Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  It felt like a chasm had opened up between them, like a ravine had been rent into the earth. Naveen on one side, Kris, and all that he’d seen, all that he’d watched unfold before him as he stood silently, on the other. Kris, and the CIA, all the way up to Director Thatcher, and further, to the president.

  “Why don’t you arrest them?” Kris finally said. His voice cracked.

  Naveen blew out a long breath. “Arrest two Americans on a base that doesn’t exist, in a country that pretends we’re not here? While I’m surrounded by other CIA officers who support what those two jackasses are doing? I wouldn’t make it out alive.” Turning, Naveen grabbed his duffel, slung it over his shoulder. “Watch out, Caldera,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand to shake. “This isn’t right. And it’s all going to come out one day. It’s going to be a fucking mess when it does. Justice always comes.”

  Turning, he headed for the vehicle bay, the concrete slab where they parked their four-wheelers. It was a grueling six-hour drive through the mud and the jungle to get to the nearest city. They were off the map, purposely. Off the edge of the world, in more ways than one.

  “Wait. Wait.”

  Naveen stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “I’m not staying, Caldera. Don’t try and stop me.”

  “I’m not staying either. Can you fit two more in your jeep?”

  Chapter 15

  Islamabad, Pakistan

  June 19, 2002

  The sound of rain, of water dripping from the faucet, the toilet bowl filling after a flush, flashed David back to Thailand, every time.

  He hadn’t seen it happen. Hadn’t seen Zahawi be smothered with the water, drowned, until Kris had interrupted and brought him back to life. But his mind could fill in the gaps, rewind reality and paint too-vivid pictures, working backward from the moment he’d appeared in the cell door.

  Untethered, his mind worked overtime, building images from his memories, dredging through his soul for the raw material. He’d been through SERE school where Dennis had studied, had based his interrogation techniques on. He’d been mock interrogated, forced to sit nude while someone tried to crack him. It had been a game, an endurance test. He’d known there was an end, a point at which it would all evaporate. It hadn’t ever been real.

  He’d never thought of his father.

  His memories fractured, a broken kaleidoscope, or the carved wood fractals of his childhood mosque, honeycomb filigrees of bursting sunlight, a million tiny rays. His father’s face, smiling at him after prayers, reaching for him, rubbing his head. His father’s face on a naked, piss-covered body, drowned in a puddle on a dirt floor.

  He’d never put his father back into his life. Not in twenty-one years, not since leaving Libya, leaving Africa, and washing the sand and the sun and the memories away. He’d left it all behind, his history, his name, his religion. Everything. He couldn’t be an Arab in America, certainly not a Libyan, not when they’d arrived. Pan Am exploding over Lockerbie had still been fresh for most people, as was President Reagan calling Qaddafi the most dangerous man in the world.

  Never mind that David and his mother agreed. Never mind that the worst victims of Qaddafi were the Libyan people.

  To be Libyan in the nineties was to be the enemy. He’d seen it on TV, in the movies, everywhere.

  He’d buried it all, fragmented the memories until they were grains of sand, blown to the corners of his soul.

  September 11 had brought the world to a standstill, had shaken the foundations of the globe, and everything he’d buried had come uprooted. He’d worked so hard to become American, but in a moment, one morning, he’d turned right back into a dirty Arab, someone dangerous, someone suspicious, the epitome of the Other in so many people’s eyes.

  Collective blame was heaped on his and every other Muslim’s shoulders, the hatred of the Western world heaped on a billion people for the actions of nineteen men and the hatred of their small cult.

  How could al-Qaeda undo the world so completely? Poison the minds of so many? Tarnish a people, and a faith, so entirely? How had their pain led them to dream about death, crave annihilation? Men like Bin Laden, like Qaddafi, like Zahawi and his best friend, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they ruined the world for everyone.

  And were ruining David’s world, spinning it around like a Ferris wheel that wouldn’t stop.

  Kris had pulled him out of Thailand, pouring him into the jeep with Agent Naveen in the middle of the rain. He’d still been unbalanced then, still fighting to keep the past and the present right in his mind.

  Ryan and Dan hadn’t come back with them. He’d thought they would. But Kris had said, when he got into the jeep, “Dan promised he’d watch them. He’s going to take over the intel analysis. Ryan… He’s taking over the facility.”

  They’d shared a long look at that. Ryan, in charge of the detention facility, overseeing Zahawi’s interrogation.

  Six hours through the rain, and they were back in the city. He and Kris had spent a full day in a rundown motel, turning off their cell phones and their satellite phones and making love until they couldn’t breathe, until they couldn’t think, couldn’t hear the rain turning to water being poured over a black hooded face. When he’d wanted to sleep, he’d rolled Kris over, slid into him again. When he couldn’t breathe, when the memories were too strong, he’d kissed Kris until Kris had breathed for him.

  Twelve hours later, they were back in Pakistan.

  He was sent to the streets, back to Islamabad and Peshawar, back to being undercover in the teeming masses. Pashto, Urdu, and Arabic washed over him. The sun, a physical burn, blasted him from above. He tasted dust and sweat, and walked between streets, between alleys, into and out of markets. Overhead, sunlight split into streamers between swaying bands of fabric stretched across alleys and market stalls. He moved from shadow to shadow, watching and waiting.

  Living. Listening to the people around him speak of Allah every other sentence. Hearing the muezzins call the city to prayer, over and over again. Mothers and sisters moved around him. Fathers and brothers called to one another. Soccer balls rustled in the dirt. Tea and cinnamon floated on the air, above the sewage and the manure.

  Pakistan, on the surface, wasn’t anywhere close to Libya. People pressed in on him from every side. Pakistan was full, crowded with humanity, whereas Libya was spacious, more sand and sun than people. Empty stretches of the desert concealed Libya’s secrets. In Pakistan, there were no secrets, only gossip and scandal waiting for the right moment.

  But it was a Muslim nation, with the rhythms of Islam embedded in its bones, in its blood, and old men walked the street with their slow, careful gaits, watching the sky and waiting for the time to pray.

  If his father had lived, would he look like this man, or that man?

  He stayed out of the US Embassy from before the sun rose to after it set. He returned late, after driving for hours, shaking any tails he might have picked up, and blending into the obscurity of the millions and millions of other Muslim men.

  Time was no longer linear. The past lived in his present, extruding from his pores, his lungs, his eyeballs. He was saturated in memory, in time, drowning in it. At the wrong moment, he’d hear a note, the lilt of Arabic, a portion of the azan, and be back in his childhood. Catch a glimpse of the sun burning the sky to the color of an overripe orange, the look in a stranger’s eye, or the skyward gaze of a man in prayer.

  He saw his father in the face of every old man.

  He had to stop. Focus. His mind was like a broken sieve, leaking everywhere.

  Kris spent a lot of time with George, especially in the evenings, when they were in meetings with Langley and Washington DC. He needed Kris, his lighthouse, his anchor. He was drifting out to sea without him.

  David tried to get back in tempo with his team. Since Afghanistan, since he’d splintered off and stayed by Kris’s side, a gulf had emerged between them. His team had been his family, his brothers-in-arms, even despite their wildness, the bloodlust that had
seized Jackson and the others, and the way their colonel in Germany had talked about killing those fucking Muslims. They were his family, as screwed up as some of them were.

  Or, they had been.

  He couldn’t fall back into the endless bullshit Cobb and Warrick threw at each other. Couldn’t muster the interest to kick Jackson off the junky game system, take his turn at shooting up the bad guys who dressed suspiciously like Middle Easterners, like Arabs, even Libyans. Their noise moved around him, through him, as if he were an alien in their midst.

  Palmer crashed down on the couch next to him, creaking the old springs. They hadn’t spent much outfitting their living quarters in Islamabad, a sprawling house near the embassy. The furniture was on the verge of collapse. “Haddad. Squared away?”

  He nodded. “Yes sir.”

  Palmer kept staring at him. “You sure?”

  He blinked. “Is this Captain Palmer asking, sir?”

  “No, Sergeant, there is nothing that I want you to tell me. This is a friend checking in.” Palmer’s voice dropped. “Something’s got you shook. We can all see it. You’ve been off since Afghanistan. Ever since you were pulled off to go one-on-one with the CIA.”

  “I’m good to go.” David tried to brush Palmer off.

  Palmer wasn’t taking it. “Look, I got a WARNO for you.” A WARNO, a warning order, a heads-up. David’s hackles bristled as Palmer leaned in closer, speaking into David’s shoulder. “Some people are asking questions. Making comments. Wondering about you.”

  “About me?”

  Palmer stared. “Jackson let it slip you aren’t racking out in your own bed.”

  He turned away. Stared at the TV, at the video game. Rodriguez was mowing down the bad guys in a tank. The bad guys looked like his neighbors from when he was seven, his neighbors who’d run a restaurant on Abdullah Bala Street in Benghazi and gave him pomegranates. His seven-year-old fingers would be ruby red, stained down to his fingernails by the time he was done. In his memories, the pomegranate juice turned to blood, the same blood on the TV screen.

  “You gotta watch your six, Haddad. It’s almost time to pop smoke.”

  “What?”

  “We’re coming up on nine months we’ve been deployed. They’re gonna pull us back soon. Rotate us out. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

  “What rumors?”

  “Iraq, man. We’re taking Iraq out next.”

  David bit his tongue, hard enough to hurt. He’d heard about Iraq from Zahawi. The black flags of Khorasan coming over the hills, through Afghanistan, through Iraq. The prophecy, the prophecy.

  “We gotta rotate out to start workups for invading Iraq. You know we’re always the tip of the spear.”

  “When?”

  “I’m waiting for the orders. Any day now.”

  It was late when Kris finally came back to his—their—bedroom. David had already halfheartedly shared a beer with Jackson and Palmer, tried to shoot the shit with Warrick a bit. Had showered, standing in the cool water with far too little pressure as images of Zahawi and his father, Pakistan and Libya, and the burning sun beating down on a dry, dusty landscape, burst like fireworks behind his eyelids.

  Kris looked like he’d been up for days, had stood before Goliath himself. Unlike the mythical David, though, he hadn’t succeeded.

  Collapsing onto their bed, Kris slumped forward, burying his face in his palms. The knobs of his spine stuck out through his rumpled button-down. David trailed his fingers down each of them, pausing at every furrow. He felt Kris’s breath, the shudder of his lungs.

  “I’m sorry,” Kris whispered. “I tried.”

  It had always been a foolish promise.

  Kris couldn’t stop the US government, couldn’t stop the might of the biggest bureaucracy on the face of the planet. Especially not from itself. “They won’t stop.”

  Kris shook his head. His face was still hidden. He spoke to the darkness of his fingers. “George told me I was making a mistake. I was ruining my career. The detainee program is the next big thing in the agency. That anyone who is anyone is jumping to get on board.”

  David’s fingers trailed down Kris’s back, tugged at the loose fabric until it was free from his pants. He slid his hand up Kris’s skin, ghosting over the small of his back, the taut warmth there. The small of Kris’s back had become his holy land, his Mecca, a place he craved and worshipped, burying his face deep in nightly prayer. The secrets of his soul were in Kris’s body, he knew. He just had to find them. He’d spend his whole life searching, on his knees in prayer before Kris.

  He knew what Kris’s answer to George would have been. He knew it like he would have spoken it himself. “You told him to go to hell.”

  Kris snorted. Finally, he pulled back, his fingers revealing his red-rimmed eyes. “I said a little more than that.” He sighed. “I swore I would never be a part of the detainee program. That one day it would come apart and I would fucking cheer when it came down around the agency. I would fucking cheer.” Kris rubbed his eyes. “George said I was damn close to being a traitor.”

  “You’re not a traitor.”

  Kris slumped, falling backward against David. “I’m being sent back to CTC. To Langley.” He rolled into David, burying his face in David’s chest. “I leave in a week.”

  Relief bubbled through David, and he wrapped his arms around Kris, pulling his body completely against his own. They fit together like a puzzle made of two pieces, their bodies made to conjoin in a million different ways. “Palmer said we’re rotating out, too. Soon, he said. Very soon. I’m going back.”

  “Where are you based in the States?”

  In all the time they’d been together, they’d never spoken about home. About the United States and what life was like for them back there. It hadn’t seemed real, as real as their days in Afghanistan and after. Going back to America seemed like a movie he was about to see, something that was going to happen to another person.

  It felt exactly like he’d felt when he was ten years old, fleeing Libya with his mother. Then, like now, he’d clung to another person to make the journey.

  America wasn’t a place to go alone. He’d die if he were alone there, suffocate under the pace and the energy. But Kris would be there. His palm found the small of Kris’s back again. He spread his fingers, stretched his hand open until he swept down Kris’s ass.

  “I’m at Fort Bragg. North Carolina. It’s a little over a four-hour drive to Langley.” He swallowed. “I’ve already looked it up.”

  Kris smiled, that sly curl of his lips that crinkled the corners of his eyes. The smile sounded like the shape of his laugh—sardonic, but warm at the center, for the one who mattered. For David. “Have you? Think you’re going to be coming up to visit?”

  It slipped out, before he’d thought it through. Days and days of hearing Arabic, of hearing his language, his father’s faith, saturate the air around him. “In shaa Allah,” he said.

  Kris’s eyes went wide. David’s breath stuttered, stopped. “I mean—”

  Kris pressed his fingers to David’s mouth. His lips followed, trading places with his fingers. David drank him in. Pulled Kris on top of him, until Kris was everywhere, until his arms surrounded David like a veil and his body was the moon over David, rescuing him from the sun, from the memories, from everything.

  Falls Church, Virginia

  July 1, 2002

  Kris’s apartment smelled like dust and old age.

  Thank God for automatic bill pay. His checking account, abandoned save for his paychecks deposited by the CIA, had dutifully pumped out payments for his apartment, his utilities, and his insurance for the near year he’d been gone. But not a soul had entered his cramped home. Dust over an inch thick coated everything. His windows were covered in grime. A forgotten spoon in his sink lived under a cover of green fuzz.

  He cleaned for days, scrubbing every room from top to bottom. In the background, the television hummed, tuned to CNN all hours of the day and night.
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br />   None of his old clothes fit. His body had changed, broadening in places, tightening in others. He had an empty closet and a stack of designer clothes to donate. The only things that fit were combat pants and worn field jackets that always smelled like gunpowder and woodsmoke. His Pakistani clothes fit, too, thanks to David. Kris spent the days cleaning his apartment in breezy kameez pants and his silk house coat, the necklace David gave him nestled against the hollow of his throat.

  The day before he reported to CTC, he went on a shopping spree, frantically buying out Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. He blew thousands, but came home feeling like a runway model, like all those days spent enduring mismatched camo and unwashed shirts were vindicated. CIA money would make him the most fabulously dressed officer. He’d helped win the war for them. They would make him look fabulous again. And no one would make him feel badly about it now. Not after everything.

  CTC hummed like a beehive had been kicked over. Shifts worked around the clock, targeteers and analysts and operations officers stacked in working groups and zeroing in on anyone who was anyone in al-Qaeda. Kris plugged into the Afghanistan group, avoiding the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed group, the detainee interrogations group, and the Zahawi group.

  In the evenings, he worked out in his apartment’s gym, watching CNN on the televisions over the treadmills. After, he fixed dinner in his apartment, throwing together a protein shake and a chicken breast while CNN kept droning. He fell asleep to the shifting lights and the dull susurrus of the TV.

  Finally, eleven days after he’d set foot in his apartment, his phone rang. The incoming number looked like a credit card, long digits stretched across the display. An international number.

  “Caldera.” His heart pounded.

  “It’s me. We’re in Tajikistan, at Camp Alpha. We just got word. We’re going to Germany, then back to the States.”