Abuse of Power (5 page)

Tony picked up on it and gave him a tight-lipped smile.

The wine was damn good and it lifted his spirits from the first sip. It tasted unlike any other heavy red. He savored the understated layers of currant and black cherry, with a tinge of coffee. But even his relaxed mind wasn’t able to stray far from the events of the last twenty-four hours.

“Y’know, something’s bothering me about this whole thing,” Jack said.

“Talk to me.”

“I watched that press conference twice and I still don’t understand why the mayor and the FBI pushed aside the whole Arab connection.”

“A problem with the source?”

“Who, the carjacker?”

Tony shrugged. “Maybe the kid was lying. Or could be he got it wrong.”

Jack shook his head slowly. “They had to have pulled security video from the Arco station by now. If it’s
not
true, someone would have said so. Maintain good relations with the Arabs and all that.”

“So you’re saying that the absence of a denial is as good as a confession.”

“That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“I like it,” Tony said. “There’s something else I like, too.”

Jack looked at him. “What’s that?”

“It sounds like you’re finally getting your mojo back.”

Jack considered that as he sat back. He let the wine and the cool afternoon breeze and the fellowship of a good friend remind him how sweet and precious life was. Even so, as Drabinsky had shown, there were qualities and ideals far greater than that, the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, whatever the cost.

If an Arab had set the bomb, Jack wanted to know who and why. He wanted to find out why the authorities were tiptoeing around the monster who was at the center of their investigation. He wanted to know where the bastard was now and if he intended to try again. Not because he was a racist or hated Muslims as his critics had said, but because the elusive son of a bitch was a murdering terrorist. Tracking him down and exposing him was the right thing to do, whoever it pissed off.

“Yeah,” Jack said at last. “The mojo is
so
back.”

*   *   *

Jack Hatfield’s fall from grace had been swift and brutal, and had come when he could least afford it. Already in the midst of his divorce, he was a year into a new contract hosting
Truth Tellers,
one of the top-rated opinion shows on the GNT cable news network, when he was blindsided by accusations that he was an unrepentent Islamophobe.

The accusations were nonsense, of course. Jack had long been a champion of religious freedom and free speech and anyone who watched his show knew that. But the liberal media elite took it upon themselves to take his words out of context so they could twist and amplify them. They went after him like a starving jackal chasing an eastern cottontail.

As much as Jack believed in religious tolerance, he drew the line at murder. And whether his detractors liked it or not, Muslim extremists were the face of terror around the globe. Time and again they had demonstrated a willingness to kill in the name of Allah. Pointing out that simple fact, and suggesting oh-so-gently that a few more imams should be speaking
against
the killing instead of getting wound up stumping for a controversial mosque in the heart of San Francisco did not even begin to rise to the level of hate speech. The exact, very rational words that started the anti-Hatfield fatwa were, “Hell, if these guys did more of the first no one would ever complain about them wanting to do the second.”

Jack knew he wasn’t doing his career any favors by compounding that statement with reports that the mosque was being funded by a Saudi business consortium he believed had ties to a Wahhabi jihadist organization called the Hand of Allah. Several mosques funded by this same group had been built in London and throughout the United Kingdom, and Jack was convinced they were superficially mosques and fundamentally training facilities for Islamofascist sleeper agents. In the days that followed his initial remarks, Jack regularly took Prime Minister Griffiths to task for allowing these facilities to be built.

The last act of the drama occurred just ten days after it started, when he held a
Truth Tellers
panel debate on the topic, bringing in participants from across the political spectrum. The debate was civil until Jack asked a simple rhetorical question:

“How would you feel if Muslim extremists got hold of a nuclear weapon?”

There was a momentary chill in the air, then one of the panelists—a supercilious professor of legal studies named Aldrich—said, “You’re assuming that’s even likely.”

“You’re naïve if you think it isn’t,” Jack told him. “And let’s not forget what Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid told us. That while it’s true that not all Muslims are terrorists, the majority of terrorists are Muslim.”

“All right, but considering there are approximately one billion Muslims in the world, how exactly do you propose to stop them?”

“When you factor in the laissez-faire attitude of much of our country,” Jack said, “the odds against us aren’t good. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that just ten percent of those one billion Muslims are fanatic haters who would kill all of us at the blink of an eye. A matter of us versus them.”

“And?”

“If it came down to it, would you rather see a hundred million of
us
killed, or kill a hundred million Muslims?”

Murmurs rose from the panel and Aldrich just stared at him with a self-satisfied grin. Within hours, a smear campaign was carefully orchestrated by a radical watchdog group called Media Wire, which spared no effort to grind Jack’s reputation into the dust beneath its jackbooted heel.

HOST OF TRUTH TELLERS WOULD KILL A HUNDRED MILLION MUSLIMS!
was the headline tossed into the echo chamber, bolstered by an edited clip of the show that isolated his last words and removed all context. The distinction between true Muslims and those who perverted their faith to justify their violence—a distinction Jack always tried to make—was completely ignored by the media.

The man behind this campaign was a reclusive, Austrian-born billionaire named Lawrence Soren. The eighty-one-year-old had made his fortune by betting against national currencies. He profited almost a billion dollars on the British pound alone. Just after the catastrophic Japanese earthquake of March 2011 and the disasters in their nuclear power plants, he had shorted Tokyo Electric and made hundreds of millions on the tragedy. No government would stop this rapacious beast because he owned their leaders. He also had a controlling financial interest in several major news organizations in the U.S. and much of the world, including the recent acquisition of the company that controlled the majority of GNT’s stock. By the time Soren was done,
Truth Tellers
had not only lost half of its sponsors but Jack was being told by the network that he had to apologize on air to the Muslim community or face immediate termination.

Because he felt he was innocent, not because he was afraid, Jack reluctantly tried an on-air explanation. It was exactly fifteen words long:

“It was not my intention to discredit all Muslims,” he said, “only those who seek to harm us.”

Before the night was out—before the show was over, in fact—he found himself as jobless as if he’d eaten apple pie off a map of Mecca. Trapped in a contract that kept him from moving his show to another network.
Time
magazine listed this sudden fall as one of the twenty biggest blunders in television history—a massive chunk of hyperbole if there ever was one. Anyway, to Jack’s mind, standing up for his principles wasn’t a blunder at all. He would lose sight of that for a while afterward, as he looked for a place to put his key, but that’s the beauty about the truth: however long you turn away from it, it’s still the truth and still there.

The final twist of the knife came three weeks later, when the British Home Office released a list of terrorists and criminals who were banned from traveling to the United Kingdom. To Jack’s utter surprise
his
name was on that list. The home secretary hadn’t bothered to include Osama bin Laden, but right there, front and center, was John Samuel Hatfield, former combat journalist and network news commentator, whose “radical and provocative statements” were deemed “a threat to public security.”

Several weeks later, the
London Daily News
ran a story on the ban, revealing a series of illuminating e-mail exchanges between the Home Office and the PM. What the newspaper uncovered was a case of political cowardice in the extreme. Jack Hatfield was being used to make the British government’s bias against Muslims seem relatively tame and tolerant. This was the same government that many believed was instrumental in the concurrent release by Scottish officials of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a convicted terrorist who was responsible for the fiery deaths of two hundred seventy people on an airplane passing over Lockerbie.

Months later, it came out that the very home secretary who had banned Jack had been using government funds to support her husband’s porn viewing habit.

When a reporter from a London tabloid had asked Jack for a newspaper quote, he said, “Her politics are more pornographic than any sex scene. What can be more obscene than the government of the U.K. refusing to deport radical Muslims who preach the overthrow of England, demand the introduction of Sharia law, and chant ‘death to the queen,’ all the while refusing to lift the ban against Jack Hatfield? I am the only member of the American media prohibited from entering the U.K. because of the degenerate political minds of the home secretary and her cohorts.”

The hypocrisy of the U.K. and the weak-kneed sensibilities of his own nation were stunning, but with his credibility all but destroyed he was forced to surrender those battles, withdraw from the national scene, use his wits and skills and whatever closet supporters he had left—and thank God there were a bunch of them—to earn a living.

He did it alone, because his wife had withered under the scrutiny and catcalls, the burning bags of feces on the doorstep and the death threats on voice mail.

He made his deals in back rooms, wrote or produced anonymously because even his friends were afraid of Lawrence Soren, Muslim backlash, or both.

But he did it all, survived so he could get to this point.

Not to stroke his wounded pride, not to show a president or prime minster that
by God
he was right.

He did it for this one chance to help the nation save itself
from
itself.

5

Sofia, Bulgaria

The moment Hassan Haddad stepped off the elevator, he knew he was being watched.

It was a weeknight, and across the lobby the hotel lounge and casino were full of European and American businessmen, either drunk or getting there, planning their schemes to rape and pillage the country’s economy as they gambled away their weekly salaries.

Both the hotel and casino were examples of the new Eastern capitalist vulgarity. Crowded craps tables, roulette wheels, and slot machines, surrounded by gold-inlaid walls and marble floors—all symbols of decadence and woeful immorality.

Then there were the Gypsy whores. Bulgaria didn’t hide its perversions any more than it hid its corruption, and these brown-skinned Roma girls knew where the gold was. Nothing could be easier than picking off a pasty American salesman whose wife was nearly five thousand miles away.

Haddad understood the temptation these men felt. He had felt it himself, many times. Most of the girls were quite attractive, wearing short sheer dresses that clung to their skin and suggested at the pleasures that lay beneath. Just last night he had succumbed to the charms of one sloe-eyed beauty, taking her to his room where she had let him do things few women would ever permit. She had received him with such enthusiasm, such passion, that he had to wonder if, unlike so many of the whores he had spent time with, her pleasure was genuine.

Haddad was so surprised and delighted by the girl that he considered inviting her to accompany him home. It was an absurd, blasphemous notion, though it hadn’t seemed so as she knelt over him.

After she was gone, he lay on the drenched bed sheets, thinking back to when he was a younger man, attending university in America. Like Bulgaria, there were no rules in the west, and the two girls across the hall from him, both as limber as gymnasts, had taught him how to please a woman. He often lay with them on their dorm room floor, watching them stroke and prod each other to a feverish frenzy—an education he wasn’t likely to forget.

Haddad had applied those lessons last night and had been rewarded in kind. But shortly after the girl was gone he remembered who he was and why he was here. Sending up a prayer, he asked for forgiveness, promising that he would never again allow himself to fall prey to such depravity.

It was a promise he wasn’t certain he could—or wanted—to keep. Nonetheless, women would not be a priority. There was something more important he needed to do.

*   *   *

The lounge and casino weren’t the only sections of the hotel that were crowded. Several businessmen sat on chairs and sofas around the lobby itself, smiling and laughing, deep in conversations that didn’t interest Haddad.

What
did
interest him, however, was the lone man sitting near the window that looked out onto a busy street.

Turkish. Casually dressed in a sports jacket and jeans. Neatly trimmed beard, after the current style. Small but hard bodied, with a powerful frame that clothes couldn’t disguise.

Haddad had seen him the day before, amid the crowd of commuters and tourists on the train from Belgrade. They had not made eye contact, and at the time he had thought nothing of the man. Had not even considered that he was anything more than a weary traveler, anxious to get to his destination. The fact that he was staying at this very hotel had not been a concern.

Many people stayed here.

Yet now Haddad sensed that there was something about the Turk that wasn’t right. The way he kept his gaze focused on the newspaper, never looking up, never showing any sign of curiosity about what was going on around him. A beautiful woman walked by but he didn’t register even a flicker of interest.