lips and smiled so widely that his large white teeth protruded from his thin face like a skeleton’s grin. He wanted the others in the car to see his triumph and know that there was nothing they could do about it. There were three U.S. marshals in the vehicle and four each in the sedans in front and back. But they weren’t there as his captors, not anymore. He was an important man, and it was their job to make sure nothing happened to him until he was safe and on his way out of the cursed United States of America. That’s why they’d chosen this morning, when no one was around, to spirit him from his cell and take him to Fort Dix in New Jersey, where a jet was waiting to fly him to freedom.
Apparently, there had been several threats to assassinate him for his role in the attack on the New York Stock Exchange the previous September, including a plot by NYPD officers because of their colleagues who’d been killed in the battle. His attorney told him that there was also a rumor that some of his former congregation at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Harlem were after thar, or “blood vengeance,” because some of their sons, and one daughter, had died for Allah because of him.
A bunch of uneducated ghetto niggers and stupid African immigrants, he thought, who don’t understand that jihad requires sacrifices; they don’t remember that Islam means “submission.”
Jabbar wondered what it was going to be like living in Saudi Arabia or wherever he ended up. He’d never been out of the country before. He’d been born in Harlem Hospital and christened DeWayne Wallace in the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street and only converted to Islam some twenty-five years later while serving time in Attica for manslaughter and armed robbery.
Released with time off for “good behavior,” he’d decided to study to become an imam, then founded a “mosque” in an abandoned liquor store in Harlem. For ten years, he’d preached a virulent anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-U.S. screed that found a small but enthusiastic audience with some of the young men in the neighborhood. His congregation grew to include families and even a few Muslim immigrants looking for a place to pray with others of their faith, even if Jabbar’s political rants made them uneasy.
Still, it had been a meager living until he met with certain foreign “Islamic scholars,” who questioned him about his beliefs in the late 1980s. The mosque had then received a sudden infusion of money from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Libya, as well as private contributions from wealthy men in other Muslim countries. The funds had paid for a comfortable, even luxurious, life for Jabbar, as well as millions for the construction of the Al-Aqsa mosque on 126th and Madison.
At first, he’d been asked to show his appreciation for the “gifts” by hosting various visitors supposedly in town to raise money for “Muslim charities” overseas. He knew that these were just the front men for terrorist organizations, who were also using fundamentalist mosques in America like his to create networks for sleeper cells. It was easy money for a while. But then he received word from a visiting imam, a radical with the conservative Wahabi sect, that his benefactors wanted him to assist the “Sheik” with a plot that, if successful, would destroy the economy of the United States by crashing the stock market.
The Sheik turned out to be terrorist Amir Al-Sistani, who had arrived in the United States acting the part of a meek, subservient business manager for a Saudi prince, Esra bin Afraan Al-Saud, who’d come to check on his vast holdings as principal owner of a hedge-fund company. Of course, the trip had been at the suggestion of Al-Sistani, who had then manipulated the prince into insisting on a private tour of the stock market. The prince had not known he was being used to gain access to the most sensitive area of the market, the computer room, until Al-Sistani revealed his plan and killed bin Afraan.
It had been Jabbar’s job to recruit young men from the streets of Harlem and brainwash them into believing that it was a martyr’s mission to destroy the stock exchange. Once he realized that most of the danger would be to others and that he would be amply rewarded, Jabbar had no objections to doing as he was asked or to using the mosque as the staging ground for training and the attack.
But something had gone wrong. The attack had failed, though he still wasn’t clear why. The last he’d heard, everything was progressing according to plan, and he’d left Harlem for a private airfield in New Jersey toting a suitcase filled with large-denomination currency. U.S. authorities were certain to trace some of the jihadi foot soldiers to the mosque and Jabbar, so Al-Sistani had arranged for the two of them to leave after the attack aboard a private jet and fly to a friendly Muslim country.
However, Al-Sistani never showed, and Jabbar had been surprised when federal agents had appeared to arrest him. In short order, he’d been indicted by a federal grand jury for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, and terrorism. He was denied bail, and the future looked bleak from his cell in the federal detention center. Indeed, some of his guards made sure to talk near his cell, wondering aloud what it would feel like to be put to death by lethal injection. “Like a dog at the pound.”
A federal agent named Jaxon had shown up one day early in the month and asked what he knew about Dean Newbury, who’d been the mosque’s attorney. Apparently, the old man had been arrested, and the agent wanted to obtain any information Jabbar could provide regarding a group called the Sons of Man.
Jabbar had played dumb. He was aware that the lawyer and the Sons of Man were connected to Al-Sistani’s plot, which had initially surprised him because Newbury—and, he supposed, the group he represented—was a rich old white man, who didn’t really fit the image of a religious zealot or terrorist. But he’d been kept out of the conversations between Newbury and Al-Sistani and had no real information to trade.
Then, a little over a week ago, his lawyer, Megan O’Dowd, a heavyset white woman who’d described herself to Jabbar as a “radical activist” attorney, had visited and told him that Al-Sistani had just been captured by the federal authorities. The Sheik had disappeared following the stock-exchange attack, but apparently neither the feds nor Al-Sistani’s friends in the Muslim world knew what had happened to him. The news that he’d been apprehended was an answer to Jabbar’s prayers to Allah, because now he would have someone to turn state’s evidence against and cut a deal with the feds. But what O’Dowd had said next was even better. Al-Sistani had some sort of information that the people who had hired O’Dowd to represent them both didn’t want out.
“Just sit tight,” O’Dowd had told him. “Something’s in the works.” Otherwise, he wasn’t to speak to any law-enforcement agents about Al-Sistani . . . or anything else.
A few days later, the attorney had returned and informed him that U.S. charges against him and Al-Sistani were being dropped and that they were to be turned over to Saudi authorities and tried for the murder of Prince Esra bin Afraan. Jabbar’s bulbous eyes had nearly popped out of his skull. “How is this better?” he’d demanded as a ripple of fear shook his bony body. The Saudis were known to behead murderers, especially the murderers of members of the royal family, no matter how low-ranking. It wouldn’t take twenty years of appeals, as it would in the United States, before the sentence was carried out.
O’Dowd had told him that Al-Sistani and, by association, Jabbar were folk heroes in the Muslim world. The attempt on the New York Stock Exchange had been greeted with dancing in the streets of Gaza, Tehran, Tripoli, Beirut, the West Bank, and Damascus. After Al-Sistani’s recent arrest, there’d been large demonstrations in Muslim capitals in support of him, amid claims circulated on Al-Jazeera television that he was being tortured by the Americans. The radical imams of Saudi Arabia had pressured the royal family to insist that Al-Sistani and Jabbar be brought to the kingdom for “a fair trial.”
However, O’Dowd had said with a wink, the trial would be for show. It was widely believed in the Muslim world that Prince Esra’s death, as well as most of the other fatalities, actually had been at the hands of the Americans, who’d overreacted as usual and gone in with guns blazing. More important, incurring the ire of the imams, who kept the populace in check, wasn’t worth the life of a minor prince of the royal Al-Saud family. At worst, the two “heroes of Islam” would receive a slap on the wrist and be “forced” to seek asylum with another Muslim regime.
Jabbar had a feeling that there was more to this stroke of good fortune than his sudden popularity in the Muslim world. This had been confirmed the next day, when he was surprised to find himself in the detention center exercise room with Al-Sistani. Up to that point, they’d been kept apart, but now they were allowed a private meeting without any other inmates or guards present. That was when Al-Sistani revealed his “secret weapon” that would result in their freedom.
The next morning, O’Dowd had told him that Al-Sistani had been quietly flown out of the country. Apparently, the authorities who might have been expected to object—particularly New York District Attorney Roger Karp—had been distracted by the most recent terrorist attack on New York City, when jihadis tried to sail a ship filled with natural gas up the East River to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. They, too, had been stopped by the police, according to news accounts Jabbar saw on the television in his cell, with the assistance of a group of armed Russian immigrants in tugboats.
Jabbar had had to fight off a panic attack when he learned that Al-Sistani was gone. He knew that back in September, Karp had agreed to hold off indicting Jabbar on state murder charges in case the U.S. attorney needed to be able to offer him a carrot to testify if Al-Sistani was apprehended. The district attorney had been tight-lipped when the media found out that Al-Sistani had been flown to Saudi Arabia and asked for a reaction. His spokesman said only that Karp was “disappointed” with the decision by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the State Department.
Then O’Dowd had showed up on Christmas Eve and told him to be ready to leave in the morning.
“What about Karp?” Jabbar had asked.
“He’s afraid of getting his ass kicked by the feds.” O’Dowd laughed. “He’s not even in town, and you’ll be long gone before he hears about it.”
As the sedans entered the east end of the Holland Tunnel, Jabbar rubbed his eyes and yawned. He’d had a difficult time getting to sleep that night worrying about Karp. When he finally drifted off, his dreams were haunted by Miriam Juma Khalifa.
Miriam, the young widow of one of Jabbar’s followers, had been murdered in the basement of the mosque by the Russian terrorist-for-hire Nadya Malovo, a.k.a. Ajmaani. Miriam’s husband had blown himself up in a Third Avenue synagogue months before the NYSE attack, and Malovo claimed that Miriam had dishonored her husband’s martyrdom by carrying on an affair after his death. But Jabbar doubted it. He knew that Miriam, who’d immigrated from Kenya with her family, was not the sort of Muslim woman to have a lover. Her father was a respected elder in the mosque, one of the voices countering Jabbar’s politics within the congregation. And Miriam was a modest young woman who followed her father’s example.
Jabbar suspected Ajmaani had other motives for murdering the girl: preventing Miriam from disclosing anything she had learned about the impending stock-exchange attack from her husband, raising the bloodlust of the jihadis who would take part, and warning anyone who might contemplate betraying Ajmaani. The brutality of the act—cutting her throat in front of the men and himself as a video camera recorded the event—also suggested that the woman simply enjoyed killing.
Personally, Jabbar hoped he’d never meet Ajmaani again. But the same held true for Miriam Juma, whose ghost had troubled his dreams. She’d often been accompanied by another woman dressed in a burka, and they’d followed him in his nightmares as he tried to escape from a menacing presence.
Thinking of the women while sitting in the sedan, Jabbar felt a chill run down his spine. He glanced at the man next to him. He knew that the marshals were none too happy with what was going on. They’d hardly spoken to him except to say what was necessary to lead him from his cell, cuff his wrists behind his back, and place him in the car. He suspected that if they had their way, they would have rather thrown him off a bridge into the Hudson River than escort him safely beneath it.
His stomach knotted when the female U.S. marshal sitting in the front passenger seat, who seemed to be in charge, turned to the marshal next to Jabbar and nodded. For a moment, he thought that his fear of assassination was about to come true. But instead, the man ordered him to turn around so that he could get to the handcuffs with a key he’d produced from his pocket.
Jabbar smiled. “I was getting a little uncomfortable,” he said, and smirked as he rubbed his wrists. “I’ll make sure to send you a postcard from Mecca.”
The man tensed but didn’t say anything as he turned his head to look out the window. Jabbar laughed and made a face for the driver, who was looking in the mirror at him.
He started to hum a tuneless melody as the car emerged from the tunnel on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, but then he jumped at the sudden sound of sirens behind them. A moment later, a dark unmarked police car with a bubble light on top sped past. He started to relax, thinking the cops were responding to a call up ahead, when a Newark patrol car pulled alongside. The passenger window slid down, and an officer indicated that he wanted the marshal’s sedan to pull over.
There was another quick blast of a siren behind them. Jabbar whirled around in his seat and saw that a third patrol car was trailing the last sedan with its red and blue lights flashing. His escort’s radio crackled on. “Marshal Capers, this is Marshal Joe Rosen in car one. It appears that the locals want us to pull over. What do you want to do?”
The woman in the front seat picked up the microphone. “It’s their turf, Joe. If they want us to pull over, pull over.”
Jabbar’s eyes grew wide. “What are you doing? Don’t stop!”
The woman turned around. “We’ve been asked by local law-enforcement officers with jurisdiction over this road to stop, and we will comply.”
“You’re the feds, you don’t need to pay attention to those New Jersey pigs,” Jabbar said as the car rolled to a halt off the side of the road. “I demand that you continue!”
“I don’t appreciate you referring to any police officers as pigs,” said the woman, her dark brown eyes flashing with anger. “And I suggest you relax until we can find out what this is about.”
With that, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers opened her door and got out of the car. By craning his neck, Jabbar could see her talking to a large black man in a suit as two uniformed Newark cops stood listening. The black man handed several papers to the marshal, who turned around and pointed at Jabbar’s sedan.
Capers and the man walked back to the car, where she opened her door and looked back at him. “Mr. Jabbar, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”
“What for?” he whined, shrinking back against the seat.
“This is Detective Clay Fulton with the New York Police Department, though if I’m not mistaken,” she said, turning to the large black man who’d come up to stand behind her, “you actually work for the district attorney.”
“That’s right, Jen,” Fulton replied. “I head up the detectives who conduct investigations for the DA.”
“And Clay, I believe you have an arrest warrant for Mr. Jabbar?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then Mr. Jabbar, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go with these men. Please step out of the car. Clay, would you help Mr. Jabbar out of his seat?”
Fulton smiled and stepped to the door, which he opened. “Let’s go,” he said, offering a large hand.
Panicking, Jabbar tried to avoid the detective’s grasp. He looked past him to Capers. “I’m still a federal prisoner,” he said. “I insist that you take me to Fort Dix and hand me over to the proper authorities there.”
The marshal pursed her lips and shook her head. “Well, actually, that’s not true. Once we passed through the Holland Tunnel and into New Jersey, we were no longer in the Southern Federal District, nor were you my prisoner. At this point, we were merely escorting you to Fort Dix as requested by the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. But that was as a favor to the Saudi Arabian government. As you know, U.S. federal charges against you have been dropped, but NYPD Detective Clay Fulton and these officers from the Newark PD have what appears to be a valid warrant, and we’re in their jurisdiction.”
Fulton grabbed Jabbar firmly by the upper arm and half slid, half pulled him from the car.
The imam blinked. “I’m not your prisoner? I can leave?” he asked Capers.
The marshal scratched her head and grinned at Fulton. “I suppose you could try to leave, and I won’t even try to stop you—unless, of course, the detective requests my assistance as a law-enforcement officer. However, seeing as how these men are here to arrest you for murder, I would caution you that there is the potential for them to use deadly force to prevent you from escaping.”
Jabbar stared from face to face, noting the smiles. “This was a setup!”
Capers shook her head. “I can honestly say that I had no idea that this would happen,” she said. “I admit that I’m not terribly disappointed to be deprived of a trip to Fort Dix, and it’s nice to see my old friend Detective Fulton on a Christmas morning. But if this was a setup, I wasn’t in the loop. Perhaps, Clay, you’ll be kind enough to fill me in on how you knew about our plans someday?”
Fulton laughed and shrugged. “I’m just following orders. How’s your daughter? You going to be at church this evening?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Capers responded. “I love singing Christmas carols.”
“Me, too,” the detective said, and then nodded to the Newark officers. “Want to do the honors?”
The Newark cops grinned as they spun Jabbar around to face the trunk of the sedan. One of the officers ordered Jabbar to spread his legs and place his hands on the vehicle as they patted him down.
“I just came from jail,” Jabbar protested as they cuffed him. “What do you think I’m carrying? I want to call my lawyer now!”
Fulton stepped forward, grabbed Jabbar by the front of his shirt, and pulled his face within two inches of his own. “I don’t give a shit, you phony fuck,” he growled. “You’ll get your call after I’ve tossed your ass in the Tombs.”
Immediately, with barely controlled violence, Fulton rattled off the Miranda warnings. “You are under arrest for the decapitation-torture murder of Miriam Juma Khalifa, committed in concert with others, in the basement of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Harlem, of which you are—you son of a bitch—the so-called imam. You have the right to remain silent. If you choose to say anything, it can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”
Two minutes later, Jabbar was being stuffed into a Newark patrol car as Fulton turned to the federal marshal.
“Thanks for making that easy,” Fulton said. “We were concerned that some by-the-book guy might want to call the U.S. attorney or Jabbar’s lawyer, and this could have got messy. I didn’t know it was going to be you in charge, or I wouldn’t have worried.”
Capers shrugged. “Happy to turn the bastard over to someone who will nail his hide to the wall. To be honest, I don’t think you would have got much resistance from the marshal’s office no matter who was riding shotgun today. Nobody likes these kinds of ‘politics over justice’ cases. All we needed was a legal excuse, and the warrant worked. I’m glad whoever the little bird is who told you about this figured it out. What’s next for the son of a bitch?”
“The boss will go to the grand jury for an indictment as soon as he gets back from his vacation,” Fulton explained.
“Knowing Karp, I’m surprised he goes on vacation,” Capers said with a smile.
“I practically had to threaten him with my resignation to get him to go.” Fulton laughed. “Even then, he was looking for excuses until Marlene put her foot down and insisted he join the family. If there’s one person on this planet who can tell him what to do, and maybe get him to do it, it’s his wife. It helped that the courts are closed for the holidays until Monday, which gives him three more days to relax. He needs the rest.”
Fulton stuck out his hand to Capers. “Thanks, Jen. I need to get this dirtbag over to the Tombs and call Butch. Then I can go home to the family.”
“Hey, thanks to you, I’m going to be home a lot sooner than I would have if I had to go to Fort Dix,” she replied. “See you tonight. I look forward to hearing that lovely baritone. Merry Christmas, Clay.”
“Merry Christmas. And thanks again.”