"Suit yourself. Where are you from, Miller?" Ali Abd Ar-Raziq asked.

"Here."

"Philly?"

Miller nodded.

"You don't sound like it. You sound like a Reading nigger."

I'll be a sonofabitch!

"I have family in Reading," Miller said, coldly. "On my mother's side. Neither they or me like that term."

"I don't even know what it means," Betty said.

"Sergeant Schneider, I'm disappointed," Ali Abd Ar-Raziq said. "Word is that you know everything about everything." He paused, smiled, and went on. "To make you conversant with a little Afro-American history not usually found in history books, Reading was one of the termini of the Underground Railroad of fame and legend. A number of the slaves who made it out of the South stayed there and became truly integrated. They even picked up Pennsylvania Dutch accents, started eating scrapple, etcetera. They went to school, college, started businesses, joined the Army, etcetera, etcetera. And soon, having made it, began to look down their noses at other African Americans."

"Hey!" Miller protested.

The man with the braided hair raised his palm to shut him off and went on: "The reason I know all this is my father's family are Reading niggers. I'll bet the major and I have acquaintances in common. You don't happen to be kin to a General Miller, do you?"

"He's my father," Miller said.

"See?" Britton said. "Your father and my father are friends."

"I'll be damned," Betty Schneider said.

"If you're not nice, Sergeant, the major and I will start speaking Dutch and leave you in the dark. You do speak Dutch, don't you, Major?"

"Only what I learned listening to my mother when we went to the Reading Terminal Market to buy stuff from the Amish," Miller said.

"Where'd you go to school?" the man with the braided hair asked in the German patois known as Pennsylvania Dutch. "Where'd you get your commission?"

"West Point," Miller said.

"Yeah, sure," the man with the braided hair said, switching back to English. "Of course. Your father's a West Pointer."

Miller nodded.

"So what did you learn about Islam when you were at West Point?"

"What is this, a quiz?"

That was opening your mouth before engaging your brain. Watch it, Richard, you can't afford to piss off Ali Abd Ar-Raziq, aka Detective Jack Britton.

"Before I start to tell you about the lunatics, it would help to know how much you know about Islam. Save us both time."

"I learned zilch at the military academy," Miller said. "But after 9/11, I started to read."

"Give me three minutes of what you learned," the man with the braided hair said.

"You're serious, right?"

The man with the braided hair nodded.

"Where was Muhammad born, for example? When?"

"In 570, into the Quraysh tribe, in Mecca."

"And the Qur'an? Where did that come from?"

"The Angel Gabriel gave it to him-the first part of it-in a cave on Mount Hira in 610. Then he started playing prophet."

"Something like Joseph Smith, the Angel Moroni, and the Mormons, right?" Britton asked, smiling.

"I thought about that," Miller said, smiling back.

"What's the definition of 'Islam'?"

" 'Submission to God,' " Miller said. "A Muslim is someone who's done that."

"Like a born-again Baptist, right? You a born-again Christian, Miller?"

"I'm Presbyterian."

"Pity. If you were a born-again Christian, it might help you understand something about how some guy raised in North Philadelphia, in a house like the one where we met, who converted to Muslim from, say, the Holy Ghost First Church of Christ, African, feels about Islam."

Miller didn't reply.

"What's the first and great commandment for a Muslim?" Britton asked.

" 'There is no god but God: Allah: and Muhammad is His Prophet.' "

"And the 'Pillars of Faith'?"

"There's five," Miller said. "One is reciting the creed-'There is no god but God, etcetera.' The second is daily prayers-formal prayers, with the forehead touching the ground. Third is fasting during Ramadan:"

"What's Ramadan?" Britton interrupted.

"The ninth month of the Muslim calendar. Last year-2004-it started in October. The fifth of October, I think."

Britton made a "Give me more" gesture.

"It lasts a lunar month," Miller went on. "No eating, drinking, smoking, or sex during the day. It starts when you can tell a white thread from a black thread by daylight and ends at nightfall with a prayer and a meal called iftar, and then starts up again the next morning."

Britton nodded at him. "And the Fourth Pillar?" he asked.

"Almsgiving. The Fifth is making a pilgrimage to Mecca."

Britton nodded again. "Tell me about jihad," he said.

"Holy war," Miller said. "To take over territories, countries, which are ruled by non-Muslims."

"This is new, right, something dreamed up recently by belligerent rag-heads? And having really nothing to do with the gentle teachings of the Prophet himself?"

"No. It goes all the way back to Muhammad. By the time he died, in 632, jihad saw the Muslims in control of the Arabian Peninsula. In the next hundred years, jihad had taken Islam all over the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Spain."

"Okay," Britton said. "The pop quiz is over. You're not exactly an Islamic scholar, but neither are you wholly ignorant of who you're dealing with like most people I've met in your line of work."

"My line of work? The Army, you mean?"

"No. Intelligence, counterterrorism. You may be a soldier, but you're not here to line your troops up and march down Broad Street."

"I'm here-as I told you in that house off Broad Street-because we have reason to believe that a group of Somalian terrorists have stolen a 727 with the intention of crashing it into the Liberty Bell, and, further, we have reason to believe that there may be a connection with some-how do I say this?- native Philadelphian Muslims. Can we get to that? You said you knew something."

"You see the movie Black Hawk Down? Read the book? Mogadishu?"

Miller nodded.

Both were right on the money. Do I tell Britton that the Black Hawk belonged to the 160th Special Forces Aviation Regiment and that First Lieutenant Richard H. Miller, Jr., was flying Black Hawks in Somalia for the 160th at the time?

"A guy on The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote the book," Britton said.

"So I understand. He did a good job."

"When that happened, when they dragged the bodies of the American soldiers through the streets, the reaction of some of the lunatics here was that it was the will of Allah, about time, right on, brother. That shock you?"

Miller shook his head.

"And, right away, some of the local lunatic mullahs-who have no more idea where they come from in Africa than you or I do-started claiming they were from Somalia. Pure bullshit, of course, to impress the brothers. And then, because that seemed to work, they embellished the story. They had contacts with Somalia, they said, and we-meaning, the mullahs-have to go over there.

"We had a series of fund-raisers, some of them your standard church chicken supper, all proceeds to the cause, and some your standard knock over the local grocery store, your friendly neighborhood drug dealer and hooker, etcetera. And they came up with the money for the plane tickets, got passports, and went."

"You tell anybody about this?"

"I turned in a report. A couple of weeks later, the FBI wanted to talk to me. So I got myself arrested-did this routine-and two guys from the FBI talked to me-in this interview room, come to think of it-and I told them what was going down, and they laughed, and said, one, the AALs couldn't get into Somalia and, two, even if they could the Somalians would not only not talk to the wannabes but would probably cut their throats and steal whatever they were carrying."