The Occurrence

  Isabel was digging herself deeper into Dominique’s curiosity.

  “That’s not always true,” Dominique said, working the conversation.

  “Does this have something to do with what happened in the warehouse?”

  Isabel was desperate to shift the attention off her sister and the miracle.

  “I guess I’m like some of those in your culture. I believe in miracles. That I’m alive is testament to that.”

  “Would Hashim consider it a miracle? Him being alive?”

  Isabel queried like a lawyer desperate to change the subject.

  Dominique smiled at Isabel’s attempt to turn the discussion around.

  “Ask him when you get him in court,” Dominique said, knowing there was something she’d touched on that Isabel was evading. Dominique would find out what that was.

  53

  From their Nissan, parked across the street from the Department of Justice, Nazir and Taliq waited. They’d been following Dominique for days. It was late afternoon. A raging thunderstorm had the people on the street running for cover. Taliq’s burner phone chirped with a text. He looked down at the message.

  “Is that from Sarif?” Nazir asked.

  “Yeah,” Taliq said, lying.

  “What did he say?”

  “Same old, same old. ‘Where’s Hashim?’”

  But it wasn’t from Sarif. It was from Taliq’s contact at the FBI. It said: Getting hot. Get out!

  Taliq knew as soon as the cells found out about Hashim there would be orders to assassinate him, so Taliq needed to extricate himself before the shitstorm hit, and he’d be in the crossfire. But there were things he still wanted to know.

  “I’m gonna ask you for the last time. What happened in the warehouse?”

  Nazir glared at him.

  “I’m not the enemy, Nazir. You’ve got to lighten up.”

  Nazir grabbed the burner phone from Taliq’s twitchy hand.

  Taliq tried to wrench it back but Nazir pulled out a switchblade and flicked it open.

  “Whoa, whoa. Take it easy. You need to lighten up. It’s a fucking phone. Give it back.”

  Taliq grabbed for the phone but Nazir swiped the blade across Taliq’s knuckles.

  “Whoa. Jesus. What the fuck. You crazy?”

  Nazir flipped open the lid of the burner and read the text.

  Taliq leaned forward and reached his hand around to his back.

  “This isn’t from Sarif.”

  “You’re too fucking paranoid. Sarif’s not the only game in town. You don’t know all the players.”

  “Who are the players? Tell me.”

  “Put the knife away, okay? We’re civilized men.”

  Taliq pulled out the Glock from the back of his belt.

  Nazir made a split-second decision.

  A flash of metal.

  Taliq’s eyes widened with the realization his throat had been cut. All the years of preparation to infiltrate the cell. The estrangement from all he’d known, ending. He thought the road out would be torturous. Prolonged interrogation if caught. He’d always feared he’d give up secrets when the pain became unbearable. He gasped for what air he could. But it didn’t help. He slumped down in the passenger seat. His head hit the window with a thud. He was dead.

  None but a few at the FBI knew Taliq was undercover and they would never let that information out. Taliq was collateral damage.

  Nazir panicked. He turned on the ignition, peeled out, and just as quick jammed his brakes when he saw Dominique crossing the road, looking at him.

  The car slid sideways on the slick road and stopped right in front of her.

  Nazir stared at Dominique.

  She stood, defiant, daring him to move.

  The last time they were this close was when they’d almost died in the desert.

  The rain pounded.

  The car idled as he waited to see what she would do.

  She approached the driver’s side door and looked at him through the closed window.

  She saw the inert body in the passenger seat.

  “This is either a strange coincidence, or you’ve been following me,” she said to him through the glass. “And from the looks of it, your friend is dead, and you’re in a predicament you’re not sure how to get out of.”

  “He’s not my friend,” Nazir said through the glass.

  “Then, I imagine you could use some help.”

  54

  A group has a nervous system. It has a heart and a soul that experiences the same love and fear. Dominique was at the center of this force. What the Ancient Greeks called, Pneuma. That which is breathed.

  It was this collective breath that put her here at this specific place and time and allowed her to get into the backseat of the car.

  In the weeks she’d been back, Dominique had found out more about cuneiforms.

  The Sumerian stones were indeed the oldest written records on the planet. Fifty-eight hundred years old. But they described things that happened billions of years earlier than that, and in great detail.

  The ancient Sumerians were telling us a story of history that’s difficult to accept because of our certainty that what we know about the past is all there is to know.

  She read the controversial works of Zecharia Sitchin. He wrote about many cities that were described in the Bible: Babylon, Akkad, and Erech, which for a long time people thought were myths because no one could prove their existence. There wasn’t even the slightest sign they’d existed. Then archaeologists found one city, which led to another, and another, eventually finding all of the cities mentioned in the Bible. These excavators and explorers of the past dug into the layers of these ancient ruins and discovered thousands of clay tablets on which the history of Sumer, and the history of the Earth were recorded in great detail, going back eons.

  The echo of remembrance reverberated through Dominique, and she knew without knowing that those she was now connected to were part of a nervous system, and she was at the center of that which is breathed.

  She dialed a number on her mobile.

  “What are you doing?” Nazir demanded, watching her in the rearview.

  “I’m calling someone to help us,” she said, as she looked at the dead body of Taliq in the front passenger seat—his neck still draining blood.

  55

  Dominique and Nazir stood in the kitchen of Catherine’s Virginia Beach cottage. It was more lived in since Hashim had spent time here. Covers had been removed from the furniture. Pots were on the stove. The kitchen table was set, looking like company was expected.

  Dominique stared at the text on Taliq’s burner. Getting hot. Get out!

  “Who was he?” Nazir asked.

  “Julian’s finding out.”

  “He had no identification?”

  “No.”

  “And his body?”

  “I’m not sure what Julian is doing with that.”

  She looked at Nazir bent over the kitchen sink, head in his hands.

  “Did you plan to kill him?”

  “No. But I never trusted him.”

  She remembered first setting eyes on Nazir in the warehouse and thinking if jihad was attracting young men this sensitive and strong there was more to fear than anyone could imagine. Now, here he was, this young man. Frightened. Isolated from the world he knew. Alone.

  Nazir reminded her of her brother when they were younger, with all the promise and apprehension of youth. She saw that promise and apprehension before her. And an inextricable bond. Something relentless had brought them together. And she knew they were on their own to find out what.

  “How old were you when your parents were killed?”

  Nazir turned to her, his eyes spheres of sorrow, as if she was looking into his heart.

  She saw his sorrow ease when she got that he knew she cared.

  “Hashim told me they’d died in an attack.”

  Nazir’s breathing calmed and he said, “I was six.”

  “You’ve been
fighting ever since?”

  “Yes.”

  Dominique remembered what Catherine told her about what Hashim had written when he was boy.

  There are stories we carry inside that have slipped beyond the veil of consciousness and wait until a certain time. And, as a falcon descends upon its prey, we rise up more fierce and hungry than the falcon, through ashes at the merest fraction of light, grasping, trembling for God.

  She saw that trembling in the young man before her.

  “What happened to you in the warehouse?” she asked.

  Nazir’s eyes took in the pale light of the moon as it brushed through the kitchen.

  He looked at her.

  She could see he was lost. She knew that he, too, was leaving the stories—ones he’d believed all his life—behind. Stories dissolving like the sunlight after the bomb hit the warehouse, as if it had been vacuumed into the air.

  “I heard a voice,” he said. “I’d never heard voices before.”

  “What did it say?”

  His body tensed. She could see he wanted to avoid the answer.

  “We all had something happen to us in the warehouse, Nazir. We’re connected in a way we weren’t before. What did the voice say to you?”

  She remembered the first time she heard a voice in that hospital room in Pittsburgh, and how she dared not tell anyone. She reached for his hand. He moved away.

  Julian entered the kitchen.

  “What did you do with the body?” Nazir asked, rushing to him.

  “What I needed to. But once the cells discover he’s missing you’ll be their prime suspect and wanted by your own people as well as the FBI.”

  “They’re not my people.” The words slipped out of Nazir’s mouth. He turned away. Ashamed.

  The hush gave way to the scent of roses.

  Nazir turned back to them.

  Dominique saw that what still held Julian rigid in doubt, and the fear and bewilderment that had kept Nazir in need of his past, were melting. And, in the opening of their hearts, Nazir said, “‘Ask the lawyer about the girl.’ That’s what the voice said to me in the desert.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Julian asked.

  “It means we’re on the right path,” Dominique answered.

  And she knew the relentless energy that had brought them together had weaved yet another thread deeper into their lives.

  56

  Saturday, September 26

  In the dark hours before dawn, Hashim was brought out of his cell at FBI headquarters. He was dressed in civilian clothes and his hands and feet were shackled. He stepped into a Humvee and was positioned between two armed soldiers and across from three armed federal agents. There were two other follow vehicles. Two of the agents in the Humvee were young and on edge, their legs bounced. The third was older and Middle Eastern. He stared at Hashim. Hashim looked away, knowing the hatred he saw in the man’s eyes didn’t need the fuel of an imprisoned terrorist’s gaze. Hashim heard the man’s name when the men were talking. His name was Kareef.

  When the convoy reached I-95, vehicles split off in different directions. The Humvee and two unmarked FBI cars took Route 1 North. Hashim was on his way to prison, trial, and likely death.

  He watched the young men across and next to him. He noticed their fingers were white, knuckle-gripped around their weapons. This threw him back to his own fear—to the time he was a boy and his father had dropped him, from the boat they were in, into deep ocean water with one instruction: “Swim back if you want to live.”

  Hashim did swim back and saw his mother filled with relief and panic when he’d reached shore. It was here his mind had crystallized with the thought that nothing and no one was safe. Only rage assured survival.

  Rage was the way to let the world know of the plight of his people. He believed bin Laden had come from that place, too, in the beginning. Diplomacy achieved nothing. Attention must be paid. Bombs led the way. They were an answer to ripping the cloak of invisibility from his world, and for the greater world to see the poverty and devastation that had befallen his people, in a land most had ignored. But the experience in the desert changed that. It changed him. Allah had spoken through the dust and destruction and metallic screech of the drone with these two words etched in the air: Nahn wahid. We are One. So simple, yet dismissed as unreal and unachievable. Life obliterated what God had designed.

  But Hashim had been drilled down into the inexorable truth of his soul—that great transformation required greater sacrifice, not destruction. He knew the others who’d been with him now had the chance to harness the same truth.

  After traveling six hours, Hashim saw the road sign: Attica Correctional Facility. He knew of the riots there in 1971. It was one of the bloodiest prison confrontations in American history. Thirteen hundred prisoners had rebelled, taken over the prison, and held forty guards hostage. They’d issued a list of demands, which included calls for improvements in living conditions as well as educational and training opportunities. They’d even entered into negotiations with state officials, but negotiations failed and state police and National Guard troops seized the prison. Forty-three individuals, including ten hostages, were killed. It was believed a group of Black Muslims were responsible for the uprising. But the Black Muslims were exonerated when it was revealed they’d succeeded in preventing any revenge attacks against the unpopular corrections officers who’d been contained in what they called the “hostage circle.” They also made them as comfortable as they could under the circumstances. They gave clothing to all the hostages who’d been stripped.

  The occurrence at Attica was legend.

  The convoy approached the Lock Gates of Attica. The vehicles stopped in front of the huge, thick black metal doors. The agents and National Guardsmen jumped out of the cars and swirled around Hashim as he got out of the Humvee.

  Hashim entered inside Attica’s walls via an exterior concrete catwalk.

  Bars of cold steel greeted them as the soldiers and guards led Hashim through the internal hall of C Block.

  The chains around his feet grated along pockmarked concrete. Bleak thoughts of his father, and the sweet but passive voice of his mother arose as if from the grave. He had been stripped of: stature, power, invincibility, and hope. What took its place was something he’d always dismissed as weakness. Something he now realized was all there was to embrace—the crumbling of hate.

  57

  The small Attica prison visiting room they met in had a chill that seeped from the mortar of its grim stone walls. Hashim was here with two lawyers assigned to defend him. They’d been here a few hours awaiting his arrival. The government wasn’t wasting time. They sat in cheap chairs across a much-abused table—Hashim on one side, the duo on the other.

  “Your surrender could work in our favor,” said the man with a smoker’s voice. His name was Carl Robinson.

  “First thing we’re asking for are pretrial discovery materials,” the other lawyer, Terrence Keyser, said. He was younger than Robinson, with much more curiosity. “That’s not going to make the prosecution happy, to have to hand over that kind of sensitive information, but it’s the law.”

  The men talked of how they figured the prosecution would come at them and how they planned to defend Hashim.

  “I have nothing to defend,” Hashim said.

  “This is America. We have what we call, ‘The Rule of Law,’” Keyser told him.

  “I know what that is. But I will speak for myself.”

  The two men looked at each other. Hashim could see they were confused.

  Robinson cleared his throat.

  “This is our job, whether we want to be here or not. We’re trying to keep you from a death sentence.”

  “There’s already a fatwa on me.”

  “We can’t protect you from that. But we might be able to keep you from getting a lethal injection,” Keyser said.

  “I’m not afraid to die.”

  “Well, I guess we’re wasting everyone’s time h
ere,” Robinson said, annoyed, as he gathered his materials and placed them in his briefcase.

  “Let me ask you something,” Robinson said, as he stopped what he was doing. “Why did you agree to see us if you want to defend yourself?”

  Hashim looked at them. They were a trial run. He didn’t need them to represent him. He needed them to gauge their reactions to what he had to say. They represented the world he would be thrust into. A world of juries and judges.

  “What I did was evil. Every action. Every order was designed for one purpose. To bring America, to bring the world, to its knees. And while I believe now that our jihad was wrong, and am willing to pay with my life for my actions, America is no less culpable in horrors. You’ve convinced yourselves you must police the world. In that is an inherent arrogance, and you’ve made as many enemies as you believe you have friends.”

  “You’re not a hero, Hashim,” Robinson said. “You’re a wanted man. And you’re lucky if you don’t get a death sentence. So, don’t tell me what’s wrong with America. They’re going to ask you to name names, name places, sites of coming attacks. And they will want all of the dummy companies that have been set up to filter the funds used for your jihad. You do that, then maybe…maybe you have a chance to convince any of us your words are something other than total bullshit.”

  “I understand,” Hashim said. “Might you be able to arrange the transaction of this information to happen in private?”

  “You don’t want to go to trial now? Is that what you’re telling us?” Keyser said.

  “I did want that platform. But it was arrogant of me to think it would have any other purpose than to create turmoil that would serve no one.”

  “We’ll take your request to our superiors. Is there anything else you want to say?”

  “No.” Hashim said as he stood up. His eyes didn’t waver from theirs.