"It's a football game."

"It's America. It's an expression of our freedom. Our patriotism. Our prosperity. Our place in the world."

Perhaps he was right. The Super Bowl often seemed to be about everything except the game. A hundred thousand people watching in the stadium, a billion more on television around the world, advertisements that sold for $150,000 per second of airtime, Beyonce or Springsteen as the halftime entertainment-the Super Bowl had transcended football. It was a uniquely American cultural event.

"The detention hearing Friday will answer that question."

"I need an answer now. And the answer needs to be yes."

"What evidence is there that he's a danger to the community?"

"I'm going to tell you."

"When?"

"Right now." He leaned forward slightly. "He's a danger to the community. I give you my word."

"That's your evidence? Mr. McReynolds-"

"Call me Mac."

"-the Constitution requires more than your word, even if you are the AG."

The AG leaned back and blew out a breath. He had not gotten the answer he wanted. He took another toffee.

"May I call you Scott?"

"In here. Not out there."

"Scott, you're not that nave."

"Maybe I am."

"Maybe you want to be. Innocence is for the innocent, Scott. For children, not grownups. Kids can be blissfully ignorant of the real world around them-my grandkids believe in Santa Claus, and they should-but we can't. We can't afford to be ignorant of the real world. Because when we are, bad guys fly planes into skyscrapers. And people die. Men, women, and children. Innocence kills, Scott."

"What if Mustafa is innocent?"

"What if he's not? What are you going to do Super Bowl Sunday if that stadium comes down?"

"Mr. McReynolds ... Mac ... a grand jury indicted Mustafa for conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Certainly you have sufficient evidence that he's a danger to the community."

The AG sighed. "Off the record?"

Scott glanced over at Ms. Meyers on the couch. Her head was down; she was shuffling through the indictment like a confused student engaged in last minute cramming before a final exam. She was clueless and oblivious.

Scott nodded at the AG.

The AG leaned forward again; this time he motioned Scott forward as well. The two men's heads almost met over the desk, close enough that Scott could smell the toffee on his breath. The AG whispered.

"We got nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing?"

Scott was also whispering.

"I mean, we got nothing. No evidence at all."

"How'd you get the grand jury to indict? Without evidence, there's no probable cause. Without probable cause, there's no indictment."

The AG shrugged. "What grand jury wants to no-bill the next nine-eleven hijackers?"

"Who told the grand jury that Mustafa and his co-defendants were the next nine-eleven hijackers?"

"I did."

The two lawyers sat back. Scott considered the legal and ethical implications of an alleged terrorist sitting in federal detention on his order despite the allegations against him being supported by no evidence whatsoever, and of the United States Attorney General admitting to the presiding judge that an indictment against an American citizen was without any factual basis whatsoever. His armpits felt damp. He grabbed a toffee.

"You searched his home and mosque?"

The AG nodded. "Nothing."

The FBI agent named Beckeman snorted. "You should see his home. Preston Hollow, got six bedrooms and six bathrooms, big-ass pool and guest house out back. Who needs a home like that?"

Scott bit down on the toffee and turned back to the AG. "Did you tap his phone?"

"Also nothing."

"No money transfers?"

"Nope."

"No incriminating emails or texts?"

"Nope."

"I read that ISIS communicates with their people over the Internet, Twitter and Facebook."

"They do. They send out press releases on Twitter, but they plot attacks on the 'dark Net,' the part of the Internet you can't google. That's where the bad guys live-drug traffickers, human traffickers, pedophiles, and Islamic terrorists. And they use software that routes their messages around the world before the actual destination to hide their locations, and end-to-end encryption to evade NSA eavesdropping. Mustafa might be communicating with ISIS daily."

"Or he might not be."

"That's correct. We think he is, but we can't prove he is. Not in a court of law. Not yet."

"A bunch of terrorists in the desert of Syria are more sophisticated with technology than the FBI?"

"No. But ISIS is the richest terrorist organization in the history of the world. We estimate their cash holdings at just under a billion dollars. That kind of money hires the best geeks in the world."

"Where do they get their money?"

"Ransom, black-market oil, sale of looted antiquities, donations from our friends in Saudi Arabia."

Now Scott blew out a breath. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Cooperate."

"With the prosecution? I thought a federal judge is supposed to protect individual rights and uphold the Constitution?"

"Not since nine-eleven. Everything changed the moment those planes hit those towers. When we saw Americans jumping out of windows to their deaths, when we saw those buildings come down, the world changed. We changed. Before that day, we worried about whack jobs like Koresh in Waco, and our job was to investigate crimes after the fact. After that day, our number one law enforcement priority has been Islamic terrorism-and there is no number two. Our job now is to prevent terrorist attacks in America. We've had to change our tactics since nine-eleven, and even more so since ISIS called for lone wolf attacks in the West. We can no longer wait for a suspect to act; we have to act before they act. We investigate threats, not crimes. Intentions, not actions. Prevention, not reaction, is our job. We have to kill them before they kill us."

He aimed a thumb at Agent Beckeman by the window.

"Our Joint Terrorism Task Forces run by guys like Beckeman have proven highly successful. Highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT teams, and other specialists from all our law enforcement and intelligence agencies working in cooperation to prevent terrorist attacks."

"That sounds like a recruiting commercial."

The AG smiled. "It is. I wrote that. The Patriot Act gave us the powers we need to negate these threats-we can search emails and capture phone conversations, we can conduct sneak-and-peak searches of homes and businesses-"

A sneak-and-peak search warrant allowed the government to conduct the search without first informing the suspect.

"-and we can employ roving wiretaps so they can't evade our surveillance with cell phones."

"What else do you need?"

"Cooperative judges."

"You mean judges looking the other way."

"I mean judges looking at terrorists like Mustafa the right way."

"Even if he's innocent of the charges?"

The AG chuckled. "Innocent? No, no, Scott, innocence is not the issue. Proof is. He's guilty, we just have to prove it. And we will."

"When?"

"At trial."

"But you want me to keep him in that jail cell until then?"

"No. Just until after the Super Bowl."

"You have no evidence of his involvement in this plot, and thus no evidence that he's a danger to the community, but you want me to detain him anyway?"

"Yes."

"You got the grand jury to find probable cause where none exists to indict, now you want me to detain him on the basis of that faulty indictment?"

"I want you to protect the American people."

"This isn't Guantanamo Bay."

"It should be, at least for guys like Mustafa," Agent Beckeman said. "Some of the Muslims the president released from Guantanamo, they're the guys beheading Americans on those ISIS videos."

"The Constitution says we're not supposed to imprison people without evidence," Scott said.

"And assholes for Allah aren't supposed to fly planes into fucking office buildings!"

The AG gave the agent a disapproving glance then spoke calmly to Scott.

"Scott, in my job-protecting the American homeland-I have to take a broader view of criminal justice when it comes to terrorism. With your run-of-the-mill criminals-murderers, drug lords, and the like-the Constitution works just fine. The defendant commits the crime; we indict him, arrest him, and prove him guilty of that particular crime. His priors are irrelevant. The fact that he may have murdered two other people before doesn't mean he murdered this victim. His priors are relevant only in sentencing once he's been found guilty. Like O.J. He got off on the double murder charge, but ten years later we nabbed him for armed robbery. The judge threw the book at him because we all know he killed those two people ten years before. He'll die in prison now."

"But O.J. was found guilty of the second offense, the offense for which he was sentenced. That's different than convicting someone of a crime they didn't commit even if they did commit prior crimes."

"Yes, it is. But what if we could? For example, what if we suspect a drug kingpin of murder, but we can't prove it. But we know he's killed a number of other people and he will kill again. If we can convict him on a murder he might not have committed, should we do it and put him in prison or let him go? Should we wait till he kills again or should we take him off the streets and prevent future killings?"

"The Founding Fathers answered that question when they wrote the Constitution."

"They did indeed. But back then, there weren't Islamic terrorists who killed thousands of people at a time. So don't we have to look at the Constitution differently when it comes to terrorism? I think we do. I call it 'cumulative justice.' I look at a terrorist's entire body of work, not just the plot he's charged with. Scott, what if we could have convicted Osama bin Laden before nine-eleven and put him in prison?"

"Three thousand lives would have been saved."

"Exactly. And all those lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan chasing the son of a bitch. But what if we had charged him with a crime of terrorism of which he was innocent, or at least we couldn't prove his guilt?"

"Then he wouldn't have been convicted."

The AG smiled. "You are nave. Of course he would've been convicted in an American court by American jurors who are terrified of terrorism in America. He was a bad guy before nine-eleven, we knew that. We just couldn't take him off the streets since he was in Afghanistan. But Mustafa is right here in Dallas. He's downstairs in a jail cell. We took him off the streets before he could commit his act of terrorism-not after the fact, but before the fact. And with the fear of terrorism, a jury will convict him and sentence him to life in prison for this plot."

"But you have no evidence of his guilt."

"Doesn't matter. Even if he didn't do this plot-trust me, he did-he's done other bad things or he's going to do other bad things, so let's take him off the streets now while we can. Before he can. Let's prevent the crime. Let's convict him and put him in prison before he kills innocent people."

"You know, like Minority Report without the Pre-Cogs," Beckeman said.

Scott turned to the FBI agent. "Without the what?"

"Beckeman's a big movie buff," the AG said.

"Only thing I know better than movies is Islamic jihadists," Beckeman said.

Scott turned back to the AG. "How do you know Mustafa wants to kill people?"

"He's been on our radar for years and on YouTube for longer," the AG said. "He's put out hundreds of videos and done hundreds of interviews. Whenever a national news outlet needs a"-the AG fashioned quotation marks with his fingers-" 'radical Muslim cleric' to spew jihadist bullshit, they call him. He's charismatic, articulate, and smart-he never takes the bait. He loves the attention. We figured he was all talk, like Republicans saying on Fox News they want to cut the size of the federal government. But six months ago, we received an anonymous tip to our hotline alerting us to this Haddad boy and the plot to blow up the stadium. We put him under round-the-clock surveillance. He was posing as an architectural student at the University of Texas at Arlington. Perfect cover. His apartment faced the stadium. The manager said he specifically requested that view, like the nine-eleven hijackers getting an apartment with a view of the World Trade Center. Haddad led us to Mustafa. Prayed at his mosque. All his boys are hardcore Islamic radicals. We recovered ISIS videotapes and magazines and their guidebook to terror."

The AG held out an open hand to the Assistant AG, who slapped a book into his hand like a nurse slapping a scalpel into a surgeon's hand. The AG dropped the book on the desk in front of Scott. He put on his glasses and read the title: The Management of Savagery. The AG shook his head.

"We read Fifty Shades of Grey to learn how to have better sex through bondage. These people read books to learn how to behead infidels for maximum shock value." He turned his palms up. "How will we ever live in peace with savages?"

The AG gazed out the window; his expression was that of a man who had lost all understanding of the world outside the window. After a moment, his eyes returned to the book. He picked it up and stared at it.