Chapter 1
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
September 11, 2001
It was supposed to be a good day.
Kris poured his creamer into his second cup of coffee. He heard feet pounding down the hallway. “It must be an accident.”
“But it’s such a clear morning. How did the pilot lose visibility?”
He hurried after his coworkers to the Counterterrorism Center, CTC, housed deep inside Langley. CTC looked like a Vegas sports bar: monitors spanned one giant wall with video feeds showing live TV, news, surveillance from a dozen overseas operations, status of forces deployed around the world, and more. In a pit before the monitors, lines of workstations stretched in rows. One wall was packed with racks of communication equipment. Radios, satellite phones on charging stands, humming servers that communicated with CIA stations around the world.
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the wall of monitors.
Every screen showed the same thing.
New York City. Lower Manhattan. Smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Murmurs rose, the ebb and flow of uncertainty. More people padded in. Analysts, officers, the deputy director. Clandestine Special Activities Division personnel.
Everyone waited for the news anchors to say it, to confirm it was an accident. A tragic, horrific accident, but still.
An accident.
One hundred CIA officers watched live as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The fireball filled the whole wall of monitors, stretching from one end of CTC to the other, as if they were right there in the center of the fury. Fire broke over the world, coloring CTC in waves from Hell.
Gasps rose, followed by screams. Kris dropped his cup. It shattered, coffee splashing his pants and the shoes of the analyst beside him.
No one noticed.
No one moved. No one spoke.
It was like the world had stopped turning, like time was frozen. Breaths seemed to take an eternity. Reality only existed in the billowing smoke, the flames roaring above New York. The desperation in the survivors’ faces as they leaned out of the windows above the impact site and the roaring inferno. As they chose to jump, leap from the building, fleeing one certain death for another.
Twenty minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
“Jesus Christ, it’s al-Qaeda.” Voices rose, comments over the din of the whispers. “This is their attack.”
Kris started to shake, violent trembles as flashes of intel cables and reports he’d seen over the past two years came together like a terrible jigsaw puzzle in his mind.
Too late. We were too late.
“Will someone please lead?” a voice shouted from the back of the room. “Will someone please fucking do something?”
Clint Williams, Director of CTC, turned and stared. He blinked, as if trying to visibly restart his brain, as if he remembered he had men and women standing before him. “We’re under attack!” he shouted. “And Langley could be a target! Evacuate! Now! Everyone out!”
Kris had woken up in a good mood.
The night before, he had lightly flirted with an attorney while watching Monday Night Football at a little bar in Georgetown. He’d cheered on Denver while the attorney rooted for the New York Giants, and they’d playfully jabbed at each other throughout.
At the end of the game, the attorney gave him a long, lingering stare over his slim chinos, his tucked-in button-down, open at the neck and showing off his undershirt and his shell necklace, the one he wore when he went out, to his spiked hair.
He’d bitten his lower lip.
“Wanna get out of here?”
Kris had thought he’d never ask.
They made out in the parking lot, pressed against the attorney’s BMW, before trading blowjobs in the back seat. After, Kris straightened his clothes and headed to his car, going home. Alone.
He was a professional now, or trying to be. Holding down a job. His college days of waking up in a different bed almost every day of the week were behind him.
“Maybe I’ll see you next week,” the attorney had called after him.
“Maybe!”
Buoyed by the night before, Kris had wound his way through the North Virginia traffic to Langley early in the morning. He’d smiled at the guards who glared at him as he badged his way into headquarters, and then to CTC. The guards had shut up about the Monday night game as he passed. As if him hearing their conversation would somehow mean something. He’d smirked and twiddled his fingers.
At his desk, he’d read the overnight cables, shaking his head over the reported suicide bombing of General Ahmad Massoud of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Massoud had been one of the better men in the dusty backwater of Afghanistan, a force against the Taliban.
He’d risen to get his second cup of coffee, wondering about the future of the tiny, forgotten country he was in charge of monitoring. Would the Taliban seize control of the entire nation? Would that be the end of the rebellion against the Taliban’s chokehold? What about al-Qaeda, shielded by the Taliban? In the breakroom, he had to start a second pot of coffee. Everyone always let it run dry, down to the dregs that burned and stank.
He was pouring his creamer, wondering, for the thousandth time, about updating his résumé and getting out of the CIA when he heard the first whisper of a plane crash in New York.
The CIA was shaping up to be a rough career. Kris was surrounded by Type A personalities, people who stared unflinchingly into the darkness of the world and believed they could bend the globe’s swirling maelstrom to their own will. Kris could barely get the security guards to say hello to him. Who was he to change the world?
He stood out, with his tweed sport coats and ascots and crisp button-downs. In a world of clandestine operators in rumpled khakis and polos with coffee stains, he was a Milan fashion model. In 2001, that meant something, in a man. Everyone, of course, noticed. Everyone talked. He could count on one hand the few people who spoke regularly to him, who were friendly.
Maybe that was why he was isolated on the Afghanistan desk.
Maybe it was time to start looking for another career.
Back in 1999, a man had stopped him outside his Advanced Farsi class at George Washington University. He’d hung in the corner of the hallway, keeping obsessively to himself, like he lived in the shadows by choice. He’d had two cell phones on his hip. In 1999, barely anyone had a cell phone.
“Mr. Caldera? Kris Caldera?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’d like to talk to you about a possible job.” He’d handed Kris a business card with the CIA’s logo on the front.
He hadn’t known then what it meant that he was being sought out by the CIA. He was a gay Puerto Rican kid on a poverty scholarship to GWU and he didn’t have a single ounce of blue blood in him, not one single connection or friend of his father’s he could call on. It was only four years since President Clinton had rescinded the ban on homosexuals being allowed to hold security clearances, only four years since people like him were allowed to serve openly in sensitive national security positions.
Not that anyone did serve openly. The closet was still shut and barricaded from the inside.
“Why me?” He’d stuck out his hip, and he had lip gloss on and smudged eyeliner from waking up in Beta Theta Pi’s frat house that morning.
“We hear you’re good with languages. Particularly ones we’re interested in.”
He loved languages, loved the way the mind skipped and danced over converting rules of grammar, syntax, and expression, twists of phrase and linguistic layups. He’d grown up speaking Spanish at home and English at school, and a mix of everything on the streets, where he ran with other brown kids in Lower Manhattan. In middle school he’d crushed on older boys, writing long love letters in French that he dreamed of whispering to the shortstop on the school baseball team. In high school, he’d worn his school uniform the sassiest way he could, his tie just past scandalous, and regularly smacked on enough tinted lip balm to make it look like he’d been kissing for hours. He’d made it a point to stare at the football players until they barked at him. He’d laughed in their faces.
One had tried to kiss him after school, smearing his lip balm all over his cheeks. He kept the boy’s secret, though.
Later, he’d crushed on a swarthy waiter from Rome who worked in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant while moonlighting off-Broadway, and he’d learned Italian just to flirt with him. As often as he could, he’d trekked up Broadway, ignoring the stares he got when the wealthy white people watched him flounce past.
Then one day, the waiter showed up with a white boy toy from the Upper East Side, and Kris never spoke another word in Italian.
The harder the language, the better he was. He’d taken Arabic throughout his junior and senior years in high school and earned a scholarship to George Washington University in DC.
Not Georgetown. They’d never accept someone like him.
But George Washington was only a few blocks away, and they offered as many languages as he could gorge himself on. He’d thought if he did well, maybe, just maybe, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service would accept him for a Masters. He could try to join the State Department, or the United Nations.
He’d maxed out of Arabic his sophomore year and switched to Farsi, taking courses until he had to do independent study with his professor to go further. He’d spent two summers on an exchange program in the Middle East, first in Egypt and then in Lebanon and Syria.
He was careful overseas, just to prove his doubters wrong. His professor hadn’t wanted him to go. “It’s too dangerous, Kris. You advertise your sexuality.”
Of course he did. When the world looked at him, all anyone saw was a skinny brown gay boy, a kid full of attitude and trash. He had two choices. He could live out loud, take the hard world exactly as it came, be exactly who he was. He wasn’t wrong; the world was. People moved out of the way on the streets for him. So what if they moved because they hated him? They still moved. So what if he was a scrawny Puerto Rican with too big a mouth and too little sense? New York was full of old gays who wanted little twinky white boys, anyway. He picked fights with everybody, with anybody. He had a sharp tongue and no patience for the sidelong looks he got. He just lived louder, filling up the space everyone left around him.
Or, on the other hand, he could try and bury everything, try and erase the gay and erase the brown and try to live a white bread kind of life. Put away the lip balm and stop cursing in Spanish. Learn Frisbee and golf and be like the upper-class private school white boys he saw in Central Park, and not the street soccer and football at his low-income school. He could make his world shades of white and pale, shades of sucking up and always trying to fit in, shades of never being enough, and being told, in a thousand, million, tiny ways, that he would never, ever fit in, no matter how hard he tried.
Fuck that.
He’d take his discrimination to his face, thank you very much. The world would acknowledge him. Somehow.
He’d left New York with the empanadas and platinos his mom had packed him, two suitcases, and a promise to never go back. Not to his father, who hadn’t looked at Kris since he caught him jerking off to a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and not to the rest of his classmates who’d called him princess and fairy and fag. Not even to his mother, who’d dreamed of flying back to the island and living with her sister, escaping his dad and the endless nights of beer drinking and watching TV for hours on end. His mom was made for Puerto Rico, for wind in her hair and a salt breeze, and friends cooking together as music played over the sound of the surf and the birds twittering from tree to tree. She wasn’t made for car horns and subway platforms, the stink of hot urine on Manhattan’s blacktop.
He hadn’t known where he was made for, either. Not New York. But where?
He’d never dreamed, never imagined, his path would take him to the CIA.
But then he’d dreamed of spies in luxury suits, seduction in far-flung lands, meeting a man’s gaze across a crowded bar, swirling a Martini. Adventure. Intrigue.
And for once, someone wanted him.
A week after graduation, Kris was at Camp Peary, The Farm, the CIA training center.
He’d been certain, then, he had made the biggest mistake of his life. He was a bookworm, studious until happy hour, when he enjoyed his vodka and his cocktails and a man to go along. He had more clothes than sense and went to the gym only to show off his long legs in tiny shorts and ogle the beefy guys pumping iron. And for the sauna. And the blowjobs.
He liked first-world comforts: technology, comfy beds, and hot men waiting for him in them.
Halfway through the CIA’s training course, he’d parachuted out of a plane and eaten worms for three days while trying to evade his trainers, career military officers, who had spent their entire lives hunting people.
He’d been captured in a swamp, hiding in the reeds. His trainers had hauled him back to The Farm for the next round of instruction: how to withstand an interrogation.
Kris had thought he’d be the first one captured.
He was the second to last.
During weapons training, he was the only one out of his class of twenty who had never fired a weapon before. Aghast, the instructors had begrudgingly started at the beginning of firearms training, all nineteen others, former military officers and federal agents, plodding along beside him as he fumbled through how to hold his weapon, load an empty clip, pull the slide back, dry fire.
Eyes slid sideways, staring at him in the cafeteria. The military guys stuck together, as did the LEOs, the law enforcement officers switching over to intelligence, in their own tight-knit fraternities.
There was no room for a twenty-one-year-old scrawny brown boy just barely graduated from college. Especially a twenty-one-year-old with a shell choker, distressed jeans, and tight t-shirts. He kept to himself, and the others seemed to prefer it that way.
The bulk of their training had been in the classroom, followed by the real world. CIA officers, for the most part, spent their time working to recruit foreign nationals to spill their secrets, betray their own governments. Give information to the CIA. That process was purely personal. Psychological.
Who was a good target to recruit? Were they vulnerable in any way? Reliable? How could they be approached? What aspects of their life could be exploited, for good or for ill, to develop the person into a source, an agent of the CIA? Were they, ultimately, friend or foe?
Kris had spent his whole life observing people—men in particular—and the exercises on targeting individuals, psychological analysis, the role-play of approach and ingratiation, were child’s play to him. The military officers were too domineering, the former LEOs too interrogative, but he successfully recruited the assigned source each and every time.
He had excelled at his surveillance detection routes. Walking home from bars alone and being a single gay man in a metropolitan city—
Well, he’d learned how to watch his back long ago. It had been second nature to run the surveillance detection routes, the more complex the better, and pick out any tails following him. One of the military officers missed three of his tails on his final exam and was sent home that same day.
Kris didn’t have to ever come out because he was never in. Everyone assumed, at first glance, what he was, and that was just the simplest for everyone. He heard a few comments, ignored the muttered curses. Gritted his teeth whenever “fag” was tossed around, a cultural synonym for idiot or weak.
It made him work harder, prove them wrong. He’d proven everyone wrong so far. He’d keep going. He’d never stop.
He excelled in most areas, passed in others. He’d have made a good case officer, going overseas to an embassy and pretending to be a low-level State Department official while trying to flip sources and foreign nationals. Maybe they would send him to Bahrain, he’d thought. Or Lebanon. Or Syria. He could work both sides of Sunni-Shia divide, target Iranian agents operating in Hezbollah and Syria as well as Hamas and Sunni extremists in Lebanon. He knew the culture, how to move around. He even knew how to find the right man in Beirut, or in Damascus. In Cairo, too.
He’d dreamed of adventure, of living overseas. Of making a difference.
Graduation day, Kris got his assignment: Alec Station, CIA Headquarters. Counterterrorism Analyst for Afghanistan, attached to the al-Qaeda team.
No adventure for him.
For years, Alec Station had long been the dead end for analysts, officers, and operators, especially those who fostered what the CIA’s seventh floor, the executives, thought was an “obsession” with Islamic-based extremist ideology.
But in 1998, the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were attacked, devastated by twin suicide truck bombings. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. After those bombings, Alec Station became the hottest outfit in the CIA.
And they needed bodies. Officers fluent in Arabic in particular, with a good grasp of the culture, an eagerness to learn, and the ability to get up to speed with years and years of intelligence in a hurry.
Kris reported to Alec Station in 1999. He was assigned to Afghanistan, the only analyst in the entire unit.
In 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Yemen.
After American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, CIA police herded everyone out of headquarters.
The parking lots were crammed. Trucks led sedans over grass embankments and fields to side exits, pushing open gates that had long been chained shut. Kris inched forward in his clunker sedan, the best he could afford as a recent college graduate. To his left and right, drivers listened to their radios in horror, jaws slack, eyes vacant.
He got as far as the George Washington Parkway before traffic ground to a halt and refused to move. Smoke from the Pentagon rose ahead, billowing black rising and rising into the perfect blue sky. His stomach twisted, yanked, knotting until he had to throw open his car door and puke on the highway.
It’s a crematorium. Just like New York. It’s all a fucking crematorium.
The first to turn around was a truck, one of the lifted ones all the former Army Special Forces operators seemed to drive. Tires screeching, it bounced over the center embankment and forged a path over the tree-filled median to the highway going back to CIA headquarters. Another truck followed. Then a car.
Kris pulled his rusted sedan out of traffic and followed them.
Hundreds of officers poured back into Langley.
Names of potential suspects from CIA stations around the world flooded in, computers whirring and phones ringing off the hook. Names of people on watch lists, names passed along by foreign intelligence agencies, friendly and not-so-friendly alike. Names from each of the four flights, passengers and crew. Somewhere in those names were the hijackers, the murderers. They searched, poring through the lists.
Every cell in Kris’s body fissured, fracturing and dissolving into a billion tiny pieces as he read the names off the flight manifests. The universe came to screeching halt as he came to two distinct names, halfway down the list:
Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.
He felt like a marionette, a puppet with loose strings being manipulated by someone else. Someone else made him stand. Had him grab the printed pages with shaking hands. Something else made his feet move, carrying him to his boss’s office.
His section chief sat at his desk with his head in his hands. The handset of his phone lay on the desktop. A circle of wetness smudged the desk beneath where he hung his head.
“Sir?” Kris barely breathed. “The hijackers… We know who they are.”
His boss looked up.
Devastation poured off him, waves of anguish. Tears ran like rivers down his splotchy face, falling from red-rimmed eyes. “Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.”
Kris nodded, as if his head wasn’t attached to his body. “Probably others with them,” he whispered. “Sir, we have files on these guys. We were watching them. The FBI, they asked—”
His boss held up his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn’t stop the sob rising through him from breaking, cresting against the cold hard facts. His shoulders trembled, teeth clenched so hard Kris heard them squeak and grind. A cry broke out of him, the sound of a soul shattering.
Grief wrenched into shame inside Kris. The weight of thousands of dead Americans pressed down on him, every one of their lives ended too soon. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. “Sir—”
“Get out, Caldera. Just get out.”
Kris worked until he fell asleep in the middle of a name trace, trying to follow the rabbit back to its hole. Once every plane in the skies over the US was grounded, they were able to connect the dots that had been blazing constellations, if only they could have seen them from just a different angle. The monitors were fixed on the news, endless shots of the empty New York skyline, the burning Pentagon, the smoking crater in Pennsylvania.
Dan Wright, an analyst who worked a few desks down from him on Pakistani terrorism, woke him up with a cup of coffee. “You okay?”
“How can any of us be okay?” Kris scrubbed his hands over his face, pressed his fingers into his eyelids.
Dan sighed. He was a few years older than Kris and had entered the CIA in the mid-1990s. Ever since Kris had joined Alec Station, Dan had been his informal mentor. He’d just shown up one day, looking out for Kris. He’d never made a snide comment, or made fun of his paisley ascots. He’d been one of Kris’s few friends, a constant at his side. Someone he could go to for a smile.
“People are saying we knew some of the hijackers?”
“I saw the reports myself.” Vomit rose in Kris’s throat. He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe.
Dan rested his hand on Kris’s back. “I’m sorry.”
Kris shook his head. His vision was blurring, tears he’d held back for over twenty-four hours building within him like his body was a dam. At some point, he’d burst. “We should have—”
Doors banging open cut off his words. Clint Williams, his boss’s boss, stormed in, followed by a dozen officers and deputy directors. He scanned the room, scowling.
“Caldera?” he bellowed. “Kris Caldera?”
He was led to the basement, through twisting, winding corridors he’d never seen before. One-ton blast-proof doors slammed shut behind him and the dozen officers escorting him.
Williams brought him to a cavernous bunker that had been converted into a haphazard office. Long folding tables had been set up, lined with laptops, desktops, and printers. Cables fanned out in every direction, a spiderweb of internet and power cords. Fluorescent lights droned twenty feet overhead. Whiteboards had been wheeled in, scrawled with names and countries. Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen. Mohammed Atef. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Someone was trying to get a projector working. In the corners, men hunched over secured satellite phones, trying to hear through scratchy connections from across the planet.
Williams went from officer to officer, checking in, trading a few words here and there, passing papers back and forth. He was a storm, a whirlwind of action, somehow keeping everything straight. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Listen up!” The bunker quieted instantly. “This is Kris Caldera. He’s the CTC analyst for Afghanistan. He knows the information you need!”
A hundred pairs of eyeballs rolled toward him.
“Use him! I want to know double what we know now by the end of the day, and double that by the next twelve hours, and double that by the next! Let’s get to work!”
Seven people headed for him as soon as Williams left. “Caldera. What are the ramifications for the Northern Alliance following Massoud’s assassination?”
“What are the Taliban’s defense armaments? What is their status of forces?”
“How allied are the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Can the Taliban be persuaded to give up Bin Laden?”
“General Khan of the Northern Alliance has taken command following Massoud’s assassination. What is your assessment of Khan?”
He couldn’t breathe. No one had cared about Afghanistan before the attacks. He’d dived into Afghanistan intelligence, relishing the opportunity to examine a culture that had been isolated from the world, try to understand a people who had resisted being conquered for ages. Afghanistan was smaller than Texas. Twenty million Afghans spoke over thirty languages, were made up of dozens of tribal groups. The British, the Soviets, and even Alexander the Great had been humiliated in the Afghan highlands. Even the Taliban didn’t control the entire country. The Northern Alliance, a festering association of fractious, infighting warlords, drug smugglers, and bitter rivals, fought the Taliban and each other for control of the country. The Afghan people were the ones who paid the price. They lived on less than a dollar a day and had the highest infant mortality rate in the world.
He'd been the Afghanistan nerd, teaching himself Dari, the Afghan form of Farsi, in order to read month-old newspapers flown in from Islamabad station and watch grainy videotapes the Taliban put out, preaching their firebrand fundamentalism and their blend of tribalism mixed with the most repressive interpretation of seventh-century Sharia law. He’d watched stonings in soccer stadiums, men and women get their hands and feet severed. Had seen pictures of ribbons ripped from cassette tapes, flying in the wind. Music was banned in Afghanistan, and all tapes had been stripped, their long black lengths fluttering at the borders, a signal to all who crossed into Afghanistan. Here ye enter the seventh century. Here there be dragons. Except they weren’t dragons, they were men, and men were always far worse than any mythical monster.
The Taliban weren’t religious scholars, and they weren’t scions of Islamic learning and philosophy. They were men who had grown weary of the banditry and the robbery and the rape, the wild savagery and butchery that had seized Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal and the civil war. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had rallied a group of villagers to enact revenge against a local warlord who had raped one of their village women. They’d hung him from the barrel of a tank. Their movement started as a means to bring order to the violent chaos of the country, and within two years, they controlled everything from Kabul to Kandahar, vigilante justice-seekers mixing Islam and tribalism that billowed into political control, control that was as repressive and violent as that which they sought to overthrow—just more organized.
Everyone ignored Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sent their radicals there, offloading them from their own countries. The CIA and the State Department seemed happy to forget about Afghanistan as long as it was stable and the Russians were gone. Who cared about the world’s backwater, anyway?
Sometimes, late at night, he thought the Afghanistan desk was a subtle snub. He still wasn’t allowed in the big leagues, apparently. Was it because he was gay? Because he wore tighter pants and spiked his hair instead of buzzing it like the other guys? Because he didn’t fit in with their fleece pullovers and their cargo pants and their ball caps?
But now, everyone wanted him, was trying to pull him in every different direction. If only he could cut himself into parts and pieces. Everything he knew, everything he’d ever learned, was rising inside him. He’d gladly saw open his brain, let everyone flick through his memories like files, parse information out of the nooks and crannies of his gray matter.
“Caldera, we don’t have current functional maps of Afghanistan. What we do have is stolen from the Soviets back in the Cold War, or from Pakistan and their ISI. Everything is incomplete. Can you fill in the gaps for us?”
He squared his shoulders. “What day is it? What day is today?”
Someone blinked at him. “September thirteenth.”
He hadn’t been home in two days. He’d been sleeping under his desk, drinking coffee and eating whatever Dan brought him. “Okay.” He breathed out slowly. “Okay.”
He started talking, running through the recent history of the Northern Alliance, the loose, nefarious conglomeration of fighters arrayed against the Taliban. The CIA had given the Northern Alliance inconsistent support, helping them one week and pulling back the next. The Northern Alliance forces were arrayed across northern Afghanistan. The south was Taliban-controlled and heavily infiltrated by al-Qaeda.
He spoke for hours, until his voice was hoarse, moving from group to group, laptop to laptop. He translated Farsi, Arabic, and Dari documents, secured satellite calls between officers and Northern Alliance commanders, and processed incoming cables from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Williams appeared and disappeared, working the room, talking to the men in charge of the hive of activity.
Eventually, an officer in the operations side of the CIA led him to the far side of the bunker, to a darkened area where cots were set up with sleeping bags. People were hot racking, rolling in and out of shared cots as they needed. “Sleep,” he was told. “Get some rest and refresh yourself. We all need you.”
He was asleep before his head hit the cot. Nightmares plagued him: fireballs erupting in front of him, burning people alive, but he was trapped and he couldn’t save them. Buildings collapsing, people leaping from the tops of skyscrapers that touched the stars, falling forever as he screamed and screamed.
Williams shook him awake. “Get up. We’re going to see the president.”
He stumbled out of the cot, almost falling on his face. Someone loaned him a fleece pullover with the CIA crest. He ditched his button-down and slid into it. The arms were too long, but it covered his unwashed stench, mostly. He shaved quickly and splashed water on his face, gargled some mouthwash, and met Williams at the east entrance.
A full motorcade waited for them.
“We’re going to the White House with the director. He’s in the next SUV.”
“Geoff Thatcher? CIA Director?”
“Yes. The president wants to know everything about Afghanistan. Thatcher said to bring the experts. That’s you.” Williams shifted, the dark leather seat creaking as the motorcade pulled away from Langley. “Kris, the president is getting ready to make a decision. We’re going to respond to these attacks, and we’re going to respond quickly. The CIA is going to do something we haven’t done since we were OSS, back in World War II. We’re going to go to war, and we’re going to lead this war. This is the last briefing before the president decides exactly what our response is going to be.”
Kris sat, speechless. He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t a presidential briefer. He was just an analyst. A junior CIA officer.
But who was ever ready for their world to be upended, for planes to fall out of the sky, for buildings to tumble like blocks, and for the weight of thousands of lives to hang around their neck? Failure tasted like ash, like flame, like dust that filled his teeth and gathered at the junctures of his bones. Shame was his shadow.
He took a breath. “What do you need me to do, sir?”
“The president is a talker. He thinks with his words. Goes with his gut. Thatcher is good at talking him through things, thinking out loud. With this president, the last in-person briefing will usually be the deciding factor. He’s going to be listening to what you say, to any answers you give, very, very closely.”
“Who else will be there?”
“The vice president and the national security advisor.”
Kris nodded. His mind whirled. It didn’t get any higher than that.
“Listen, the national security advisor and Thatcher don’t get along. She’s a tough nut to crack. She and Thatcher are like oil and vinegar. The VP thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He’ll go behind all our backs and double-check, triple-check everything we say. Don’t worry about talking to any of them. Speak directly to the president.”
He could smell himself as they clambered out of the SUV at the secured entrance to the West Wing of the White House. Secret Service agents hustled them inside quickly, past a massive show of defensive force. Agents with snarling dogs, rifles, and heavy weaponry were on full display, ready to destroy any intruder who dared bend a blade of grass on the White House lawns.
Kris tried to keep his arms down to hide his unwashed stench. He couldn’t do anything about the bags under his eyes, but hopefully the president wouldn’t remember him as ‘the smelly one’. He hadn’t been home in three days.
In the Oval Office, the president and vice president sat side by side in the spindly armchairs before the fireplace, with the national security advisor on the sofa next to the president. They stood, shook hands tersely, and beckoned Thatcher, Williams, and Kris to sit on the other sofa.
“Break it down for us,” the president said, lacing his fingers together. His Texan drawl was deep, a sign of his stress. “What do we have today?”
Director Thatcher spoke urgently, summarizing everything the CIA had learned in the last twelve hours. He’d been briefing the president three times a day or more since the attacks. Everything he shared, Kris had been a part of, working with the response team in the basement.
While Thatcher spoke, the vice president stared at Kris, watching him closely. Kris stared back.
The president pursed his lips as he frowned. “Musharraf in Pakistan has come around. He’s decided the Taliban aren’t worth committing political suicide over.”
“Good. We’ll need their full cooperation. Border posts and frontier bases along the border with Afghanistan opened up to American forces, a rescinding of all ‘no-go’ areas in Pakistan, unrestricted access to Pakistani airspace and full, unimpeded landing rights at all air bases and airports.” Thatcher scrawled notes as he spoke.
“State is working on it.” The national security advisor’s voice was clipped, perfunctory.
The president’s gaze flicked to Kris. “Director Thatcher says you’re the agency’s number one Afghanistan analyst. That you know that country better than anyone. Tell me. Do you think the Taliban will give up Bin Laden?”
Everyone looked at him. Everyone.
The president had issued an ultimatum to the Taliban the day of the attacks: give up Bin Laden, or your government will be destroyed.
Bin Laden had been granted refuge in Afghanistan since his exile from Sudan. As the president had said, as smoke still rose from Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, any nation that harbored the terrorists would be treated as an enemy of the United States. “You’re either with us or against us.”
What Kris said next would shape policy. Shape the world. The unit secretary at CTC still couldn’t remember his name, even after two years working there. He was that inconsequential. The security guards hated his guts. Yet here he was, briefing the president. Deciding the course of history. His palms slicked with sweat. Ice flowed down his spine.
“Mr. President, the Taliban will never surrender Bin Laden.”
“Why?” The national security advisor frowned. “If they want to survive, they have to give him up.”
“It’s not the Pashtunwali way.” Everyone frowned. “The Taliban blend tribal traditions and fundamentalist Islam into their repressive form of totalitarian rule. It has less to do with Islam and more to do with tribalism. Pashtunwali is their ethical code. It’s so ancient, the tribes view Islam as a modern add-on to their worldview. That part of the world has operated on Pashtunwali for millennia. Specifically, melmastia, hospitality and protection of all guests, nanawatai, the right of a fugitive to seek refuge within the tribe, and, badal, blood feuds and revenge.”
“Shit,” the vice president grumbled. “So he’s going to hide under Taliban skirts and claim tribal law?”
“The Taliban and al-Qaeda aren’t friends. Mullah Omar repeatedly ordered him to stop antagonizing the US. To stop giving interviews and drawing attention to themselves, and to the other Arab jihadist training camps. When Bin Laden pledged his allegiance to Mullah Omar, he was trying to pave over Omar’s complaints. Fix their relationship. But, right after his pledge, Bin Laden launched the embassy bombings in Africa. Mullah Omar was furious at him when the US attacked the training camps.”
“Why didn’t he kick Bin Laden out then?”
“Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia tried to convince Mullah Omar to hand him over, Muslim to Muslim. He flew to Afghanistan on a royal jet, big state visit. But Mullah Omar threw him out. He said he was sickened to see the prince of an Islamic state, and the guardian of the two holy cities of Islam, doing the bidding of the ‘infidel West’. He accused the prince of being a takfiri, an apostate.”
“Bet that went down well,” the vice president grunted.
“Turki stomped on the feast Mullah Omar had spread for them and stormed out.”
“So why not give him up this time? If he didn’t want Bin Laden attacking the US, then why is he willing to die for him now?”
Kris swallowed, images from the attacks flashing in the darkness behind his eyes every time he blinked. Flame, smoke, and screams. Papers fluttering like rain, falling as if time had slowed. Ash blanketing the world. Bodies falling, jumping. He shook his head. “Bin Laden assassinated General Massoud on September 10. He sent two al-Qaeda bombers, posing as journalists, to his command center. They blew themselves up and decapitated the leadership of the Northern Alliance, and the one man who was a serious threat to Mullah Omar. Under Pashtunwali, Bin Laden paid Omar a blood debt, one the Taliban will be honor bound to return. They will never hand him over, Mr. President.”
Silence. The president stared at him as if measuring his soul, taking the weight of his words. Finally, he nodded and sat back. “I don’t want to give the Taliban any maneuvering room on the world stage. We’re going to keep demanding they turn over Bin Laden. They’re demanding proof he is responsible. What do we have that we can show the world?”
“Source reporting from Kandahar and Khost. Jubilation in the streets. Our intercepts before the attacks. We knew they were planning something. We just didn’t—” Thatcher’s voice croaked, choked, and died. He looked down. “Whatever we show as proof will be exposed, Mr. President. We cannot burn sources and methods at this time. Not right before a war.”
Kris jumped in. “There’s Yemen.”
“Yemen?” The vice president frowned.
“The USS Cole bombings. The FBI is running a fusion cell in-country, working on prosecuting the attackers in Yemeni courts. They have an al-Qaeda operative there, someone who used to be Bin Laden’s bodyguard, in jail. We could question him.”
The president nodded. “Get on it. I want confirmation for the world that Bin Laden was behind these attacks. Something we can show off.”
“Everything comes down to our response,” the vice president said. “Everything. We have to find these terrorists and we have to stop them. Wherever they are. By whatever means possible.”
“Geoff,” the president said, turning to the CIA director. “I want the CIA to be the first on the ground. As soon as possible.”
“Mr. President, we’re on our way.”
They hurried to the motorcade waiting outside the West Wing. Thatcher huddled with Williams as Kris followed, herded by hulking Secret Service agents.
Williams turned to Kris. “Great job. Take the last SUV back to your place and pack a bag. You’re going to Yemen. You leave in three hours.”