Page 44 of Whisper

“Nothing. Nothing is going on. You’re so focused on Caldera and worrying about him, you haven’t even realized that he and I are exactly the same.”

George blanched, rearing back. His jaw dropped open.

“I mean, we’re acting the same.” David fumbled his words, stuttering once. “We’re behaving the same. If the Afghans don’t have a problem with me, they don’t have a problem with him. With our friendship. It’s probably closer to what they’re used to seeing. Frankly, you’re just reading into everything, seeing what you want to see and thinking the worst.”

“I thought you were coming out, Sergeant.” George chuckled, shaking his head. He groaned. “I couldn’t take double that stress. Not now.”

David kept his mouth shut. His fists clenched, the leather of his gloves squeaking, fingertips digging into his covered palms.

“I know he’s the best. That’s why I sent him to the front, to Khan. I thought, ‘once he’s done, once he’s got what we need, he can go home’. Does he need to be here still?”

“Do you want this alliance to really work? Do you honestly think everything is just fine, it will go perfectly smoothly from here on out? What about when something happens that you can’t fix, or when you’ve pissed Khan off so badly he wants to throw you out of the country, and Caldera is ten thousand miles away?”

“Damn it.” George scrubbed his hands over his face. “All right, he stays. You guys obviously work well together. I’m going to keep you partnered up. Captain Palmer says he’s fine with that, that the rest of your team is making good progress with their appraisal of the Shura Nazar forces. Are you good with it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Watch out for him, Sergeant. Don’t let anything happen to him.”

“Sir, can I speak freely?”

George grunted.

“You need to think about why you believe Caldera needs protecting. He’s a CIA officer, the same as you. You both went through training. He’s stronger than you give him credit for.”

“That’s enough, Sergeant.”

“And you need to think about why it took me barging in here to make you see reason. Why couldn’t Caldera himself tell you this? Why don’t you see his accomplishments? Why did you only listen to me?”

“I said that’s enough!”

David’s jaw snapped shut.

“Get out of here. I’ve got to go over the intel you guys brought back from the front and get on the horn with Langley.” The dark circles beneath George’s eyes seemed to grow, spread, turning to pools where all the sleep he wasn’t getting stacked up like spilled ink. “Send in Ryan when you leave.”

David didn’t speak as he strode out of the nerve center. Ryan waited just outside, leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette. He stared at David, his cheeks hollowing when he sucked in a deep breath of smoke.

“What happens is on you,” he said, puffs of smoke billowing around his every word. “You wanted this. You own it.”

David kept walking. Kept his shaking hands balled into fists. Shoved them into the pockets of his jacket. He needed to get away. Get clear of everything.

Get away from Kris, especially. Just for a little while.

Palmer and his men had set up a makeshift firing range in the hills above the village, shooting into the dirt and dust against the slope of the mountains. Snow crunched under David’s boots as he climbed the narrow goat track leading to the range. Sounds faded, falling away, until it was just the snow and his breath, the sounds of himself, his own life, that surrounded him.

He pulled his handgun and lined up, taking aim at the debris his team had dragged in for targets. Old water canisters and broken furniture. Decrepit Soviet jeeps, half blown apart. Moldy tires, more than half disintegrated.

He breathed with each bullet he fired. Slowly, in and out. His mind cleared, going blank, until there was nothing left. No thought, just breath. Just the squeeze of the trigger and the bullets slamming into their targets, and then into the snowy hillside.Thump, thump, thump.

The isolation suited him. Fit him like a glove, a perfect pairing of his soul and nothingness.

He’d always been alone, always been another, from ten years old on. He’d been a boy without a home, without a father, a history, a people, or an identity, a boy apart from all the others. He’d learned early to carve and mold and cover the parts of himself that didn’t fit into the world. Keep the fractals of himself hidden, the way he came up at harsh angles to everyone else. He was a kaleidoscope, shifting and changing in the light. What was true was kept in the shadows, the same shadows that lived in his bones, that covered the memories of praying beside his father in the sunlight, murmuring the Quran.

He’d practiced hiding so many parts of himself so many times, that when he became a man and there was something else to hide, it was only too easy, and oh so natural, to bury that as well.

Bury everything.

It was harder to keep everything hidden here, in Afghanistan, the land of secrets and death, the graveyard of eternity. His seams were coming apart, the latticework he’d laid over his soul to contain everything heneverwanted the world to see. At night, truth rose like stars, like the moon, bathing him in things he didn’t want to see, to feel. The rhythms of Islam were pulling on him, the daily calls to prayer, the whispers that saturated the air, made the country thick with the presence of Allah. Something was tapping at him, something he had thought had been cut out and he’d left behind in the sands of Libya. Something that had been forcefully ripped from him, twenty-one years ago.