2
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
He’d warned them, hadn’t he? Political correctness be damned, he’d told the truth. Muslims were a problem. Not all of them, but too many. They didn’t want to play by American rules, follow American values? They wanted to live under Sharia law? Cut off thieves’ hands?
Fine. Let them do whatever they liked.
But not here. People forgot—the media wanted them to forget—that fifty years ago the American population had been five percent foreign-born. Not even ten million immigrants. Most Americans had barely even heard of a mosque. Now the country was fifteen percent foreign. Forty-five million immigrants. Forty-five million! Almost as many people as Texas and New York combined.
A whole lot of those were Muslims. Anyone with any sense could see the country needed a break. Time to stop the Muslim–Mexican overload. Enough prayer calls. Enough taco trucks.
Look at China. The Chinese, they didn’t pretend to care about a bunch of Arabs. They didn’t let anybody in. They didn’t waste time worrying whether they were being mean to terrorists. They just worked their little Chinese butts off and put the rest of the world out of business.
As far as Paul Birman was concerned, the United States of America ought to act more like the People’s Republic of China.
Hit pause. Probably his biggest applause line. Not saying we need to rewind, but it’s time to hit pause. While we take care of our own. Not just for us. For them, too. Give everybody time to get straightened out, hear what I’m saying?
They did. He was popular now, more popular by the day. Not just in Tennessee, all over the country. Certainly the South and the Midwest, the real country, the states that nobody in California or New York noticed. Where Walmart was a place people picked up groceries, not a punch line for rich comedians. Flyover country. Two years ago, Birman was lucky to draw three hundred at a rally. Now he pulled three thousand easy. Three thousand people coming to hear him speak.
What the people who criticized him didn’t understand was that he didn’t say things to be popular. He said them because he believed them.
Because they were true.
As last week had proven. What had happened in Dallas was terrible. But all those voters who thought he was exaggerating, they knew better now.
Birman was no evangelical. He’d seen too many holier-than-thou types caught with their pants down. He understood folks weren’t perfect. They gambled, drank, broke their vows. Sometimes they came back to God, and sometimes they didn’t. He tried not to judge. He’d been faithful to Gloria since the day they met; he knew she wouldn’t put up with a wandering eye. But growing up he’d done some stuff he’d wished he hadn’t. So, no, he didn’t believe in the Bible as the Revealed Word. But he believed in God, and he knew God had blessed him. With a beautiful wife, four great kids, all the money he could hope to spend.
Now he was beginning to believe God had anointed him to lead the United States.
He’d never say those words aloud. He knew The New York Times would mock him. He wasn’t stupid, even if they thought he was. He wasn’t an intellectual, sure. Didn’t want to be. But he’d graduated from the University of Tennessee. He’d run his family’s malls, in Memphis and Nashville and Birmingham, until the time came to sell them. His family was Tennessee royalty, political and business. During the post-Depression boom, the Birmans built hospitals and apartment complexes and factories. Then they went to Washington and made sure the state got its fair share of federal money, maybe a little more.
If the Birmans were royalty, Paul’s branch of the family were the kings. His dad, Henry, had been the first Birman to reach the Senate, the real prize. Henry saw early that white Tennessee voters were tired of Democrats. He turned Republican, won five terms, then passed the seat to Paul. Good timing, because the family had just sold its malls for seven hundred seventy-five million dollars, cashing out at the peak of the pre-2008 real estate bubble. Paul took home two hundred ninety million. Enough money to sit around and do nothing for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to sit around and do nothing.
Everyone in the state knew his name. People liked him, his pretty wife, his cute kids. He was a natural retail politician, a handshaker. No secret to it, he liked people. He didn’t promise too much, just looked them in the eye, said he’d do his best. He looked the part, too: tall, blue-eyed, straight-backed, high-shouldered, and handsome. Birman Does Right by Tennessee. The only slogan he needed. He won the primary by twenty points and the general by thirty. He even took a quarter of the black vote, more than his father ever had.
In the Senate, Birman put up his hand for only one job, the Intelligence Committee. Most senators avoided the SSCI. It meant background checks and secrecy agreements. Members couldn’t disclose much of what they learned. And the committee didn’t have pork to dole. But Birman sensed it would give him a platform. He took the work seriously. Six years after Birman joined, the committee chairman lost his seat. The other members chose Birman to take his place.
As chairman, he had access to a surprising amount of information. He didn’t get the morning updates the President received in the famous Presidential Daily Brief. Nor was he given what the agencies called sources and methods, specific information about the CIA’s operatives or technical details about how the NSA gathered its electronic intelligence. But congressional committees could make the lives of officials at Langley and Fort Meade difficult. The agencies preferred to keep him happy. They would answer any reasonable question. What kind of cooperation are the French giving us in North Africa? How good is our human intelligence on the Chinese Politburo? Do we have electronic coverage of the Kremlin? How seriously should we take these hacks?
More than anything else, Birman wanted to know about the Muslims. In his heart, he couldn’t help thinking of them that way, a brown-skinned muddle that stretched across Africa and Asia. From Morocco to Indonesia, fifty countries he had no interest in visiting. More than a billion people, and they couldn’t decide whether they loved the United States or hated it. He kept the CIA and the NSA and the FBI’s Counterterror Division busy with questions. How many fully radicalized Muslims live in the United States? How many are actively plotting jihad? Are any under the command and control of the Islamic State?
The answers disappointed him. Mostly because they weren’t answers at all. The agencies actively monitored a couple thousand people. They had tens of thousands more in their databases. But they couldn’t tell Birman how many were serious threats and how many were just spouting off. They couldn’t tell him what drove a potential terrorist from anger to planning, from planning to action. Even in retrospect, for example, they couldn’t figure out what pushed Omar Mateen over the edge in Orlando.
“It’s a balance, Senator,” the FBI’s counterterror director said. “We can’t arrest everyone who doesn’t like the United States or gay nightclubs. People have the right to say nasty things in this country. Most of ’em have the right to bear arms, too.”
People tended to talk to him like he was an idiot. Mostly, he let them. “But Mateen, you were alerted about stuff he’d said, why not watch him?”
“We talked to him. We had to prioritize. Can’t watch everyone.”
Right, Birman wanted to say. Because there are too many of them. So you play Whack-A-Muslim. Hope you’re on the right ones. Hope the NSA scans the right words. Hope somebody calls the police when they hear the guy telling his friends, Don’t be downtown tomorrow. If all else fails, hope the gun jams, the bomb doesn’t blow, the homeless guy sees the pressure cooker and tells the cops. In other words, hope the enemy is incompetent.
When he’s not? San Bernardino. Orlando. More to come.
The math was simple, even if no one wanted to admit it. More Muslims in the United States meant more radical Muslims. More radical Muslims meant more terrorists. If the FBI couldn’t adequately track the Muslims who already lived here, what would it do with twice as many? Or five times?
Birman started to speak out. Obviously, the United States couldn’t deport American citizens or green card holders. But it ought to keep more Muslims from entering, he said. Hit pause. When the Washington gasbags said he was creating a “climate of intolerance” or “frightening law-abiding American Muslims,” he said, You know what? I don’t care. I want American Muslims to be a little frightened. So they’ll pick up the phone when they see something.
The first time he’d said those words was on Face the Nation. Afterward, he flew back to Tennessee on his private jet. The Birmans lived in a famous Nashville mansion, built after the Civil War but in plantation style. A big white portico that framed tall windows, twelve thousand square feet, two kitchens. It was the kind of house that had a name, the Henrietta.
When his chauffeured Escalade pulled into the driveway, he was surprised to see his father Henry’s prized Shelby Mustang there, a 1967 GT500, white with blue stripes. Henry was eighty-five now and couldn’t drive. But he still rode in the Shelby now and again, his nurse at the wheel. He lived a couple miles away, in the house where Paul had grown up. A mansion, too, though not as big as this one.
Henry waited in the sitting room. The name hardly did justice to the space, forty feet long, thirty wide. It had as its centerpiece a first edition of Gone with the Wind, signed by Margaret Mitchell. Even Birman found this level of Southern self-love silly. But his wife traced her Alabama ancestry back six generations. He joked that he’d barely convinced her to move to Nashville. She thought the city was too far north.
Henry nodded for him to sit, like the house belonged to father and not son. Birman did so without complaint. Henry had always been his greatest hero. Birman’s kids liked him fine. But he’d never deluded himself into thinking they revered him the way he revered his daddy.
“Paul.” Henry was dressed in powder blue nylon pants and a loose sweatshirt with a faded University of Tennessee logo. Like an old man. Even into his seventies, and even on the hottest summer days, Henry had never gone out without a perfectly knotted tie and a crisp white shirt. Birman’s heart broke a little.
A bottle of Wild Turkey sat on a spindly cherry side table between their chairs. Birman wasn’t sure why. Henry hardly drank anymore. Birman tried not to wince as Henry poured two glasses, the golden liquor splashing onto the table.
Suddenly he knew his father wasn’t just old but dying, that he wouldn’t see the end of the year.
“No fun being old,” Henry said. “One consolation: Seeing your sons grow up into men.” Birman’s younger brother Bobby lived in Los Angeles and made movies, sort of. His second marriage was ending. He still didn’t have any kids. “Half-men, in Bobby’s case.”
“He’ll get it together.”
“Don’t know about that. Can’t do much about it now.” Henry went silent, like he’d forgotten what he wanted to say next. Maybe he had.
“Didn’t come here to talk about Bobby, anyways.”
“The Shelby looks great.”
“Yes, it does . . . Paul, you believe all that stuff you were saying today?”
For a moment, Birman thought his dad had hallucinated an earlier conversation between them. Then he remembered Face the Nation. “On TV? Yes.”
“How we’ve got to make these Muslims behave? Even if it means treating them tough? You know, America’s always been a place people can come if they have trouble at home.”
For the first time, Birman wondered if he might be wrong. He didn’t care what the liberals said, but his dad was no liberal.
“These people aren’t like the others. A lot of ’em, anyway.”
“All right.” Henry Birman patted his son’s arm. “Then you keep saying it, boy. And don’t let anybody scare you when they get nasty.” He lifted his glass, somehow keeping it steady. “Raise your glass.”
“Sure you should be drinking, Dad?”
“Don’t be a ninny. We both know my time’s almost done.”
Paul wiped his face to hide the tears that had popped. “What are we drinking to, then?” Expecting: My grandkids or Tennessee or America . . .
“That Ford in the driveway. It’s yours now.”
Now Birman couldn’t hide his tears, they were a hurricane.
“Promise me you’ll take it to the White House. You’re gonna be president, Paul.”
The old man had always known how to make an exit. He died three weeks later.
Henry’s benediction meant so much to Birman that he never used it for political purposes, though he knew audiences would have loved the story.
Birman didn’t suffer much doubt. But on those rare occasions when he wondered if he’d taken the right path, he went out to his eight-car garage, nicer than most houses, and sat in the Shelby. He cranked the engine once a month, drove it down the driveway so the gas line wouldn’t seize. But he’d never driven it off the property. He didn’t tell anyone, not even Gloria, but he was waiting for Inauguration Day. He saw himself driving the Shelby up Pennsylvania Avenue, the big engine rumbling, the heater on against the cold January air, Secret Service agents walking on both sides.
He started to believe the old man wanted it, too, and from Heaven was helping guide him. The only possible explanation for his sudden string of triumphs.
Tonight’s speech had been on the calendar for months, an address to the annual convention of the National Federation of Independent Business, conveniently in Nashville this year. The federation was a powerful force in the Republican Party. Birman had planned to give his standard business speech on the hidden costs of regulation. He understood these men and women. Dry cleaners who shut down rather than deal with new environmental rules. Restaurant owners held up in discrimination lawsuits. Used-car dealers who had to fill out twenty pages of forms every time they wrote a note. They were just getting by. Guess what? The government didn’t help ’em a bit.
Then Dallas happened.
The NFIB had put most of its speakers at the Ryman Auditorium, which had almost twenty-four hundred seats. Even before the attacks, the federation had scheduled Birman for the Grand Ole Opry House, twice as large. Now it had moved him to the Bridgestone Arena, where the stars played when they came to town. It sat eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand people. Birman worried he’d be looking at an arena of empty seats, but the federation president told him not to worry. Our guys want to hear what you have to say.
True enough. When Birman stepped onstage that night, he didn’t see an empty seat. The crowd whooped for him, a deep, masculine sound, the roar of a spinning turbine. The lights dimmed, and a spotlight bathed him. As though he were a prophet come to bring the Word.
The crowd was restless. He waited for it to still. He’d had a speech ready, of course, a revved-up version of his standard. As he watched it unfurl on the teleprompter, he knew it wouldn’t do. Not tonight.
“They don’t stand for our values.” No introduction. No Hello, NFIB. What he had to say was too important. “And we’re not going to stand for them. Not anymore. Time to stop them.” The crowd rumbled, the applause building.
Birman spread his arms, waved them down. “No cheers. Not now. Not while Americans are dying.” The arena quieted then. The watchful restless quiet of an attack dog made to heel. “Safety is the government’s first duty. And it is failing!”
His voice rose now, the fury building, surprising him with its power. “We need to show these jihadis they will have no safe havens, not abroad and not at home. Our politicians tell us, Don’t overreact. Don’t be angry. I’m tired of being told not to be angry. I am angry. And our President, he’s not acting. We have to change that. I am ready to encourage my party to pass a war resolution. But all the resolutions in the world won’t matter unless the President listens.”
He paused, felt the crowd waiting with him, straining. Eighteen thousand people, desperate to be let off the leash. “It’s time for them to understand. Not abroad. And not at home.” And more loudly. “Not at home.” Birman had never felt so connected to anything, not even making love to his wife. He raised his hands. “Not at home. Not—at—”
Until the voices rose and carried him away.
Afterward, he had too much electricity in his veins to go straight back to the mansion. He headed to his office. Inevitably, Birman occupied the top floor of the AT&T Building, the tallest tower in all of Tennessee. The Cumberland River sparkled in the night below him. The city’s lights stretched into the hills.
He called Gloria to tell her he’d see her by midnight. “Gotta catch up on email.”
“Paul? You were great tonight. I love you.”
“Love you, too.” He sat back on his recliner and poured himself a small glass of Wild Turkey, just a taste, and watched his speech. He was halfway through when a knock rattled his office door.
His cousin Eric. Birman’s bodyguard would have stopped anyone else. Birman paused the video. “Come on in.”
Eric Birman stepped inside. Eric was four inches shorter, and a hundreth as rich, as Paul. He’d served in the Special Forces most of his adult life, quitting a few years before as a full bird colonel. He still had a soldier’s bearing, ramrod straight and trim. Now he served as Birman’s chief of staff and advisor on national security issues. An unusual arrangement, but Birman wanted someone he trusted. Eric was good on the details, the stuff that Birman hated. Truth, he was closer to Eric than his brother, Bobby. He saw Bobby only once or twice a year. He talked to Eric a dozen times a day.
“Jimmy tell you I was here?” Jimmy Sanders, Birman’s bodyguard, a retired New York City cop who’d worked on the Joint Terrorism Task Force for a decade. He was still connected to the NYPD and FBI. He was also barely forty and drawing a full pension. No matter. Wasn’t Birman’s money.
“No one told me. I know you’re watching yourself. Better than porn.”
“You watch that stuff?”
“You don’t?” Eric poured himself a glass of whiskey. “Guess you don’t need to. You got this.”
Birman started the video again. They watched in silence until the moment the crowd began to roar.
“I go too far?”
“I don’t think so. You owned those folks tonight. They would have elected you Emperor of the Universe.” Eric reached for a legal pad and a pencil. Birman felt his spirits sag. Whenever Eric grabbed the pad, playtime was over.
“Not at home. How’d you find that? Even better than Hit pause. Because it’s the attacks and the attackers, right? Send them home would be too obvious. This way, everybody knows but you don’t say it.”
“I guess.” In truth, Birman hadn’t thought through what he meant. He’d just known not at home would work.
“You guess.” A superior little smile snuck onto Eric’s face for just half a second before he batted it down. “People are going to ask you tomorrow what it means. And we’re going to need a coherent answer. Maybe even a policy. Case you forgot, you even threw in the war resolution.”
Eric thought he was the brains? Fine. Let him work out the details. “You handle it.” Birman pushed himself up. Gloria always rewarded him on these nights. He saluted Eric, made for the door.
“Paul—”
“I trust you, cousin. Let me know what I’m thinking in the morning.”