Purpose of Evasion Read online

  Running behind, Karim spoke through ragged breath. “What did you mean? Upstairs? About your grandfather?”

  Sami winced. His natural hesitation rose first. It was an instinct he developed after the confrontation with his grandfather, a day he still remembered vividly, down to the smells, the angle of light. The instinct was honed by years lurking in the secrets. He turned his new preference for secrecy into a profession. And no one really knew him again.

  Karim knew him. As they scanned the vehicles, looking for the white pickup, Sami decided he had hidden long enough.

  “You can’t trust him.” Sami couldn’t see Karim’s expression, but he knew what it showed. “He introduced you to Hasan, right?”

  “You haven’t been to the mosque in years. How do you know Hasan?”

  “My grandfather is too lax in his embrace of zealots.” Before Sami could go on, they found the truck.

  They stopped running, the heavy breathing modulated and the sirens’ wail now a far-off cry. Karim wanted Sami to continue. What about his grandfather? And Hasan? But Sami wasn’t speaking. He looked at Karim with a curious expression.

  “The keys. I need the keys.”

  Both of their hearts sank.

  “I’m sorry, Sami,” Karim said.

  “You don’t have them?” It was more of a realization than a question.

  “The valet does.”

  ***

  Yoda continued texting and calling, but Sami never answered. Yoda met Emily and Alexa at the rendezvous point and they filled each other in on what they knew. Alexa shared Sami’s instruction. Find Hasan. That should be easy. They knew where the Council of Muhammad meeting was being held, and they all got into Alexa’s rental car and headed in that direction.

  On the interstate, Emily opened her computer to pull up the GPS beacon on Hasan’s car.

  “Get off the highway.”

  “What?” Alexa was driving. She and Yoda both looked back at Emily in confusion.

  “He’s not at the meeting.”

  “Where is he?” Yoda asked, regret in his voice. Everything was out of control.

  “He’s on the move. He’s heading west. On the Beltway.”

  Alexa signaled to reverse direction on the northbound highway. “He’s going back to D.C.?”

  “Fuck!” Yoda was the first to realize. “He’s heading to Dulles.”

  ***

  Sami darted away and left Karim by the truck. He returned on the run with the heavy road sign that marked the crosswalk by the elevator. He barely slowed as he approached the truck, flinging the sign’s heavy iron base at the rear driver’s window creating a spider web of cracks. The truck’s alarm bleated an urgency much louder and closer than the hotel sirens.

  Sami tried to remove the base, now wedged into the tempered glass. Karim helped and together, using the stand like a battering ram, they struck a blow forceful enough to knock the window out of the frame. Sami reached in and unlocked the door.

  They moved to the rear of the truck and Sami opened the tailgate. Sitting in the bed obscured by darkness was a black tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. It was four-sided and looked like a large box or trunk. The tarp was held on with bungee cords, also black.

  This was the box Alexa described. Sami looked for any obvious sign this was a bomb, but it was too neatly packaged. If there was any conventional explosive inside, something from the plastic explosive family - Semtex or C4 - a bomb this size wouldn’t just destroy the parking deck but was a threat to the hotel above and all the emergency personnel outside. Sami needed everyone away. But he also needed Karim to understand. He looked at his old friend.

  “Hasan? He…” Karim could not formulate the words, but Sami knew what he was thinking.

  “We watched him. He lied to you, so they could get this in the truck, and he tricked you into coming here. He’s not coming, Karim.”

  “Why? I would…this would kill me.”

  “It will kill everyone in this hotel.” Sami grabbed Karim by the arm again, pulling more gently this time. They ran back to the stairs and started up two at a time. “Someone will detonate the bomb with a remote device, probably activated by a cell phone wired into the explosive. I know that you weren’t, Karim, but you need to tell me. Were you going to detonate the bomb?” Sami shouted.

  “I didn’t even know it was there!” Karim said through ragged breath.

  They arrived back at the door to the lobby hallway. Sami reached to pull it open and Karim stopped him.

  “Your grandfather? Abu Muhammad, he…” Karim could not form the words.

  THIRTEEN

  LOUDON COUNTY 1993 | WASHINGTON 2001

  “Sami, there has been a horrible tragedy.”

  Souteli Khala was a pidgin Urdu nickname that Sami developed for the step-aunt who was standing in the bright light of his grandfather’s kitchen. She was his friend Karim’s mother and a good friend of his own mother.

  Dust motes encircled her. They were so numerous and phosphorescent that Sami could not pay attention to what she said. But she spoke of Sami’s mother, again and again, starting and restarting the same sentence with tears streaking her walnut-colored cheeks and she couldn’t complete the thought.

  Sami realized it was something serious. Too serious. He tried to change the subject.

  “Is Karim here?” he asked. “I can go play with him.” He rose from the chair. The strategy had the added benefit of appearing to be appropriate behavior when a child was confronted by their Auntie crying.

  “No, Samir. Karim isn’t here.” Souteli Khala said. She exhaled violently and pressed the tips of all four fingers hard into the high, round cheek below each eye to staunch the tears. “You need to sit. I’m sorry.”

  When Sami’s grandfather brought him into the kitchen, Souteli Khala was already there. Now Sami’s grandfather was gone, and he said nothing before he left. Karim wasn’t there. Sami had never been alone with Souteli Khala before and he did not understand why he was now.

  “Samir, your mother, and your father…there was a bomb today.” Her words caught on a lump in her throat. “The embassy was destroyed. A section of it. Your parents’ residence was part of that section. It seems the bomb was close to them. Maybe even within their apartment, they don’t know yet. But, Samir, they are...There is nothing left of either of them.”

  Sami thought he might ask after Karim again, but Karim wasn’t there. He could go find his grandfather and tell him that Souteli Khala was saying awful things. Anything not to think about what she said. Sami knew that Souteli Khala feared his grandfather, but so did he. Just like everyone else. He didn’t run to Abu Muhammad. He regretted what he did instead, but he was only a child.

  “Maybe they weren’t hurt then?” he offered. “If there is nothing left? Maybe they were out?”

  “I’m afraid…it is certain.” Souteli Khala was not entirely prepared, but she was prepared for this. He was a child. He would see it as a problem, a riddle, and he would fantasize a solution. But it was real. His parents were dead.

  ***

  BAKU, AZERBAIJAN (May 22, 1993) - A massive explosion destroyed several floors in one wing of the U.S. Embassy here this morning, killing at least 7 people, 4 of them Americans, in what officials are calling a terrorist attack. The enormous explosion disrupted the busy downtown shopping district where the U.S. Embassy has been located since the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union and Azeri independence.

  The bomb exploded as the business day began and as night fell crews from the embassy and from local Azeri emergency services were still sifting through the wreckage attempting to locate bodies. The loss of life is thought to be high because the bomb was somehow placed within the embassy’s living quarters. Investigators believe the attack was the work of terrorists but have not released details on how the attackers accessed the residential area of the compound.

  While U.S. officials have not commented on claims of responsibility, Azeri officials are
directing blame at Sunni terror groups. The country is predominately Muslim, but the majority Shia population is considered to be much less adherent than in neighboring Iran. Experts on the region say an ongoing war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, the recent collapse of Soviet rule, and other political disputes have contributed to the creation of an opportunity for Islamist attackers who have recently attacked western Levant countries – such as Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey – to gain access to Azerbaijan.

  President Clinton called the attack “a cowardly act of terror,” and vowed to bring those responsible to justice ''no matter what or how long it takes.''

  Witnesses said the explosion was concentrated in the residential wing, with a blast radius that traveled up and down within the building rather than outward toward the street. It appeared to emanate from the second floor, where embassy staff apartments are housed. As of this evening, embassy spokespersons could not comment on how an attacker would have gained access to that part of the building, which is tightly secured.

  ***

  It was Friday night at the George Washington University Gelman Library. Again. Friday nights always seemed to find Sami in the same corner carrel on the seventh floor, reading microfilm from newspaper stories recounting the attack that killed his parents.

  Though only 20 miles from home in Virginia, during his first two years at George Washington, Sami felt like he was on the other side of the world. He was raised in a secular style. Even with the heavy influence of his grandfather after his parents’ death, his upbringing had still been mainstream American. College - with alcohol and drugs, profanity and pornography - felt like another world.

  Had he confided his fears to his grandfather, he would have been reminded of Iblis, who – made from fire and permitted to linger among the angels - told Allah, “Because You have sent me astray, surely, I will sit in wait against the human beings on Your straight path. Then I will come to them from before them and behind them, from their right and from their left…”

  Sami didn’t need reminding. He knew the story well. He preferred the movie trope, well-worn in everything from Westerns to spy movies, where the hero was tempted by illicit enticements which only held his doom. Pussy Galore.

  Sami was struggling to acknowledge that he felt no temptation from that enticement. That was another reason to sequester himself in the Gelman; the better to avoid confronting the creeping fact of his own proclivities.

  His grandfather would have seen a connection between Sami’s preferred metaphor, and his own failing. His sexual deviance was grounded in his secularism. And both were grounded in American Sin. The phrase was forever capitalized and italicized in Sami’s mind and was – as Sami completed his freshman year - often given the same treatment in the Op-eds of major American newspapers.

  American Sin was the title of a successful book that his grandfather published just before Sami arrived at GW. The book was written during the waning days of the Clinton White House, published during the Gore v. Bush campaign, and became a cause celebre among Christian conservative ideologues who saw their own words in its pages but spoken by a conveniently exotic mouthpiece. Here was a way to beat their drum without being accused of blowing their dog whistle. When Bush won, and Beltway insiders attributed the win to a resurgence of religious fundamentalism at the ballot box, Abu Muhammad’s book got its fifteen minutes among D.C.’s cognoscenti.

  His grandfather. Sami thought about the man more than he cared to admit. The voice was a constant presence in his life, creating an inner dialogue with Sami’s own thoughts. It was the cartoon: an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other. But which was which?

  Even as his grandfather’s public image grew, the man diminished in Sami’s estimation. As his voice gained more adherents, his words rang hollower to his grandson. As Sami wiled away another Friday night at the Gelman, reading stories about his parents’ murder, he felt himself drawing closer to something, a new truth. The closer he drew, the more distant he felt his grandfather becoming.

  The Gelman was a very good university library. Other than a musty 1970s interior, which Sami found suited to hiding, what recommended it most were the special collections: the Kiev Library of Judaica; the Global Resources Center, a super-sized version the CIA World Factbook; and the National Security Archive.

  The National Security Archive was an institution which described itself as “an investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents, leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.”

  It was a librarian of the National Security Archive who noticed Sami every Friday, when he borrowed every newspaper and magazine microfilm available on the 1993 embassy attack. Some he had reviewed half a dozen times. Already taking a liking to Sami, when he told her why he read those stories, again and again, she took pity on him.

  She suggested that a FOIA request might bear fruit on some information outside the media record. Beyond that, she suggested that Sami – having gained as highly-developed an understanding of the public narrative on the attack as anyone – could use his understanding of the players to cross-reference other available research documents in the library. That librarian gave Sami his first lesson in the craft of open source intelligence collection.

  Sami had been kept in the dark about the facts of the attack, his grandfather always receiving the investigators’ updates privately, and rarely passing any information along to Sami. He was grateful to have tapped into another trove of documents, matching his own endless appetite for information about the attack that killed his parents. Sami’s attitude of simple succor soon evolved. He saw connections in the public record; connections that FOIA requests revealed government investigators had seen too.

  Sami had an advantage that the government investigators had not. In his youth, he made trips to Pakistan and to the Holy Land with his grandfather. On these trips, he met people, stayed in their homes, and shared their food. They were his grandfather’s hosts. His grandfather’s friends. That unique insight allowed him to make connections the government investigators never made. Connections between his own grandfather and people who the investigative documents revealed were suspected of organizing and funding the attack.

  From what the documents reported, and what he had seen with his own eyes on trips with his grandfather, Sami developed a theory. It hardened into a belief. And then, into a horror.

  FOURTEEN

  ANNAPOLIS

  Sami hesitated. His stomach flipped. There was no time left. Ten minutes ago, he had opened this can of worms. It was time to tell Karim the truth.

  “The bomb that killed my parents. When we were in college, I became interested in the story and I discovered things I never expected. The bomber got into the embassy because he was meeting with my father. My grandfather arranged the meeting. He never confessed that he arranged the meeting to the FBI. Or that the bomber was someone he knew. I confronted him and he admitted it. I didn’t want you to know, I wanted no one to know, so I told you the secret that scared me much less. To explain why I wouldn’t speak to him anymore. I blamed him for instigating our estrangement because I was gay. Rather than anyone finding out, I exiled him for letting terrorists into his confidences.” Sami felt a weight lifted. “I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you.”

  “Sami!” Karim’s face was a mask of terror. Despite the last few minutes’ frenzy, only now did he look afraid. “Your grandfather! He introduced me to Hasan!”

  A black veil fell over Sami’s vision. He needed to know more. Was it possible that his grandfather had made the same mistake again? Or worse? Is that what Andy knew? And who else knew?

  He had been right to risk coming after Karim. Whatever the personal risks, getting his friend out and interrogating him was imperative. Th
ey needed to get out of this hotel. Delirious with a million other questions, Sami recovered quickly.

  He threw open the door to a hallway that was the length of a football field. At the end, the lobby was crowded with hotel staff, first responders, and a few guests still milling around. For the first responders, it was their third or fourth false alarm of the day. Their casual calm was settling over the others.

  Until they see two military-aged males of Pakistani extraction, Sami thought, but he reminded himself that only he and Karim knew there was a bomb. The responding authorities thought, at worst, there was a kitchen fire, or someone had a heart attack.

  Sami faced an awful choice, but he knew that as bad as he wanted to stop the attack, he could not be the one to tell the police about the bomb. If he did, he and Karim would be arrested and questioned. They were not registered guests, the truck downstairs was smashed and if their story could hold up, it would take too long.

  The alternative was to make a scene. Enough of a scene to clear the building. Yell “BOMB!” Better yet, run down the hallway and scream “Allahu Akhbar!” And be sure they didn’t wind up in police custody. Sami needed to catch Hasan and he needed Karim’s help. As they approached the lobby, and the time when Sami needed to decide, he turned to Karim. His friend was gone.

  A door clicked a few feet behind and Sami turned back. The door was metal with a large stainless-steel handle. It was not a hotel room or a ballroom or a stairwell. There was a large glass window, reinforced by chicken wire. VALET was stenciled on the door in frosted white letters. Inside, Karim was scanning a wall-mounted key cabinet. Sami reached for the handle.

  “Hey!” A firefighter called to Sami from the lobby. Not aggressive, not accusatory. More annoyed than anything. “Pal, you need to clear out.”