Purpose of Evasion Page 21

  Sami’s fingers tightened around the pistol grip, but the gun remained in the holster. He had not come here to listen to a sermon. Not from this man. He had heard too many. He focused on the substance of the discussion. His grandfather changed the subject off Gerald Seymour. Sami recorded the questions for later. What did the White House know? When did they know it?

  “It was you.” There was a trace of childlike disappointment in Sami’s voice.

  “’It’ was never me. I have watched for years, yes. I have been supportive, in whatever way I could be. But what choice did I have?” He rose and whirled away from Sami toward the window. “Open your eyes, Samir. You are a guard, standing at the warm, radiating door to the incinerator.”

  Though his grandfather was never a virulent anti-Semite, the reference was a clear reference to the Holocaust. It caught Sami by surprise. It was not a Qur’an analogy. It was modern. Western. American. It marked a similarity that Sami and Abu Muhammad shared. One of the few. They slid between worlds.

  That skill accounted for his grandfather’s ascension as America’s leading authority on Islam, his political dexterity, and his connection to people as disparate as Hasan Khalifa and Gerald Seymour. It was also the skill that defined Sami’s career, and his success as an agent of America in its battles with extreme Islam.

  “You have chosen the side of the aggressor. Of the brute. America is a global criminal enterprise. I came here in pursuit of the elusive American Dream, only to find that America is a tragedy clothed in myth. It began in genocide and when the Indians were finished, it imported black Africans to slaughter, and when it finished with them, it turned to the rest of the world.”

  “I’ve heard the speech,” Sami interrupted. As it had the night before, the impudence rankled his grandfather. “I have it on tape, actually. From my first interrogation of Hasan Khalifa. He gave it better. I see why you attached yourself to him. He is a gifted communicator. He’ll make a great witness.”

  “He’ll never see the light of day— “

  “Stop! Don’t presume to exert control over things beyond your grasp. If you make it out of this hotel alive, you won’t be dictating the events of your prosecution.”

  “Remember, Samir. I am the one with the direct line to the White House.” This was followed by a knowing half-nod. With his head declined, Abu Muhammad narrowed his gaze over his spectacles. “He will go to Guantanamo Bay. Which is where I would go ‘if I make it out of this hotel alive.” Another set of air quotes.

  Sami was certain that this was mania. It was only then, and only because of how intimately he knew his target that Sami was sure what happened next.

  Abu Muhammad would detonate the bombs.

  Unless Sami stopped him.

  It had been the plan all along. Khalifa and the Council of Muhammad and whatever else were negotiable. If they succeeded, great. If not, all that was essential were Abu Muhammad’s appearances on TV news. The raising of his profile. The footage the world over of a man who had appeared on Sunday talk shows and been the friend of White House insiders. Those pictures running over a news crawl that said he had blown up a hotel in Washington.

  A trained assassin - one that worked in a different dark corner of U.S. intelligence from Sami, the corner the U.S. government denied in the polite company of diplomatic board rooms – would have extracted the Sig now. Target confirmed. Pump three bullets into the target, center mass, and then evacuate the building. Call in confirmation when out of local law enforcement’s reach.

  But Sami was not a trained assassin. His determination to kill would be tested, but that was not what faltered now. Instead, he succumbed to the only unforgivable sin of an assassin. His curiosity. And worse, his emotion. But not for his grandfather.

  Now that Sami knew the truth about the events of the past week, the case was closed. But another cold case remained very much open. His memory jogged, and for a moment Sami was a ten-year-old boy again, sitting at the kitchen table of his grandfather’s home.

  “Sami, there has been a horrible tragedy…”

  “How long?” Sami asked now.

  After a moment of confusion, his grandfather responded. “Don’t be ignorant, child. Use complete sentences.”

  The question Sami wanted answered overtook every other thought and impulse, and yet he still could not speak it.

  Now he was in college, sitting in the library, piecing together facts from government and news reports. The names and faces in them were swimming in his memory and they were familiar. They were faces he had seen when traveling with his grandfather.

  “How long?” he muttered again. “When did you start?”

  His grandfather laughed. “The great American spy!” He retook his seat on the couch, before the neat line of cell phone detonators. “People are being allowed back into the building. The time is near. And they send you?”

  Unable to conceal his alarm, Sami ran to the window. His grandfather was not bluffing. A line of guests were outside of the hotel’s main entrance, snaking back a hundred yards. They were conducting some kind of security screening to permit re-entry. Andy had prevailed upon the incident commander to do that much.

  It would be meaningless. The threat was already inside. Like so much post-9/11 American security, the screening would be counterintuitive. It would only admit innocents to become victims.

  “This will be the first to explode.” Abu Muhammad said from the couch, indicating the phone furthest to his right. Right to left. Most Americans would have arranged the phones the other way, as they arranged written words or numerals. His grandfather went right-to-left. Like the Qur’an. Like their native language.

  “It’s an inconvenience because it is the weapon set on the high floor. I will have to wait for these people to reoccupy the building. To filter back upstairs.” His finger straightened and he moved it to the left. “Then this one. And this one. We flush them downstairs and then these explode. They are near the middle floors, on the ends of the building, near the evacuation stairs. By now, the carnage already great, whoever has made it to the lower levels, near the exits, and all the emergency personnel. The police. Everyone will feel this one.” He pointed at the last phone, all the way to his left. “It is the largest. A single bomb that will have a place in American history. ‘Fat Boy.’ ‘Little Man.’ A bomb that will have a name.”

  Sami knew that Abu Muhammad’s comparison was inept. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 – whatever else it had been – was an expression of power. It may have been pragmatic. It may have saved the lives of some U.S. service members by preventing the need for an invasion of Japan, but it traded those lives for Japanese civilians. It was, undoubtedly, bullying. A new global superpower flexed its muscles.

  His grandfather’s bomb would express something different, something expressed by the rash of global terror attacks that any person could list: London, Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Paris, 9/11. And now, this hotel.

  The scripture, the icons, the prayers, the bombings. The path to eternal peace, somewhere else. They thought it was their hope. It was all so hopeless. Sami never understood suicide attacks. He respected the IEDs in Iraq. They were strategic and effective. Asymmetric warfare. He had to counter it, but he respected it.

  The suicide attacks? The bomb vest? The truck attacks? Desperate. Weak. When you have resigned yourself to minimally effective, low casualty attacks against soft targets and the only way you can attack them is by suicide, you are staring failure in the face.

  His grandfather had been in that stare down since Sami’s parents died. Blowing oneself up to kill innocent people was evil, but there was something worse about how Abu Muhammad had planned this. He wasn’t walking into a market and blowing himself up. He had planned a detailed attack, for maximum casualties. He wouldn’t just kill shoppers and shopkeepers and families, he would strike at the core of American values.

  He would undermine American values and exploit American domestic discord. It was an attack only an Americ
an could conceive and execute. A traitor. Like the attack on the embassy. The one that killed Sami’s parents.

  All of this flashed through Sami’s mind in a second. History, politics, religion, and emotion, flying on the wings of neurons.

  Just as quickly, he was back in his grandfather’s study. Not last night, but years before. On the night when he confronted his grandfather.

  “You introduced them to the bombers, didn’t you? You arranged the meeting?” He asked then.

  His grandfather confessed. The truth was more than Sami could handle and he did not press. But that was years ago.

  With unconscious quickness, Sami swung his hand around to the small of his back and unholstered the Sig. His grandfather had lied. It had not been misplaced trust. Not a horrible mistake. Abu Muhammad was the one. He planned the attack that killed Sami’s parents.

  Sami wouldn’t listen to any more pontification. He fired.

  ***

  Sami expected more. He thought blood would cover the pale-yellow shirt, but there was only a small tear. Blood spread in an irregular brownish splotch, but slowly.

  “Samir!” Even now, his grandfather was preparing a lecture.

  “You lied! There was no confusion. No accident. You planned the attack that killed them!” The spy had not become an assassin. He had not fired three quick rounds center mass. It was one bullet fired by a vengeful son. A scorned grandson. “You used your own son to gain access.”

  Gasping for air, his grandfather replied. “These people, they are serious. For them, for me, the jihad is not a political set piece as it is in this country. Something for the Sunday talk shows. It is jihad. War. Life or death. American bombs are raining down on their homes, on their children. They wanted to know if I was serious. How serious? Would I sacrifice what they had sacrificed? Would I sacrifice everything earthly for Allah? Your parents betrayed their God. Look at you! You can have no better example. You were young and don’t remember your father’s work, but he was a conciliator. He was committed to betraying Allah for some elusive peace. I saved him. And I tried to save you, Samir. But this place. This sick, hedonistic, materialistic, immoral place already had you in its maw.” His grandfather coughed and lie on the side where he was shot, blood staining the couch.

  Now Sami knew. His grandfather had not just been connected to the people who had killed his parents. He hadn’t just been duped by a friend who used access to the embassy to detonate the bomb that killed Sami’s parents. No, Abu Muhammad made the introduction and planned the meeting for the bomber to kill Sami’s parents. He was the mastermind behind the terror attack that would kill his own son. Knowing that his grandfather had done that, Sami was left with no doubt that Abu Muhammad would kill himself and everyone else in this hotel.

  And the grandson panicked. He stepped over to the couch where his grandfather lay moaning, and without paying attention to which detonator went where, he stuffed the four phones into his pockets. He ran to the window to see if anyone outside heard the shot. The line to reenter had shrunk. Guests were back inside now, but there was no indication of alarm. It was orderly.

  No one heard the shot that was still ringing in Sami’s ears. If not for the ringing, he might have heard the bathroom door slide open. Instead, he felt a bullet bury itself in his shoulder and knock him against the window like the kick of a mule.

  ***

  Sami thought about God at the oddest moments.

  Abraham Lincoln said: “I have been driven to my knees many times by the conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” Religion as desperation. Deathbed conversion. Epiphany in crisis. Born again behind bars. Rock bottom.

  And it held. It comforted. Day after day, every whispered wish, each tearful request for reprieve.

  Not for Sami. The moments when he thought of God were the moments when he was so overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic gratitude, and so unable to figure out who to thank for it, that he thought of God. Then he checked himself.

  I’m lucky: a gay Muslim, in America, in the 21st century. If God had anything to do with it, then what did God have against the Congolese who were hacked to pieces during the Belgian conquest less than 100 years ago? Or, the Jews who died by the millions in Europe 75 years ago?

  What did God have against the people about to walk in the front door of the hotel?

  God had nothing to do with it. Sami owed his debt to the place he called home. To the people, White, Anglo, Christians who might have hated him, but who made the trip across an ocean, worked their hands to the bone and died at forty-five so that their kids – and their kids’ kids – would not know another pestilence, famine, or genocide. He couldn’t thank that person, so he thought about his good fortune and his gratitude, and he became overwhelmed at the randomness of it and he thought about God.

  These were founding myths, yes, but neither was Abu Muhammad right. Nor Tom Tinker, nor Gerald Seymour, nor the man who sat in the White House having wet dreams about a wall. Whatever they intended, those Seventeenth Century WASPs invented a place that others would come to, others they never hoped to live alongside. And they were still coming.

  Not only his grandfather, and his parents, but others. They were coming because they wanted what he had. They wanted what overwhelmed him with gratitude. The ones coming now would be outcasts just like the Irish and the Italians and the Jews, and the Chinese, and the Latinos. They would be hated, and they would live miserable, poor, unhealthy lives picking other people’s strawberries or mowing their lawns. But their kids would be Americans. And God had nothing do with it. They made that luck.

  That was what he honored: he represented a place where anyone could do that. Make a life. Change the future. That was why he did what he did, which his grandfather never understood. That was why he didn’t regret it – any of it. The bombs over Baghdad. The millions displaced. The creation of ISIS. The drone strikes that sometimes kill children. He didn’t regret it because America intended none of those consequences. Collateral damage was a painful euphemism, but it wasn’t a lie. America tried.

  Sami resented anyone who chose the alternative.

  Drop to your knees in the conviction you have no place else to go and flip the switch. Religion as pathology. It was a crutch. Don’t worry that your life is hard, that you don’t have the discipline or intelligence, or creativity to change your reality. Or the patience to let it happen. America could be bad, but he had never seen it be evil. Until today.

  He had done his best for America. He was down now, bleeding onto a hotel carpet while Gerald Seymour sat in the White House conspiring with terrorists. Sami didn’t know how he felt. Or what was real. His mind was bending. The pain in his shoulder was like nothing he had felt before. Starved for oxygen during training at The Farm, the searing pain in his lungs then was sharper, but not as heavy. The pain of alienation from his grandfather, and his friends, and his mosque community was deeper, but not as urgent. The pain of losing his parents…His parents.

  Abu Muhammad killed Muhammad Lakhani. My grandfather killed my parents. Now he shot me. Shot his own grandson. Sami knew what he hadn’t been sure of as he climbed the hotel stairs: he was not here for America. Who gave a fuck about the USA? He was here for vengeance.

  He rolled onto his good shoulder and slid his hips back toward the wall. He propped himself onto his elbow and the pain burned like a thousand matches lit against his skin. He winced and paused. The pain did not abate in the slightest and he sucked in a deep breath and pushed himself straight up against the wall. He saw his legs in front of him, but he couldn’t feel them. They were props in this drama. For a moment he thought he was paralyzed before he realized that his legs were numb because so much feeling was concentrated near the gunshot wound.

  His parents.

  Sami should never have left his grandfather alive. The Assassin would have fired those three shots center mass. The vengeful son?

  Muslim. American. Gay. Soldier. Spy. Terrorist. Grandson. Orphan. He had lectured his grandfather about the Ame
rican melting pot. Maybe Abu Muhammad and Seymour were right. Maybe multiculturalism was a failed experiment. Sami sure was tired of juggling his various identities. The vengeful son should have emptied the magazine.

  Sami was determined to do that now. He hooked his good arm onto the window sill and heaved himself upright with a pained growl. It was only then, facing back into the room with a view over the back of the couch where his grandfather lay, that Sami saw they were not alone in the hotel suite.

  TWENTY-NINE

  NATIONAL HARBOR

  Sami stared into the eyes of the man who shot him. Somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, their color was washed out in grey, but they remained the blue eyes of a white man. The skin was wrinkled and pale. There was no beard. It was not the face of any terrorist that America knew. If Gerald Seymour won, they would never know the face of Tom Tinker.

  Tinker wore a lightweight button-down fishing shirt and khaki cargo pants over hiking boots. For all the world, he could be a guy on the way back from a summer fishing trip. Which is what he hoped the TSA agents would think - without a second thought - when he boarded the plane. He was holding a ticket in one of his myriad pockets, but first, he needed to finish this.

  The only accessory that marred the angler look was the pistol he held in a perfect triangle firing position. Sami tried to focus on his training rather than the pain. The gun was a subcompact. But large caliber. Maybe a .40? Glock 27.

  “Stand up and put your hands on your head,” Tinker commanded.

  Sami complied, but slowly. “I can stand, but the hands-on-head thing will be a little tough since you shot a hole through the right side of my torso.”

  “Turn around and face the window. I am coming over to…” Tinker hesitated. “No. Walk in front of the couch and place the detonators back on the table.”