Page 162 of Whisper

He didn’t have to find David’s killer, though.

His killer stared back at him from the mirror every day.

He sat in silence for twenty-four hours, building a wall around his heart, around himself. David was supposed to come back to him, but he hadn’t. This wasn’t a movie, and there wouldn’t be any reunions, any dances at midnight.

There was a truth in the fact that he was alone, that David wasn’t a whisper away, his soul vibrating just out of reach of Kris’s perceptions: there was nothing, and no one, for him, in this life or the next.

His walls built higher, deeper. The void in his heart yawned wide, and he threw his hopes and dreams into its bottomless abyss.I will never love again.

He went back to the house once, yanking clothes out of their closet and stuffing things in garbage bags. He called a realtor and told them to sell it, as fast as they could, and get rid of everything inside it. He couldn’t spend a single second longer in the house, a mausoleum to David’s dreams. He couldn’t breathe the air that David had imbued with all his hope, all of his love. He couldn’t create a future for one in a house that was made for so much more.

Three weeks later, he put a down payment on a studio condo in Crystal City. He spent the first night lying on garbage bags full of clothes and staring out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, until the sun rose over DC.

Dan checked on him twice a day, calling, texting, and dropping first by the hotel, then his unit. Kris could set his watch by Dan’s visits, his quiet concern. He brought Kris food, tried to distract him.

One night, he brought a file over and slid it across the carpet to Kris.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Pictures, from a drone strike. Black and white photos with a targeting grid overlaid on the grisly center scene. Close ups of a mangled car, and a body hanging out of the driver’s door. A face he’d burned into the backs of his eyelids. “Al Jabal.”

“There’s been a huge increase in drone strikes over there. Revenge and payback. Kabul station tracked down Al Jabal. He was the one who put all the pieces together. Convinced Hamid, and then convinced Zawahiri of what they could do with Hamid. He’s also the one on the videotape, with…” Dan swallowed. “The agency believes that he was David’s killer.”

Ryan had done it. Kris stared at Al Jabal’s body, half blown apart, fallen like a broken rag doll out of the car. He should feel satisfaction, wrath, fury. He should cry. He should wail and feel it all again, relive the moment he saw David’s burned and blackened body. He should be angry at Ryan for taking away his vengeance. Or grateful, even though it was Ryan. He should feelsomething.

He felt nothing.

His soul had stretched and stretched until it snapped. All of his edges were frayed, flapping in the breeze. Everything good within him was gone. All that was left were brittle bones, baptized in a thousand lives of shame, and a prisoner’s sentence to endure.For all of your days.

“I thought you’d want to know.” Dan said softly. He seemed thinner, the arches of his cheekbones more pronounced, the square angle of his heart-shaped jaw sharper. His face was gaunt, shadows living under his eyes. “Are you really going to do this? Join SAD?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You don’t have to stay in the CIA. You’ve given them everything. You don’t have to do this. Especially when you know they just want you to fail. Why give them that satisfaction?”

“I’m going through with it. I am joining SAD. I am going to make it through the training, and not just by the skin of my teeth. I am going to fucking excel,” Kris hissed. “I’m going to be the faggot in their ranks, someone theycan’tignore. Someone theycan’tget rid of. They think they can make me quit? Ryan thinks this is how to get rid of me? He’ll never be rid of me.”

Dan’s lips thinned as he stared at Kris.

“I can’t leave. What would I do? Who would hire me? The man who got his entire team killed. The man who ruined the Hamid op.”

“None of that is true. There were so many things against you, things you couldn’t know.”

“I’ve seen the Congressional hearings. George has always loved to throw me to the wolves.”

CNN had broadcast George’s unclassified public hearing on the failure of the Hamid op a few days before, and George had taken great pains to isolate the failures to one individual: the base commander of Camp Carson. According to George, speaking for the CIA, Kris had “failed to imagine the lengths al-Qaeda was prepared to go to”, and had “failed to properly conduct a thorough counterintelligence operation”.

Never mind that George, Director Edwards, Ryan, and even the White House had been pressuring Kris to movefast, get Hamid operational as quickly as possible, get movement on the Bin Laden and Zawahiri case.

“Kris—”

“I can’t go anywhere else,” he snapped. “I can’t. My entire life is here. Everything I’ve done. Everything I am. If I lose this…” He waved his hand in the air, let it fall, slapping on his carpet. “It’s the only thing I have left.”

“I’m here,” Dan said softly. “You will always have me.”

“You are too good a friend to me.”