pick me. I’m presenting another paper. It’s called, ‘Use of the IL-4 Gene to Produce Interleukin-4.’”
“Cool stuff. You know it better than anyone. Yo, bro.” Posten started to walk away. He stopped. “Hey, you’re going to the company party aren’t you?”
“Of course.” Mustafa watched him waddle out the door.
Sitting at his desk, he checked his corporate email. Amongst the usual worthless dung, he sawone from another employee, Joseph Hassan. Mustafa vaguely remembered him. Older man, Muslim. Hassan wanted to meet for lunch. Mustafa paused. Hassan … wasn’t that the name of El-Amin’s lawyer?
He twisted around to his briefcase and grabbed the morning edition of the
This could be the key to getting the information he wanted about the El-Amin case. He knew his good looks attracted women. She’d be easy to fool. And if necessary in order to control her, there were other measures he could take in the meantime.
He banged his desk with a closed fist in triumph. Allah always provided. Mustafa tapped a quick response on his computer to Joseph and agreed to meet.
Three
It constituted one of the biggest pleasures of his life, but Paul Schmidt was afraid to tell anyone about it.
In his two-bedroom home in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, he kept everything locked in the basement. In this densely urban setting, people didn’t do his kind of hobby. People owned guns but few treasured or collected weapons the way he did.
He’d grown up on the outskirts of St. Cloud, a town on the edge of the pine forests of northern Minnesota.
He missed the woods but realized there wasn’t much work for people with his skills in St. Cloud. The town had been named after an Indian chief and that lineage carried down to him from his grandmother, a one-half Ojibwa Indian.
Paul was proud of the heritage and knew it showed in him. The dark skin, dark straight hair, tall lanky body, and a quiet personality. From his father, he’d inherited the German sense of order, competence, and duty to country.
Tonight, he walked through the living room where he’d hung the heads of the big game he’d successfully hunted. They’d become like friends visiting and occasionally, he even talked to them. Paul stepped down the narrow wooden stairs to his basement in anticipation. A closed, faintly musty smell met him.
He’d built a crude but serviceable workbench seven feet long across the wall in the largest room. Paul flicked on the overhead lights.
He organized his tools in specific order. Some were hung on pegboard mounted behind the low bench and others stored in the drawers of low file cabinets. Paul found the cabinets at thrift shops and was proud to have never paid more than four dollars for one. The presses for reloading shells occupied the far corner.
Although he liked guns better, his knife collection was extensive, and he particularly loved the antique ones he’d found. All were carefully sharpened since a knife without an edge was as good as trying to cut with a pencil.
Tonight, he’d simply clean some of the rifles, not that they really needed it since he kept them spotless. The sweet familiar smell of cleaning fluid and the special gun oil comforted Paul.
His passion was restoring older weapons. He found them from many sources, brought them back to his workshop, and set them on the white butcher block paper covering the table.
Usually, they came to him covered in rust, oil, or even mud-hiding the beautiful craftsmanship underneath. He loved the process of carefully cleaning and uncovering the original features. Many weapons had old stories or mysteries about them that Paul could discover when he scraped away the outer layers of age and abuse.
His friends would think his fixation was weird.
And maybe it was, but he loved the technical sophistication of arms and the historical romance. If he lived in northern Minnesota, he’d fit right in. In fact, next to small engine repair, gun repair was a major industry.
After high school, when the Army recruiter in St. Cloud had talked to his best friend, the midfielder on the high school soccer team, Paul became interested too. Paul qualified for the Rangers and took to the training with gusto. He loved the order, the mission, the clear rules, and the self-reliance he learned.
After his successful discharge from the Army, Paul knew he wanted to continue serving the country in some way. He returned to Minnesota, finished college, and then law school.
With the help of his parent’s friend, a congresswoman, she persuaded the FBI to hire him in 2000. Things went well until the disaster in Milwaukee almost cost him his job.
The recent Somali murder case offered him the way to rehabilitate his career and help his country.
His biggest challenge would be the political ones in the Bureau itself. Even after all these years, the memory of his screw-up caused his shoulders to tighten. He felt immense guilt and at the same time, furious anger at the Bureau. It had been his fault of course, but they’d hung everything on him as the sacrificial lamb, with no more concern than someone might have in shaking out a wet rag to toss into the dryer.
Then, after his demotion, he was the one who’d taken the call three years ago from a teacher at Hiawatha High School in the southern suburb that started the FBI investigation.
He remembered her breathy, anxious voice.
“This is Gennifer Simmons, that’s Gennifer with a ‘G,’ and I’m worried about something.”
Demoted to answering the phone on the public tip line, Paul droned, “What’s the problem?”
“Our school has a big Somali population and there’s a boy, well I should say he’s a man ’cause he seems much older than the other kids and …”
“What about him?”
She paused. “I … I don’t know if I should do this because a teacher’s first duty is to her students but, well, I’m really worried.” She gulped a deep breath. “We call him the ‘Pied Piper’ since he’s always getting the younger boys to follow him. And he lectures them, talks about infidels.”
“Yeah?” Paul tried to be patient.
“His lecturing and getting the boys to follow him wasn’t so bad, I guess, but when he came to me a couple times with maps of Minnesota and asked me to show him where to get across the border into Canada … well, I got really worried. But I’m not sure I should be telling you”
Paul’s feet clumped to the floor as his brain raced. He grabbed a pen and notepad. “We’re definitely interested. Who is this young man and where can I talk to him?” Was he being too alarmist? No … after 9/11 he knew to react to anything.
“Well … that’s just it. I don’t think you can.”
“This could be a matter of national security, don’t you see that?” he shouted.
“But … he’s gone.”
“He’s gone? Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. He and three other young men just disappeared.”
The FBI response was instantaneous. In a few months, many other Somali young men disappeared from their homes and schools. No one-friends, family, religious leaders-knew where they went or why. Then, a few showed up, fighting in Somalia, and the FBI cracked open the case.
But now, Paul didn’t think the Bureau was going far enough in their investigation, and it scared the hell out of him.
In his basement, Paul walked to the stand up steel locker in the corner. He felt the damp coolness. He withdrew several of the weapons from the locker, both handguns and rifles. Paul laid some of his handguns on the table.
There was the cute little Glock 29, the subcompact with the powerful 10mm upgrade from the Glock 26. He
