Escape (4 page)

The father of the movement from which Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations would spring, Qutb, who'd been hung in Egypt for sedition in 1966, also had a lot to say that spoke directly to young black men living in Harlem. "
The white man
in
Europe or America is our number-one enemy,
" he'd written.
"The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles, and noble objectives.... Let us plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children."
Heeding that advice, Khalifa had enrolled his son, Abdullah, in the madrasah established at the mosque.

Now, as he stood outside the synagogue, Khalifa imagined the seeds being planted in his son's mind. If it was the will of Allah, Abdullah would someday blossom into a American mujahideen like his father.

He wondered what his wife would have to say about that. He'd met Miriam Juma soon after joining the mosque. She and her family were illegal immigrants from Kenya who'd come to the mosque hoping to find work as well as a place to worship. The imam had noted the way that Khalifa looked at the sixteen-year-old, and after several weeks of negotiations with her father—and repeated reminders that such a union would help her immigration status—a marriage between Khalifa and Miriam was arranged.

Miriam was unlike any of the women Khalifa had known in Harlem. As a wife, she knew her place and did not argue or "sass" him; she had his meals ready for him when he returned home from the mosque, where he earned a meager living as a member of the imam's "security team," and quickly bore him a son. She was a model of female Muslim propriety—she wore the
hajib,
a long scarf that covered her hair and shielded her face, as well as loose-fitting gowns that modestly hid the curves of her body when in public.

Miriam had hoped that their son, Abdullah, would go to public school kindergarten when he turned four that previous fall. But she did not fight Khalifa when he insisted that Abdullah be enrolled instead in the madrasah.

Only when he began talking about jihad and fantasizing about going to Afghanistan or Sudan to train with Al Qaeda did she argue with him. Islamic extremists were not true Muslims, she insisted.
"They are apostate, and doomed to hell for killing innocent people ... especially making war on women and
children,
which the Qur'an forbids. These fatwas are false absolutions that twist and bend the law for their own ends. Their fatwas have no legitimacy with true Muslims, only the ignorant who cannot read and therefore do not know the Qur'an. "

As she spoke, Khalifa felt doubt, and that made him react angrily; he told her to be quiet. But Miriam was not to be silenced on this matter.
"Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance,"
she insisted. "We
greet each other, and even strangers, with 'salaam,' which means peace. Osama bin Laden, Sheik Rahman, and these others are nothing more than murderers who use the Qur'an for their own political ends."

Miriam pointed to her own father, Mahmoud Juma, as the sort of Muslim man Khalifa should try to emulate. "He
works hard to support his family,"
she said.
"And worships Allah in his prayers five times a day without strutting around with his chest puffed out saying, 'I am mujahideen and going
on
jihad' when he has a wife and children who depend on him. He lives his life by the Qur'an. He doesn't need fatwas to absolve him of things that he knows—that every human knows—are sinful. Murdering people in the name of Allah is a sin that will never be forgiven.
"

Khalifa stormed out of the apartment and went to the mosque to pray. He had grown to love his wife—he was even surprised at the tenderness he felt toward her—and when he prayed he thanked Allah for her. When he was honest with himself, it was at such times that he saw the true beauty of his faith. He had noted how content his fatherin-law was to have the opportunity to make a living, even though he was only a janitor in a building in the Financial District. The former Kenyan fisherman wanted nothing more, it seemed, than better lives for his children, legal resident status
("and perhaps someday, Allah willing, citizenship"),
and to worship according to his beliefs.

"All these I found in America, not a supposedly Muslim country, where they try to dictate which 'version' of Islam is correct,"
he'd pointed out one night when Khalifa was railing on about American injustices. But it only made Khalifa angry and confused.

Imam Jabbar must have sensed his follower's discomfiture after one of Khalifa's arguments with his wife that past winter. He'd just ended one of the secret meetings with the inner circle, in which he'd announced that two special visitors involved in a "very special project" would be arriving the next fall. They would all be called upon to make great sacrifices in the cause of Islam. As the others filed out, he'd pulled Khalifa aside.

"So, my brother," he'd begun, placing his hands on Khalifa's shoulders. "You seem troubled. Are you having doubts?"

Khalifa shook his head. For a moment, he thought he'd heard a veiled threat in the other man's tone, but then dismissed it as paranoia. "No, imam," he said. "I am committed to jihad. It's just my wife ... she ... well, she…"

"Yes, she what?" the imam said sternly. "You haven't told her about our discussions?"

"Oh no, imam."

The imam smiled and changed his tone to that of a father figure counseling a favorite son on "woman troubles."

"Good. Then, perhaps, she has been immodest? Has she shamed you?"

Khalifa wished he hadn't brought up the subject of his wife. The things she said were troubling and contradicted what the imam taught; Jabbar might not appreciate her opinion. He might even order him to divorce her. So Khalifa, on the spot, made up a lie. "Well, I have been concerned that she is picking up bad habits from non-believer women. As you know, she works at a grocery store as a clerk, and sometimes she says things that aren't right for a Muslim woman."

The imam relaxed. He'd heard this complaint many times. Among couples who converted to Islam, it was the man who usually stayed with it. Give women raised in Harlem a few months, or even weeks, of kowtowing to her man, and there was a tendency to revolt ... and if the man wasn't careful, that included a swift kick to his backside. Then the women would be out of the gowns and back into their tight pants and blouses with their breasts bouncing around for all to see, and they often took their men with them.

Miriam was different because she was an immigrant and raised a Muslim. Her father was one of the most respected men in the mosque, even though he did not agree with Jabbar's politics and said so frequently. The daughter was young and couldn't help but be influenced by the overwhelming decadence of American culture. Jabbar didn't want to come down too hard on her, which could cause her to revolt and leave the mosque, taking her husband with her. He'd spent too much time grooming Khalifa to lose him now. So he counseled him to be firm "but understanding of her age" when she seemed to stray from the path.

"Perhaps, you should buy her something—a new scarf or comfortable undergarments to wear in the privacy of your bedroom," Jabbar said with a knowing smile, pulling a roll of cash from his pocket. He peeled off several twenties and handed the money to Khalifa, who protested but then accepted the cash and thanked the imam.

"It is my pleasure, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa," Jabbar said. "You are a good man, and soon, if it is the will of Allah, all of Islam will know your name."

Some eighty blocks south of where Khalifa stood, Darla Milquetost leaned back in her chair at the receptionist's desk, trying to decipher the raised voices coming from behind the door leading to the private office of the District Attorney for the County of New York. Then she noticed that the two young assistant district attorneys sitting on the couch in her office, waiting to meet with her boss, were entirely too interested in the argument for her liking.

"Is there something you need?" Milquetost's tone and stare could have chilled the toes off a penguin. It was one thing for her to eavesdrop on the boss; after all, she had his best interests at heart. However, whatever was being said on the other side of the closed doors was certainly none of their business.

Startled, the ADAs found something eminently fascinating about the months-old reading material on the coffee table in front of them. Rookie assistant district attorneys might have slugged their way to the top of their class at Harvard Law, or fought for the prestige of clerking for one of the imperious justices of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but they all quickly learned that there was one person you didn't mess with on the eighth floor of the Criminal Courts building at 100 Centre Street in downtown Manhattan. That person wasn't so much The Man Himself, District Attorney Roger "Butch" Karp, though he could be intimidating and demanding; it was the ferocious middle-aged woman who guarded his inner sanctum. Cross Mrs. Milquetost, and requests for audiences with her boss, or recommendations for promotions and plum assignments, had a way of being shuffled to the bottom of a pile of papers. Legend had it that a multiple-offender was now practicing traffic court law on Staten Island.

In particular, woe be it to the newbie who read the nameplate on her desk and pronounced her name "Milk Toast." Frost would form on all glass surfaces as her voice iced over, "It's Mil-kay-tossed ... that's French in case they didn't teach foreign languages at whatever school you graduated—I assume you graduated—from. Do not forget—Mil... kay ... tossed." Mispronounce it once, and you were on her bad side until a lot of ass-kissing thawed the glacier that surrounded her heart. But do it twice and it was a one-way ticket to the Outer Boroughs.

Satisfied that the ADAs were appropriately occupied with dog-eared copies of
Law Enforcement Magazine,
Mrs. Milquetost inclined her brunette bouffant toward where the voices had grown suddenly quieter. A moment later, she nearly launched to her feet when the door to the office popped open with a bang.

A short, dapper man emerged and fixed her with an angry glare from his intense blue eyes. Normally, the mere presence of assistant district attorney Vinson Talcott "V. T." Newbury would have sent Mrs. Milquetost happily aflutter. He was extraordinarily handsome—even if his sandy blond hair was thinning and the lines in his face deepening—as well as charming and impeccably mannered.

If she hadn't had a nice new boyfriend, Mrs. Milquetost, a widow, would have liked to demonstrate to Newbury that beneath her proper business persona beat the heart of a poetically passionate woman.
Oh who are you kidding, you'd drop Bill like a wormy apple if Mr. Newbury showed the slightest interest, which he hasn't,
Mrs. Milquetost thought gloomily.

V. T., as she'd never had the nerve to call him, was the opposite of "The Beast," otherwise known as assistant district attorney Ray Guma, who in her opinion was a boorish, hairy ape of a man whose only manners were bad ones. Where Mr. Newbury was bluebloodedly well-spoken, Guma grunted with the irritating accent of his native borough, which he laid on especially thick when trying to rile her. He also seemed to take great delight in mispronouncing her name, but there was little she could do about it. The Beast had unfettered access to Mr. Karp and was untouchable.

Both men were longtime friends of her boss, though she didn't understand how two such opposite characters could possibly coexist or why Mr. Karp put up with Guma. She certainly wouldn't have; she read the
New York Post
on the subway every morning on the way to work, hoping to find a story about some terrible accident befalling Ray Guma. Finding nothing could put her in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

Usually the pendulum of her moods swung the other way at the appearance of V. T. Newbury in the office. But he'd stalked in that morning and without so much as an "Is he in?" stormed the inner office, from which the sounds of discord soon emanated. It broke her heart that Newbury and Karp seemed to be at such odds these days, and she continued to hope that they would reconcile. But the shouting matches had been growing more frequent and angry of late. As she had confided to her boyfriend, work at the New York DAO wasn't so pleasant anymore.

A deep, irritated voice followed Newbury out of the office. "Damn it, V. T., come back, we can talk this over. You're overreacting."

Newbury whirled and faced the open door. His pale complexion turned bright red. "I think we've said all that needs to be said," he replied. "As for my 'overreactions,' they are none of your business."

Not knowing what else to do, Mrs. Milquetost picked up her telephone and placed a call to the building's janitorial services to complain about "mildew in the air conditioner." She'd actually planned on making the call later, but now seemed a good time with all the tension in the room. She hazarded a glance at the ADAs on the couch, who'd looked up when V. T. stormed out of the inner sanctum but now had their noses buried even further in their reading material. She wished she, too, had a copy of
Law Enforcement Magazine
to hide behind.

V. T. Newbury had only recently returned to the DAO after he'd been badly beaten during a robbery. His assailants had broken his nose and fractured a cheek bone—both requiring the services of plastic surgeons to repair—as well as cracking several ribs and giving him a concussion. But from what she gathered listening in on conversations among those who had known him for many years, the most serious injuries weren't physical.

Despite his refined features and somewhat effete mannerisms, V. T. Newbury was said to be as tough and fearless a prosecutor as anyone in the New York DAO. Specializing in white-collar and organized crimes, he'd taken on the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and reduced them to common felons doing time, and put away a dozen supposedly "untouchable" mob bosses on racketeering and criminal conspiracy charges. He currently headed up the New York DAO bureau of racketeering and public corruption, which for more than a year had been pursuing recently discovered cases against New York City police officers that had been shoved under the rug. None of them had ever been able to intimidate V. T. Newbury—not billionaires, not gangsters, and not crooked cops.

But not anymore ... not since the beating that put him in the hospital for two weeks. The old fire and zest for the fight seemed extinguished, as was the sense of humor that, while dry as a Silver Bullet martini, was also as integral to his personality as monogrammed handkerchiefs were to his wardrobe. As he walked through the halls of the Criminal Courts building, he looked like a dog that expected to get beat for some unknown infraction.

The rumor around the office was that he was going to accept an offer from his uncle, Dean Newbury, to join the family's white-shoe law firm in Midtown. He would be taking the place of his father, Vincent Newbury, who'd died suddenly that past fall of a heart attack. Along with a guaranteed, and substantial, rise in income and nicer digs—on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper with a view of Central Park, instead of a tiny office in the Criminal Courts building—he'd gain a ticket out of the primordial swamp of prosecuting New York's criminals. Little wonder the office pool was running four to one that he'd be gone within a month. And no one blamed him.

No one except Butch Karp, apparently. A legendarily straight arrow who saw prosecuting criminals on behalf of the citizens of New York City as a calling nearly on par with the priesthood, the district attorney had been overheard discussing V. T.'s possible "defection" in terms that were borderline insulting—and unexpected, given the longtime friendship between the two men.

The friendship was not very apparent now as Newbury stalked over to the door leading out to the hallway. He grabbed the doorknob just as Karp appeared from his office.

"I just want you to reconsider before you do something you'll regret," Karp said to his colleague's back.

Newbury set his jaw and replied, "Shall I announce this at the meeting on Monday, or are you going to save me the trouble?"

Karp shrugged. "Fine. Never thought I'd see the day when you'd let a couple of punks chase you out of this office for a Fifth Avenue day spa, but money talks and bullshit walks I guess. I'll let the others know and save you the ... embarrassment."

Newbury paused at the insult, then flung open the door. He stomped out, slamming the door behind him so that the glass pane rattled dangerously.

After a long pause, Karp turned toward the ADAs. Reluctantly, like prisoners ordered to look into the eyes of the firing squad, they raised their heads to meet the infamous Karp glare. It was worse than they'd heard. He was a big man—six-foot-five and 240 pounds—which made the fire in his gold-flecked gray eyes all the more imposing. A sound like steam from a tea kettle escaped his pursed lips.

Gazing down at them, Karp knew that the latest episode of the rift between himself and V. T. would now become the buzz of the office. It was sure to inspire wonder in those who knew how far he and V. T. went back. He would never have believed it himself.

They'd been friends and colleagues for thirty years, ever since they both arrived fresh out of law school to work at the New York DAO when the office was run by the legendary, seemingly immortal Francis Garrahy. V. T. came from a family of wealth and social prominence. His mother traced her ancestry back to the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, while his father's side had been knocking around since the Revolutionary War. From the moment he'd graduated from Harvard Law, V. T. had seemed destined to eventually take over his paternal family's two-hundred-year-old law firm, but to everyone's surprise and consternation, he'd joined the DAO instead. Ever since, his family had waited for him to "get it out of his system," but except for a brief stint with the, U.S. Attorney General's Office, he'd remained at 100 Centre Street.

Karp, on the other hand, was a Brooklyn Jew whose predecessors had emigrated from Poland fleeing Cossacks and pogroms. His mother had been an elementary school teacher, and while his father, Julius, had graduated from law school, he'd made his living as a businessman manufacturing and selling women's hair products. Their son, "Butch," had attended the University of Califomia-Berkeley on a basketball scholarship until a knee injury ended the possibility of an athletic career and put him on the path to law school. After graduating, he'd applied to one place and one place only, the New York District Attorney's Office, with the aim of making it to the homicide bureau.

In between then and now, Karp had dabbled in private practice, but he'd hated it and returned to the DAO. He still took on the occasional off-the-clock case to help a friend—in one recent trial, he'd helped a coach in Idaho, the brother of an old basketball friend, defend himself against charges trumped up to get him fired. But he was where he wanted to be, though it was still hard to imagine that he was now the duly elected district attorney, the heir to Garrahy's legacy.

Their family backgrounds were not the only differences between Karp and Newbury. In a court of law, V. T. was the meticulous, low-key technician who prosecuted cases like an engineer building a bridge. The more complex the crime, the more he enjoyed the challenge of piecing it together so quietly and efficiently that defendants hardly knew that he'd made a case against them until the jury returned with a guilty verdict.

Karp, however, was the courtroom brawler. A tactician in the sense of military warfare, he wasted little time cutting to the chase, tearing the heart out of defense strategies while ripping the truth out of hostile witnesses and defendants who dared to lie on the stand. He was a true believer—a champion of the U.S. Constitution, which to him was as sacrosanct as any Torah, Bible, or Qur'an, and a modem, laser-focused, metro-savvy Don Quixote committed to the ultimate victory of right over wrong, good over evil.... Which earned him a great deal of teasing from Guma, who occasionally referred to him as Miss Goody Two-Shoes.

Despite their differences, however, Newbury, Guma, and Karp shared a common dedication to the cause of justice. Early on they'd come to respect each other's strengths and joke about their foibles. They always knew where they could find someone to lean on when the frustrations and burden of trying cases in the busiest district attorney's office in the country weighed heavily.

Although he would himself have been a plum recruit for any private law firm in the city, Karp also admired Newbury's dedication to a career of public service when he could have easily given in to his father's yearly invitation to join the family firm. But all of that had changed when Newbury, responding to an anonymous tip regarding the NYPD investigations, went to meet the source only to be accosted by two young black men who'd beat the living hell out of him.

A few days after the assault, Karp had arrived outside his friend's hospital room when he overheard V. T.'s uncle, Dean Newbury, head of the family firm, urging him to give up the DAO for private practice. A subsequent exchange between Karp and the older man had grown heated and then ended when V. T. had sided with his uncle and said that he was thinking about accepting the offer.

Karp had backed off. One of his oldest friends was lying in a hospital bed, and he had a right to consider what was best for him. "What he needs is space," he'd confided to Mrs. Milquetost in a rare moment of openness. "But this is where he belongs, he'll be back."

But when V. T. got out of the hospital and returned to work at the DAO, word soon spread that he was going to quit. Karp even brought it up at one of the Monday morning staff meetings, telling those assembled not to worry about the rumor, because V. T. would never be "happy kissing fat-cat asses and whoring himself to oil companies." He'd meant it as a joke, but Newbury reacted by gathering his papers and walking out without a word, leaving the room filled with an embarrassed silence and averted eyes.