Badge of Evil Read Free Page A

suspects. He’d passed the information to the head of the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau and they were off to the races. That’s how this two-month investigation, which was about to reach its climax, got started. No one was sure how Brock had gotten the information, but it didn’t seem to matter. Good intel was good intel.
    With everyone in place, Brock and Pennetta walked briskly together to the scene. They were the entire command structure for the operation. In a typically ballsy maneuver, Brock had shut out the Feds. He’d never notified the Joint Terrorism Task Force—an uneasy alliance of cops and FBI agents—when they started surveillance of the suspected terror cell. And he’d kept a tight lid on while they were planning the operation as well. He had no interest in sharing any credit with another agency.
    To prevent information about the raid from getting out now—and attracting half the cops in the city—nobody used the police radio. Everyone was communicating with point-to-point Nextel walkie-talkies. They were also intrinsically safe, which meant they gave off no spark that could, in a small space like the apartment they were about to hit, detonate explosives.
    After walking almost an entire block in silence, Brock finally spoke. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong,” he said as they headed toward Fourth Avenue. “I’m ready.”
    â€œYou have no idea what I’m thinking,” Pennetta said as they turned onto Fourth Avenue, which looked like an armed camp. “Two things are lighting up the nerve endings in my head—getting the job done and getting my men out safely. I wasn’t worried about you screwing up; you’re not even on the radar screen. That said, with all due respect, sir , this is still the dumbest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen anyone in this department do. With all the shit that’s being thrown at us, the last thing this department needs, this city needs, is another incident for the left-wing cop bashers to grab on to.”
    Arrogant, self-righteous prick , Brock thought. Fuck you. This is my department, not yours. He was so angry now it was an actual physical sensation, as real as stomach cramps or a bad headache. He wanted to let it out, to explode, but he knew he couldn’t, not now. Neither man said anything else, and in a few moments they were in front of the target.
    It was a plain, unremarkable white-brick building, just like hundreds of others built in Brooklyn and Queens after World War II. There were double glass doors that led to a small alcove with mailboxes and doorbells on one wall. Through another set of glass doors were a long hallway, an elevator, and a staircase. The ground floor once had several apartments and a large restaurant with a separate entrance. All of that space was now occupied by al-Noor Mosque.
    The mosque had been around for about ten years and had grown so steadily that it had expanded twice, each time taking over adjacent storefronts and knocking down the walls. But even with the additional space, accommodating the surging Muslim community in Bay Ridge was difficult. Al-Noor served as a community center and offered day care, a K–12 school, and adult classes on the Koran.
    Politics at the mosque mostly revolved around local issues. There were passionate discussions, of course, about the problems facing Muslims in various parts of the world, but al-Noor was not known as a hothouse for radical Islam. On Friday afternoons, the focus was on handling the crowds, not, as it was at some of the city’s other mosques, on the imam delivering a fiery postprayer diatribe.
    Loudspeakers had to be placed out on the street so that the hundreds of Muslim men who couldn’t get inside to pray—and who filled Fourth Avenue, kneeling and touching their foreheads to the ground—could participate in the service. This was the mosque where the five suspects