Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  “Habib albi,” Kris breathed. “Enta habibi.” Love of my heart. You are my love.

  David pulled back. Their eyes met. “Ya rouhi,” David whispered. My soul.

  Kris kissed him. Their bodies were still joined. David still filled him, body and soul. “You are my soul, too.”

  Chapter 17

  Falls Church, Virginia

  August 2003

  Kris stared at his ringing Blackberry. He blinked.

  Why the fuck was George calling him at nine o’clock at night?

  He pushed off David and sat up on their couch. They’d been watching the news, another nightly report of rising tensions in Iraq and Washington DC.

  Five months after the invasion of Iraq, the moral undergirders of the war had collapsed. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. The image of an Iraq armed to the teeth, ready to support every jihadi in the world, had fallen apart. The supposed links to terrorist groups, the narrative that Iraq was a broad state-sponsor of terrorism that imperiled the world, had turned to dust and smoke. No al-Qaeda camps were found in the country. No terrorist training facilities. No documents outlining an alliance, no proof of cooperation, no indications anywhere.

  Even Saqqaf had vanished from Kurdistan before the invasion began.

  But online, his reputation had never been greater. The man Bin Laden had refused to meet, the thug Zahawi had decried as being too unintelligent for al-Qaeda, had turned into the darling of online jihadis. Moments after the secretary of state’s speech to the UN, jihadist message boards had lit up with praises and blessings.

  Saqqaf had gone from third-string nobody to the new terrorist superstar, thanks entirely to the United States.

  David shifted, muting the TV. “Who is it?”

  “George.” Kris stared. His phone kept ringing. Should he answer? Or should he just toss his phone behind the couch?

  He squeezed his eyes shut as he answered. “Caldera.”

  “Took you long enough. Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

  Kris snorted. “Should I tell you what you interrupted? Detail it out for you?”

  “No thanks.” George’s voice was thin, strained.

  “Why do you guys always think the gays are hosting sex parties in dungeons, or about to blow a clown car of dick? Why do you straights always think it’s some wild insanity? Can’t we just be eating dinner? I mean, fabulously, of course—”

  “I’m regretting I called.”

  “Why did you call?”

  “’Cause now I need a favor.”

  “I really don’t understand why you think I’d even be willing to take your call, much less give you a favor.”

  “You’re still on the line, aren’t you?”

  Kris smiled. Was this friendship? George was an asshole who played politics with Langley, with Capitol Hill, but he’d come through for Kris more than once. He’d turned a blind eye in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. He’d hooked David up with his new job. David was finally finished with his Blackcreek training and was assigned to Langley, helping on the range with weapons qualifications and special training for advanced tactics. He spent a lot of time with the junior CIA analysts getting shuttled off to Iraq. Every night, he came home to Kris. Kris’s apartment had become theirs. Cramped and too small, but theirs. George had helped make that happen.

  “What do you need, George?”

  “You have an inescapable talent for slicing through any and all bullshit that comes at you, Caldera. It’s one of the reasons you’re so popular. Especially with the vice president.”

  “So we’re acknowledging now that everything was bullshit?”

  “It’s always been bullshit. We just all knew to keep our mouths shut.”

  “Well… you know me. That’s always been my problem.” He put as much sass into his voice as he could and turned the whole thing around, knowing George would go straight to what he was suggesting.

  George coughed. “Jesus, Caldera. I thought you were with Haddad now. Together forever, or isn’t that why you wanted him at Langley?”

  He stayed quiet. George was still George. He didn’t need to hand deliver his weaknesses to George. Not gift wrapped like that.

  “How soon can you be in Baghdad?”

  “Baghdad?”

  “The White House is shitting bricks over the situation on the ground. The chief of station in Baghdad wrote a report, and he used the word ‘insurgency’. The White House went nuclear. Pushed back. No one has used the insurgency word, not yet.”

  “It’s fucking obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Someone is pumping the National Security Council up with stories of renegade Baathist loyalists and scattered pockets of violence. But our soldiers are being picked off. We’re up to ten dead a week now, from snipers and IEDs. The White House is petrified this is turning into Vietnam.”

  “I believe I tried to warn them that could happen.”

  “In fact, you did.” George read the title of Kris’s prewar analysis. “‘Security Challenges in a Post-Saddam Iraq—Navigating the Political Battlefield.’ I fished this out of the agency’s black hole.”

  “Glad it was taken seriously.”

  “I need you here. I need your eyes, and your brain. I need your analysis. I need you to find out exactly what’s going on. This is your specialty. Putting the pieces together like no one else can. Getting into their minds. Understanding the world from every dimension.” He sniffed. “I need your help, Caldera.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’ll take what you say and force the White House to understand. No bullshit. Not this time.” He sighed. “Too many lives are on the line.”

  “That’s always the justification, isn’t it? ‘Lives are on the line’. ‘We’re saving lives’. ‘It will be better this way’.”

  “Caldera. This is important. And yes, we can save lives. If we understand what’s going on, we can fix it.”

  “Could have saved lives if someone had read my report before the war.”

  Silence.

  “Book two tickets on the next flight to Baghdad. I’ll be there.”

  “Two?”

  “If you think I’m flying in without backup, without security, you’re out of your mind. I’m bringing someone I trust.”

  “Let me guess.” George snorted. “Haddad?”

  “We’ll see you soon, George.”

  “See you soon. And… thanks, Caldera.”

  Baghdad, Iraq

  August 2003

  Baghdad in August was like landing on the surface of Mercury. Heat blasted him in the face, as if the sun had been given a magnifying glass and was intent on burning Iraq off the planet. He squinted behind his sunglasses. Grabbed his bottle of water and downed the whole thing. Nothing helped.

  A pair of F-15s roared down the next runway. In the heat haze, they seemed to melt as they lifted off, shimmering into the dull blue sky. Dust and sand filled the air, a grit Kris could taste between his teeth. Everything was dulled by the sand.

  George had sent a car for them. They blazed through the Baghdad streets to the Green Zone in a blacked-out SUV, racing past Iraqis struggling with their broken-down sedans and dusty bicycles. Sullen stares from Iraqis waiting in long lines for food and fuel followed them.

  “Those people look happy we’re here?” Kris peered out the window. “They look happy with their liberators?”

  David, silent since before they’d landed, stared at the people. “Their eyes are hard. They look like what my people looked like. Under Qaddafi, when I was a kid. A quiet rage against their oppressors mixed with a powerless void.” He licked his lips. “It creates an impotent rage. Being someone else’s afterthought.”

  “They’ve been abandoned.” Kris saw it in the faces of the men and women they zipped by. “What kind of world have they been given now? We asked for their trust. And we’ve given them this.”

  There wasn’t enough food. Most families relied on handouts from the UN, when before the war their cupboards had been ful
l. Power was rarely on. Security blockades chopped the city up, leaving neighborhoods cut off from one another. Shadowy attacks on American soldiers and patrols had turned a creeping paranoia into a full-blown American-run police state. Instead of Saddam, the Americans were now the occupiers, controlling Baghdad’s every move. And yet still, near-daily bomb blasts ambushed the military patrols and sniper fire rang from almost every neighborhood.

  The Green Zone was Baghdad’s riverside district, and the occupation’s headquarters. The curving bends of the Tigris walled off the Green Zone, limiting the entrance to one six-lane highway. Concrete barriers guarded by tanks and Humvees and dozens of soldiers greeted them as they snaked their way through the entrance.

  Saddam’s palaces had been taken over and turned into the US Embassy and military command posts. Inside the Green Zone, verdant gardens stretched long, with scattered fountains spurting water in lazy arcs and dazzling flower beds sprawled in roaring bloom. Imperial palms reached for the sky, towering at least forty feet overhead. The Green Zone was manicured, ordered, and peaceful. The headquarters of the occupation was worlds apart from the Baghdad the Iraqis lived in.

  Humvees shared space with SUVs. American flags flapped from every building, at the doors and on the roof. Helicopters roared overhead, sweeping low over the city. Some landed at the hospital. Others kept going, turning for the airport.

  George met them on the steps of a grand former palace, marble and gold stretching as far as they could see. “Pretty incredible, huh?”

  Kris peered over the top of his sunglasses at him. David hitched their duffel on his shoulder.

  George scowled. “C’mon. I’ve got a lot to show you.”

  “We’ve had three major bombings that have made everyone sit up and take notice.”

  George personally walked Kris and David through the devastation and destabilization that had seized Iraq over the summer months, following the invasion. They spoke in his secured office, on the top floor of the palace overlooking the Tigris and the gardens. The air conditioning churned, keeping the room just on the wrong side of too cold. It was good to be the head of the CIA in Iraq.

  “August seventh. The Jordanian Embassy was hit. Car bomb. Remote detonator. The driver parked his van and walked away. The blast tore a thirty-foot hole in the embassy. Destroyed cars up and down the street. Seventeen Iraqis were killed.”

  George slid photos across the desk. Kris and David looked together, flipping through images of bodies on the streets, crumpled cars, and the destroyed embassy. It looked like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the building.

  “This was the first time civilians were targeted. We don’t understand why this target was picked. We don’t know who ordered the bombing, either. We’ve been going through who was there that day, trying to see if it was an assassination that went large. Took out a bunch of collateral damage.”

  Kris stayed quiet. His brain churned.

  “After, rumors ripped through the city. Some said an American helo had fired on the embassy. There were riots.”

  Sighing, George passed over a second set of photos. Another building destroyed, flattened by a bomb blast. A burned UN flag lay on the heaps of shattered concrete. “August nineteenth. Twenty-two people were killed at the UN headquarters here.”

  “In the Green Zone?” David frowned.

  “No. The UN kept their headquarters outside of the Green Zone.” George shook his head. “This was a suicide blast. The driver drove a flatbed up to the building and detonated. The head of the UN mission in Iraq was killed.”

  “A suicide blast rules out the White House’s theory that this was the work of Saddam loyalists and disgruntled former Baathists.” Kris squinted.

  “They have conceded that ‘foreign fighters’ are in Iraq. But nothing else.”

  “Where are you on the investigation into the bombing?”

  “We turned up electronic surveillance all over the country. NSA’s been vacuuming up all cell phone calls. We picked up a series of calls that are obviously coordinated attempts to relay messages. There’s no chatter. Just coded phrases, and then the callers hang up.”

  “Have you started a phone web?”

  George smiled. “Like you did in Pakistan? It was the first thing we did. We’ve got a network of numbers, but no names.”

  “Where do the numbers come from?”

  “Stolen prepaid SIM cards from Germany. God only knows how they ended up in Baghdad.”

  “So that’s a dead end.”

  “For now. We’re still listening to everything. Every call through those numbers.” Grimacing, George passed over the last set of photos, scenes of carnage and death that eclipsed both previous bombings. “And a few days ago. Friday, prayer day. The whole city, it seemed, was trying to go see Sheikh al-Ahmad, who had just returned from exile in Iran. He was a beloved Shia cleric. His sermon was on forming a unity government, on building bridges throughout the country.”

  “Was?”

  David looked down. Fisted his hands over his mouth.

  “Twin car bombs killed eighty-five people at the mosque, and after, more were crushed to death in the stampede of panic. Al-Ahmad was vaporized. We only found a foot.”

  Kris closed his eyes.

  “Riots have been going on for two days now. The Shia in the city and across Iraq are outraged.”

  “As they should be.”

  George shot him a look. “I’ve set you both up with rooms in the Green Zone. Caldera, you’re in the secured wing of the embassy. CIA, FBI, NSA only. Haddad, you’re with the contractors.” He sketched a quick map, three lines showing the major roads and the river, and Xs for buildings. He tapped a square he’d drawn, over a mile away from the embassy palace. “Here. The contractors are here. In the Imperial Palm Hotel.”

  “George.”

  “It’s policy, Caldera.” George held up his hands, shrugging. “No nonsecured personnel in the secured wings.”

  “So you’re telling me that all the spouses, when they visit on the CIA’s conjugal tour, stay in some hotel? And not a single CIA officer has brought someone back to their ‘secured room’?” He made air quotes with his fingers as he snapped.

  “I don’t believe you two are married.” George held Kris’s icy stare.

  “George—”

  “These are the rules, Kris,” George snapped. “I’ve gone to bat for you a hundred times already! Saved your job, and your ass! Before, and now. I’m not putting my neck on the line for this.”

  “Nice to know where your lines are, George.” Kris stood. “I’ll be at the Imperial Palm Hotel.”

  George gave them a bulletproof SUV and boxes of intelligence. Evidence reports from the FBI and military police, NSA intercepts, CIA and military intelligence analyses of the bombings.

  George had hooked David up with a decent room, at least. Once, the hotel might have been something. Fifties art deco style seemed out of place in Baghdad. The hotel felt uncomfortably close to one Kris had spent Spring Break in one year on Miami Beach, sleeping his way through what seemed like an entire fraternity.

  Instead of frat boys in popped collars, contractors swarmed the hotel, hanging out in the hallways and the lobby and in their jeeps and SUVs. They wore baseball caps and had weapons strapped to their thighs and under their arms, and their polos all had some security company emblem emblazoned on the chest. Every single one stared Kris up and down as he walked in, with his man bag and his linen suit, his pale-pink button-down, and his spiked hair.

  It would be one of those places, one of those deployments.

  David shouldered close to him, walking inside his shadow. Kris watched him glower back at the contractors, hold their stares until they were forced to look away. He put one hand on Kris’s back, low, protective, possessing.

  He smiled. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible after all. Not this time.

  Even though David was exhausted, he helped Kris set up the intel. The Jordanian Embassy bombing, the UN bombing, and the mosq
ue bombing, each on a different wall. Kris pinned and taped evidence in clusters. Bomb fragments and wiring diagrams. Witness statements. Victim profiles. NSA intercepts and a copy of the phone web went on another wall.

  As Kris started working through the intel, mumbling to himself, David lay down and started to snore.

  Hours later, David woke, jet-lagged and out of sequence. A helicopter was rumbling by, flying low and rattling windows. Darkness stretched outside the Green Zone, spreading over Baghdad. Electricity was still off, except for the generators the Americans kept running to light up the highways and overpasses. Dots of illumination flickered throughout the city, a mix of generators and fires that built a paint-by-numbers canvas of post-invasion depression.

  Inside the Green Zone, floodlights kept night at bay, lighting up the central roads and gardens in fluorescent daylight. Neon spilled into their hotel room.

  Kris was on his fourth cup of hotel coffee, brewed from the bathroom coffeemaker, a relic of the seventies. David came up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and burying his face in his neck. “What have you found?”

  “The bombs are the same. Old aircraft munitions, probably raided from one of Iraq’s military bases during the invasion. The wiring fragments recovered are the same at each location.”

  “It’s one person?”

  “One bomb maker, or one organization being taught by a single bomb maker, yes. All three blasts were the work of a single entity.”

  “Any thoughts on who?”

  “I have an idea. I want to connect more dots, though. Like these.” Kris took David to the NSA intercepts. “We’re seeing more of the relay messages. These callers are definitely using a code. ‘Praises were given to Allah today.’ And the calls are going to the same numbers they went to after each of the other two bombings.”