Page 93 of Whisper
Or, theyhadbeen.
He couldn’t fall back into the endless bullshit Cobb and Warrick threw at each other. Couldn’t muster the interest to kick Jackson off the junky game system, take his turn at shooting up the bad guys who dressed suspiciously like Middle Easterners, like Arabs, even Libyans. Their noise moved around him, through him, as if he were an alien in their midst.
Palmer crashed down on the couch next to him, creaking the old springs. They hadn’t spent much outfitting their living quarters in Islamabad, a sprawling house near the embassy. The furniture was on the verge of collapse. “Haddad. Squared away?”
He nodded. “Yes sir.”
Palmer kept staring at him. “You sure?”
He blinked. “Is this Captain Palmerasking, sir?”
“No, Sergeant, there is nothing that I want you totellme. This is a friend checking in.” Palmer’s voice dropped. “Something’s got you shook. We can all see it. You’ve been off since Afghanistan. Ever since you were pulled off to go one-on-one with the CIA.”
“I’m good to go.” David tried to brush Palmer off.
Palmer wasn’t taking it. “Look, I got a WARNO for you.” A WARNO, a warning order, a heads-up. David’s hackles bristled as Palmer leaned in closer, speaking into David’s shoulder. “Some people are asking questions. Making comments. Wondering about you.”
“Aboutme?”
Palmer stared. “Jackson let it slip you aren’t racking out in your own bed.”
He turned away. Stared at the TV, at the video game. Rodriguez was mowing down the bad guys in a tank. The bad guys looked like his neighbors from when he was seven, his neighbors who’d run a restaurant on Abdullah Bala Street in Benghazi and gave him pomegranates. His seven-year-old fingers would be ruby red, stained down to his fingernails by the time he was done. In his memories, the pomegranate juice turned to blood, the same blood on the TV screen.
“You gotta watch your six, Haddad. It’s almost time to pop smoke.”
“What?”
“We’re coming up on nine months we’ve been deployed. They’re gonna pull us back soon. Rotate us out. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“Iraq, man. We’re taking Iraq out next.”
David bit his tongue, hard enough to hurt. He’d heard about Iraq from Zahawi. The black flags of Khorasan coming over the hills, through Afghanistan, through Iraq. The prophecy, the prophecy.
“We gotta rotate out to start workups for invading Iraq. You know we’re always the tip of the spear.”
“When?”
“I’m waiting for the orders. Any day now.”
It was late when Kris finally came back to his—their—bedroom. David had already halfheartedly shared a beer with Jackson and Palmer, tried to shoot the shit with Warrick a bit. Had showered, standing in the cool water with far too little pressure as images of Zahawi and his father, Pakistan and Libya, and the burning sun beating down on a dry, dusty landscape, burst like fireworks behind his eyelids.
Kris looked like he’d been up for days, had stood before Goliath himself. Unlike the mythical David, though, he hadn’t succeeded.
Collapsing onto their bed, Kris slumped forward, burying his face in his palms. The knobs of his spine stuck out through his rumpled button-down. David trailed his fingers down each of them, pausing at every furrow. He felt Kris’s breath, the shudder of his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” Kris whispered. “I tried.”
It had always been a foolish promise.
Kris couldn’t stop the US government, couldn’t stop the might of the biggest bureaucracy on the face of the planet. Especially not from itself. “They won’t stop.”
Kris shook his head. His face was still hidden. He spoke to the darkness of his fingers. “George told me I was making a mistake. I was ruining my career. The detainee program is the next big thing in the agency. That anyone who is anyone is jumping to get on board.”
David’s fingers trailed down Kris’s back, tugged at the loose fabric until it was free from his pants. He slid his hand up Kris’s skin, ghosting over the small of his back, the taut warmth there. The small of Kris’s back had become his holy land, his Mecca, a place he craved and worshipped, burying his face deep in nightly prayer. The secrets of his soul were in Kris’s body, he knew. He just had to find them. He’d spend his whole life searching, on his knees in prayer before Kris.
He knew what Kris’s answer to George would have been. He knew it like he would have spoken it himself. “You told him to go to hell.”
