Page 187 of Whisper

“I am. I just don’t berate my subordinates about it. I keep my freak-outs all in here.” Dan tapped his forehead.

“See, that’s why you got the big office. Why you became one of the big boys at the CIA.”

“My poker face?”

“You can take Ryan’s shit and not want to strangle him. Not vault over your desk and beat him to death with your keyboard. I’d be in jail for murder, I know I would.”

Dan snorted. “We all learned from your example. ‘CIA Officer versus Vice President’ is a teaching module at The Farm now, you know.”

Kris laughed, his head tipping back. His laugh echoed, bouncing around Dan’s glass office for a long moment. God, it felt good to laugh again, for fun and not at someone or like he wanted it to hurt.

He caught Dan’s gaze as he sat back. Warm joy, liquid gold, poured from Dan, seemed to slither through the air and into his skin, down to his bones. Kris’s stomach clenched. His heart pounded. Heat built in his blood. He let it. Let himself react to Dan, to Dan’s outpouring of love.

Dan cleared his throat. “Actually, I was going to call you.”

“Missed me already?”

“Always.” Dan smiled. “But, no, this time, officially.”

Kris frowned. Froze, with lemon chicken halfway to his mouth. “’Bout what? The intel dump? This new threat? I don’t work in CT anymore. You know that.”

“There’s something in it that I need to show you.”

“You know Ryan is going to shit if you bring me in on this.”

“I have to.” Dan winced, set down his carton of crispy beef and grabbed a red-bordered Top Secret folder from the stack on his desk. “This is the transcript of an audio file uploaded to al-Qaeda’s media office and sent out online.” He held out the folder.

Kris reached for it. Dan didn’t let go, not right away. He held Kris’s gaze, worry in his eyes. Kris sat back slowly as flipped the folder open.

Inside lay a statement, first in Arabic, then translated into English:

To be a Muslim is to live with a pain that sits in your soul. A pain the rest of the world cannot know. It is Muslim pain. To have everything of our greatness ripped away. Everything of our history, destroyed. The world once saw us as people to admire. To love. But now, the world sees only ruin. I know what it’s like to be hated for who you are. To have your life dictated by others, and your choices, your path, made for you. There is a rage that lives inside us, brothers. There is a rage that screams, ‘we will prove everyone wrong’. We are more than this. Yallah, this is Muslim pain. And we will not feel this pain any longer.

“I’ve watched videos of your interrogations,” Dan said carefully. “I know you built rapport with your detainees by addressing their pain. You’ve called it ‘Muslim pain’, verbatim, before.”

“I’ve said several things in here verbatim before.” Kris flipped the folder shut. Set it back on Dan’s desk. Memories clamored from behind the locked door in his mind. He swallowed. “Whoever said this, you think he’s a former detainee? Someone I worked over once? Someone we let go who went back to the great jihad?”

“Can you remember who all you said this to? I’ve pulled the old detainee records, but I was hoping to spare some of my people from having to watch thousands of hours of footage of your interrogations to build a list of suspects. If you can help narrow it down…”

“The records aren’t complete, anyway.” Kris pressed his lips together. “The first detainee I used this approach with was Abu Zahawi.”

When the detainee program came to light, CIA leadership at the time had ordered Zahawi’s interrogation tapes destroyed. Everything, from Kris’s questioning to Paul’s torture, the beatings, the waterboarding. The only remnants of Zahawi’s interrogation lay in Kris’s notes and in Zahawi’s statements to the military tribunal, his public condemnation of his treatment by the CIA.

Dan blinked. His eyes pinched.

“Let me see the list you’ve got. I’ll run through it, see what names jump out.”

“Thank you.” Dan sighed. “I know this is hard. I know you want to put everything from back then behind you. I appreciate this.”

“You can show me how thankful you are later.” Kris winked.

Laughing, Dan passed over a printout, a list of detainees Kris had interrogated. It was three pages long, two columns on each page. Jesus. He folded it in half, slid it into his trench.

“So who is this asshole, hmm?” Kris went back to poking at his food. “What’s the word on the al-Qaeda street?”

Dan leaned back, his hands laced behind his head. He exhaled slowly, shrugging. “They call him Al Dakhil Al-Khorasani.”

“‘The stranger from Khorasan’? Interestingkunya.”