Page 238 of Whisper

“You want him to live?”

Haddad’s eyes closed. “Don’t do this,” he whispered. “Don’t make me choose.”

“I thought I would have to spell it out for you but you jumped the gun, Haddad. Good boy. So. Do you want to see Kris’s beautiful, beautiful brains all over the ground? Or do you want him to live a long, long, happy life?”

Haddad doubled over, screaming through gritted teeth. He pressed his forehead to the ground, anguished sobs crashing through his chest.

“Allyourpathsleadhere, Dawood Haddad! Every choice you made in your life, every pitiful, desperate, stupid choice you made, built your road to this! It’salwaysbeen your destiny! You’re nothing but a filthy Muslim!” Dan’s bellows bounced off the warehouse walls, echoed in the darkness. “You were always,alwaysgoing to go out like this. Worthless. Meaningless. But I have given your death meaning, Haddad. You should fucking thank me. You should thank me in your prayers for delivering the end times that your fucking psychotic God and all his followers begged for. Because this will be the end. And you’re all going to fall. You’re all going to die. You will always fall to us. To me!” Dan hissed.

Haddad’s sobs seemed to tear him two, seemed to rip his soul into tatters.

“It’s so fucking poetic, don’t you think? I will beat you, and I will kill you, and I will take everything that is yours. Exactly like history is supposed to go.”

Haddad rolled his face against the ground. Dan saw a puddle of snot and spit, the ocean of his tears. “Allah,” he moaned. “I cry out for you in the darkness…”

“Your God is dead, just like your people will be. And you will be remembered as the man who brought about the end. Who ushered in the end of days and woke the might of the American people.” His thumb dragged over Kris’s lips. “Because you’re going to do this. You will never, ever let him die.”

Haddad’s shoulders shook. His prayers turned to a low keen, a wail that sounded like a soul dying.

“If you care about him, at all, then you’re going to make this right for him.” Dan pushed off Kris, standing and tucking Kris’s gun into the small of his back. Kris rolled, limp and boneless as a rag doll, his cheek dusted with grime, but still perfect. Still utterly perfect. He was wonderful like this, pliant, limp, open to Dan in all the ways he never was. Why had Kris sealed off the deepest part of himself from Dan? Why hadn’t he ever let Dan into his heart, his soul?

Fucking Haddad. It was always,alwaysHaddad. “You’re going to write him a confession. You’re going to confess everything.”

Finally, Haddad sat back. His eyes were vacant, shattered orbs that bled sorrow and hollow acceptance inside every tear. Snot and spit and dirt stained his face. He was a filthy animal, nothing but a filthy animal. How had he ever captured Kris’s love?

“You’re going to tell him this was your plot. That you wanted it, that you dreamed of it, hungered for this. That you planned it, all of it. You’re going to give him a future in my arms.”

Haddad shook his head, like he didn’t understand. A line of spit dribbled from his lips, stretched to the ground.

“Yes, you are. As long as you play along, as long as you do your part, he lives. And he lives with me. In my arms.” Dan pointed his gun at Kris’s face. “Or he dies. Now.”

“Dan.” Noam appeared at his shoulder. “We’re all set.” He nodded to Kris. “We have to move. If he’s here, then reinforcements are likely on the way.”

“He loves to buck the system. And I made him believe I was the only one he could trust. Kris wouldn’t have called anyone. He tries to be the Lone Ranger, always. He probably wanted to save the day on his own.”

“Still. We have to go.” Noam headed for Haddad’s partner, the last component to their plot. The Arab man lying on his side, unnaturally still. “Help me move him.”

Dan caught the latex gloves Noam tossed him. They snapped as he tugged them on. No fingerprints, not on the bodies, and not on the SUV. They’d wiped it down a week before, had driven it to the safe house wearing gloves.

Dan grunted as he hefted the Arab. “He’s heavy.”

“A dead body packed full of shrapnel is.” Noam winked.

The man’s arm flopped down, the back of his hand dragging on the ground. Dan stared at his face, still, expressionless, locked in death. In the moonlight, he looked like wax, like a doll.

Save for the bullet hole in his temple.

He’d been an ISIS fuck, executed by the Israeli military when they caught him planting IEDs on their border. He’d been one of the millions of Middle Eastern ghosts, unknown men who could be Syrian or Iraqi or Palestinian, orWho Gives A Fuck, who had no home and no hope and no future. He’d been a body without an identity, a human who didn’t exist to the multitude of bureaucracies in the world, someone who’d been born and had lived and had slipped through the cracks of everything and everyone.

And that made him valuable.

Noam, at Mossad, had taken ownership of his corpse for research purposes. He’d faked an autopsy, filed a report, and marked the body as disposed.

Mossad would never know just how far off the reservation Noam had wandered.

And then Noam had come to America for his six-month exchange with the CIA, flying diplomatic transport and skirting all checks, all inspections. No one questioned the refrigerated crate he’d brought with him.

Over the months, Dan had built a profile in the system for their mystery man. ISIS, young twenties, an exchange student from Iraq, supposedly here on a student visa, but he’d never shown up for classes. How the American people would rage, demand a change to their open borders.Look at the terrorists pouring into the country, they would scream.