Page 12 of Whisper

“By who?”

“You.”

Silence.

Kris pulled a manila folder from his bag and laid out nineteen photos. He placed Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta’s photos right in front of Tadmir.

Tadmir’s eyes were wide, so round and huge Kris could see whites all around his dark irises. His gaze flicked from the photos to Kris and back, lingering on al-Shehhi.

“These are the hijackers who murdered thousands.” He tapped al-Shehhi’s photo. “Your friend flew United Airlines 175 into the South Tower in Manhattan.”

Tadmir’s jaw dropped. All the oxygen seemed to disappear, sucked out of the tiny, drab interrogation room. Shock poured from Tadmir, and he stared down at al-Shehhi’s photo as he shook his head, over and over, his mouth hanging open. “How… how is this possible?”

“You tell me. You’re al-Qaeda.”

“Not like this… Allah forgive me, not like this. This is not what I believe in. The Sheikh… he’s gone crazy.”

“These men, they are all al-Qaeda?”

“Yes, all of them. I recognize them all. They were at my guesthouse near Tarnak Farms…” Tears welled in his eyes. One hand reached for al-Shehhi’s photo, his quivering fingers touching the image as if he could touch al-Shehhi’s face so gently. “Why?” he whispered.

Kris stayed silent. His heart raced, pounding out a bassline drumbeat in his mind, hard enough to crack his skull. Blood burned in his veins. Ash filled his nose, his eyes, his lungs, searing everything until he could taste the flames, the jet fuel dripping through the Twin Towers’ superstructure, could feel the singe on his own soul. Across from him, Tadmir wept for the friend he’d lost, and Kris tasted the bitterness of failure and shame.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Tadmir wiped his eyes, blinking. “I am sorry,” he said slowly. “This is not right. It is not what I believe. They were supposed to fight in Israel, in Chechnya. Against soldiers. Governments. Not this. So I will help you. What do you need from me?”

“Everything.”

The FBI agents, who’d been watching the interrogation on closed-circuit TVs, joined him. Together they asked Tadmir for details about the hijackers, their time at the al-Qaeda training camps, their connections to Bin Laden.

Tadmir gave them everything.

He smoked the entire pack of cigarettes, and his eyes kept straying to al-Shehhi’s photo. He shook his head, every time, and then launched into describing al-Qaeda’s defenses and marked on the map where he knew the Taliban had entrenched their own defensive positions.

After twelve hours of listening to Tadmir spill his soul, Kris ducked out. His hands were shaking, his legs, his whole body. He held himself up, one hand on the wall, as he walked toward a dingy window. He had to call Washington.

Williams picked up on the third ring. The satellite connection was scratchy, as if Williams were more than just a world away. “Kris, great job. Really great stuff. Thatcher and I are on the way to the White House to brief the president. Come home. Fly back to DC right away. We need you for what’s coming next.”

Chapter 3

CTC

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia

September 15, 2001

“The people in this room will be leading the first wave into Afghanistan.”

Kris glanced left and right. He and about twenty others had been pulled by Williams into a side room off the basement-level bunker. Everyone around him was huge. Huge physically, hulking muscles and ripped bodies. Huge in reputation. Career officers of the CIA, men who had their names etched in iron, who had stopped more terror attacks than years Kris had been alive. They were legends in the CIA, officers used as training examples at The Farm. Men who didn’t breathe oxygen, who didn’t pump blood through their bodies. They were made of far sterner stuff, iron patriotism and pure American grit. It was like looking at one of the world’s first astronauts. Who were these men who did these things? How did humans accomplish these feats?

And then there was him.

He’d managed to go home and shower after his flight back from Yemen. Change into a fresh pair of khakis and a burgundy turtleneck and repair the bird’s nest his hair had become. Next to all these legends of the CIA, he had spiked hair, a shell necklace over his turtleneck, and shined Oxfords.

They looked like lumberjacks from American fables come to life, and he looked like a Gap ad. A member of a boy band.