Page 163 of Whisper

Dan smiled, sadly. “You’re not alone.”

Yes I am. For all of my days.

He said nothing.

Pakistan Northwestern Frontier

Bajaur Province

Federally Administered Tribal Areas

He was dying, albeit very, very slowly.

Al Jabal’s father, Abu Adnan, had brought David into his one-room home and laid him on his straw-stuffed mattress. Two goats lived inside, sharing the warmth of the fire. The place smelled of wood smoke and straw, musty fur and oats.

Abu Adnan did his best to care for him. He set David’s broken leg, pulling until the bone slipped back into alignment. Without an X-ray, it was impossible to know if it was set correctly, but at least it was back inside his thigh. “Alhamdulillah,” Abu Adnan said. “We have set goats and cows in these mountains, and occasionally a mule. But this is the first man I have ever helped with his bone so broken.”

David stumbled through his pain, explaining how to wrap his broken ribs. Abu Adnan finally managed to cut up David’s shirt and tie it into strips, wrap it around his chest until he felt like a mummy.

Infection loomed. He felt himself grow hot, burn from the inside. Consciousness slipped away, replaced by a hazy twilight, a flickering montage of images that appeared out of order.

Abu Adnan washing him with water boiled over the fire. Cleaning him, even when he soiled himself. Changing bloody bandages along his leg, his chest, his arms. Praying beside him, the slow movements and soft whispers an almost constant hum in the back of David’s mind.

He saw Kris, first standing in Abu Adnan’s doorway. He tried to chase him, but Kris disappeared, reappeared across the peak in the farmland of another mountain dweller. No matter how he tried to chase Kris, leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop in his delirium, Kris always seemed to stretch farther and farther away.

“Kris…” he moaned in his sleep. “Come back to me.”

Was Kris dead? Was he seeing Kris from the other side? Was Kris telling him to join him?Soon. Soon I’ll be dead, too. We’ll be together again, my love. Ya rouhi.

And then he thought of his father. What had his father thought before being killed? What had gone through his mind? He’d prayed, of course. David could remember the shape of his father’s lips, blurry over the television screen, mouthing the words to prayers he’d watched his father make a thousand times before. He replayed the memory again, felt the hands of the Mukhabarat officers holding him still, forcing him to watch his father’s execution.

Murmured prayers. Were they the last pleas to a God who had abandoned them? He watched the shape of his father’s lips in his memory again, suddenly clear, as if he’d stepped into the past, into the memory, into the basketball court.

His father was whispering his name.Dawood, Dawood. Grow up with the love of Allah in your heart. Never let anyone take His love from you. Dawood, you are the best of the world, the best of your mama and me. Dawood, I love you, my ibni.

Father… How can you love Allah so much whenthisis the way of the world?

Abu Adnan’s prayers continued, as did his tender ministrations. Never, not in a million years, would David have imagined he’d be cared for by the father of the man who tried to murder him, who had murdered so many of his colleagues, his friends. What did he do with that? How did he respond to Abu Adnan? Hatred was too simple.Father, Baba, you would know what to do.

His fever spiked. Not long now. Consciousness slipped further and further, and the last thing he remembered was Abu Adnan holding his hand as he prayed throughout the night, asking Allah for mercy for his brother.

Camp Peary, Virginia

CIA Training Compound

The Farm

June 2009

Not only did Kris graduate SAD training, he graduated fifth in his class. His classmates were Rangers and Delta Force, SEALs and Air Force pararescue men. Physical specimens honed to the peak of their limits, used to pushing every boundary. They breezed through training as it if was a cake walk, comfortable in their position in the class, overly confident in their abilities. Overly confident that Kris wouldn’t last, either.

But Kris wanted it, needed it,more.

Isolated, left alone by the others, pushed aside like a leper, he turned his rage inward, channeling it into pure drive. Every fury-filled thought he had, every sidelong glare he caught, stoked the furnace of his shattered soul. He spent days and nights in the base gym, repeating his and David’s workouts until he puked. And then he did it again.

During combat training, every punch that landed was a punch David had felt. Every kick was a blow that had hit David’s body. Every breath he took, every step he walked, every beat of his heart, was for David. He couldn’t let up, not for a moment. He had so much to do. So many lives to avenge, deaths to answer for.

Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight souls hung his tattered soul in the gallows. All the dead of September 11, plus one: David.