Page 253 of Whisper

“I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought we all were. Dan… he was one of my best friends. I don’t understand—”

Kris looked down. The CIA, and Ryan, George, and Edwards in particular, were going to have to take a long hard look in the mirror. How did one of their own turn against them? How had Dan, long a rising star in the agency, become so twisted? Turned so evil?

“The Dan you thought you knew has been gone a long time. Same with me. The man I thought I knew? He was just a fake. A fantasy. The real Dan is the one lying in the morgue, right now. That’s who he was, at his core.”

Ryan buried his face in one hand, hiding from Kris. His shoulders shook. “If Dan can do that, then who else can? How far does this go? Is he an aberration? Or is his hatred… normal?” Kris heard what Ryan didn’t ask: could Ryan slip and fall into the darkness, slide down into the abyss after Dan? Was he, too, capable of something like that?

“Something in between, I think.” Kris played with the lid of his coffee cup as Ryan stared at him, his dark, bloodshot eyes boring into the center of his forehead. He’d never seen so much fear in Ryan’s gaze, a fear that danced deep in the back of his eyes.

“Dan hijacked the hatred he claimed to loathe. He became exactly what he despised. He hijacked ISIS and al-Qaeda’s destinies. He became the most devout believer of their twisted ideology.”

“Dan wasnota Muslim—”

“No, but he was a nihilist. He wanted to watch the world burn, tear everything down, destroy anything in the way of his vision of the perfect future. That’s exactly what ISIS and al-Qaeda believe as well. And—” He glared at Ryan. “You should know better than that. ISIS and al-Qaeda do not represent authentic Islamic beliefs.”

Ryan swallowed, looked away.

Would Ryan finally listen? Actually hear him if he tried to really speak? They’d been using the same language but talking past each other for sixteen years.

“Dan, Noam, George, and you, yes,you, Ryan, have all had the same problem for sixteen years. You look at Islam and all you see is al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram. You see the loudest, worst parts, and you erase a billion other believers who don’t share any of those beliefs. You don’t see nuance when you look at The Other. You just see an enemy.”

Ryan stayed silent.

“Al-Qaeda and ISIS are the right-wing fascists of the Muslimummah. They rose to prominence like all fascist groups do. In response to failures of nationalism, of governance, in response to people’s fears about the future, worrying economics times, and a fragile world teetering on the edge of all-out war. Fascists are rising everywhere, from the US to Europe to Asia. They’reallplaying on fears, trying to control the world through terror, through hatred. They pull lines from the Quran to justify their evil, and twist everything to their own ends, just like fascists everywhere justify their actions. Why can’t you see how al-Qaeda and ISIS are exactly the same as fascists rising within the West? It’s fascism, and it’s hatred, pure and simple.

“The failure of the Arab Spring to bring any lasting change, any democratic reform, led to the resurgence of these fascists in the Middle East. To ISIS, and their satellites. Al-Qaeda, trying to come back after Bin Laden’s death. They’re tapping into fear, amplifying terror, feeding hopes and dreams like a drug. ISIS and al-Qaeda are just the fascist, right-wing Islamic response to the yearning for a bright future for the Muslim world.

“No one over here seems to get that. There are fascists in Islam, and they’re hated just as muchthereas the fascists rising in our communities arehere.And there are people fighting against them inside of Islam. It’s not just the Western world versus ISIS versus al-Qaeda. This isn’t the clash of civilization that so many people dream about. It’s just another fight against the return of fascism. And we need to fight that, yes, but we need to support the progressives, too. Not tar every Muslim into shades of evil.” Kris exhaled, holding Ryan’s gaze.

“What about Haddad? I mean… Dawood?” For the first time, Ryan used Dawood’s Muslim name.

“Dawood?” Kris smiled, sadness tugging down the corner of his lips. “He’s a hippie. He always has been. Gentle in his heart, his soul. He just wants to connect with the universe, find the good in everyone. Just like his father, I assume. If his father had lived, I think Dawood and he would have been as happy as they could ever be living in the desert, herding camels, and living a simple life of prayer and family love.” He chuckled. “Maybe smoking some hash, too. But Dawood is an Islamic hippie. He’s always just wanted to love and be loved.” His thoughts turned darker, turned against themselves. “This war has shredded him. Sixteen years, and almost a decade out in the cold. I can’t believe he held on to himself.”

“Did he?”

Kris nodded. The night they’d had together, and Dawood’s confession in the woods. He’d seen the truth of Dawood, the light of his soul, the inner strength of the man he most loved, most admired in the whole world. “Ten years changes a person. It does. For Dawood… He’s like a diamond that’s been compressed out of ashes. Gold that’s been through fire, all the rough spots, the wreckage, burned away. When I look at him, I’m breathless.” Kris closed his eyes as his throat clenched. “He’s the best of all of us. And he always has been.”

“And you?” Ryan asked. “Did you change?”

“For the worse,” Kris whispered. “Without Dawood, I forgot how to love.”

“Where do we go from here?” Ryan swallowed hard, both hands clutching his coffee cup.

Where did Ryan, and the CIA, and the world go from here? Kris hadn’t a clue. How could anything change? How could the hatred ever stop? Would anyone so hateful, so twisted, so full of vileness and malice, like Dan, like Noam, like the fighters of ISIS, ever reconcile? Ever find a way through the madness to peace?

Dan had given up peace long ago, had surrendered to cold expediencies. Peace through victory, Dan must have thought. Peace through death and destruction, laying waste to the enemy. Peace through circumnavigating justice, avoiding the trifles of conscience and human rights. If Dan had believed he was fighting monsters, then it was only a small leap to accepting that monsters didn’t have human rights. He could follow Dan’s warped logic down into the abyss, the rationalities and explanations for torture, for murder. For using terrorism as his own weapon of political persuasion, to galvanize the masses to his will.

He had becomeexactlywhat he despised.

“In a way, we lost this war when we lost Dan.” Kris cleared his clenched throat, tried to speak through the memories, the pain. “When we lose ourselves, when we become what we hate, we’ve lost everything. Defeat came, and we lost the war, and we never even saw it. But now we're sitting in the rubble and ruin and trying to make sense of the future.” Kris exhaled slowly. Ash sat heavy on the back of his tongue.

What was left, after all that?

How did Ryan reconcile his best friend to the abyss? Ryan’s fingers scratched over the cardboard sleeve of his coffee, picked at the overlapping edge. His bloodshot eyes stared at a point on the laminate table between them, somehow gazing a million miles away, into the past, into all of the paths that had led them to this point.

“This world is full to the brim with agony and grief and rage. Everyone is searching for something to hold on to, Ryan. Searching for certainty. Who is the enemy and how do we destroy them to make the world safe again? Searching for hope, that there is still goodness in the world, beyond the hatred, beyond the pain. But we have to face the world as it is, and not try and force it to be something it’s not. Thereisevil in this world. There are fascists, both in the West and in Islam. There are terrible things, and terrible people, and terrible choices. But we have to find some kind of light through the darkness. Something that cuts through that.”

“I was always so…” Ryan’s expression twisted, like he was about to jump off a skyscraper, like he welcomed it. “Ihatedhow certain you were. All the time. You were so fucking certain of yourself, of your morals. This was right and that was wrong. I didn’t know how you held on to that, with everything…”