The problem was that Broderick’s damn bill just kept gathering momentum. You couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing two people debating it, and the editorial pages of every newspaper in the country had been devoted to the topic for the last three months. Oprah, of course, had a show where she dressed in a burka and compared the Muslim registry proposal to the Holocaust and Japanese internment camps and lynchings in the South. God bless Oprah.
And lately, almost assuredly because of all the media attention on the subject, other things were starting to happen. Customs agents on the Canadian-Michigan border riddled a car with bullets and killed the driver — a turban-wearing Sikh, not a Muslim — when he attempted to flee a security checkpoint. It turned out the man had two pounds of hashish hidden in his spare tire. Subway cops in Chicago stopped three Muslim teenagers who ‘looked suspicious,’ and when the teenagers sassed the cops, one of them got thumped with a nightstick and was still in a coma. In Kansas City, an Arabic-looking kid was jumped by two college football players because they’d seen the kid shove a parcel into the courthouse mail slot and run away from the building, which in fact the kid had done. He worked for a law firm and was dropping off a transcript that the courthouse clerk had wanted back that night, and he was running to catch his bus. His neck was accidentally broken during the tussle. In Dallas, people stampeded out of a Wal-Mart, screaming their heads off, when a Muslim woman entered the store with a bulge under her coat. It turned out that the woman had not wrapped sticks of dynamite around her torso; she was pregnant.
Mahoney could understand that people were afraid. They were terrified that they or their loved ones might be the victim of the next suicide attack. He could also understand why the Japanese were put in the camps after Pearl Harbor and how McCarthy had been able to whip the country into a Commie-hunting frenzy in the years following World War II when ol’ Joe Stalin had the bomb. He didn’t like it, but he could understand it. And he also knew that if Broderick’s bill passed, people would one day regret what they had done just as they now regretted having interned the Japanese fifty years ago. But what really pissed him off were people like Bill Broderick, politicians who took advantage of a frightening situation and fanned the flames of hatred and bigotry to get their way.
What he wished was that something else would happen — he didn’t know what, but something. Some scandal, some crisis; hell, even some natural disaster. Anything that would take people’s minds off the Muslims, anything that would change the current focus and provide some time for people to come to their senses.
It had been a long time since John Mahoney had prayed.
20
Mustafa Ahmed was praying as he walked slowly across the Capitol’s grounds toward the West Terrace. There were tourists everywhere, even as cold as it was. He stopped when he reached the wooden sawhorses barricading the steps leading up to the Capitol and looked up at the building, a building he’d always loved.
Before 9/11, people could simply walk up the steps and stand on the terrace and look back at the National Mall, or they could walk right into the Capitol itself and look around. But no longer; all that had changed. Now, to see the interior of the building, tourists had to go through a visitor’s entry and pass through metal detectors and wait while their bags were searched. And the exterior of the building, including the West Terrace, was surrounded by wooden and concrete barricades, and behind the barricades stood uniformed U.S. Capitol policemen. Mustafa could see two of the policemen standing there now, up at the top of the steps, and just as he crossed the barrier a third officer joined the other two men.
‘Sir,’ one of the policemen called out, ‘you can’t come up this way. You need to use the tourist entrance.’
Mustafa ignored the cop and slowly continued up the steps.
‘Sir!’ the cop yelled. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
And then Mustafa opened his raincoat.
Beneath his raincoat was a canvas vest, and attached to the vest were twenty small bricks of C-4 explosive. White, red, and blue wires connected the bricks to each other. In Mustafa’s right hand was a dead man’s switch. The switch was a black tube about four inches long, and wires ran from the switch, up his arm, through his coat sleeve, and connected to a detonator. The switch was called a dead man’s switch because if Mustafa took his thumb off the little button on the top of the switch — or if his thumb was to come off because he had been killed — the C-4 would explode.
Mustafa continued to walk up the steps, his pace measured, his arms spread wide. The U.S. Capitol policemen, all three of them, now had their weapons out. They were screaming at Mustafa; they were screaming at the tourists to run away; they were screaming at one another.
Then one of the policemen shot Mustafa three times in the chest.
The last thought Mustafa Ahmed had before he died was: Thank God. They hadn’t lied to him when they said the bomb wouldn’t explode.
DeMarco and Mahoney had been in their respective offices when Mustafa Ahmed was killed.
Mahoney’s office was on the second floor. It was spacious, filled with historically significant furniture, and had a view appropriate for a man of his station. He had been sitting behind his desk, sipping coffee laced with bourbon as he listened to one of his staff brief him on a bill having to do with tax benefits for people who made fuel out of corn, a subject simultaneously so boring and so complex that it made his brain ache.
DeMarco had been in his windowless box in the subbasement, and the only thing historically significant about his office furniture — one wooden desk, two chairs, and an empty file cabinet — was that the items had been purchased when Jimmy Carter was president. When Mustafa Ahmed was killed, he had been on the phone trying once again to contact the air marshal who had shot Youseff Khalid.
According to structural engineers hired by Fox News, had Mustafa been allowed to enter the building, and had his bomb exploded inside, the dome of the building might have collapsed into the rotunda, and then all the rubble would have continued downward, squashing DeMarco pancake-flat as he sat in his office.
Mahoney would most likely have died too. But in Mahoney’s case, he could have been killed if the bomb had exploded when Mustafa was standing on the West Terrace steps. The walls in Mahoney’s office could have imploded and crushed him, or the glass in the windows could have blown out, a million sharp pieces, severing Mahoney’s head from his thick neck.
Mahoney had not heard the shots that killed Mustafa but he did hear the sirens. It seemed that every car in Washington equipped with a siren was simultaneously headed toward the Capitol. He was wondering what all the commotion was about when two plain-clothed U.S. Capitol policemen burst into his office and told him he had to leave immediately. As the security guys were hustling Mahoney from his office, he asked what the hell was going on.
‘Some Muslim son of a bitch just tried to blow up the Capitol,’ one of the cops said. ‘We need to get you out of here until we can sweep the building.’
DeMarco left the Capitol along with a few hundred other people like himself — meaning those not sufficiently important to warrant personal protection. He was standing on Independence Avenue, watching all the cops milling about, when a woman grabbed his arm. ‘Come on, honey,’ she said, ‘let’s go over to Bullfeathers and get us a drink. You know they’re not gonna let us back in for a couple of hours.’
The woman — a forty-year-old redhead with a body sculpted by some sadist who taught aerobics — worked for the Majority Whip, and whenever she saw DeMarco she treated him to a smile that was more than just friendly. According to Mahoney’s secretary, a woman who could be relied upon for such information, the redhead was recently divorced and was trying to make up for twenty years of monogamy.
DeMarco wanted to know about the dead man lying on the West Terrace steps, but when he saw all the news vans he figured he’d learn more sitting in a bar and watching television than he would by bothering the Capitol cops.
‘Sounds good,’ he said to the redhead, but he felt leery, like a little kid who’d just been offered a ride by a stranger.
