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Dr. George Huang leaned back in his chair, stretched and tried, with only limited success, to stifle a yawn. Captain Cragen had called him in around 10 the night before to work up a profile on a serial rapist who was active in the area. The last time he’d looked at the clock it had been 3:30 in the morning. The hustle and bustle in the squad room downstairs seemed to have picked up appreciably, and the smell of fresh coffee wafting into his office indicated that Detective Munch, who ostensibly worked days, had started his shift. He checked the clock again. It was 8:30 a.m. He had a few final touches to add to the profile before presenting it to the SVU detectives at 9, but first, being a man of neat and orderly habits, he turned the page on his desk calendar. The brand new day just starting downstairs in the 16th Precinct was September 11. Huang typed in the final paragraph. While he proofed the document and made small corrections here and there, the crackling sounds of the radios the uniformed officers wore on their shoulders seemed to increase. As he sent the file to the printer, he heard Munch exclaim, “What the hell?” He gathered up his papers as the printer ceased its whine. A quick look at the clock told him it was 8:55. He liked to be on time. As he descended the stairs to the squad room, he heard Detective Elliot Stabler telling his partner, Detective Olivia Benson, and Munch, “It’s true. There’s been an accident. An airliner has crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. They think it must have developed mechanical problems after takeoff and was in the process of turning back to land. It didn’t make it.” Huang would have liked to have heard more, to prepare himself for what was likely to be a difficult day, but it was protocol for him to discuss any profile he developed with Cragen before releasing it to the SVU detectives. He knocked politely on Cragen’s office door before entering. He and the captain exchanged brief pleasantries. He began to describe the likely characteristics of the perpetrator for whom the detectives would be searching. In the midst of his dissertation, the voice of Detective Fin Tutuola could be heard through the closed door. “Son of a bitch! It’s happened again.” “Pardon me, Doctor.” Cragen rose from behind his desk and strode out into the squad room. “Would someone mind telling me what’s going on out here?” he asked in his most no-nonsense tone. “At around quarter ’til, dispatch reported that an airliner had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Dispatch is now saying that a second jet hit the South Tower around 9,” Stabler explained. “Once could be an accident, mechanical problems like they said, but not twice. We’re under attack, Captain,” Munch added. For once, no one teased Munch about being their resident conspiracy theorist. “What I wanna know, Doc, is what kind of sick bastard flies a plane full of people into a building full of people on purpose,” Tutuola growled. “The doctor can give that lecture when this is over. Right now, The Brass is probably about to call a Plan 3 if they haven’t already. You know what you’re supposed to do, people, so I suggest you get out there and do it.” After the detectives filed out, Cragen turned back to Huang. “If Munch is right, then I suspect the Bureau will be taking you back. They’ll need all the help then can get to find and interrogate the people who planned this and to prevent others from doing something similar.” “I suppose so, yes,” Huang said slowly. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain, there are some things I need to finish before I’m reassigned.” He was half-way up the stairs to his office when he looked up and said, “You know, if this is a terrorist attack, they’re not crazy, Captain. Not in the usual sense of the word. It would make it so much easier if that were the case.” “Most likely, they have been carefully recruited, indoctrinated and trained, probably by somewhat who has a rather warped view of their religion. They see themselves as doing what is necessary for their people. They believe they are heroes and will be rewarded in the afterlife. They do not see themselves as suicides and thus don’t fit the profile of a typical suicide; that is, depressed, hopeless and helpless with low self-esteem. Also, they’re as likely to come from wealthy families as from impoverished ones.” Cragen sighed. “Wonderful,” was all he said as he headed back into his office to answer a ringing phone. The next few days passed in a blur. Huang’s services were in high demand, but not his profiling skills and not by the FBI. Instead, what was sought was his calm and gentle demeanor, his quiet and sensible voice and the compassion in his dark, almond-shaped eyes. Those who sought him out were not only the detectives of the SVU and the ADAs who tried their cases, but also the officers, uniformed and plainclothes, of the 16th precinct and other precincts in the city as well as the firefighters and medics from the firehouses down the street or a few blocks over. The word had long been out that the shrink over at the 1-6 was an OK guy, one who could be trusted. George Huang helped them deal with loss. All that some would admit was that the skyline just didn’t seem right without the lights and the bulk of the twin towers. Huang understood. He couldn’t imagine his hometown without the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid or even the big Ghirardelli Chocolate sign. An earthquake could destroy them all, of course; that was a given if one chose to live in San Francisco, but it was worse if the destruction was purposefully caused by people one didn’t even know and had never personally harmed. He knew that for his “patients” the unspoken question remained: What’s next? The Empire State Building? The Statue of Liberty? Yankee Stadium? It was harder for the desk sergeants and the cops on the beat. There was the seemingly endless stream of people wanting to report a missing person. The questions and answers were always the same: “When did you last see them?” “When they left for work.” “Where do they work?” “The World Trade Center.” Only the floor numbers changed. There were all the anxious, frightened people handing out hastily printed pictures and descriptions to anyone who would take them and asking in quiet desperation: “Have you seen him?” “Do you know where she is?” “Please look at the picture. That’s my parent. . . my spouse. . . my sibling . . . my child . . . my friend.” The shop windows - indeed, almost any surface - were covered with the sad notices. Tough men and women who thought they’d seen it all asked in breaking voices, “What do I say, Doc? What do I tell them? I know those people are gone. Just . . . gone.” It was hardest of all for those whose partners and coworkers had entered the stricken buildings to help when everyone else was trying to escape. They’d gone in but never come out. Survivor’s guilt tore some of his “patients” apart. They didn’t feel lucky that they’d been on vacation, called in sick, traded shifts or got stopped to help someone already outside. “Why am I alive, Doc? It should’ve been me.” There was some comfort in the new voices in the firehouses, the voices of those who’d come from a distance and volunteered their help, the honeyed southern drawl, the Texas twang, the flat Midwestern accent that put an “r” in Washington Heights and the totally strange sound of the California Valley Boys, all with town names on their helmets and coats that the native New Yorkers would have to look up in an atlas or on a road map. Yes, there was some comfort, but nowhere near enough. Night after night, George Huang came home to his apartment, fixed himself a simple meal of steamed rice and steamed or stir-fried vegetables and brewed a pot of tea or had a glass of wine. Just as he advised his “patients”, he didn’t turn on the TV with its endlessly repeated pictures of horror and the constant rehashing of a mishmash of news, rumor, speculation and personal opinion served up by talking heads. Instead, he put a CD with the intricate Baroque works of Handel or Bach in the stereo and willed his mind to choose a particular melodic line and follow it throughout the piece. He wondered why the call hadn’t come from the Bureau. More than once, he’d picked up his phone and started to dial the number of the local field office, but he’d never completed the call. Why was that? What kept stopping him? True, in the weeks and months leading up to the tragedy, the Bureau hadn’t exactly covered itself with glory, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. Those were process errors; they could be fixed - not easily perhaps - but it could be done. If you asked any of the SVU detectives, they’d tell you that the Doc was a quiet, thoughtful, rather self-effacing man. They’d also tell you that he knew his stuff. Huang wasn’t a braggart, but he know his own worth, and he knew he had skills that would be valuable in this new war on terror. So what was making him feel uneasy about reminding the Special Agent in Charge of the New York office of his presence? It came to him one early evening as he was waiting to check out at the Chinese market. The proprietor had a small portable TV tuned to an all-news channel sitting on the counter. The news reader reported on instances of vandalism and telephoned threats made to a Moslem school and mosques in the suburbs of Chicago. While he hastened to add that there was no indication that anyone there had been involved in the 9/11 attack, it was certainly understandable that people in the Chicago area would be on edge. After all, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, Chicago’s Sears Tower was the tallest building in North America and a prime target. “I am thankful that those who did this terrible thing were not Chinese,” the elderly clerk said as he nodded toward the TV and totaled up Huang’s purchases. “It would have made life difficult for us.” With that Huang remembered his grandfather’s stories of growing up in Hawaii in the 1940s, in the years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His grandfather had often spoken of how his Japanese-American neighbors had been rounded up and sent to camps on the mainland with only what they could carry in a suitcase. They’d lost the homes and businesses they’d worked so hard to build, not because they’d actually done anything wrong but because people, mainly white people, were afraid. It hadn’t stopped there. In those years, anyone with a yellow skin and almond-shaped eyes was suspect. People of Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Filipino ancestry all looked alike to the whites and were all fair game for taunting, bullying and worse. As he sipped his tea that night, Huang reflected that the government-sanctioned prejudice of which his grandfather had spoken could easily rear its ugly head again. In the rush to make up for prior lapses, the Bureau might too enthusiastically “round up the usual suspects” as the saying went. While outright concentration camps might not be tolerated in America at the moment, there were certainly ways to circumvent both the spirit and the letter of the law. Military justice had its quirks. Holding suspects outside the US had its appeal as well. Out of sight is often out of mind. Huang was a man of few illusions. If he knew for certain that a suspect had information that could prevent a ricin attack in the subway, the high-speed derailment of a packed Long Island commuter train or the bombing of the Chrysler Building, then yes, he would be more than tempted to set aside the doctor’s oath to “first, do no harm.” He could justify it by saying, as the aliens did on the popular science fiction show he watched as a kid, that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” Except, of course, that one could rarely be that certain, and his family had had firsthand experience with being part of “the few.” Plus, the American belief, however inconsistently applied, that “the few” and even “the one” still had rights was too important to toss aside. To do so would mean that no one was safe and that the terrorists had won. Huang sighed to himself. He needed more time to think about whether he wanted to be involved in some of the things the Bureau might do. He was suddenly reminded of the discussion he’d had with Munch some time before all of this had started. It seemed like ages ago, but certainly was no more than 2 weeks. “Hey, Doc,” the often morose and pessimistic detective had said, “I've heard that one of the worst Chinese curses is ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Is that true?” “No,” he’d answered. “It’s not Chinese. That’s an urban legend.” Well, someone should use it as a curse, he thought. He couldn’t deny that things had gotten both more interesting and much more difficult since 9/11. George Huang liked to deal honestly with people. In order to do that, he knew he had to be honest with himself first and foremost. It wasn’t just the weighty philosophical arguments about right and wrong, justice and injustice that had lately kept him from even attempting to call the Bureau to remind them of his areas of expertise and to request a transfer back. No, a great part of the truth was that he had finally found a comfortable niche for himself in the 16th Precinct with the detectives of the Special Victims Unit. When he was first assigned, the interagency rivalry had been much more intense than he’d expected. Detective Stabler, in particular, had seemed to go out of his way to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that the federal agent was an unwelcome intruder. “Captain, we don’t need the Feds sticking their noses in our business. We don’t need them looking over our shoulders, breathing down our necks or telling us what to do. We know how to do our job,” Stabler had complained. “No one said you didn’t, Elliot, but I’m not about to turn down help, especially when it’s being paid for out of someone else’s budget. Make the most of it,” Cragen sternly advised. Stabler had done as ordered. He and Huang had their issues, no doubt about it, and words were sometimes still exchanged in raised voices. Overall, however, they’d come to an understanding of sorts and had developed a degree of mutual respect and even friendship. It had been so gradual that even Huang hadn’t really noticed it until they’d been called to a crime scene where one of the uniformed officers, upon seeing Huang’s badge, had made a sotto voce derogatory comment to Stabler about “the Fed.” Huang had made to go about his business without dignifying the comment with a response, but Stabler had given the officer a small smile, the same rather predatory look he gave a suspect just before he tore into him, had taken a few steps toward him to use his height to his advantage and had quietly said, “Yeah, Mac, he’s a Fed, but he’s our Fed.” It had been a warning, one the officer had had enough sense to heed. Rumor had it, not that it was Huang's usual practice to put great stock in the rumors he heard, that Tutuola and Munch had similarly set people straight about his place in the hierarchy of the 16th Precinct. Truth be told, Huang no longer looked forward to returning to service with the FBI. He had no desire to pack up his things and move back to DC, or to some military base like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or to some out of the way fragment of the former Soviet Union where torture wasn’t illegal. He had no wish to have to prove himself again. He didn’t need to hear the snide comments about his “going native” with the NYPD. He didn’t need to see the look of amusement on a fellow male agent’s face when he stood next to a female agent who was 4 inches taller than he was even without her high heels. He didn’t need to deal with those who, not quite behind his back, made fun of the glasses he wore after he'd worked all night and his eyes had rebelled against wearing contacts for yet another 8 hours. Things were returning to normal in New York, although he thought it a bit perverse to describe the return of crime to its usual level as “normal.” Reports of rape, domestic battery and child abuse, the everyday terror that women and children faced in the city, were on the rise now that the shock of 9/11 was beginning to wear off. Thrown into the mix were attacks on conservatively, if not traditionally, dressed olive-skinned women with dark eyes whose head scarves proclaimed their religion and made them targets. Huang finally decided that he and his coworkers had their own war to fight. If the Bureau wanted him back for their new War on Terror, they knew where to find him.