by Alan Gratz
Hagan seemed to read my mind. He laughed. “Kamran, did you ever happen to hear the story about the man who asked God to help him escape from a flood?”
“You mean, like, Noah?”
“No, not that flood. A wee bit smaller one. It goes something like this: there’s a flood, see, and the waters, they chase the man in our story up onto his roof. The rain keeps falling and the waters keep rising, but our man’s not worried. That’s because he’s sure his God is going to save him. Well, in short order a rowboat comes along, and the man rowing it tells our man on the roof to jump in. ‘No, thanks,’ says he, ‘I’m waiting on God to save me,’ and the man in the rowboat goes along his way. Well, the waters rise, getting ever closer, and along comes a motorboat. But our man’s response is the same: ‘Go save someone else,’ he says. ‘God will save me.’ So off goes the motorboat, and the waters, they come up to our man’s feet. Last of all comes a helicopter, and they drop our man a ladder. But what does he tell them?”
“God will save me,” I said.
Hagan nodded. “He sends the helicopter packing and settles in, waiting for God to save him. Well, the rain keeps falling and the water keeps rising, and our man, he’s swept away and drowns. Being a pious lad, he goes straight to heaven, but when he gets there, he’s got a bone to pick with his maker. ‘I had faith in you,’ he tells God, ‘I prayed to you. Believed in you. You said you would save me, but you never did. What’s up with that?’ God shrugs. ‘I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter,’ says he. ‘What more do you want?’ ”
Dane snorted a laugh.
“You,” Hagan said to me, “you’re like our man on the roof—only you jumped in and tried to swim before I could even send you the rowboat.”
“So if Dane’s the rowboat, and I’m the motorboat, and Aaliyah’s the helicopter,” Jimmy said, “what’s that make you in this story, Mickey? God?”
Hagan grinned. “How close are we?” he asked Jimmy.
“Five minutes.”
“You got all these people together just to break me out?” I asked. I was feeling a little unworthy.
“Not just to get you out,” Hagan said. “To go with you to Arizona. To find your brother and stop a terrorist attack.”
MY PULSE QUICKENED. SO I REALLY WAS GOING TO do it. We were going to do it. My escape had been worth it after all.
“Don’t think it will be easy,” Hagan warned me. “These three are good—the best—but you’ll still have work to do to find your brother, and the authorities will be after you at every turn. And then there’s Haydar Ansari.”
Ansari. The Iraqi terrorist Hagan had told me they thought was behind everything. He hadn’t been captured with the al-Qaeda cell planning to blow up the Women’s World Cup. Did that mean he was here, in America?
“Aaliyah will brief you on Ansari,” Hagan said. “Jimmy will keep me in the loop via a secure connection. Dane’s in charge of the mission.” Hagan leaned forward, his gaze serious. “This is dangerous, Kamran. Make no mistake. I’m only sending you along with these three because you know everything there is to know about your brother and where they might be keeping him. But you’re to do everything they tell you and anything I tell you, Kamran. No arguments. Do you understand?”
I nodded, glad to have people who actually knew what they were doing to tell me what to do.
I glanced at the gun in Dane’s hand. “And what about Darius?” I asked.
“I’ve told Dane: Darius isn’t to be harmed, if at all possible. We’re operating under the assumption that he’s innocent, and has been working to help us stop Ansari.”
“And if he hasn’t?” I asked. “What then?” I was ashamed to doubt my brother, but it had to be said.
“Then I’ll deal with it,” Dane said.
I shuddered. It didn’t take much imagination to think what that might mean.
“Trust each other,” Hagan told us. “Work as a team. Time is of the essence. We don’t know how long we have before they strike. I’ll do everything I can on my end to keep the authorities off your trail.”
The van slowed. “We’re here,” Jimmy said.
Dane slid the van door open and hopped outside. After a quick look around, he nodded to Hagan. Hagan motioned for me to follow him. He led me around to the back of the van, where a midsize sedan with government plates was parked in a hidden spot off the road. It was cold out, way colder than anything I was used to in Arizona, and I buried my hands in my pockets and shivered.
Hagan pulled a card from his jacket pocket and gave it to me. The only thing written on it was a phone number.
“Memorize that, then throw it away,” Hagan told me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A phone number of last resort,” he told me. “One last failsafe. You call that number from any pay phone, any landline, any cell phone in the country, and the cavalry will come riding over the ridge to save you. And, may I remind you, to arrest you. Consider it a ‘get thrown back into jail free’ card. Which would presumably be safer than the alternative. You call that number, and it’s all over. Understand? Last chance saloon.”
I nodded.
“I’m putting you in harm’s way, Kamran, which is a wicked thing for me to do to a lad of seventeen.”
I started to protest, but Hagan held up a hand.
“Spare me the ‘I’m a man grown’ speech,” he said. “You’re a senior in high school, and you’ve no business playing at cloak and dagger. But the simple fact is I need you. Your country needs you, as the cliché goes.”
“My brother needs me,” I said.
“Aye. That he does,” Hagan said. “You’re a good kid, Kamran, and an even better brother.” He held out his hand, and I shook it.
“Thanks, Mr. Hagan. For everything.”
“Call me Mickey,” he said.
Dane came around the back of the van. “We need to do this,” he said.
Hagan nodded and sent me back inside the van. He got in the sedan and pulled it out into the dark, lonely road, across both lanes. Jimmy backed the van out and pulled it up to a stop in front of the car, as though Hagan had blocked our path.
“What are you doing?” I asked Jimmy, but Aaliyah shook her head at me.
Ahead of us, Mickey Hagan got out of his car with a gun.
“What’s he doing? What’s going on?” I asked, but nobody answered me.
Mickey came around the side of the van. Dane opened the sliding door, raised his gun, and shot Mickey Hagan in the leg.
“No!” I cried, lunging for the door. “Mickey!”
Dane held me back. “Go,” he told Jimmy. Jimmy floored it, and the van swerved off the road, around Mickey’s car, and down the road.
“What the—? What’d you do that for?” I cried.
“Get down,” Dane said, and he pushed me to the floor.
Bullets ripped into the van, punching holes in the metal doors on the back. The front windshield shattered, but stayed in place.
“Geez, Mickey!” Jimmy cried. The van swerved. Screeched. Straightened. I heard more gunshots, but no more of them hit the van. “We’re good,” Jimmy said at last.
Dane helped me up off the floor. “It was Mickey’s idea. To make it more convincing he had nothing to do with your escape.”
Mickey’s idea? To let Dane shoot him in the leg? This was way more serious than I’d thought.
“Get us to the backup van,” Dane told Jimmy, and he settled down on one of the benches to take his gun apart again.
I crawled up on the bench across from him, staring at the bullet holes in the back of the van. Mickey had missed anything important on purpose, but the next time we ran into the authorities—the real authorities—we might not be so lucky. I was officially a wanted fugitive now, and this was officially real.
THE MOTEL ROOM WAS EMPTY WHEN I CAME BACK in with a bucket full of ice. Jimmy was still in the bathroom, and Dane and Aaliyah hadn’t come back from the van yet. We were in some little town in West Virginia, we
ll off the main route anybody would take to Arizona. The CIA, the DHS, the FBI, they all knew by now that I thought Darius was in Arizona, so it only stood to reason that’s where I’d be headed. Unless my “abductors” were taking me somewhere else.
I still couldn’t believe I’d sat there and watched Dane shoot Mickey Hagan. I’d seen people get shot before in movies and TV shows, but being there for the real thing was shocking. Guns were loud. Made you jump. And to see the bullet rip into Mickey’s leg, to know that it was real, and not some special effect …
I popped open one of the cans of soda Jimmy had brought with him and poured it over a plastic cup full of ice, trying not to think about Mickey. It felt like such a treat now, such an indulgence, to have a soda on ice, after weeks of milk and juice from cartons.
I sipped my drink and turned on the TV to distract myself. I shouldn’t have. A photograph of me—my junior yearbook photo, of all things—was on the first channel I went to. I winced. It had been weird to see Darius’s picture all over the news, to hear famous announcers talking about him. It was even weirder to see my picture and hear people talking about me.
Apparently the secret of Kamran Smith was out. Nobody had known I was being held prisoner, but now they all knew I had escaped. The manhunt was on, Anderson Cooper said. Homegrown terrorist on the run, said Sean Hannity. Rachel Maddow called it a sad new chapter in an increasingly sad story. But the story was the same all over: Kamran Smith and his brother, Darius Smith, were American terrorists. One of the “experts” Hannity had on his show, some think-tank guy I’d never heard of, said Darius and I had both wanted to join the army so we could “take down America from within.” They talked about my application to West Point, my time at East Phoenix High School, my run-ins with other kids.
Was this really happening?
They showed the front of my high school. Then Omar Maldonado, my old teammate, was on camera. “He always acted all high-and-mighty,” Omar said. “Like he was better than everybody else.”
“I knew he was a terrorist. It was just—the way he looked at you, you know? Like he hated all of us,” said Rachel Dubois, a junior girl I had literally never seen before in my entire life.
Nobody interviewed Adam or Julia or anybody else I’d thought had been my friends. But maybe they were saving that for the morning shows.
Jimmy came out of the motel bathroom waving a Zippo lighter around. “Dude. Sorry about that. That’s going to linger.”
I clicked the TV off. I’d seen more than enough.
Jimmy flipped his lighter closed and went straight for the ice, pouring a Red Bull for himself.
Jimmy must have been only a few years older than me. He looked like somebody from a college garage band, with long, sandy blond hair, multiple ear piercings, and expensive sneakers. The arms that stuck out from his black Arctic Monkeys tour T-shirt were toned and tattooed. Black numbers ran up and down his left arm.
“You like my ink?” he said, catching me staring. He pulled the sleeve of his T-shirt up to show me his whole arm. The numbers were big and small, stacked horizontally and vertically in all different kinds of fonts. “IP addresses,” he told me. “Every super-secure site I’ve cracked is on here.” He pointed to different numbers as he said their names. “Pacific Bell. Microsoft. London Times. Bank of America. NASA.”
“You’re a hacker,” I said.
“No. A cracker. Hackers just find the exploits. Crackers take advantage of them.” Jimmy grinned. “I’m what they call in the business a ‘black hat.’ At least I used to be. Now I guess I’m a white hat. One of the good guys.”
“What happened? Why’d you change hats?”
Jimmy pointed to one of the largest numbers on his arm. “This one right here. United States Department of Defense. That’s right: the Pentagon. I was just going in to punk them. Honest. I was going to replace the DoD website with one that looked like the game choices Matthew Broderick gets when he dials in in WarGames. You know, Chess, Poker, Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War?”
I shrugged and shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Jimmy threw up his arms. “Nobody watches the classics anymore! Anyway, they caught me. Stupid, really. I should have bounced the signal through a few more onion layers of symmetric encryption. Got cocky, got caught. So I cut a deal: I’d tell them how I got in—and how to fix it—and they wouldn’t throw me in jail for the rest of my life. Opened up a whole new career for me. Now all kinds of companies pay me to test out their Internet security.” He pretended to take off a hat and put another on. “Black hat off, white hat on. I never made so much money. I’ve even done work for the CIA. That’s how I met Mickey. ’Course, the DoD still makes me wear a GPS ankle monitor.”
Jimmy hiked up his pants leg to show me a black gizmo strapped to his ankle.
“You’re wearing a GPS monitor?” I said. “But that means they can track you! Track us!”
“Chill, dude,” Jimmy said. “I cracked this thing the day they put it on me. As far as the good old US of A knows, I’m at a video game convention in Orlando.”
Dane and Aaliyah came back with armloads of bags and equipment, and I hurried to take one of them from Aaliyah. She smiled at my zealous chivalry like she was onto me, but still appreciative. She had changed clothes from before, trading in her business suit for jeans and a T-shirt that read BACKSTREET BOYS and showed a printed photo of the band.
“What happened?” I asked, nodding at her T-shirt. “Did you have to go shopping at the Goodwill?”
Aaliyah’s bright smile suddenly switched off, and she gave me an icy stare. I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake, and my heart sank.
Jimmy hooted. “Ooh-hoo! You’ve done it now, kid! Nobody makes fun of the Boys around the princess and lives!”
“I—I’m sorry,” I said, my face hot with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean—”
“You only get one warning,” Aaliyah said, perfectly serious. “And I’m not a princess,” she told Jimmy.
“You check the room for bugs?” Dane asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy said. “Gave the place the sweep. We’re clean.”
Aaliyah latched the door and flipped the security lock.
“Are we—are we all sleeping in the same room?” I asked. “I mean, is Aaliyah—”
“Yes,” Dane said. “It’s more secure.”
Jimmy grinned. “You were thinking maybe you two could share a room, cowboy?”
My face must have been as red as Jimmy’s soda can. “No, I didn’t mean—”
“Just ignore him,” Aaliyah said. She set up a laptop on the little table by the window and pulled out a chair. “Now have a seat, Kamran. It’s time you learned all about Haydar Ansari.”
“HAYDAR ANSARI,” AALIYAH SAID. “AKA ‘THE LION.’ ”
Aaliyah called up a picture of a boy playing soccer. There were other players in the foreground, and the picture was kind of blurry, but the shot was clear enough to see that Ansari was a good-looking guy with olive skin and dark, curly hair.
“He’s just a teenager,” I said.
“Was. He’s in his forties now. But this is the only confirmed picture we have of him,” Aaliyah said.
I stared at the picture. It could have been me, playing soccer instead of football. We didn’t resemble each other all that much, but for at least one brief, innocent moment, both our lives had been about nothing more than scoring a goal or a touchdown, not politics.
“Haydar Ansari was born into a well-to-do family from Tikrit, Iraq, the same city where Saddam Hussein was raised,” Aaliyah explained. “Ansari’s distantly related to Hussein, in fact—third cousin, three times removed.”
“Father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate?” Jimmy joked. He hopped on one of the beds with his laptop and groaned. “Ow. Who picked this motel? These mattresses are like stone.”
Dane thumped a heavy canvas duffel bag on the other bed. “I’ve slept on stone before,” he said. “This is b
etter.”
Aaliyah ignored them. “Ansari’s family was rewarded with power and wealth when Hussein took power. Wealth and power they lost when Baghdad fell and Saddam was defeated during Operation Desert Storm.”
“You were in that one, weren’t you, Dane?” Jimmy asked.
Dane didn’t look up from the bag he was rooting through. “I was in that one,” he said.
“As a part of the ruling Baath Party, Ansari’s family lost everything in the war. To escape persecution from the new Shi’a government, they fled to Syria, where Ansari spent the rest of his youth angry at the United States for ruining his life. It wasn’t long, of course, before he fell in with al-Qaeda.”
“As you do,” Jimmy said.
“As you do,” Aaliyah said. “Ansari went on to make a new name for himself, going to university and becoming a successful businessman in his own right. We now know he was funneling much of that money back into al-Qaeda. When Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011, al-Qaeda effectively splintered into dozens of smaller, autonomous cells around the world, which was how it was designed to operate in the first place. Soon after, Haydar Ansari went from merely funding militant activities to leading them, becoming the leader of a particularly dangerous cell in Afghanistan.”
My eyes went from the picture of the young Haydar Ansari to the file on him on Aaliyah’s screen. The beginning read like the bio of any regular guy. Born. Went to school. Married a Syrian woman named Bashira. Had kids. A home. A career. But in 2011 he’d given it all up. Left it all behind to become a black-masked face in an al-Qaeda video, leading terrorist attacks from a hidden bunker somewhere inside Afghanistan.
“Ansari’s cell has been responsible for some of the worst attacks on US servicemen and civilians in years,” Aaliyah said. “We know it’s him, but we still haven’t been able to catch him.” She called up a picture of a bombed-out building in a dusty desert town. “We thought we’d killed him with a drone strike three years ago, but six months later he claimed responsibility for a bombing in Egypt that killed six Americans. He’s like a cockroach. We step on him, but he just comes back.”