Page 4 of Whisper

Graduation day, Kris got his assignment: Alec Station, CIA Headquarters. Counterterrorism Analyst for Afghanistan, attached to the al-Qaeda team.

No adventure for him.

For years, Alec Station had long been the dead end for analysts, officers, and operators, especially those who fostered what the CIA’s seventh floor, the executives, thought was an “obsession” with Islamic-based extremist ideology.

But in 1998, the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were attacked, devastated by twin suicide truck bombings. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. After those bombings, Alec Station became the hottest outfit in the CIA.

And they needed bodies. Officers fluent in Arabic in particular, with a good grasp of the culture, an eagerness to learn, and the ability to get up to speed with years and years of intelligence in a hurry.

Kris reported to Alec Station in 1999. He was assigned to Afghanistan, the only analyst in the entire unit.

In 2000, al-Qaeda bombed theUSS Colein Yemen.

After American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, CIA police herded everyone out of headquarters.

The parking lots were crammed. Trucks led sedans over grass embankments and fields to side exits, pushing open gates that had long been chained shut. Kris inched forward in his clunker sedan, the best he could afford as a recent college graduate. To his left and right, drivers listened to their radios in horror, jaws slack, eyes vacant.

He got as far as the George Washington Parkway before traffic ground to a halt and refused to move. Smoke from the Pentagon rose ahead, billowing black rising and rising into the perfect blue sky. His stomach twisted, yanked, knotting until he had to throw open his car door and puke on the highway.

It’s a crematorium. Just like New York. It’s all a fucking crematorium.

The first to turn around was a truck, one of the lifted ones all the former Army Special Forces operators seemed to drive. Tires screeching, it bounced over the center embankment and forged a path over the tree-filled median to the highway going back to CIA headquarters. Another truck followed. Then a car.

Kris pulled his rusted sedan out of traffic and followed them.

Hundreds of officers poured back into Langley.

Names of potential suspects from CIA stations around the world flooded in, computers whirring and phones ringing off the hook. Names of people on watch lists, names passed along by foreign intelligence agencies, friendly and not-so-friendly alike. Names from each of the four flights, passengers and crew. Somewhere in those names were the hijackers, the murderers. They searched, poring through the lists.

Every cell in Kris’s body fissured, fracturing and dissolving into a billion tiny pieces as he read the names off the flight manifests. The universe came to screeching halt as he came to two distinct names, halfway down the list:

Nawaf al-HazmiandKhalid al-Mihdhar.

He felt like a marionette, a puppet with loose strings being manipulated by someone else. Someone else made him stand. Had him grab the printed pages with shaking hands. Something else made his feet move, carrying him to his boss’s office.

His section chief sat at his desk with his head in his hands. The handset of his phone lay on the desktop. A circle of wetness smudged the desk beneath where he hung his head.

“Sir?” Kris barely breathed. “The hijackers… We know who they are.”

His boss looked up.

Devastation poured off him, waves of anguish. Tears ran like rivers down his splotchy face, falling from red-rimmed eyes. “Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.”

Kris nodded, as if his head wasn’t attached to his body. “Probably others with them,” he whispered. “Sir, we have files on these guys. We were watching them. The FBI, they asked—”

His boss held up his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn’t stop the sob rising through him from breaking, cresting against the cold hard facts. His shoulders trembled, teeth clenched so hard Kris heard them squeak and grind. A cry broke out of him, the sound of a soul shattering.

Grief wrenched into shame inside Kris. The weight of thousands of dead Americans pressed down on him, every one of their lives ended too soon. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. “Sir—”

“Get out, Caldera. Just get out.”

Kris worked until he fell asleep in the middle of a name trace, trying to follow the rabbit back to its hole. Once every plane in the skies over the US was grounded, they were able to connect the dots that had been blazing constellations, if only they could have seen them from just a different angle. The monitors were fixed on the news, endless shots of the empty New York skyline, the burning Pentagon, the smoking crater in Pennsylvania.

Dan Wright, an analyst who worked a few desks down from him on Pakistani terrorism, woke him up with a cup of coffee. “You okay?”

“How can any of us be okay?” Kris scrubbed his hands over his face, pressed his fingers into his eyelids.

Dan sighed. He was a few years older than Kris and had entered the CIA in the mid-1990s. Ever since Kris had joined Alec Station, Dan had been his informal mentor. He’d just shown up one day, looking out for Kris. He’d never made a snide comment, or made fun of his paisley ascots. He’d been one of Kris’s few friends, a constant at his side. Someone he could go to for a smile.