The Last Patriot

“Selleck wants you on this personally,” said Rasmussen, picking up the intricate wooden puzzle Ozbek kept on his table.

The NCS Director. Ozbek raised his eyebrows as he perused the file. “Why me?”

“Because it’s complicated.”

“Obviously, but complicated how?”

“Sunday night there was a murder at the Jefferson Memorial,” said Rasmussen.

Ozbek finished scanning the file and handed it back to his colleague. “And?”

“Somebody whacked an employee of the Foundation on American Islamic Relations. Are you familiar with them?”

Ozbek was. The Saudi-funded Foundation on American Islamic Relations, or FAIR as it was ironically known, was one of the biggest Islamist front organizations in the United States. It had offices across the country with representatives who rushed to the microphones any time a Muslim was accused of anything. They were knee-jerk reactionaries who trotted out the dreaded Islamophobia slur before knowing any of the facts of a case.

Muslims pulled over with pipe bombs in their trunk

? Those are just fireworks and the law enforcement officer responsible is nothing more than a bigoted Islamophobe.

Muslim imam airline passengers praying loudly right at the gate, deriding America in Arabic, switching seats to configurations similar to the 9/11 hijackers, and asking for seat belt extenders that could be used as weapons although they are not overweight and simply leaving them at their feet? These poor men are guilty of nothing more than flying while Muslim. And FAIR will help coordinate the imams’ lawsuits against the Islamophobic passengers who were unnecessarily frightened and reported the men’s completely normal activity to the flight crew.

FAIR’s efforts had had a chilling effect across the country. The FBI was openly attacked for publishing pictures of Middle Eastern men wanted in connection with unusual surveillance of ferry boats in Washington State. The cowardly Chico Enterprise Record newspaper refused to publish any description further than the ages of numerous men who were actively surveilling fire stations across northern California with cameras, video cams, and sketch books. When asked by firemen what the hell they were doing, the Middle Eastern men fled in waiting vehicles.

As far as Ozbek was concerned, there was nothing “American” about the Foundation on American Islamic Relations and the word should be stripped from their name. They were an Islamic supremacist organization pure and simple who wanted to see the American government overthrown and replaced with an Islamic one governed by sharia law. They made him, as well as the overwhelming majority of responsible, law-abiding Muslims in America, sick.

What’s more, they were entirely too well connected in Washington. Though Ozbek couldn’t prove it, he was certain that FAIR’s chairman, Abdul Waleed, had been strategic in one of the most egregious scandals to come out of the Pentagon in decades.

The Defense Department’s sole advisor on Islamic Law and Islamic extremism had been recently terminated because a high-ranking Pentagon official, who also happened to be Muslim, found his opinions too critical of Islam. It was like firing the government’s only advisor on Nazism right in the middle of World War II, or sacking its lone Communism advisor in the middle of the Cold War, just because a German or Russian staff member was upset that the advisor wouldn’t tone down his opinions of the enemy and what drove them.

Ozbek had seen FAIR’s chairman photographed with the Muslim Pentagon official, Imad Ramadan, too many times not to believe that the pink-slipping of the Islamic law expert didn’t in some dark way bear FAIR’s fingerprints.

The entire event was insane, even for the PC quagmire that was Washington politics.

But be that as it may, Ozbek didn’t see what FAIR or a murder at the Jefferson Memorial had to do with the Special Activities Division. “What’s all this got to do with the CIA and the Transept program?” he asked.

“This is where it gets complicated,” replied Rasmussen. “First of all, the suspect arrested at the scene, an Andrew Salam, claims he didn’t do it. He says he was framed.”

Ozbek rolled his eyes.

Rasmussen set the puzzle down and raised his palms. “I know. I know. But listen to this. He claims he’s a NOC for the FBI.”

NOC, pronounced knock, was an espionage term largely used by the CIA that stood for non official cover. It designated a covert operative who had no official ties to the government he or she served. The problem was that the FBI didn’t use NOCs.

“Let me guess,” said Ozbek. “The FBI disavows any knowledge of this guy?”