Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [13]
Tony picked up on it and gave him a tight-lipped smile.
The wine was damn good and it lifted his spirits from the first sip. It tasted unlike any other heavy red. He savored the understated layers of currant and black cherry, with a tinge of coffee. But even his relaxed mind wasn’t able to stray far from the events of the last twenty-four hours.
“Y’know, something’s bothering me about this whole thing,” Jack said.
“Talk to me.”
“I watched that press conference twice and I still don’t understand why the mayor and the FBI pushed aside the whole Arab connection.”
“A problem with the source?”
“Who, the carjacker?”
Tony shrugged. “Maybe the kid was lying. Or could be he got it wrong.”
Jack shook his head slowly. “They had to have pulled security video from the Arco station by now. If it’s not true, someone would have said so. Maintain good relations with the Arabs and all that.”
“So you’re saying that the absence of a denial is as good as a confession.”
“That is exactly what I’m saying.”
“I like it,” Tony said. “There’s something else I like, too.”
Jack looked at him. “What’s that?”
“It sounds like you’re finally getting your mojo back.”
Jack considered that as he sat back. He let the wine and the cool afternoon breeze and the fellowship of a good friend remind him how sweet and precious life was. Even so, as Drabinsky had shown, there were qualities and ideals far greater than that, the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, whatever the cost.
If an Arab had set the bomb, Jack wanted to know who and why. He wanted to find out why the authorities were tiptoeing around the monster who was at the center of their investigation. He wanted to know where the bastard was now and if he intended to try again. Not because he was a racist or hated Muslims as his critics had said, but because the elusive son of a bitch was a murdering terrorist. Tracking him down and exposing him was the right thing to do, whoever it pissed off.
“Yeah,” Jack said at last. “The mojo is so back.”
* * *
Jack Hatfield’s fall from grace had been swift and brutal, and had come when he could least afford it. Already in the midst of his divorce, he was a year into a new contract hosting Truth Tellers, one of the top-rated opinion shows on the GNT cable news network, when he was blindsided by accusations that he was an unrepentent Islamophobe.
The accusations were nonsense, of course. Jack had long been a champion of religious freedom and free speech and anyone who watched his show knew that. But the liberal media elite took it upon themselves to take his words out of context so they could twist and amplify them. They went after him like a starving jackal chasing an eastern cottontail.
As much as Jack believed in religious tolerance, he drew the line at murder. And whether his detractors liked it or not, Muslim extremists were the face of terror around the globe. Time and again they had demonstrated a willingness to kill in the name of Allah. Pointing out that simple fact, and suggesting oh-so-gently that a few more imams should be speaking against the killing instead of getting wound up stumping for a controversial mosque in the heart of San Francisco did not even begin to rise to the level of hate speech. The exact, very rational words that started the anti-Hatfield fatwa were, “Hell, if these guys did more of the first no one would ever complain about them wanting to do the second.”
Jack knew he wasn’t doing his career any favors by compounding that statement with reports that the mosque was being funded by a Saudi business consortium he believed had ties to a Wahhabi jihadist organization called the Hand of Allah. Several mosques funded by this same group had been built in London and throughout the United Kingdom, and Jack was convinced they were superficially mosques and fundamentally