Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  One standing, a holstered gun on his hip, gesturing as he spoke. Ryan. He gritted his teeth, tried to breathe through the surge of rage.

  One kneeling, his hands behind his back, like he was cuffed. Dawood?

  Another figure lay on the ground, still, unmoving. His throat clenched. Dan? Was he too late?

  Muffled voices carried on a soft conversation, punctuated by harsh laughter that grated down Kris’s spine.

  Time to end this. Time to confront Ryan. He eyeballed the inside of the warehouse over the edge of the broken window. Ryan had his back to the SUV, to the freight doors. That was his breach point, keeping to the shadows as he slipped in.

  Kris moved, and then waited at the edge of the doors, listening to Dawood’s voice.

  “The death toll will be astronomical. This will ignite a fury that cannot be contained, that cannot be controlled. You will unleash hatred and wrath on the world, and all for what? A lie?”

  “It’s not a lie. It’s a revelation. It’s showing the world exactly what you truly are. Your Quran, your hadith. Your jihadi brothers, your ISIS fighters, they beg for this, for the apocalypse, for the end of the world. They beg to meet their God.”

  Kris’s blood turned to ice, freezing solid in his veins. A thousand spiders tap danced down his spine, the pitter patter of pure terror.

  That wasn’t Ryan’s voice.

  “I’m just giving your kind exactly what they want. A holy war, and the apocalypse. The end times. It just won’t turn out the way they want.”

  “You have become what you hate,” Dawood said. “You have become exactly what you hate.”

  Kris felt every beat of his heart, heard the rush of blood in his veins. His thoughts tumbled, swirled, coalesced.

  Truth stared him in the face, at last.

  He didn’t call Ryan. Everything he said, it was a lie.

  I gave up Dawood, right into his hands.

  He covered his tracks, threw suspicion off him, from the moment I brought Dawood’s confession to him.

  Straight to him, the mole.

  “And you don’t understand. We will always win. I will always win.” Laughter, suddenly so familiar to Kris, a laugh he’d heard hundreds of times over the years, a laugh he’d come to rely on, a sound he’d set the compass of his heart to when all his moorings had come undone. “I already have won. Especially where it really matters.”

  “You’re going to break his heart.”

  “I’m going to hold him close and kiss away his tears when he mourns the memory of who you were. When he rages against what you became, and what atrocities you are about to commit. He’s going to give his heart to me.”

  Fury crackled through Kris. How long had he been played? How long had this been going on? How blind had he been? His vision swam, narrowing until all he saw was the dark silhouette before him, the shape of a man, a shadow outlined in headlights. The back of a head, the very center.

  Where he’d put his bullet.

  He pushed forward, striding out of the shadows as he raised his weapon. “Dan. Freeze, you son of a bitch! Hands up!”

  Dan gasped. He could hear it, in the stillness of the warehouse, Dan’s quick little inhale. He kept his back to Kris and raised his hands, slowly.

  Beyond Dan, Dawood kneeled on the ground, hands behind his back. A trail of tears glittered off his cheeks. “Habibi—” he started.

  “Shut up!” Dan growled. “Suspects don’t get to speak!”

  Kris advanced, digging the barrel of his gun into the back of Dan’s head. “Take your own advice, Dan. I will pull this fucking trigger if you move one single muscle.”

  “Kris—”

  “Try me. Please. Give me an excuse.”

  “You’re confused, Kris. You don’t know what you’re seeing. You walked in on something that can’t be understood, not like this. Let me help you.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Kris bellowed. “Keep your fucking mouth closed! You’ve spread enough lies!”

  “Kris, you’re wrong. You don’t understand—”

  “Habibi, it’s him. It is.” Dawood sighed. Fresh tears poured from his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “Who the fuck is that?” Kris jerked his chin to the body on the ground, a man lying on his side, his back to the headlights, to Kris. His burnished skin suggested Arab, and his unnatural stillness, the way his limbs lay loose and unmoving, clawed at Kris’s guts.

  “Haddad’s partner,” Dan snapped. “Like I said, you don’t understand what is happening here—”

  “Habibi!” Dawood shouted, panic shredding his voice. He tried to stand, his eyes wide, crazed. “Look out—”

  A pinch, a hot prick, stabbed Kris in the neck. He whirled, but the world smeared, and shadows turned to darkness as everything tipped sideways.

  He felt hands on his arms, catching him as he fell, and the last thing he heard was Dawood’s voice bellowing his name.

  Dan lowered Kris’s unconscious body to the warehouse floor, cradling his head before it hit the cold ground. “You were supposed to keep a lookout.”

  “I was working on the timer.” Noam glared at Dan as he yanked the syringe from Kris’s neck. “He appeared out of nowhere. I barely had time to duck so he wouldn’t see me.”

  “He’s SAD. You’re Mossad. Aren’t you supposed to be better than SAD? Isn’t that your point of pride?” Dan cursed. “He may have seen too much. Why the fuck is he even here?”

  Noam wagged the empty syringe over Kris’s body. “This beauty will wipe his recent memory. He won’t remember anything. He won’t even remember how he got here.”

  “You better be fucking sure.”

  “I am. I use this all the time.”

  Dan glared. “Is everything ready?”

  “Almost. Converting from a switch to a timer takes a while.” Noam glowered at Haddad, cuffed and kneeling. “Would have been better if he hadn’t fucking turned on us. I thought he was the anchor of our plan?”

  Dan grinned, all teeth and raw hatred, his fury pouring from him, crackling off his being, the very center of his soul finally unleashed. “Haddad has always fucked everything up. It’s his legacy. I shouldn’t be surprised about this.”

  “I need a few more minutes on the timer.”

  “Get back to it. And don’t worry about Haddad. He’s still going to fucking help us.”

  “I won’t.” Haddad swayed on his knees, as if he were about to pitch forward. Everything in him screamed, reaching for Kris. Dan could see his straining restraint, how he barely held himself back from crawling across the dirt to go to his husband. “I won’t murder for you. Ever.”

  Dan cradled Kris’s still face in one hand. Kris was so stunningly beautiful. He’d always been gorgeous, from the day he’d walked into CTC nearly twenty years ago and had pressed pause on Dan’s life the first moment he’d seen him. How he’d stolen Dan’s breath, had captivated Dan’s mind. He’d nurtured long fantasies of their lives enjoined, the happiness they could have, as soon as he worked up the courage to ask him out. How he’d craved Kris, nurturing his desire in the silence of CTC, watching Kris in his formative years.

  Nearly twenty years ago. How long their lives had been entwined, had been shared.

  They were destined to be together, in every way.

  Until Haddad. Until Haddad had fucked everything up.

  Dan pulled his gun from Kris’s limp fingers. He rolled Kris’s head, turning Kris’s face to Haddad. Dirt and grit dug into Kris’s cheek as he pressed the barrel of his gun against Kris’s temple.

  “No! Yallah, no, no. Astaghfirullah, no. No, please. Please…” Haddad’s voice, his breath, trembled. “Please…”

  He begged beautifully. His tears glistened, each a drop of joy in Dan’s soul. Naked terror danced in Haddad’s gaze.

  “Please… Don’t do this. Don’t…”

  “You want him to live?”

  Haddad’s eyes closed. “Don’t do this,” he whispered. “Don’t make me choose.”

  “
I thought I would have to spell it out for you but you jumped the gun, Haddad. Good boy. So. Do you want to see Kris’s beautiful, beautiful brains all over the ground? Or do you want him to live a long, long, happy life?”

  Haddad doubled over, screaming through gritted teeth. He pressed his forehead to the ground, anguished sobs crashing through his chest.

  “All your paths lead here, Dawood Haddad! Every choice you made in your life, every pitiful, desperate, stupid choice you made, built your road to this! It’s always been your destiny! You’re nothing but a filthy Muslim!” Dan’s bellows bounced off the warehouse walls, echoed in the darkness. “You were always, always going to go out like this. Worthless. Meaningless. But I have given your death meaning, Haddad. You should fucking thank me. You should thank me in your prayers for delivering the end times that your fucking psychotic God and all his followers begged for. Because this will be the end. And you’re all going to fall. You’re all going to die. You will always fall to us. To me!” Dan hissed.

  Haddad’s sobs seemed to tear him two, seemed to rip his soul into tatters.

  “It’s so fucking poetic, don’t you think? I will beat you, and I will kill you, and I will take everything that is yours. Exactly like history is supposed to go.”

  Haddad rolled his face against the ground. Dan saw a puddle of snot and spit, the ocean of his tears. “Allah,” he moaned. “I cry out for you in the darkness…”

  “Your God is dead, just like your people will be. And you will be remembered as the man who brought about the end. Who ushered in the end of days and woke the might of the American people.” His thumb dragged over Kris’s lips. “Because you’re going to do this. You will never, ever let him die.”

  Haddad’s shoulders shook. His prayers turned to a low keen, a wail that sounded like a soul dying.

  “If you care about him, at all, then you’re going to make this right for him.” Dan pushed off Kris, standing and tucking Kris’s gun into the small of his back. Kris rolled, limp and boneless as a rag doll, his cheek dusted with grime, but still perfect. Still utterly perfect. He was wonderful like this, pliant, limp, open to Dan in all the ways he never was. Why had Kris sealed off the deepest part of himself from Dan? Why hadn’t he ever let Dan into his heart, his soul?

  Fucking Haddad. It was always, always Haddad. “You’re going to write him a confession. You’re going to confess everything.”

  Finally, Haddad sat back. His eyes were vacant, shattered orbs that bled sorrow and hollow acceptance inside every tear. Snot and spit and dirt stained his face. He was a filthy animal, nothing but a filthy animal. How had he ever captured Kris’s love?

  “You’re going to tell him this was your plot. That you wanted it, that you dreamed of it, hungered for this. That you planned it, all of it. You’re going to give him a future in my arms.”

  Haddad shook his head, like he didn’t understand. A line of spit dribbled from his lips, stretched to the ground.

  “Yes, you are. As long as you play along, as long as you do your part, he lives. And he lives with me. In my arms.” Dan pointed his gun at Kris’s face. “Or he dies. Now.”

  “Dan.” Noam appeared at his shoulder. “We’re all set.” He nodded to Kris. “We have to move. If he’s here, then reinforcements are likely on the way.”

  “He loves to buck the system. And I made him believe I was the only one he could trust. Kris wouldn’t have called anyone. He tries to be the Lone Ranger, always. He probably wanted to save the day on his own.”

  “Still. We have to go.” Noam headed for Haddad’s partner, the last component to their plot. The Arab man lying on his side, unnaturally still. “Help me move him.”

  Dan caught the latex gloves Noam tossed him. They snapped as he tugged them on. No fingerprints, not on the bodies, and not on the SUV. They’d wiped it down a week before, had driven it to the safe house wearing gloves.

  Dan grunted as he hefted the Arab. “He’s heavy.”

  “A dead body packed full of shrapnel is.” Noam winked.

  The man’s arm flopped down, the back of his hand dragging on the ground. Dan stared at his face, still, expressionless, locked in death. In the moonlight, he looked like wax, like a doll.

  Save for the bullet hole in his temple.

  He’d been an ISIS fuck, executed by the Israeli military when they caught him planting IEDs on their border. He’d been one of the millions of Middle Eastern ghosts, unknown men who could be Syrian or Iraqi or Palestinian, or Who Gives A Fuck, who had no home and no hope and no future. He’d been a body without an identity, a human who didn’t exist to the multitude of bureaucracies in the world, someone who’d been born and had lived and had slipped through the cracks of everything and everyone.

  And that made him valuable.

  Noam, at Mossad, had taken ownership of his corpse for research purposes. He’d faked an autopsy, filed a report, and marked the body as disposed.

  Mossad would never know just how far off the reservation Noam had wandered.

  And then Noam had come to America for his six-month exchange with the CIA, flying diplomatic transport and skirting all checks, all inspections. No one questioned the refrigerated crate he’d brought with him.

  Over the months, Dan had built a profile in the system for their mystery man. ISIS, young twenties, an exchange student from Iraq, supposedly here on a student visa, but he’d never shown up for classes. How the American people would rage, demand a change to their open borders. Look at the terrorists pouring into the country, they would scream.

  All for an electric ghost and a man who had never existed in the world.

  Dan heaved the shrapnel-stuffed body into the rear of the SUV. Noam had packed the vehicle with explosives, built to ISIS specifications, using ISIS blueprints. He’d wiped his own fingerprints, had meticulously spent hours pressing their corpse’s fingers on each block of plastique, each wire. In the end, only fragments and ash would remain, scattered traces of DNA, but the hint of one partial print would be all they needed.

  One dead ISIS member, one SUV packed with explosives, and Haddad, detonating the bomb on the anniversary of September 11.

  There was no better start to the end of days.

  “I’ll pack up.” Noam shut the trunk. “Haddad and I will head to the staging point. What are you going to do with Caldera?”

  “I’ll keep him with me. He’s our insurance. If Haddad balks in any way, call me. I’ll send video of Kris eating a bullet to get him back on track.”

  Noam snorted. “You’d kill him? You?” Noam stared at him, the edges of his gaze pitch black, as if his eyes were sucking in the moonlight, the starlight, taking the light out of the world.

  Dan swallowed. “Is there anything you wouldn’t give for this?”

  Noam had spent nine months undercover inside ISIS ranks, had been a part of the migration from Syria to Iraq, the first months of the war. He’d seen the butchery, the bloodlust, the calamity unleashed upon the world. When Dan had met him in Tel Aviv, Noam had been hovering on the edge of eating a bullet or ten, one shot of vodka way from ending it all. He’d dreamed in screams and the roar of gunfire, in crimson blood and bodies burned alive.

  He’d seen the future, the end times, the way the world would go if they didn’t act. If they didn’t right this wrong, now, put down those animals once and for all. All of them. Every last one.

  Their plan had been born then, in whispers of rage, in drunken bloodlust, in sweat-and-sex-covered delirium, a hundred nights of perfecting their shared wrath, their bitter fury.

  And now they were here.

  “Haddad still has something to do.” Dan tore out a page of the SUV’s manual from the glove compartment and stalked back into the warehouse.

  Haddad hovered over Kris, his lips pressed to Kris’s temple, tears falling like rain on Kris’s smooth skin. “I love you,” he whispered. “Forgive me, ya rouhi. Forgive me my love for you.”

  “Get the fuck off him!” Dan kicked Haddad, the flat of his
foot slamming into Haddad’s face. Bones crunched in the darkness, Haddad’s nose, his cheek, and he went flying, landing on his cuffed hands in a skid across the ground. “He’s not yours anymore.”

  Haddad didn’t move. He lay on the ground, his chest shuddering, face to the dirt.

  Dan tossed the torn page and a pen on the ground in front of him. He pulled out his handcuff keys. “Time to write your confession.”

  Chapter 34

  Deanwood

  Washington DC

  September 11

  0043 hours

  “There’s no one here.” Ryan cursed, his bloodshot eyes scanning the empty warehouse. Red-and-blues flashed, lighting up the dark corners, the empty spaces of the abandoned industrial dump. “Whoever was here is long fucking gone.”

  “We found Dan’s personal vehicle two blocks away.” George swallowed back his bile, his rising vomit. “It’s what Kris was driving. And the FBI is lifting tire tracks from an unknown vehicle that was parked by the side doors now. Looks like an SUV.”

  “There are a million SUVs in DC.” Ryan’s face pinched, his emotions battling his control. “Has Dan answered any of your calls?”

  “His phone is off. He’s pulled the battery. We can’t get a location trace.”

  Ryan spun away, both hands over his face, his eyes squeezed closed. George watched him pace, watched his shoulders tremble.

  Techs swarmed over the warehouse, FBI agents looking in every crack and crevice with their flashlights, CIA analysts shadowing their moves, working in concert with one another. George and Ryan stood with the FBI deputy director, managing the hunt that had just shifted, twisted from hunting for a terrorist to hunting one of their own.

  What would a CIA officer on the run do? Where would he go? They were staring their own playbook in the face, trying to track an enemy that knew all of their moves, that could play everyone against each other. Who knew their defenses better than even they did.

  If there was anyone who could pull off a September 11-style terror attack and pin the blame on someone else, it was Dan.