Whenever I dared to steal a glance at one of them, they looked like pretty nasty pieces of work. White guys with shaved heads and thick arms and chests. They had Nazi swastikas tattooed on their biceps and on their foreheads. A couple of them had Christian crosses tattooed on them too. How they thought those two symbols could ever go together-a symbol of hatred and a symbol of love-I didn’t know. I’ll tell you what else: I wasn’t about to ask. They didn’t look like the types of guys who would enjoy a good theological conversation. They looked more like the types of guys who would enjoy punching me repeatedly in the face until I lost consciousness or died. That sounded like it would be more fun for them than for me, so I kept my mouth shut.

When I finished my workout, I moved away from them. I wandered to the edge of the crumbling basketball court, glancing this way and that to make sure no one was coming after me. I stood by the court and watched the game, feeling the cold air dry the workout sweat on my cheeks and neck.

The game was three against three. They were good players. Rough, fast, with accurate shots from anywhere near the key. They swirled back and forth in front of me in a shouting gray cloud of motion. They elbowed one another in the face, and jostled one another shoulder to chest as they fought for position under the board.

One guy broke through and went airborne, jamming a dunk through the hoop. As the teams reset, I took another nervous glance over my shoulder at the yard behind me. But this time, something made me pause.

The guards. Suddenly I didn’t see any guards. The blue shirts that usually passed among the gray uniforms had vanished. I felt an instinctive clutch inside me, a flash of something like panic. Where had they all gone?

The next moment, the killers struck.

There were three of them. They were black men. In prison, the Muslims were mostly black. They weren’t your regular everyday Muslims either. They were hate-filled radical Islamists.