After the Fall

by Patricia Gussin

  Unless, circulated over and over in Dru’s brain as the knife went into a plastic baggie. Then he was ushered inside the Feds’ vehicle. Alone in the back seat of the car, Dru asked again, “Why are you taking me to the Pentagon?”

  “A matter of convenience,” he was told. “The agents wanting to talk to you are from the DIA. They normally work out of Fort Meade. The Pentagon is closer. Plenty of interrogation rooms.”

  Dru had never made it his business to follow the various alphabet soup of agencies of the American government. “What’s the DIA?”

  “Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  After that he asked no more questions, and the two agents in the front seat chatted about the formation of the “Dream Team.” In normal circumstances, Dru would have jumped in, offering his projections for the first American professional-player team to compete in the Olympics in Barcelona that summer, plugging Isaiah Thomas of the Detroit Pistons. But these were anything but normal times, so Dru kept his mouth shut, worried whether he should call an attorney, wondering whether that American privilege extended to this Defense Intelligence Agency?

  Dru had driven by the Pentagon on several occasions over the years Adawia had lived in the DC area, but he never could have imagined being taken there. Now he was on his way, escorted by agents who had found a knife in his pocket. He had failed. His fate was sealed. His family was doomed.

  Once they’d arrived, the same two agents took Dru to a conference room located within the maze of the huge, looming, white building. Maybe he’d never leave the Pentagon. This was a military establishment; this is where the Americans did their torture. Once they got what they wanted, they simply eliminated their victims. Not dissimilar to Saddam’s regime in Iraq. Just more secret. After all, they did have to maintain the pretense of justice.

  The burly agent asked Dru if he wanted water or coffee. Dru nodded a reflex response.

  “Okay, Mr. Hammadi. Which? Water or coffee?”

  Water or coffee. Was this it? Poison in the drinks? No, too easy.

  “Coffee,” Dru mumbled. He was a caffeine addict. Would get a blistering headache if he didn’t have any soon.

  “Be back.”

  Both agents left, locking the door behind them. He was trapped, would never get out of this behemoth of an institution.

  Dru waited for twenty minutes before the two agents returned with a mug of steaming coffee. The aroma filled the small room, and Dru eagerly reached out for the drink.

  “Sorry it took so long,” the skinny one said. “Freshly brewed.”

  “Nothing but the best for our clients,” said the other agent. “We’re saying our good-byes now. Depending on what the DIA guys determine, we may turn you over to the locals for illegal possession of a weapon. Have to see how it all plays out. Lots of jurisdictions in play here.”

  Jurisdictions? Like, if they eliminate me, who cares about the knife?

  “Wait here. The DIA agents will be in shortly. Enjoy your coffee.”

  When the FBI agents left, Dru was even more scared. They’d treated him humanely. No telling what these clandestine DIA people were about.

  Alone in the drab conference room, sipping his coffee, feeling more clearheaded, Dru assessed his options. Qusay Hussein himself had ordered him to deliver Adawia. She was vital to their escalating bioterrorism program. If he failed, he and his family would be executed. Of this, he had no doubt. Imprisoned here, he could not get Adawia out as ordered. He needed to tell her how to access the fake documents that would get her from London to Jordan and on to Baghdad. Without them, she’d have to use her own passport and her own money to get to Baghdad. Would she do it on her own?

  Dru knew he must appear to cooperate with these Feds, but he could tell them nothing about his link with Jamail Abdul and the Iraqi regime. He had to protect Shada and the boys. Once Adawia was back in Baghdad, he’d join Shada in Canada. Right now, Canada seemed a safer place to live.

  Dru finished his coffee, wishing he’d asked to use a restroom before the two FBI agents had left. How long would they keep him here?

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4

  Addie sat rigid in a straight-backed chair at a conference table somewhere in the Pentagon. Her interrogators sat across from her. Agent Tommy Mintner, a friendly-appearing, youngish blond guy, and Agent Paula Sharkey, equally young, African-American, and eager to convey that she was a trained microbiologist. Mintner’s questions focused on Dru; Sharkey’s, on Addie’s father.

  They’d asked about her alibi for the night Jake’s wife was killed. She’d given them Dru—Badur Hammadi. They knew about the Maryland marriage license. They asked about marriage plans. She told them. Friday, same courthouse. Nothing more. They’d asked her about her family, her father, what he did, about his research. She’d been honest, explaining he was a research doctor in Baghdad. She had no one but herself to blame for exposing Dru and her father by her honest answers. She should have been more evasive.

  About Dru—Mr. Hammadi—they wanted answers about how long she’d known him. Where they met, how often they saw each other? Why he’d visited her recently? Why was she traveling to London in two days? Wasn’t she still a suspect in Karolee Harter’s murder investigation? Had the police confirmed her alibi with Mr. Hammadi?

  She kept answering the Dru questions truthfully, with one exception. She denied having any knowledge about his travel. As for her trip to London? “Just a holiday,” she said, and “no, no one told me I couldn’t leave the country. The police were going to talk to Dru, Mr. Hammadi, to confirm my alibi, that I was with him the night Mrs. Harter was murdered. I don’t know whether they did or not. I’ve not seen him.”

  As the questions kept coming, Addie began to realize the Americans must have some kind of high-tech listening program. Where they monitored phrases and names and places and who-knew-what for key words. The agents wanted her to know that her father’s name was a key word, a word linked to the most dangerous names in Iraq: Hussein Kamel, Qusay and Uday Hussein, and Saddam Hussein himself.

  Addie—as well as the whole world—knew the Bush administration was frantically looking for “weapons of mass destruction.” Ever since the Gulf War ended a year ago. There had been ten different inspection teams sent by the United Nations, each with a specific agenda. The focus was not only nuclear, but also chemical and biological. That’s where her father came in. He was Iraq’s top microbiology scientist. Who else would Saddam trust with his bioterrorism initiative? Addie’s father had never divulged this secret, but she’d figured it out when Dru demanded she return to “carry out his research.” The American spies must have figured it out too, and now she was in the Pentagon, being interrogated. As if she had no other pressing problems.

  Addie struggled not to break out in tears as she answered questions. Not knowing what her father had been doing helped. She could simply say, “I don’t know,” “I haven’t been back home in four years,” “My research is antirejection science; his is microbiology—two different fields.” She did not reveal that the underlying biomechanism for Immunone for antirejection was similar, very similar, to chemical entities with the potential to resist certain organisms—anthrax, to be specific. With her know-how, Iraq—or the United States, if they were interested—could have an antidote to newer, more lethal anthrax strains, and could operate with impunity in an anthrax bioterror attack.

  “Yes, I realize that,” Sharkey said. “But you are his daughter. What do you know about his research?”

  “Nothing,” Addie had to repeat, as the question was asked over and over.

  Mintner, the more human of the two, asked if she wanted water. She said she did, and he went to get it.

  Alone with Sharkey, the woman said, “You and I have a lot in common. We both graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School. Both at the top of our class. So we’re both smart. Look at us, even our suits are the same color.” Sharkey pointed to her trim suit and to Addie’s, the same shade of burgundy. �
�I don’t buy that you’re not playing into your father’s hands. He’s brilliant. As a microbiologist, I followed his career until your country stopped sending scientists to international meetings. My experience at USAMRIID telIs me he could cook up an anthrax plan as easily as most can boil water. So even if you don’t know diddly about microbiology, it would be easy for him to pass along to you what he knows. Wouldn’t it?”

  Yes. That’s exactly what I think is going on. He’s ill and the regime wants someone well-trained that they can trust.

  “Is that what you want, Dr. Abdul? To produce toxic organisms that will kill indiscriminately in the most horrific of ways? Have you ever seen an anthrax death? I have.”

  Addie shook her head and, finally, a tear trickled down her cheek. “No, of course I don’t. I want to heal, not hurt… or kill. Why are saying this to me? There already have been ten inspections throughout Iraq; nothing has been found.”

  “There are still places we—the UN—cannot go. Places where your father has ready access. The Presidential palaces, for instance.”

  “I don’t know,” Addie said. What if they knew Dru had been at the Radwaniyah Palace only recently? And there were many other palaces where her father could move freely.

  Agent Sharkey had leaned across the table to fix her with an intimidating stare.

  Addie slumped in her seat, lowered her head, and let the tears flow. Sharkey reached over to a shelf for a box of Kleenex, passed it across the table to Addie.

  Addie was blowing her nose when Agent Mintner returned with her glass of water. “What…?” he started.

  “Dr. Abdul knows more than she’s telling us,” Sharkey said. “Dr. Abdul, I’m a microbiologist, and I get it that your antirejection drug Immunone has similar properties to newer antibiotics, those effective against evolving resistant organisms such as anthrax.”

  Addie was stunned. This woman had figured out the link between Immunone and the discovery of related chemicals that would protect against bioweapons of mass destruction. Chemicals the West would want to develop. What would they do with her? Could they force her to work with them? Keep her here against her will?”

  “You are free to go,” Agent Starkey was saying. “But we may have further questions.”

  Addie nodded, needing to get out of this oppressive building. She was an Iraqi citizen.

  She needed to talk to Jake, but first she needed to get to Dru. She’d told the Feds all she knew about Dru, but truthfully, she didn’t know much. He was an Iraqi who’d befriended her in college, who helped her navigate Western ways. When that agent asked if Dru had visited Iraq recently, she’d said, “Not to my knowledge.” A lie, but a safe one, she thought, unless they interrogated Dru and he told them otherwise.

  She was worrying about just this possibility as Agents Mintner and Sharkey walked her to the exit.

  “A driver will take you back to your car,” Sharkey said. That’s when a familiar figure rounded the corner to her right, his back to her. Dru, wedged between two men in suits. The Feds had Dru. Here. Now. What would he tell them?

  Only after the agency driver dropped Addie off at her Audi in the FDA parking lot did she begin to shake so violently that she had trouble inserting the key. She’d held herself together in the back seat of the FBI car, having not said a word, not shed a tear, but once alone, she slumped over the wheel of her car, her body heaving with gulping sobs.

  The sun was setting by the time Addie sat up and started the car. She didn’t know what to think, what to predict, where to go, whom to trust. Those DIA agents hadn’t actually threatened her, she realized, with a slight sense of confidence; as a matter of fact, they’d been quite cordial.

  Her main focus was on Dru. What had he told them? Had the Feds meant her to see him? She didn’t think so, but in a secure building that massive, could it be a coincidence their paths had crossed? She didn’t think that Dru had seen her, but his presence there changed everything. Would he contradict what she had told the agents? Didn’t law enforcement everywhere try to play one suspect against the other? Would Dru use her to his own advantage? Would the DIA agents let him out as easily as they had her?

  Dark enough for headlights now, Addie switched them on and drove out of the parking lot. She’d head home where surely Jake would be waiting. She’d tell him all about today. How she’d left her request for a leave of absence up in the air at Replica. Good thing, as Immunone’s approval had been confirmed for Friday, as Jake well knew. She’d tell him about being picked up by the FBI and about the DIA interrogation. Maybe he could explain to her about the different agencies and the task force they kept referring to. But would he still want to marry her now that she was a target of the federal government? If she was married to Jake, an American, would it give her protection under the American laws? She presumed it would. He did love her, but would he marry a woman under government surveillance?

  Addie found a parking spot and, as she walked the short block to her building, she wondered where Dru’s loyalties lay. With Iraq, where his parents and brother still lived? Or with the United States, where his kids were born and his wife seemed happy? How long could he walk the line of dual allegiance? He’d told her, hadn’t he, that he was scared for his wife and kids, and had sent them off somewhere? Did that mean that he’d made his decision? He was choosing the West, sacrificing his family in Iraq? Leaving them to the horrors of torture by Qusay Hussein?

  And what about her family? If she was not on that London flight on Friday, her parents, her sister, would be arrested, maybe tortured, even killed. What would happen to her two little nephews? Would they take Farrah’s husband too? Leaving two more orphans among the thousands of Iraqi children who’d lost their parents to war or torture?

  Addie could not let that happen. She’d comply with the orders handed down to her through Dru. Married to Jake or not. As she turned the key in the door of her apartment, she planned to tell Jake everything, let him decide.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4

  Tim’s surgical case had run for ten hours. Laura had called him six times during the day, but he had not been able to take any of the calls. Later, she missed him at home because he’d stopped at the grocery store on his way. At each failed connection, she’d left a message, upbeat, bubbling over with excitement at Immunone’s imminent approval. Except for the last one, just before she’d left Keystone. She’d sounded exhausted. Well, who wouldn’t? Tim tallied the reasons. Laura had less than two hours sleep last night. She was only sixteen days post extensive surgery on her shattered hand. The pressures of her new job were even greater than expected. She’d taken it upon herself to divulge a deep, dark secret of her past to her kids, risking a lifetime of their respect and loyalty. She’d not allowed herself time to deal with the psychological trauma of losing her cherished surgical career. Other than that, no problem. Or so Laura would have you believe.

  On the way home, Tim had stopped to pick up steaks, potatoes, salad makings, and a bottle of champagne. Laura would have had a glass of the bubbly with her colleagues at Keystone, but when she got home, he wanted it for just the two of them, a simple dinner, sipping champagne before a glowing fire. She’d been self-sufficient for so long that he wanted to shower her with attention, to protect her—as much as she’d let him—from overexertion, from overextending herself.

  As Tim seasoned the sirloin and set it aside to prepare the potatoes, he couldn’t help but chuckle. Who am I kidding? Laura thrives on hard-core work and responsibility. Why the hell would I want to change her?

  But his smile turned to a frown when Laura came through the front door. Tim wiped his hands on the nearest towel and rushed to her side. She was struggling to remove her coat, all but strangling herself with the scarf caught in the left coat sleeve. The dressing on her right arm and hand was too bulky to fit in the sleeve, and when the coat fell to the floor, Tim noticed the edema and discoloration in her right hand. Last time he’d checked, the color was pink, and there’d
been no swelling whatsoever.

  “Laura, my God, your hand—let me see it.”

  “It’s okay. I just have to get it elevated.”

  Tim led her to an oversized, upholstered chair in the living room and immediately began arranging pillows to raise her hand to a position higher than her heart. “Didn’t you go to therapy today?” he asked.

  “I wanted to, truly, but with all the hoopla over Immunone’s approval, I couldn’t get to it. I took some Motrin. It’ll be okay.”

  “Laura, you have to take better care of yourself. My God, so soon after surgery. What would you tell your patients if they disregarded everything—”

  Shit! Wrong. Why did I have to bring that up? Of all the things to say—

  “Sorry to be such a nag.” Tim leaned over, kissed her on the forehead, and was rewarded with a tired smile.

  “I’m going to pop the potatoes in the oven,” Tim said, bending to slip off Laura’s two-inch heels and lifting her feet onto the ottoman. “I’ll redress your hand, take some of that pressure off, then you can get out of that suit into something more comfortable. Champagne dinner will follow. Sound okay?”

  “Tim, I so don’t deserve you,” Laura said, leaning back, starting to relax. “I haven’t even asked about your day. How did the double valve replacement go?”

  “Difficult, long, but I think the kid is going to be okay. I’m glad we got started at six this morning, or I wouldn’t be home yet to tend to my favorite patient. Really, Laura, you have to take better care of that hand.”

  “I know, and I will, I just had to get today behind me. We got the approval. There’ll be a lot of public relations activity, but then my department can get back to work on the next big breakthrough. I just wish I could continue my surgical transplant program now that Immunone’s on the market; the prognosis for heart-lung transplant will be even better. We’ll still have the organ shortage issue though.”