"So what happened?"

"Off the AALs went, they said to Somalia."

"You sound as if you don't believe they actually went."

"What the FBI said made sense to me. None of these wannabes speak Arabic, much less Somali. I figured they wouldn't get any further than Kenya, or Ethiopia, where they would find out what Somalia was really like and decide it was the Will of Allah to whoop it up with the local hookers instead of actually going there. Who would know they hadn't gone? Or they would actually try to go there and get knocked over by some really professional bad guys."

"So what actually happened?"

"I don't know," Britton said. "Right about that time, my wife was about to have our first son, so I did almost a year in the Pennsylvania Correctional Facility in Camp Hill."

"Excuse me?"

"I was picked up on an armed robbery charge, plea-bargained it down to four years, and was sent to the state slam at Camp Hill, near Harrisburg. When I was a bad boy, which was often, they put me in solitary, from which I was surreptitiously removed and sneaked out of the joint in the warden's trunk. That way, I got two weeks with my wife-a couple of times, three-we had a nice apartment in Harrisburg-before they sneaked me back in. The department shrink said I had suffered severe mental stress on the job, so technically I was on medical leave."

"Jesus Christ!" Miller said.

"Anyway, like I said, it was about a year before I got back to the mosque."

"I don't understand," Miller confessed.

"The mosque hired a pretty good lawyer to appeal my conviction. The sonofabitch used to come to Camp Hill-which meant I had to sneak back into the prison to meet with him and then sneak back out-every other month to tell me how he was doing. After about a year, like I said, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, the district attorney declined to prosecute, and I was sprung."

"You volunteered to go back?" Miller asked, incredulously.

Britton met his eyes for a moment before replying.

"I'm in pretty deep with the mullahs," he said. "It would have been hard to get anybody else into the mosque who would have learned much."

"You couldn't pay me enough to do what you're doing," Miller said.

"Yeah, but, like I was saying, when I got back to the mosque the mullahs were, quote, back from Somalia, end quote, they were watching me pretty closely:"

"They were suspicious?"

"I wasn't the only guy from the mosque, by a long shot, in Camp Hill," Britton said. "And they hadn't seen much of me while I was in there. Yeah, they were suspicious. They're very suspicious people. Anyway, I didn't want to ask too many questions, and they weren't talking much about Somalia-which I figured was because they really hadn't been to Somalia-so I let it rest.

"And then, about six months ago, two mullahs showed up. They said they were from Somalia. I don't know if they were or weren't. But they certainly were from someplace other than here. Spoke English like Englishmen. And what they were up to, I don't know. They kept me out of their meetings.

"You tell the FBI about them?"

"I told Chief Kramer. He told the FBI, and the FBI told him they had nothing on the names I'd given him. So the chief staked the mosque out, got pictures of them, and gave the pictures to the FBI. The chief got word to me that the FBI had run them. They were pilots for an Arab airline-Yemen Airways, I think-and were in the country legally. Going to some flight school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. All approved by the U.S. Government."

"And?"

"And that was the end of it until a couple of weeks ago-about the time your airplane went missing in: where?"

"Luanda, Angola," Miller finished.

": when the lunatics began talking more than a little smugly about what was going to happen when the Liberty Bell was no more."

"You report that? To Chief Kramer? The FBI?"

"These people come up with some nutty idea once a week. They're going to blow up City Hall or the Walt Whitman Bridge or the Benjamin Franklin Bridge or one of the sports arenas. Poison the water. Assassinate the archbishop. It's just talk. I don't report much-or any-of it until I have more than hot air to go on. You heard about the kid who kept crying 'Wolf'?"

Miller nodded.

"And then you showed up," Britton went on.

"And asked you if you had heard anything about the Liberty Bell," Miller said.

Britton nodded.

"You have to admit that flying an airplane into the Liberty Bell sounds bizarre," Britton said.

"Bizarre or not, we think that's what they intend to do," Miller said. "You have the names of the two Somalians?"

"They'd be in my report. Schneider?"

"I can get that," Sergeant Betty Schneider said. "But you said the FBI said they had nothing on those names. What about the names the FBI put on the stakeout photos?"

"The chief never gave them to me," Britton said. "I suppose he has them."

"He went out for coffee," Betty said. "Maybe he's back."

She left the interview room and a minute later returned with Chief Inspector Kramer.

"They never gave me names," he announced. "Just said the two were on the up-and-up. I can call there, but it's late and all I'm going to get is the duty officer, who'll probably stall me until he can clear it with the Special Agent in Charge."

"Chief," Miller said. "I'd like to suggest we wait until I can tell Castillo about this." He turned to Britton. "How long can you stay?"

Chief Kramer answered for him: "We picked him up on suspicion of murder. We can probably keep him until breakfast-say, eight o'clock-without making the AALs more than usually suspicious."

"Castillo said he'd get back to me as soon as he could. Why don't we wait for that?"

"Okay with me," Chief Inspector Kramer said. "Okay with you, Britton?"

Detective Jack Britton said, with no enthusiasm whatever, "Why not?"

[THREE]

Delta Force Compound

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

2310 9 June 2005

Around the time the first Delta Force was organized, the Army had about finished implementing a new personnel policy regarding offenders of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Someone had pointed out-many soldiers, officers, and enlisted thought very late in the game-that only a very few soldiers committed what in civilian life would be called "serious felonies," that is to say, rape, murder, armed robbery, and the like. The vast majority of prisoners in Army stockades all over the world had been found guilty of offenses against the Army system and most of the offenses had to do with being absent without leave, mild insubordination, drunk on duty, and the like.

Those sentenced by court-martial to six months or less were normally confined to prisons, called "stockades" on the larger military bases-forts like Bragg, Knox, and Benning-where they spent their days walking around the base, guarded by shotgun-armed "prisoner chasers," picking up cigarette butts and trash.

Someone had pointed out that not only did this punishment not contribute much to the Army but that the prisoner chasers-usually, one for every two prisoners, sometimes one for each prisoner-had to be taken off their regular duties to perform that guard duty, which was not an effective use of manpower.

Furthermore, if a soldier disliked the Army so much that he went "over the hill" or told his sergeant to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut when chastised, for example, for having a dirty weapon, or needing a shave, he probably wasn't making much of a contribution to the Army when he wasn't in the stockade.

The ideal was "cheerful, willing obedience to a lawful order," and, if a soldier wasn't willing to offer that, what was he doing in the Army?

If a first sentence to the stockade didn't serve to make someone see the wisdom of straightening up and flying right, then hand him a Bad Conduct discharge and send him home.