by Alan Gratz
“Not conduct reconnaissance for al-Qaeda?”
“Conduct—no!”
Special Agent Tomaszewski turned a page. “Tell me about the incident when you were younger. When the two boys who lived down the street called you names.”
I couldn’t believe it. How in the world had the Department of Homeland Security heard about that? Somebody who lived on our street must have told them. Maybe Ben and Steve themselves. Which meant they’d interviewed all my neighbors, trying to dig up dirt on us. What was she going to ask me about next, the Halloween I rolled a neighbor’s house with toilet paper?
“Kamran?”
I shook my head. “It was nothing. These two kids called me names. They didn’t even know what they were saying.”
“And how did your brother react? He was angry, wasn’t he?”
Aha. Now I understood what she was getting at. Big bad Darius, neighborhood terrorist. “Yeah. He beat them up,” I told her. There was no point lying about it. She obviously already knew the whole story.
“And 9/11. How did he react to that?”
“I don’t know. I was three.”
“But Darius would have been … eleven. That’s a difficult time to suddenly have everybody look at you like you might be a terrorist.”
“It’s tough to have people look at you like a terrorist any time,” I told her. “Like right now, for example.”
The guy beside her tried to swallow a grin. Point for me.
Special Agent Tomaszewski wasn’t put off in the slightest. “It must have been an impressionable time for him.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it was. Maybe that’s what made him want to be a hero.”
“A hero to whom?”
“To the United States of America. In case you missed it in your folder there, he’s been fighting for freedom in Afghanistan for three years. Darius is an American hero.”
“Darius Smith has been seen on film training al-Qaeda militants and is responsible for the deaths of fifty-three people at the US embassy in Turkey, including twenty-two civilians. He also stood by and watched while an American journalist was beheaded yesterday.”
My face got hot. I lurched forward, the handcuffs clinking where they were attached to the table. “He didn’t do any of that! Not on purpose! He’s a prisoner! They’re just making it look like—”
“Why would Darius throw everything away?” Special Agent Tomaszewski cut in. “What would make him want to abandon his friends, his family, his country?”
I sat back and glared at her. I had already told her the truth. She just didn’t want to hear it.
“Did you know that Darius is a devout Muslim, Kamran?”
“I told you already, he isn’t—”
She slid another photo around from that folder of hers. “Do you know what this is?” she asked. It was a picture of a string of black wooden beads with a tassel on the end of it.
“It’s a string of beads,” I told her.
“It’s a misbaha,” she said. “A string of prayer beads. Muslims use these to keep count of their prayers. We found this in your brother’s apartment.”
I frowned. Why would Darius have prayer beads? “He’s not religious,” I told her.
Special Agent Tomaszewski slid more papers in front of me. Printouts from websites. “Our search of your brother’s computer says otherwise. Somebody from his computer’s IP address has been asking for rulings on questions of Islamic law in an online forum under the name Rostam90. ‘Is it still forbidden to shave my beard if my job requires it?’ ‘Can I go to parties where alcohol is being served even if I don’t drink?’ ‘Is it permissible to pray in my army boots?’ ”
I stared at the printouts. Rostam90 had to be Darius. He was born in 1990. Had Darius really become a Muslim? And if he had, did that even mean anything?
“I’ll ask you again, Kamran,” Special Agent Tomaszewski said. “Loyal to whom?”
I SAT ON THE BED IN THE LITTLE HOLDING CELL THAT had become my new home, thinking about Darius. He was all I thought about now. All I talked about.
I’d been here—wherever “here” was—for over a week now. Every day was the same: wake up in this cell, have some stale cereal brought to me for breakfast, and then get taken to the interrogation room down the hall. Special Agent Tomaszewski and the silent, nameless guy would meet me there with her folder full of papers, and we would go over everything again. Or she would bring up some new part of Darius’s life and spin it, making it sound like just another reason for him to become a terrorist, another explanation for why he’d turned traitor and joined al-Qaeda.
Then I’d be brought back to my cell for lunch, and sometimes I’d be taken back to the interrogation room in the afternoon to go over it all again with two different people. I still hadn’t seen my parents. I had no idea if they were even in the same building. And I still had no idea when I was ever going to get out of here, or what was happening with Darius.
Day after day I argued with Special Agent Tomaszewski and the others, telling them that Darius wasn’t a terrorist, but after a week of hearing why he might be one, I was beginning to wonder. To doubt. And I hated myself for doubting. I felt like I was betraying Darius for even thinking it.
But what if Darius had betrayed me? What if Darius had betrayed everyone and everything he loved? What if Darius had never really loved any of us to begin with? What if he had been pretending all that time, playing the part of the All-American son, getting straight As and playing football and joining the army, always with the plan to get to Afghanistan and run to al-Qaeda, where he could at last be himself? Finally let the real Darius come through?
I stood and kicked my flimsy wooden bed. I hated doubting Darius, I hated that Darius had ever given me reason to doubt, and I hated Darius for getting into trouble like this in the first place.
We would all have been better off if he died in Afghanistan.
No. No, I couldn’t think that. I could never think that. I didn’t want Darius dead. I wanted him alive, and back home, and proven innocent.
But what if he wasn’t innocent? Special Agent Tomaszewski certainly didn’t think he was. She had him pegged for a terrorist from age eleven, maybe even earlier. Was Darius still mad at the Ben and Steve Hollises of the world? Did he hate all the haters? Had they called him “monster” with their looks and their whispers and their prejudice so often that he had finally decided to become what they said he was?
And the codes. The secret codes I kept trying to tell them about. Was I just imagining things? Maybe my brother had really gone insane. Maybe he was just mixing up the real legends of Rostam with the stuff we’d made up as kids.
I sat down on my bed again. I felt like I didn’t know anything anymore, least of all my brother.
Someone knocked on the door like they did when they were bringing me food or taking me to the interrogation room. But it was late. My dinner tray had already been taken away, and they never came for me after dinner.
I took a deep breath. What did they want from me now?
THE DOOR OPENED, AND THE MAN WHO’D SAT IN ON all my interviews with Special Agent Tomaszewski stepped inside, carrying a chair. The guy with the Irish accent. He still looked rumpled and unshaven. It was good that he’d brought his own chair, especially if he was planning to stay. I had no other furniture besides my bed and the toilet and sink in the corner.
My guard came in with the handcuffs they put on me to take me from place to place, but the Irish guy stopped him. “We won’t be needing those for this, Sergeant. Will we?” he asked me.
I shook my head. Whatever was going on, we could do it without the cuffs. I hated those things. They hurt my wrists. Worse, they made me feel like I’d done something wrong.
“That’s what I thought.” The Irish guy set his chair down, and nodded the guard toward the door. “I’ll be fine. I’ll call if there’s trouble.”
My guard looked at me doubtfully and left. He probably had no idea who I was or what I’d done to get myself locked up here. For all
he knew, I was a violent criminal.
The Irish guy sat in his chair, facing me straight on. He crossed his legs and leaned back. “Hello, Kamran. I know all about you, but you don’t know me so well,” he said. “My name’s Mickey Hagan. I’m an analyst with the CIA.”
An analyst with the CIA. I swallowed hard. I was in way over my head here.
“I—I came to—well—” Mickey Hagan paused. “Ah, for the love of God. I don’t know what I came here to do.”
I hadn’t expected that. He was quiet for a long time—longer than was comfortable—but I didn’t say anything. They’d made me talk all day in the interrogation room, and I wasn’t in the mood to say anything more. I sat back on my bed and crossed my arms.
“That’s not entirely true,” Hagan said at last. “I do know why I came here. I came to tell you a story.”
Great. A story from a CIA analyst who’d been sitting in on my interrogations for a week. He must have seen my lack of enthusiasm written all over my face.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Just—just hear me out. It has a lot to do with you. All to do with you.
“I wasn’t born here,” he went on. “I’m an American citizen now, like your mother, but I was born in Northern Ireland, so long ago now I don’t care to mention. Do you know anything about Northern Ireland?”
I shook my head.
“It’s just as well, I suppose. If you’d grown up when I did, you’d have heard all about it on the news. It’s the wee top part of Ireland. Ireland’s hat, if you will,” he said, his eyes flashing with something like humor. “Northern Ireland, you see, doesn’t like to think of itself as part of the rest of Ireland. They’re Protestants there, mostly. Church of England types. And they’d rather Mother England still ruled the whole island.”
I didn’t see how any of this had anything to do with me. Hagan waved a hand like he understood he needed to get on with it.
“There’s still plenty of Catholics there, though, the rest of Ireland being full up with them and all. They sort of spill over, you see? That was me when I was a lad—a Catholic Irishman in a country that didn’t want one. My older brother, Conor, he was always getting into trouble with the law when we were boys, but that was the way of things. If you were Catholic in Northern Ireland, you had the deck stacked against you, you see. They sent us to separate schools. We had to eat in separate cafés. If you were Catholic, no Protestant would hire you for any job of work, and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, they own all the companies. Eventually they built a wall between the Protestants and the Catholics, in case we didn’t get the memo that we were to have nothing to do with each other.
“But the wall did very little to keep the peace. For decades, Northern Ireland was torn apart by what they benignly called ‘The Troubles.’ The Republicans, the ones who wanted Northern Ireland back in Ireland proper, they fought the Loyalists, the ones who wanted Northern Ireland to stay part of England. They set fire to each other’s homes, put bombs in their places of business, shot each other in the streets. And it didn’t matter if you didn’t have an opinion one way or another. If you were a Catholic, the Protestants always looked at you like you had a bomb under your coat. But maybe you know what that feels like already.”
I did know what it felt like, and he knew it.
“If you lived on either side of that wall in Northern Ireland, you were a part of it, sure as I’m sitting here. Whether you wanted to be or not,” Hagan said. “You were just as likely to die by accident in Northern Ireland as you were on purpose.”
Something about saying that made Hagan get quiet for a few seconds. Then he rallied and went on.
“So the Hagan family, we did what any good down-on-its-heels Irish family does when the going gets tough: we up and moved. Away from Northern Ireland and its troubles, down to Galway, in the good old Republic of Ireland. Without the Protestant government there to tell us what we could and couldn’t do, we settled in nicely, thank you very much, and we thought that was the end of it. I went to school, got good enough grades that my parents didn’t cuff me on the ear, and spent my every last minute mooning over girls and playing football. The real kind, not what you Americans call football.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that. It’d been so long since I’d last smiled I’d almost forgotten how to do it.
“But Conor was still getting in trouble with the law,” Hagan said, “even after it weren’t Protestant policemen doing the hassling. He’d learned in Belfast not to trust the law, you see, and it was a hard thing to unlearn. He’d become a fair hooligan in Belfast, too, and that’s a tough path to leave once you’ve started down it.
“Me? I went the other way. After graduation I joined the army—the Irish Army—and soon I was angling for a career in military intelligence, if that isn’t an oxymoron for the ages. So while Conor found himself in and out of jail, I found myself on the other side of things, defending him, pulling strings to get him square again in the ever-watchful eyes of the law. He’d never done anything really bad, I kept telling myself. Just a little rabble-rousing now and again. Yes, he was political. Yes, he wanted reunification with Northern Ireland. Fifteen years in Belfast had made him a zealot. But in a free society, you’re allowed to have opinions, am I right? Or so the brochures say. Conor would get arrested at a Sinn Féin meeting, and I’d stick up for him with my superiors. Because Conor wasn’t truly guilty. He couldn’t be. I’d grown up with the lad. Knew him better than anyone else. And Conor Hagan wasn’t a terrorist.”
So there it was at last. The connection to me. How many times had I said the same thing about Darius in that interrogation room? Darius Smith isn’t a terrorist. He couldn’t be. And what was my best argument? Because I’d grown up with him. Because I knew him better than anybody else, and I couldn’t believe it. Because if Darius Smith was a terrorist, I would have known about it.
Wouldn’t I?
“SO HERE’S ANOTHER STORY FOR YOU,” HAGAN SAID. “The other story about me and my brother growing up in Northern Ireland, that one isn’t finished yet. We’re just taking a little break from it. Call it poetic license.
“In 1982, a long time before you were born, God help us all, a young man working for the Irish Republican Army went into a fish shop in Belfast, Northern Ireland, carrying a bomb. Now, the Irish Republican Army isn’t the Republic of Ireland Army, mind you. They’re two different things. I worked for the Republic of Ireland’s army, the ones with the tanks and the planes and the fancy uniforms; this lad worked for the Irish Republican Army, the IRA as they were known, a terrorist organization hell-bent on bringing Northern Ireland back into the fold by any means necessary—which usually meant a petrol bomb or a machine gun.
“The Ulster Defense Association, an equally bloody-minded terrorist group fighting to keep Northern Ireland independent, was supposed to be having a meeting upstairs of the fish shop this lad entered with the bomb, you see. The plan was for this young man to enter the shop disguised as a deliveryman, scare the customers downstairs away with a gun, and then set his time bomb on a short fuse that would give him just enough time to get away before blowing the UDA leadership to heaven or hell, I don’t know which. But something went wrong. The bomb went off before it was supposed to. Before any of the innocent people downstairs could be chased from the shop. Blew the whole building up, it did, raining down wood and brick and mortar, killing the eight Protestants inside and wounding fifty more on the street outside. Killed one UDA man, too—the fishmonger—but no others. They’d canceled the meeting, you see, and the bomber, he didn’t know. He died, too, of course. Wasn’t supposed to, but when the bomb went off early, he went with it. Killed him right off.”
Mickey Hagan stared at his shoe, visibly building up the courage to continue.
“The bomber was my brother Conor, of course,” he said at last. “You’ll have figured that out already, bright lad that you are. It weren’t two stories but one. The beginning and the end of the tragedy. The bomber was my brother, the one I�
�d sworn wasn’t a terrorist till I was blue in the face. Stupid me, I’d believed him when he’d told me he was off to see Galway United play football. I’d believed everything he’d ever told me, every last lie, and now he was dead for it. We both were, in a way. But maybe you know a little bit about how that feels, too.”
Darius wasn’t dead—not that I knew, at least—but I knew what Hagan meant. All my life I’d thought one thing about Darius, and now he was maybe something else, and it was like his whole life was a lie. And mine, too, for believing him.
So that’s why Mickey Hagan was here. To tell me a story about his brother. The brother he trusted, believed, defended, only to watch his faith and loyalty go up in flames. He was here to help me accept the fact that Darius was a terrorist.
“I just …” I said, “I was just so sure.”
Hagan nodded, understanding.
“Even after everything,” I said. “After everything he’s said and done, I still can’t believe Darius is a terrorist.”
“And neither can I,” Hagan said.
WAIT—THIS CIA GUY WAS TELLING ME HE THOUGHT Darius wasn’t a terrorist?
“But you just got done telling me that story about your brother. About how you thought he was innocent, but it turned out he was guilty all along,” I said.
“Because I wanted you to understand what happened to me,” Hagan said. “And I knew you, of all people, would understand. All week I’ve watched you slowly lose your confidence in your brother, the same way I did. The truth is hard enough to accept. You fight it. Deny it. But when you do come ’round, you start to question everything. You start looking for signs your brother was a terrorist in every little thing he said and did, and then you beat yourself up for being so blind.”
I nodded. I’d been doing that very thing when he walked in.
“After Conor died, I was a wreck,” Hagan said. “Not just because I’d lost my older brother, the boy I’d looked up to and idolized all my young life, but because I doubted myself. If I hadn’t seen that Conor, who I knew better than anyone else, was a terrorist, how was I supposed to ever be right about anybody? I couldn’t trust my hunches anymore. My intuition—my gut.” He thumped a fist on his chest. “From that moment on, I was forever second-guessing myself.”
