"Your Honor, in 1986, President Reagan and the Congress granted amnesty to the three million Mexicans residing illegally in America. They deserved a path to citizenship, Reagan said. But, that was it. There would be no more amnesty. The border would be locked down. Democrats hailed the move, assured that the new citizens would vote Democrat. Republicans warned that granting amnesty to illegal immigrants would only encourage more illegal immigration, that in twenty years there would be ten million Mexicans residing in the U.S. illegally. The Democrats were right; the Republicans were wrong. Today, twelve million Mexicans reside in America illegally. And get this-the Supreme Court said that under the Constitution illegal immigrants are entitled to state benefits such as education and health care even though they intentionally violated our laws in entering the U.S." He shook his head. "Is this a great country or what?"

"Mr. Thomas, this is a court of law, not the Sunday morning political talk shows. Please refrain from editorializing."

"My apologies, Your Honor."

"So, your contention is that the president must deport every Mexican residing here illegally?"

"Yes, sir. The immigration law says 'shall be removed,' not 'may be removed.' "

"What if, as the government contends, there's simply not enough manpower or money to do so?"

"The federal government's budget is four trillion dollars. The Department of Homeland Security gets sixty billion. There's enough money. But that's what they always say. 'We don't have the money.' If they don't have the money to enforce the immigration laws, then why does the president's executive order grant legal status to twelve million illegal immigrants and all the government benefits that come with legal status? Those people will be entitled to social security numbers, work permits, health care, education, welfare, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and even earned income tax credits, which as everyone knows, is just a welfare payment since you can get a tax refund even if you never paid taxes. That credit alone will cost one hundred fifty billion dollars for those immigrants. Every year. Two and a half times Homeland Security's budget. Deporting them would cost less and only once. This is all about politics, and the president wants the states to pay for his politics so he can win in November. Federal mandates to the states come without federal funds. They make the rules but don't provide the money."

"We don't have the money," Mr. Daniels said.

"Then don't make the rules," Mr. Thomas said. "And why the hell is the president letting in those Syrian refugees after Paris?"

Mr. Daniels shrugged.

"We're not taking them," Mr. Thomas said.

"You have to."

"The hell we do. States have rights, too."

Mr. Daniels laughed. "Since when?"

"Gentlemen, let's stay on topic," Scott said.

"The president is playing politics," Mr. Thomas said. " 'I'll get the Muslim vote, so let's admit sixty-five thousand Muslims even if some want to kill Americans. I'll get the Hispanic vote, so let's not deport twelve million illegal Mexicans.' But he tells us we've got to pay for his politics. Texas has to pay billions each year for them. Five hundred thousand illegal immigrants cross the border each year and stay here because the president promises them free-free education, free health care, free homes, free food, free Internet, free everything. Who wouldn't come?"

"That's the law," Mr. Daniels said.

"We're going to change the law."

"How? The president must sign any law, and there'll never be another Republican in the White House. The demographics have turned on you."

"And that's why you want twelve million illegal Mexicans to be given the right to vote-because they'll vote for you. That's why the president doesn't want to deport them."

"And Republicans do? You control both houses of Congress. Why don't you guys pass an e-verify law that requires every employer in America to verify their workers' legal status? And fines the hell out of them if they don't? Take away the jobs, Mexicans will self deport. They'll go home. But the ugly truth is, Republican businessmen want illegal Mexicans here for the cheap labor, they just don't want them to vote. You can't have it both ways."

"All right, gentlemen, let's focus on the law. Mr. Thomas, doesn't the president have prosecutorial discretion?"

"He does. But the executive order goes beyond prosecutorial discretion. It changes the law, as the president himself said in his official press conference announcing the executive order. He said, and I quote: 'I just took action to change the law.' "

"He misspoke," Mr. Daniels said.

"He misspoke the truth," Mr. Thomas said. "Congress clearly stated in the immigration law that persons residing in the U.S. shall be deported. The president's executive order clearly states that such persons shall not be deported. The law denies legal status to persons residing illegally in the U.S. The executive order grants legal status to them. The law states that such persons are not entitled to government benefits. The executive order states that they are. The president may exercise prosecutorial discretion. He may not change the law. But that is exactly what the executive order does. What the president publicly said he did. Change the law. The president issued the executive order like a child throwing a temper tantrum. He didn't get what he wanted from Congress so he tried to change the law himself."

"How do we decide when he's crossed the line from exercising prosecutorial discretion to legislating the law?"

"We don't, Your Honor. You do. You decide. You're the judge."

And so it was. When a society no longer shares common values, beliefs, traditions, languages, dreams-when society is simply a collection of strangers fighting for themselves, when "we the people" becomes "me, myself, and I"-there is friction. They rub each other the wrong way. They disagree. Your way or my way but never our way. But which way? They demand that judges decide. To referee their lives. To decide right or wrong, legal or illegal, winners and losers. Someone must win, someone must lose, and someone must decide. In America, that someone is a judge.

"Let us in."

Jorge Romero released the intercom button. A voice came across.

"Who is it?"

"Jorge. With a special delivery from Hector."

The overhead door to the warehouse lifted. Manny drove the pickup truck inside, and Jorge walked alongside. They had driven straight through the night. Jorge could not sleep; consequently, he was very tired when they arrived in Dallas eight hours later. They had texted the Arabs, but they refused to meet during the day. So Jorge and Manny had gotten food and a room. It was now seven-thirty that night.

The door shut behind them. It was a piece-of-shit warehouse located in a strip of piece-of-shit warehouses. But it was sizeable, large enough for an eighteen-wheeler. And in fact, parked in one corner was a ten-wheel truck without the eight-wheel trailer. It was a Peterbilt, a big rig, black with a massive chrome grill and low front panel that looked like it could plow snow. The cab sat high off the ground; a big two-step running board was fixed below the driver's door. Steel plates leaned against the side of the truck; next to the truck was welding equipment.

Which made Jorge wonder.

"Place stinks," Manny said through the open window.

It smelled like a meth lab. In another corner stood a forklift and many barrels of the kind crude oil was transported in marked "FERTILIZER" and "AMMONIUM NITRATE." Drums with the X over a skull and "DANGER" and "FLAMMABLE" stamped on the side occupied the same corner. Flammable chemicals and fertilizer. He didn't figure Arabs for farmers. His padre had been a farmer in the Sierra Madre; some days-days like this one-Jorge Romero wished he had followed in his father's poor footsteps.

No, he figured the Arabs were building a bomb to kill the gringos. But being in the drug business, Jorge knew better than to ask the nature of a man's business. Still, he hated the fucking Arabs. So perhaps when he had crossed the Rio Grande back into Mexico, he would tip off the FBI about the contents of this warehouse.

Two young men appeared. One tall, wearing yellow sneakers, and one short, holding a large suitcase. The Arabs. Jorge was not so keen to deal with Arabs; he did not trust them. But he did not question el jefe. He only followed orders.

"We have your shipment."

"Excellent," the taller Arab said. "Unload it."

As if he were el jefe barking orders.

"Payment first," Jorge said.

The taller Arab gave him a cold look. "I would like to see what I have bought first."

Jorge was tired from the long drive up from the border. He wanted to collect the money and find a whore for the night. He nodded.

"S.".

Jorge and Manny unloaded the containers and placed them on the concrete floor. The taller Arab counted the containers.

"There are supposed to be twelve."

"My man, Pedro, he fell at the river. One container punctured on a rock."

"Then I owe you only one-point-one million."

"That shit killed Pedro and another man. Pay me in full, and we will call it even."

Jorge and the Arab again exchanged cold looks. This time the Arab relented.

"Fine. I will pay you in full." He turned to the other Arab. "Little brother, bring the case."

The other Arab stepped forward with the suitcase and placed it on the floor. He squatted and unlocked the case then opened the top. He rotated the case so Jorge could see inside. Manny stepped next to Jorge and whistled.

One-point-two million U.S. dollars.

Jorge Romero knew better than to look away from a customer. But he was tired and he was hungry and his thoughts were on a woman, a whore he would buy for the night with his cut of the cash. He knew he had made a grave error when his eyes came up from the cash to see the tall Arab holding a gun on them.

"What the hell is this?" he said.

"Payment in full."

The Arab shot Jorge in the leg. The other Arab screamed with fright; Jorge fell to the floor. He had been shot before but it always hurt like hell. The Arab then shot Manny in the leg; he also went down.

"Abdul, what are you doing?" the short Arab said.

"If you kill us," Jorge said, "Hector will send many sicarios north to kill you."

"Yes," the Arab named Abdul said, "but we will be in heaven with our father by the time they arrive."

He turned to the shorter Arab. "The masks."

The shorter Arab walked away. Fucking Arabs. He wanted very much to kill them, but fate had turned against Jorge Romero that day. He had made a grave error, and now he would pay with his life. Hector had also made a grave error, to trust the Arabs. A people who would strap a bomb to their own children and send them out to die, those are not people one should trust. Killing was man's work, not the work for the children of God.

Jorge made the sign of the cross.

Beckeman sat in front of the television drinking a beer and watching Saving Private Ryan. He watched a lot of movies. Action. Adventure. Thrillers. Even dramas now and then. But never romantic comedies. There was nothing funny about romance.

He checked his watch: 8:00 P.M. Thirty-seven hours until the detention hearing, and they had found no evidence against Mustafa. It was like having to prove that Satan was bad.

Look the hell around!

He stopped the DVD and changed the channel to Fox News. On the screen he saw Attorney General J. Hamilton McReynolds III sitting on the front row with the other cabinet secretaries, the Supreme Court justices, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all gazing admiringly at the president and commander in chief.

"We won!"

The Constitution requires that the president "from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union." So that night the president stood at the podium in the chamber of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., doing what every president since George Washington had done: inform the Congress of the State of the Union. George's speech in 1790 was the shortest on record, only 1,089 words. That was George. Bill Clinton's speech in 1995 was the longest, 9,190 words. That was Bill. Thomas Jefferson sent written messages to the Congress. That was Tom. President Truman gave the first televised State of the Union address in 1947; and ever since, the annual speech to a joint session of Congress and the nation had become high political drama in America. The president offered his State of the Union, telling the people why he had done a standup job leading the country over the past year; the opposing party then gave a response telling the people why the president was full of shit. Politics in America.

"We defeated the terrorists who wanted to destroy our Super Bowl-our way of life! By God, that won't happen on my watch!"

Mac stood and applauded the president, as did every member of Congress on both sides of the aisle-Democrats sat on one side of the main aisle, Republicans on the other. The president was a Democrat, but Republicans knew the American people wanted the parties united in the war on terror. They wanted to be safe, at least in America. They didn't want the Democrats and the Republicans fighting each other; they wanted them fighting the terrorists. Both parties understood that sentiment. So the war on terror transcended politics. The president was twice as hard-ass as George W.; being Democrat gave him a free pass with the liberal press. He had increased drone strikes by 900 percent; he had killed more Muslims with drones than Bush had ever dreamed of killing. Guantanamo Bay was still hosting Islamic terrorists. Osama was dead, killed by American soldiers in Pakistan. As the president had so famously said, "We have the right to kill anyone anywhere anytime."

You've got to love him.

"Most presidents won't admit to their mistakes. I will. I made a mistake with Guantanamo. I campaigned on closing the camp. I thought it was wrong to detain human beings without due process. It is. But after taking office and learning who the prisoners are, what they did and what they want to do-simply put, kill Americans until the day they die-I realized two things: one, they are not human beings. Human beings have consciences. They don't. They are evil beings. Human bodies possessed by evil. Pure evil. And two, we could not close Guantanamo. We can't send them to hell where they belong, so the next best thing is Guantanamo Bay. I authorized the release of several prisoners who are now commanders in the ISIL forces. We had them and let them go and now we must fight them again. That was my bad."

Mac sighed. ISIS-the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-or ISIL-the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant? The media went with ISIS, the president with ISIL, for reasons that escaped Mac. Of course, the conspiracy theorists had their own take on the matter: the Levant comprises a larger area in the Middle East, including Israel; so, when the president says ISIL, he (a closet Muslim) is telling Muslims in the Middle East that he secretly does not recognize Israel as a sovereign nation but instead as a territory belonging to ISIL. Watch too much Fox News and that's what happens to your mind.

"In 2004, we had the current leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, in custody at Camp Bucca in Iraq. In 2009, we released him as not constituting a threat. Also my bad. Now he is the so-called Caliph Ibrahim. He's responsible for tens of thousands of innocent deaths, for hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions of civilians, for mass executions of Christians, for the use of sarin in Syria, and for thousands of women and girls being held as sex slaves. He personally and repeatedly raped the American girl they held as a hostage, Kayla Mueller, before her death. He said he owned her. Owned her. An American girl. Her abuse, her death, haunts me. And it will forever. I did not comprehend the evilness of the people we're fighting. I do now."

The chamber was deathly silent. And then the president did something Mac had never seen him do: he abandoned the teleprompter. He strayed from the prepared text of his speech. He spoke from the heart, an organ Mac had thought did not inhabit his body.

"To al Baghdadi, I say this: You say you're a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. You're not. You're a direct descendant of Satan. You are the devil incarnate. To do what you did to that sweet child in the name of God, that is the work of Satan. That is evil. You are evil. And I make a solemn oath-I will send you to hell where you belong. So look to the sky, Abu, because one day very soon, a drone missile with your name on it is going to give you a one-way ride to hell. As president of the United States of America, I guaran-damn-tee it!"

Mac exploded from his seat and clapped so hard his hands hurt. The entire chamber was deafening with applause and cheers and shouts of support. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He cried for little Kayla. He cried because after seventy-two years of life, he had finally witnessed an American president standing up to the evil in the world. Standing up for the innocent like Kayla. Throwing reelection concerns out the window and being the president of the United States of America. Being the leader of the free world. He had never felt so proud in his life.

On most issues of the day, Beckeman disagreed with the president. But he stood now, alone in his living room, and saluted his commander in chief.

Mac was the last person in the chamber to take his seat. The ovation had lasted ten minutes, maybe longer. There wasn't a dry eye in the place. And that said something, to get jaundiced senators and members of Congress to cry over anything except a reelection defeat. The president spoke again.

"Now we have Omar al Mustafa in custody. Not in Guantanamo. Not in Iraq. But in Dallas. I will not make the same mistake three times. I've learned my lesson in dealing with terrorists-when you have them in custody, keep them in custody. And that's exactly where he will remain."

The members again applauded. The president raised a hand to quiet them.

"We won, this time. But we have to win every time. They don't. They just have to win once. Once a year. Once a decade. Once a lifetime. We had the tragic attack in California, an attack inspired by ISIL but not directed by ISIL. There has not been a major coordinated terrorist attack on the homeland since nine-eleven-and there won't be on my watch. That is my solemn pledge to the American people. But to fulfill that pledge, we need more funding for the FBI and Homeland Security. So we will never again be attacked here at home."

That was a basic rule of politics: never let a good crisis go to waste. Seek more tax money. And when it came to protecting the homeland from terrorism, the people would pay. They would pay dearly to be safe in their homes and offices and sports stadiums.

"In other matters of state ..."

The president moved on to the boring part of the speech-Mac had been given an advance copy to vet-so Mac's thoughts returned to Dallas. Beckeman had reported in: they had uncovered no evidence against Mustafa. It was now up to the judge. The detention hearing would be held Friday, and the judge would have to decide by Monday. Judicial independence was usually a good thing, but there were exceptions.

"... They are pursuing the American Dream, even if they are Mexicans. My executive order will keep families together, and that is what America is all about-families."

Beckeman didn't have a family, Mexican or otherwise. So he sat alone in front of the television. He had resigned himself to a life alone; it was the job. He was good at it, and it needed to be done. It had to be done.

Looking at the president standing before Congress, he thought of the men who had created this country. They had put it all on the line to create America. The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence summed up what freedom was all about: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Freedom wasn't free. It required sacrifice. It required a fight. Fifty-six men signed the Declaration, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Samuel and John Adams. But not George Washington. He commanded the Revolutionary Army and was defending Manhattan Island against the British that day. He was a soldier, and he was doing what a soldier does: fighting for freedom. Putting his life on the line for America. Beckeman wasn't George Washington, but he was a soldier. He was fighting for freedom. He was putting his life on the line for America.

Some things are worth dying for.

The shorter Arab returned with two gas masks. The Arabs placed them over their heads. Then the Arab named Abdul shot the container nearest Jorge and Manny. Clear liquid oozed out of the hole. Jorge did not smell or taste anything. But he had seen Ricardo's and Pedro's dead bodies at the river. He knew something bad would soon happen. Thirty seconds later, it did. Jorge's chest suddenly clamped down on his lungs, and he knew he would never wear another pair of cowboy boots handmade by Juan Castillo.