Page 5 of Whisper

“People are saying we knew some of the hijackers?”

“I saw the reports myself.” Vomit rose in Kris’s throat. He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe.

Dan rested his hand on Kris’s back. “I’m sorry.”

Kris shook his head. His vision was blurring, tears he’d held back for over twenty-four hours building within him like his body was a dam. At some point, he’d burst. “We should have—”

Doors banging open cut off his words. Clint Williams, his boss’s boss, stormed in, followed by a dozen officers and deputy directors. He scanned the room, scowling.

“Caldera?” he bellowed. “Kris Caldera?”

He was led to the basement, through twisting, winding corridors he’d never seen before. One-ton blast-proof doors slammed shut behind him and the dozen officers escorting him.

Williams brought him to a cavernous bunker that had been converted into a haphazard office. Long folding tables had been set up, lined with laptops, desktops, and printers. Cables fanned out in every direction, a spiderweb of internet and power cords. Fluorescent lights droned twenty feet overhead. Whiteboards had been wheeled in, scrawled with names and countries.Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen. Mohammed Atef. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Someone was trying to get a projector working. In the corners, men hunched over secured satellite phones, trying to hear through scratchy connections from across the planet.

Williams went from officer to officer, checking in, trading a few words here and there, passing papers back and forth. He was a storm, a whirlwind of action, somehow keeping everything straight. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Listen up!” The bunker quieted instantly. “This is Kris Caldera. He’s the CTC analyst for Afghanistan. He knows the information you need!”

A hundred pairs of eyeballs rolled toward him.

“Use him! I want to know double what we know now by the end of the day, and double that by the next twelve hours, and doublethatby the next! Let’s get to work!”

Seven people headed for him as soon as Williams left. “Caldera. What are the ramifications for the Northern Alliance following Massoud’s assassination?”

“What are the Taliban’s defense armaments? What is their status of forces?”

“How allied are the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Can the Taliban be persuaded to give up Bin Laden?”

“General Khan of the Northern Alliance has taken command following Massoud’s assassination. What is your assessment of Khan?”

He couldn’t breathe.No onehad cared about Afghanistan before the attacks. He’d dived into Afghanistan intelligence, relishing the opportunity to examine a culture that had been isolated from the world, try to understand a people who had resisted being conquered for ages. Afghanistan was smaller than Texas. Twenty million Afghans spoke over thirty languages, were made up of dozens of tribal groups. The British, the Soviets, and even Alexander the Great had been humiliated in the Afghan highlands. Even the Taliban didn’t control the entire country. The Northern Alliance, a festering association of fractious, infighting warlords, drug smugglers, and bitter rivals, fought the Taliban and each other for control of the country. The Afghan people were the ones who paid the price. They lived on less than a dollar a day and had the highest infant mortality rate in the world.

He'd been the Afghanistan nerd, teaching himself Dari, the Afghan form of Farsi, in order to read month-old newspapers flown in from Islamabad station and watch grainy videotapes the Taliban put out, preaching their firebrand fundamentalism and their blend of tribalism mixed with the most repressive interpretation of seventh-century Sharia law. He’d watched stonings in soccer stadiums, men and women get their hands and feet severed. Had seen pictures of ribbons ripped from cassette tapes, flying in the wind. Music was banned in Afghanistan, and all tapes had been stripped, their long black lengths fluttering at the borders, a signal to all who crossed into Afghanistan.Here ye enter the seventh century. Here there be dragons.Except they weren’t dragons, they were men, and men were always far worse than any mythical monster.

The Taliban weren’t religious scholars, and they weren’t scions of Islamic learning and philosophy. They were men who had grown weary of the banditry and the robbery and the rape, the wild savagery and butchery that had seized Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal and the civil war. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had rallied a group of villagers to enact revenge against a local warlord who had raped one of their village women. They’d hung him from the barrel of a tank. Their movement started as a means to bring order to the violent chaos of the country, and within two years, they controlled everything from Kabul to Kandahar, vigilante justice-seekers mixing Islam and tribalism that billowed into political control, control that was as repressive and violent as that which they sought to overthrow—just more organized.

Everyoneignored Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sent their radicals there, offloading them from their own countries. The CIA and the State Department seemed happy to forget about Afghanistan as long as it was stable and the Russians were gone. Who cared about the world’s backwater, anyway?

Sometimes, late at night, he thought the Afghanistan desk was a subtle snub. He still wasn’t allowed in the big leagues, apparently. Was it because he was gay? Because he wore tighter pants and spiked his hair instead of buzzing it like the other guys? Because he didn’t fit in with their fleece pullovers and their cargo pants and their ball caps?

But now, everyone wanted him, was trying to pull him in every different direction. If only he could cut himself into parts and pieces. Everything he knew, everything he’d ever learned, was rising inside him. He’d gladly saw open his brain, let everyone flick through his memories like files, parse information out of the nooks and crannies of his gray matter.

“Caldera, we don’t have current functional maps of Afghanistan. What we do have is stolen from the Soviets back in the Cold War, or from Pakistan and their ISI. Everything is incomplete. Can you fill in the gaps for us?”

He squared his shoulders. “What day is it? What day is today?”

Someone blinked at him. “September thirteenth.”

He hadn’t been home in two days. He’d been sleeping under his desk, drinking coffee and eating whatever Dan brought him. “Okay.” He breathed out slowly. “Okay.”

He started talking, running through the recent history of the Northern Alliance, the loose, nefarious conglomeration of fighters arrayed against the Taliban. The CIA had given the Northern Alliance inconsistent support, helping them one week and pulling back the next. The Northern Alliance forces were arrayed across northern Afghanistan. The south was Taliban-controlled and heavily infiltrated by al-Qaeda.

He spoke for hours, until his voice was hoarse, moving from group to group, laptop to laptop. He translated Farsi, Arabic, and Dari documents, secured satellite calls between officers and Northern Alliance commanders, and processed incoming cables from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Williams appeared and disappeared, working the room, talking to the men in charge of the hive of activity.

Eventually, an officer in the operations side of the CIA led him to the far side of the bunker, to a darkened area where cots were set up with sleeping bags. People were hot racking, rolling in and out of shared cots as they needed. “Sleep,” he was told. “Get some rest and refresh yourself. We all need you.”

He was asleep before his head hit the cot. Nightmares plagued him: fireballs erupting in front of him, burning people alive, but he was trapped and he couldn’t save them. Buildings collapsing, people leaping from the tops of skyscrapers that touched the stars, falling forever as he screamed and screamed.

Williams shook him awake. “Get up. We’re going to see the president.”