Chapter 36
George Washington University Hospital
Washington DC
September 16
Kris’s entire world had been reduced to a series of beeps. Every two seconds, another soft beep. Every forty-five seconds, the slow flow of oxygen restarting. Red and green and blue, washing the hospital room in dim lights, dancing lines whispering over the still bedsheets.
He sat at Dawood’s bedside, listening to the hum of modern medicine. Watched the IV lines and arterial catheters, the oxygen lines, all snaking from his husband. Monitors traced the steady beat of his heart, measured his oxygen levels.
Kris’s touch ghosted down Dawood’s still hand, skirting the IV needle and the bandage, following the bones in the back of his hand down to his ring finger.
A gold wedding band, inlaid with a channel of dusty diamonds, was back where it belonged. Dawood’s ring, on Dawood’s hand.
He’d flown into a rage after the helicopter lifted off from the traffic circle outside the Lincoln Memorial, flying Dawood across the capital to George Washington University Hospital. Ryan had let him go, let him run after the helicopter, screaming, crying, shrieking at the top of his lungs until he fell again, a soaking wet pile of adrenaline and terror.
While George weaved in and out of the police, the FBI, trying to control the scene, trying to stop the thousands and thousands of cell phone videos streaming the incident live to the internet, Ryan had grabbed a paramedic and brought him to Kris.
He remembered being loaded onto a gurney. Being strapped down, and the pinch of an IV line in his elbow. Hands, pressing on his ribs, and what felt like lava erupting through his chest. “Broken ribs,” one of the paramedics had said. “Gotta get him—”
He’d woken up in a hospital room, in the dark.
Someone sat at his bedside, though. Tall, lanky, and with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. Messy brunet strands. One leg was crossed, and he was reading from a legal file.
“Tom?” Kris had croaked. He’d tried to swallow. “Is that you?”
Tom had dropped his files and leaned in, one hand brushing back Kris’s hair. He’d smiled, the warm, wonderful smile Tom had, the one that lit Mike’s soul on fire. “Hey Kris. How are you feeling?”
“Where’s Dawood? Where’s my husband?”
“He’s in ICU. He’s in pretty bad shape.”
His chest had caved in, and every fear he’d felt that day in Afghanistan, the day after the Hamid op, came roaring back, a thousand times sharper. “No, no, no,” he’d whispered. “No, he has to be all right. He has to be okay.”
“They’re doing everything they can.” Tom had leaned in, pressed a kiss to his forehead. “He’s got the best care in the nation. He’s a hero.”
He’d laced his fingers through Tom’s and let it all out, every sob he’d held in, every fear, every anguish, every impossible dream, every second of the last ten years he’d endured without Dawood, pouring out of him like a dam had broken. “I can’t be without him again,” he’d finally choked out. “If he’s gone… I don’t want to live without him again. Not again.”
“It’s early.” Tom had wiped his tears away. “It’s only been a day. Give it time.”
Groaning from the floor had made him frown. Tom had looked down, smiled.
Mike had appeared, rising from the sleeping bag he’d unrolled on the floor of Kris’s hospital room like a bear coming out of hibernation. His pompadour was a ragged mess, standing up on one side of his head, and his eyes were dark, sunken into his face. But he saw Kris awake, saw his tears, his broken soul.
“Kris…”
Kris had sat up as Mike crawled into bed with him, both meeting in the middle, arms wrapped around each other like they were trying to combine lives, like Mike was trying to give him enough of his heart to keep Kris’s going. Kris had felt it, and he’d shuddered in Mike’s hold. Collapsed, falling into Mike, and had let Mike hold him up as his tears restarted, as his fears raced in, and he imagined the world without Dawood, the love of his life… again.
Five days later, and he sat by Dawood’s bedside, a constant, uninterrupted vigil.
He’d been discharged after a day, his broken ribs wrapped and bandaged, and had gone home to change, shower, and dig out his and Dawood’s wedding rings from the duffel in the back of his closet. They were dusty, the gold spotted and dull. But they were theirs.
At the hospital, he’d kissed Dawood’s ring finger before sliding his wedding ring back on like he had eleven years before when he’d vowed to be Dawood’s for all time, for every day of his life.
The ring was loose on Dawood’s slender fingers. He’d lost weight in ten years. Lost weight and gone gray in places. Silver streaked his temples, and strands peppered his dark hair. It was longer than he’d ever seen, soft waves that came almost to his ears, combed back. It was a good look on him. A gentle look.
His own ring fit, sliding on like he’d never taken it off. Like it was supposed to be there, always, for eternity.
Never again. Never ever will I take this ring off. Never will I be separated from you.
The doctors had removed Dawood’s breathing tube two days before, and they weren’t cautioning Kris to prepare himself, to expect the worst, as often anymore.
Noam’s gunshot had shredded his liver, and the surgeons had removed almost three quarters of it. He’d lost blood, almost too much. But it was the crash into the Potomac that had killed him, at least for a few minutes, underwater. He hadn’t breathed, and his brain had swelled, a massive concussion from the crash. How many minutes had he gone without oxygen? Would he ever wake up? Would he be the same if he did?
“We need to be realistic,” one of the doctors had said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance he won’t wake, ever. It all comes down to him now. How he responds. We’ve done all we can, but he experienced significant trauma.”
“He’s coming back.” Kris had laced their hands together, had cupped Dawood’s left hand in both of his. Kissed each finger, slowly. “He’s coming back.”
He had to. This was their second chance, their impossible happy ending. This was theirs, their love story, and it didn’t end here. Not after everything. Not after Dawood had fought back from the dead, not after Kris had put an end to Dan, to the betrayals, to the twisting of everything Dawood held dear.
If you are gone, my love, then I will follow you. I won’t let you go again. Never, ever, again.
If you breathe your last breath, the very next will be my last as well.
He kept his vigil through the long hours of the day and night. Mike and Tom came every evening, bringing him food, sitting with him, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence.
At night, he slept in the cup of Dawood’s left hand, cradling his face in the hollow of his palm. Sometimes he traced Dawood’s veins, the muscles in his arm. Kissed his wrist, and imagined what their future would look like.
Together. They would be together, and that was all that mattered.
It was the afternoon, seven days after September 11. Kris held Dawood’s hand, watched the rise and fall of his chest. Physically, he was getting better, slowly. The medications the doctors were using to keep him sedated were being weaned back. Everyone was waiting, wondering.
Would he wake up?
Knocks sounded at the door. Kris and Dawood had been given a private suite, VIP level, and CIA guards traded shifts with DC police. No one could just stop by, just turn up. Even Mike and Tom had to be cleared three times before they could visit.
Kris turned his bleary gaze to the door.
George and Ryan hovered at the opening.
Both seemed condemned men, like they’d lost something irreplaceable in the last week, something they didn’t know how to live without. Ryan was half in and half out of himself, like he wanted to escape reality. Escape himself.
Kris knew that feeling.
George led the way into Dawood’s hospital room. He had a brown folder in one hand, and he held it out to Kris as he stopped at the foot of Dawood’s bed.
“This is from the CIA, Kris, and as you’re Dawood’s legal next of kin…” He trailed off, shrugging.
“Last I heard, I wasn’t his next of kin.”
“June 26, 2013, you became his next of kin.” George slid both hands into his pockets, looked down. “United States versus Windsor. The Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional. Which meant the CIA, and the entire federal government, recognized same sex marriages from that moment forward.” He swallowed. “I watched the case, and I thought about you. And Haddad.”
“Little late for us, don’t you think?”
“Not anymore.”
He opened the folder. Papers tumbled free, across Dawood’s legs. A USB drive landed on the sheets.
“A recording of what happened in the warehouse. Between Dan and Dawood. You were there, too. It seemed right, giving you a copy. So you could know… what happened.”
He flipped open a folded sheet of heavy paper, cream linen, with the CIA seal embossed at the top of the page. A letter from Director Edwards.
Officer Dawood Haddad,
You have the gratitude of a thankful nation for your dedicated service, your commitment to excellence, and your many, many sacrifices over the years. While we cannot turn back time, we will do everything we can to make your sacrifices right.
From a grateful nation,
Director Ken Edwards
“Haddad is a hero. The papers, the news, everyone has the story. He was undercover within al-Qaeda for years, working to prevent their largest attempted strike on American soil since nine-eleven.”
Kris frowned. “That’s not entirely true. What about Dan?”
George’s gaze pinched. “Dan… died tragically a few days ago in a traffic accident.”
They were going to bury it. Bury it and hide it forever, a secret that would never see the light of day. He shouldn’t be surprised. The CIA buried their skeletons, their secrets, deeper than they buried their dead. Part of him was disgusted, wanted to be sick. But he’d been a part of those secrets they’d buried. He’d been a skeleton in their closet. “And Noam?”
“Mossad has officially denounced him and has labeled him a rogue element and called his actions criminal in the extreme. That’s the classified version. The unclassified version is he, too, tragically died in a motor vehicle accident.”
Kris closed his eyes.
“We dredged the Potomac in the middle of the night. Brought up the SUV. There was a dead body full of shrapnel and enough plastique explosive to put a fifty-foot crater in the National Mall. Kill thousands. When Haddad drove that SUV off the bridge, he shorted out the circuits in the homemade timer. He saved everyone’s life.”
The dead body. Dawood’s partner.
Kris flipped the letter from Director Edwards over. The gratitude of a grateful nation was all well and good. But there was ten years of bitterness in the water under that bridge. Ten years of isolation, of backs turned on him and the memory of his husband.
The next sheet was a reinstatement into the CIA, signed and sealed by the director, for Dawood Haddad.
Kris was listed as his official spouse.
It included his salary information from a decade before and the automatic promotions he would have been eligible to receive. Every year was there, added and tabulated, with interest calculated. Total back pay to be disbursed, the last line read. $2 million.
“This belongs to him. And to you. To both of you. No matter what.” George fumbled, trying to find the right words.
Kris shook his head. “This is the right thing to do. He’s always been with us.”
“I know. It’s only a start, though. If he wanted to continue, if he wants to come back… He’s welcome.” George cleared his throat. “As are you.”
Kris laughed, hollow and empty. “George… I think I’m done with the CIA.”
He was, finally, just done. The guilt that had seized his life, that had propelled him forward. The certainty that he had to toil, for his entire life, to undo the failures, the wrongs of September 11.
But he’d given his all, and then more, until he was stripped raw. He’d given the CIA, the nation, everything he had to give, and then he’d kept going. He’d lived with ghosts for so long, the heavy weight of their lives hanging off his bones, grinding the spaces between his joints, that he’d gotten used to the pull of their shame.
And when they’d gone, he’d replaced their haunting with his own self-shame, his own recrimination. The noose around his neck wasn’t of the past, or the dead, or his failings anymore. It was only him, only his own deluge of anguish and the stifling suffocation of his deepest self-loathing.
He’d failed, before. He’d failed to stop September 11. He’d failed to stop Hamid.
But he’d done some things right, as well. He hadn’t lost his soul, hadn’t hijacked the hatred of al-Qaeda, of ISIS, and started living in their twisted brand of hate. Hadn’t hitched his soul to a black hole and ridden the collapse until he’d perverted into whatever it was that Dan had become. Something ugly and evil. Something that was against the world and everyone in it.
The balance of his life was set. His deeds were done. The days of saving the world were beyond him. Someone else, someone younger, would have to step up, step into the void and fight the good fight. Fight the battle between losing your soul over the edges of inhumanity and stopping the rise of evil, from all corners of the globe, looking to hurt. To kill. In any way evil could.
Nietzsche once said, Beware when fighting monsters, you do not become a monster yourself. For when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.
Kris had stood on the edge of the abyss and peered down. Dan had plunged headfirst, as had Noam. As had Saqqaf, and Zahawi, and Bin Laden, and so many others.
Dawood had been his anchor, his fixed Northern Star, keeping him grounded on the firmament, keeping him from tumbling into the darkness.
Memories and ghosts and promises lived in his bones. He’d carried them for half his life. It was time to let them go.
It was time to start living for him.
Him and Dawood.
Ryan hovered behind George, staring at Dawood for a long moment before flicking his gaze to Kris. “Can we… can we talk?”
Part of him didn’t want to. Ryan and he had history, sixteen years of animosity and snapping at each other, and the disastrous Hamid op that had sealed the uncrossable gulf between them, an impenetrable divide.
But, Ryan had held him as he’d come undone on the banks of the Potomac. And he’d hunted Al Jabal until he was dead, until he was nothing but ash, had devoted his entire being to hunting Dawood’s torturer and killer. There were redeemable moments in his life. Was there more Kris couldn’t see?
“Sure. I need a coffee anyway.”
“I’ll buy.”
George took Kris’s seat beside Dawood, watching over him with his hands pressed together, fingers against his lips like he was praying over Dawood. Maybe he had his own confessions to give, his own words to say in the silence, for Dawood’s ears alone.
Ryan shuffled to the door and held it open for him, looking as uncomfortable as hell, then fell into step as Kris headed on autopilot for the hospital’s cafeteria. There was a coffee stand there that made a decent sludge, enough to keep him awake for a few more hours. Ryan bought two cups and guided him to a table in the corner, settling in the chair backed against the wall.
Ryan batted his coffee cup back and forth as Kris crossed his legs. Sipped his coffee and stared at Ryan.
Ryan licked his lips. Pressed his lips together. “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “For… everything.”
“Everything is pretty big.” Kris shifted. Sighed. “What do you mean?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought we all were. Dan… he was one of my best friends. I don’t understand—”
Kris looked down. The CIA, and Ryan, George, and Edwards in particular, were going to have to take a long hard look in the mirror. How did one of their own turn against them? How had Dan, long a rising star in the agency, become so twisted? Turned so evil?
“The Dan you thought you knew has been gone a long time. Same with me. The man I thought I knew? He was just a fake. A fantasy. The real Dan is the one lying in the morgue, right now. That’s who he was, at his core.”
Ryan buried his face in one hand, hiding from Kris. His shoulders shook. “If Dan can do that, then who else can? How far does this go? Is he an aberration? Or is his hatred… normal?” Kris heard what Ryan didn’t ask: could Ryan slip and fall into the darkness, slide down into the abyss after Dan? Was he, too, capable of something like that?
“Something in between, I think.” Kris played with the lid of his coffee cup as Ryan stared at him, his dark, bloodshot eyes boring into the center of his forehead. He’d never seen so much fear in Ryan’s gaze, a fear that danced deep in the back of his eyes.
“Dan hijacked the hatred he claimed to loathe. He became exactly what he despised. He hijacked ISIS and al-Qaeda’s destinies. He became the most devout believer of their twisted ideology.”
“Dan was not a Muslim—”
“No, but he was a nihilist. He wanted to watch the world burn, tear everything down, destroy anything in the way of his vision of the perfect future. That’s exactly what ISIS and al-Qaeda believe as well. And—” He glared at Ryan. “You should know better than that. ISIS and al-Qaeda do not represent authentic Islamic beliefs.”
Ryan swallowed, looked away.
Would Ryan finally listen? Actually hear him if he tried to really speak? They’d been using the same language but talking past each other for sixteen years.
“Dan, Noam, George, and you, yes, you, Ryan, have all had the same problem for sixteen years. You look at Islam and all you see is al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram. You see the loudest, worst parts, and you erase a billion other believers who don’t share any of those beliefs. You don’t see nuance when you look at The Other. You just see an enemy.”
Ryan stayed silent.
“Al-Qaeda and ISIS are the right-wing fascists of the Muslim ummah. They rose to prominence like all fascist groups do. In response to failures of nationalism, of governance, in response to people’s fears about the future, worrying economics times, and a fragile world teetering on the edge of all-out war. Fascists are rising everywhere, from the US to Europe to Asia. They’re all playing on fears, trying to control the world through terror, through hatred. They pull lines from the Quran to justify their evil, and twist everything to their own ends, just like fascists everywhere justify their actions. Why can’t you see how al-Qaeda and ISIS are exactly the same as fascists rising within the West? It’s fascism, and it’s hatred, pure and simple.
“The failure of the Arab Spring to bring any lasting change, any democratic reform, led to the resurgence of these fascists in the Middle East. To ISIS, and their satellites. Al-Qaeda, trying to come back after Bin Laden’s death. They’re tapping into fear, amplifying terror, feeding hopes and dreams like a drug. ISIS and al-Qaeda are just the fascist, right-wing Islamic response to the yearning for a bright future for the Muslim world.
“No one over here seems to get that. There are fascists in Islam, and they’re hated just as much there as the fascists rising in our communities are here. And there are people fighting against them inside of Islam. It’s not just the Western world versus ISIS versus al-Qaeda. This isn’t the clash of civilization that so many people dream about. It’s just another fight against the return of fascism. And we need to fight that, yes, but we need to support the progressives, too. Not tar every Muslim into shades of evil.” Kris exhaled, holding Ryan’s gaze.
“What about Haddad? I mean… Dawood?” For the first time, Ryan used Dawood’s Muslim name.
“Dawood?” Kris smiled, sadness tugging down the corner of his lips. “He’s a hippie. He always has been. Gentle in his heart, his soul. He just wants to connect with the universe, find the good in everyone. Just like his father, I assume. If his father had lived, I think Dawood and he would have been as happy as they could ever be living in the desert, herding camels, and living a simple life of prayer and family love.” He chuckled. “Maybe smoking some hash, too. But Dawood is an Islamic hippie. He’s always just wanted to love and be loved.” His thoughts turned darker, turned against themselves. “This war has shredded him. Sixteen years, and almost a decade out in the cold. I can’t believe he held on to himself.”
“Did he?”
Kris nodded. The night they’d had together, and Dawood’s confession in the woods. He’d seen the truth of Dawood, the light of his soul, the inner strength of the man he most loved, most admired in the whole world. “Ten years changes a person. It does. For Dawood… He’s like a diamond that’s been compressed out of ashes. Gold that’s been through fire, all the rough spots, the wreckage, burned away. When I look at him, I’m breathless.” Kris closed his eyes as his throat clenched. “He’s the best of all of us. And he always has been.”
“And you?” Ryan asked. “Did you change?”
“For the worse,” Kris whispered. “Without Dawood, I forgot how to love.”
“Where do we go from here?” Ryan swallowed hard, both hands clutching his coffee cup.
Where did Ryan, and the CIA, and the world go from here? Kris hadn’t a clue. How could anything change? How could the hatred ever stop? Would anyone so hateful, so twisted, so full of vileness and malice, like Dan, like Noam, like the fighters of ISIS, ever reconcile? Ever find a way through the madness to peace?
Dan had given up peace long ago, had surrendered to cold expediencies. Peace through victory, Dan must have thought. Peace through death and destruction, laying waste to the enemy. Peace through circumnavigating justice, avoiding the trifles of conscience and human rights. If Dan had believed he was fighting monsters, then it was only a small leap to accepting that monsters didn’t have human rights. He could follow Dan’s warped logic down into the abyss, the rationalities and explanations for torture, for murder. For using terrorism as his own weapon of political persuasion, to galvanize the masses to his will.
He had become exactly what he despised.
“In a way, we lost this war when we lost Dan.” Kris cleared his clenched throat, tried to speak through the memories, the pain. “When we lose ourselves, when we become what we hate, we’ve lost everything. Defeat came, and we lost the war, and we never even saw it. But now we're sitting in the rubble and ruin and trying to make sense of the future.” Kris exhaled slowly. Ash sat heavy on the back of his tongue.
What was left, after all that?
How did Ryan reconcile his best friend to the abyss? Ryan’s fingers scratched over the cardboard sleeve of his coffee, picked at the overlapping edge. His bloodshot eyes stared at a point on the laminate table between them, somehow gazing a million miles away, into the past, into all of the paths that had led them to this point.
“This world is full to the brim with agony and grief and rage. Everyone is searching for something to hold on to, Ryan. Searching for certainty. Who is the enemy and how do we destroy them to make the world safe again? Searching for hope, that there is still goodness in the world, beyond the hatred, beyond the pain. But we have to face the world as it is, and not try and force it to be something it’s not. There is evil in this world. There are fascists, both in the West and in Islam. There are terrible things, and terrible people, and terrible choices. But we have to find some kind of light through the darkness. Something that cuts through that.”
“I was always so…” Ryan’s expression twisted, like he was about to jump off a skyscraper, like he welcomed it. “I hated how certain you were. All the time. You were so fucking certain of yourself, of your morals. This was right and that was wrong. I didn’t know how you held on to that, with everything…”
“You couldn’t watch what Dan did to Zahawi.”
“But I didn’t try and stop it, either. Not like you.” Ryan’s voice broke. He looked away from Kris, visibly fighting for control.
This war had robbed them all of their empathy, their ability to see reason. Hatred was a smog that hung in the air, that colored the world in shades of blood and fire. That let men be tortured to the brink of death and beyond, that let Dan build an entire program, a machine dedicated to breaking men, to anguish and suffering, all in the name of expediency.
“I was lucky, Ryan. Dawood has always been my rock. My light in the darkness. You once said he compromised me. That being close to him led to me making wrong decisions. You almost called him, and me, traitors to the CIA.”
Finally, Ryan looked up. Met his gaze. “I was wrong,” he whispered. A single tear slipped from his eye. Ryan wiped it away with the back of his hand, turned to the side. Hid his face, his shame. “About… everything. And for far too long.”
Now he recognizes what he’s done. Kris was exhausted, almost too exhausted, for this conversation. But he could see Ryan’s agony, see his pain bleeding out all over the table, flowing across the hospital’s cafeteria. See a soul-weary ache, and a desperation for something that looked like salvation.
Ryan’s wounds went soul-deep, fissures on his heart and his conscience that he’d have to reconcile with. Choices he’d made that had fractured who he was, until he was a man barely hanging on, clinging to rationalities and his rage. George, too, was lost in his own psychic wounds. A lifetime of playing politics and fighting a war, and losing both, forever destined to make sacrifices and compromises for the worst of all sides, did that to a man. He’d been a politician more times than not, trying to please everyone, but when the hard calls had to be made, George had, at least, been able to call people who could get shit done. Kris. Dawood.
And what about them? Dawood was fighting back from choosing to die, choosing to sacrifice himself for everyone, and Kris didn’t know if bringing him back was the right or wrong choice to make. After forty-seven years of an anguished life, did Dawood deserve his peace? Did he deserve to meet Allah face to face, and rest, finally, in the arms of his creator? He was a hero, an undeniable hero. Should he be given the hero’s send-off?
Was it selfish, holding on to him?
He wouldn’t live without Dawood again. He’d come to that simple truth days ago. What happened would happen. But his choice was made.
“We all lost ourselves in this war. Some more than others.” Dan… How did you spin so entirely out of orbit? “Every choice we make, we choose to either cut out a piece of ourselves, sacrificing what we know is right, or we make the choice to be better. But it all comes down to us. How each of us faces the world, and our choices in it. And after that…” Kris sighed. “It’s up to our conscience to make peace with our souls. Because it’s us who will build this future, Ryan. Us. Individuals. Men and women and people who think and feel and make decisions. So are we going to make a world of hatred? Or are we going to look at ourselves, at what we’ve done, and try to make something better?”
There weren’t any answers to that, not yet. Answers didn’t lie in reports or CIA briefings, in Congressional testimony, or in destroyed videotapes.
Answers lay in everyone’s souls, deep inside their hearts. The greatest battle they would endure would be to face the world and feel it, see it, through someone else’s eyes. Through someone else’s heart.
“I don’t know if I can live with this,” Ryan grunted. “Dan, he was my direct report. He was my friend. My only real friend. I didn’t see this? I didn’t see what he’d—”
“Don’t take Dan’s sins onto your soul. They’re not yours. Dan duped everyone. Everyone. I was just as close to him as you were.”
Ryan crumpled over his coffee cup, hiding his face again.
“We all have a past. We all made choices. Dan made his. Dawood made his. Those choices set them on a collision course toward each other. Two shooting stars bursting apart on impact.” Kris reached across the table, pried Ryan’s clenched fingers off his coffee cup. He squeezed. “What matters is what we do now. How we live with our past. The choices we made.”
When Ryan met his gaze, Kris saw shades, echoes of Ryan’s decision. A bullet, a gun. A lonely house, and a bottle of whiskey.
“Don’t do that, Ryan.” He squeezed hard, until Ryan’s bones shifted in his hand. “Don’t take the easy way out. We need you. The world needs you. We need to make this right.”
“I don’t know how…” Ryan breathed.
“Don’t drag your past into your future. Don’t hold on to that pain. Leave your history where it belongs. In the past. Learn from it. Take it out and look at it, turn it over. But put it back where it belongs. Don’t let those ghosts live with you in the present.” He shuddered. Swallowed. “I… carried nine-eleven with me. I’ve carried it all this time. Because I felt responsible. Because the hijackers’ names crossed my desk. Do you remember the Nine-Eleven Commission? When they were done, they recommended thirty-six CIA officers be censured and terminated, because they knew about the hijackers entering the US and they didn’t share the intel with the FBI. I was one of those thirty-six.” He licked his lips, swallowed hard. “Director Thatcher said there was enough hurt to go around, enough self-blame and self-castigation. He didn’t fire any of us. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t responsible.”
Ryan frowned.
“Did that give me the drive I had? The fire to live this life? Did my moral failing, at twenty-three years old, shape my ethical certainty for the rest of my life? A commitment to doing the right thing, no matter what? Maybe.” Kris shrugged. “But I also let those ghosts dictate my life. Keep me tied to what I felt was my sacred duty. I couldn’t separate the good from the bad. Couldn’t learn from my past without feeling the shame, spiraling into the agony all over again.
“We’ve done terrible, obscene things. The CIA, and each of us, individually. And in this world, there are appalling things, appalling people whom we’ve fought, darkness that we’ve come up against. But they’re people. Just people, making terrible choices from their own places of darkness and horror. We can slide into the darkness with them, or we can fight them and their horror, their terror. Some days it feels like we’re just killing machines, trying to take out as many bad guys as we can before more crop up. But maybe there’s something different we can try. Maybe there’s a new direction you can lead us through. You and George.”
Ryan nodded slowly. He squeezed Kris’s hand. “You could have gone the other way. Decided the ends justified the means. You’d do anything to stop another nine-eleven.”
“It was a moral failing that caused nine-eleven. More moral failings, more abandoning what’s right? That wouldn’t solve anything.” Kris shook his head. “You’re at a crossroads, Ryan. You’re at the center of fate and destiny, where all paths have converged.”
Paths upon paths, choices made that carved destinies, changed the course of time and reality. What if Dawood hadn’t been lost for ten years? What if there had been no one to stop Dan?
Ryan closed his eyes. Took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When he opened them again, the certainty, the finality, was gone, replaced by someone else. Something that looked almost like hope.
“What you do next, the choices you make, will impact the lives of millions. Billions. Make your choices for them. For everyone else. Walk the path that will save lives, and you will change the world.”
“Like Dawood did?” Ryan, finally, smiled, just faintly.
“Like my husband, yes.”
“I never said…” Ryan breathed, red washing his cheeks. “Congratulations on your marriage, Kris. On finding the love of your life. I mean, that was such shit timing in the middle of a war. But, thinking back, that had to be fate, right?” He chuckled, once.
“Thank you.” It was eleven years late, but it was something. Kris let go of Ryan’s hand, sat back. Sipped at his cold coffee. “And you? Any wife at home?”
“I haven’t been able to connect with anyone. This job…” He waved his coffee cup, trying to encompass the enormity of their lives. “I stopped even trying to meet people. The last few dates I went on were… years ago. I don’t know, maybe something is broken in me.”
“It’s not. Not anymore.” Kris smiled, his lips thin. “You are going to be okay, Ryan. Don’t eat a bullet.”
Ryan took his time answering, fiddling with his coffee cup, staring at the plastic table. But when he looked up, Kris saw certainty in his gaze. “I won’t. Because of you. I won’t.”
Kris returned to Dawood’s bedside, needing to ground himself in Dawood, take over George’s vigil. George stood up, and they exchanged a long, silent glance before George pulled him into an awkward hug. Kris felt his trembles, heard the words George couldn’t say.
As the sun set, and the last of the daylight bled from Dawood’s room, Kris pulled up his phone. Opened an app he’d installed days before, sitting by Dawood’s bedside.
Daily verses of the Quran appeared. He’d been reading to Dawood as often as he could in the stillness, in the silence. He laced their hands together and recited, whispering from the Al-Furqaan surah. “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. The servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk the earth in humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say, ‘Peace’.”
Oh, how deeply that described Dawood, in almost every way. Kris felt a hot blade slide through his heart as he tried to breathe.
Next to read was the Al-Imraan surah. “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. O Allah, Owner of Sovereignty. You grant sovereignty to whom You will, and You strip sovereignty from whom you will. You honor whom you will, and You humiliate whom you will. In Your hand is all goodness. You are Capable of all things. You merge the night into the day, and You merge the day into the night, and you bring the living out of the dead, and You bring the dead out of the living, and You provide for whom you will without measure.”
He studied Dawood’s face, the stillness. The stubble, dark brown mixed with silver. Wake up, my love. Wake up.
Kris flicked to the next verse, from the Al-Araf surah. “It is He who sends the wind ahead of His mercy. Then, when they have gathered up heavy clouds, We drive them to a dead land, where We make water come down, and with it We bring forth every kind of fruit. Thus We bring out the dead—”
Kris dropped his phone on Dawood’s bed and pitched forward, resting his forehead on Dawood’s thigh. “Oh Allah,” he whispered. “I’m not ready to let go. Please… please don’t take him. Not yet. Please.”
Fingers brushed his hair. Ghosted over the back of his neck.
Kris sat back, staring up at Dawood—
At Dawood’s open eyes, at his soft smile. “At the end of the path…” Dawood whispered, his voice hoarse, dry, unused for a week.
“You were there,” Kris recited in unison with him. “You were there,” he repeated, rising, rushing Dawood, cradling his face in both hands as he kissed him, kissed every inch of his skin, his eyelids, his lips, his forehead. Dawood held him, his left hand squeezing his arm. His right arm was immobile in a full cast and sling, propped on a pillow.
Dawood reached for Kris’s left hand, brought it forward. Stared at his wedding ring, and then up at Kris, his jaw slack.
Kris lifted Dawood’s left hand and kissed his ring finger, his wedding band. Dawood hissed, and then smiled, the same smile he’d worn the day of their wedding.
“I married the love of my life for all time,” Kris said. “Nothing will ever break that.”
Dawood pulled him close, until they were kissing again. “Ya rouhi,” he whispered. “You are the moon in my darkness, habibi. Always.”
“You are my love, my light, my guiding star.”
They kissed, and kissed, and kissed, until the nurses bustled in and gently separated them, moving Kris to the side of the room as they got to work checking Dawood over.
Their gazes stayed locked together, fixed on one another, the entire time.
Nothing would ever break them apart.
Not ever again.
When the nurses finally left, Kris crawled into bed beside Dawood, careful to keep away from his stitches, the still-healing bullet wound in his side, and not jostle his broken arm. Dawood folded into him, their heads resting together, lips trading kisses as they held hands.
“Weird question,” Dawood asked, after an hour. “Do you have a phone I can borrow?”
“Of course.” Kris dug his phone out of his pants and held it out.
“Can you go to Gmail? I need to check something.”
Kris pulled up the internet browser and typed in the email address and login information Dawood recited.
A single email waited in the inbox.
Re: Confessions, sent by Behroze Haddad.
“Is that your son? The boy you adopted?”
Dawood nodded. He swallowed hard. “I told him everything the night before I met Dan. Who I really was. How I came to the mountain. He was just a child when I arrived. I was the stranger who showed up and became the healer, and then the imam. I stitched his arm closed twice, cleaned and bandaged so many of his cuts and bruises. He was the only one of his family to survive.”
“Where is he now?”
“I sent him to Islamabad to study to be an imam. I made him swear he would never pick up a weapon, never follow the path of violence.” Dawood exhaled shakily. “I told him about you, too. About my husband.”
Kris blinked. “I wonder what he’s said.”
“Read it to me?”
Kris clicked on the email. He started to read, but his voice choked and he stopped, unable to continue. Tears blurred his vision. He held the phone for Dawood to read.
Baba,
I am filled with a thousand questions.
I knew you always had secrets. When we were kids, sometimes we would make up stories about where you came from. Since you always stared at the moon, I told everyone you were from there and had fallen to earth, and you were trying to climb the mountains to get back home.
I think, in the end, I was the closest in our guesses.
You have always told me my jihad is of the heart. That my challenge, my entire life, will be to love unconditionally. To love like the Prophet, peace be upon him, when all I want to do is rage. Be angry, or hate.
I thought I was angry and struggling when you left me in Islamabad. I kept to my studies, and I’ve tried to follow your teachings: my jihad is of the heart. I should always love.
You did not tell me that, in time, answers would arrive. That I would understand one day why I have loved as hard as I have, even through the pain, the anger. Why still, to this day, you remain a fixed point in my heart, a man and a memory I constantly turn to for guidance. Your absence has been a wound that I have not been able to close, Baba.
I want to know more about who you are.
And I want to know Kris, too.
Teach me, Baba. I have so much more to learn.
You said you may never respond to my email if the worst were to happen. If you are reading this, know that I have prayed for you every day since you sent your email, and I will continue to pray for you every day going forward. Your name will always be on my lips for Allah.
You have my love, Baba. Always.
Behroze Haddad
Dawood turned into Kris’s neck and wept.