by Alan Gratz
“My coach always says, ‘No distractions, no doubts, no second guesses,’ ” I said.
“Wisdom of the ages, that is,” Hagan said. “After Conor died, I was haunted like a banshee by all three. I was distracted. I doubted myself. I second-guessed myself at every turn. And when you do that in the spy business … well, it’s over. You’re done. The Irish Army didn’t want the brother of a known terrorist in their ranks anyhow, so I did what any good down-on-his-heels Irishman does—”
“You up and moved,” I finished for him.
Hagan smiled wryly. He liked that. “Indeed. Came to America, as so many of my blessed people have, where it turns out they didn’t mind so much that my brother was an IRA terrorist, as the IRA had no beef with the USA. Got a job with the CIA as a counterterrorism analyst, and here I am: a well-traveled, very experienced counterterrorism expert with a very high pay grade, but no confidence to make the tough calls and too much seniority to be let go. And what does that get you? You’re the rumpled old man in the interrogation room who isn’t allowed to ask questions. You’re nobody. Nothing. A joke.”
Hagan ran his hands over his face and up through his unkempt hair, then slapped his knees, surprising me.
“I want to believe again, Kamran. I want to be the man I once was, the man who believed my brother was innocent. No—who knew my brother was innocent. I want to stop second-guessing every last thing. I want to have a gut feeling about something and be right about it for once. And I’ve got a gut feeling about your brother, Kamran. I think he’s what you’ve been saying he is all along: a loyal American soldier who got captured, and who’s now doing his damnedest to tell us everything he can about what his captors are up to so we can stop them.”
I couldn’t believe it. Just when I’d started to think everybody else was right about Darius, somebody finally came along who believed what I’d been saying from the start. I was all mixed up inside. I wanted to believe, like Hagan. Wanted to go back to that innocent, naive Kamran who wouldn’t hear anybody say a bad word about his older brother. But could I go back? Could I forget everything I’d learned about Darius this week? Could I ever see the events of his life as anything but the path to terrorism?
“Everybody else in this building thinks your brother is a traitor to his country,” Hagan said. “And they may be right. I don’t know. That’s my curse. I can’t trust my gut anymore. But I want to try. So I’m choosing to believe in you, Kamran. In you and your brother and your Code of Honor. The only question now is, do you still believe?”
That was a good question. And one I wasn’t sure I had a good answer to.
“I—I don’t know if I do anymore,” I told him. “But I want to.”
“Good enough,” Hagan said. He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
“Now,” he said, “if you’ve got a bit of free time on your hands, I’d very much like to go over those tapes of Darius again with you.”
“THERE,” I SAID, POINTING TO THE VIDEO OF THE embassy attack. “See how he’s wagging his finger? It’s like the pattern to the knocks. We used to send messages to each other through the wall, letting each other know when we could sneak into each other’s rooms and talk at night.”
Hagan and I sat in a dark room full of TV monitors and computers. It was the first time I’d been somewhere other than my holding cell or the interrogation room. Hagan had even brought me a can of Coke and a bag of chips. This was living large.
Ha. A couple of weeks ago my definition of “living large” was dancing with Julia Gary and going to the Super Bowl with Adam. It’s funny how little things can become big things when you’ve got nothing anymore.
“So what’s the message?” Hagan asked me, his face lit up by the glow of the TV screen.
“I—I don’t know. I never could figure it out,” I said, feeling lame.
“That’s because you’re seeing it, not hearing it. Let’s get it audible.”
“But there’s no sound.”
“A little creativity wouldn’t go amiss, I’m thinking,” Hagan scolded. He rewound the video and we watched it again. This time, Hagan knocked on the table as Darius wagged his finger. “Anything?” he asked.
I shook my head. It wasn’t sounding like any of our codes. Maybe I’d been wrong.
No. Stop second-guessing yourself.
“Not yet,” I said.
“You say you used these codes at night, through the wall, yes? Close your eyes. Go back to being little and listening for your brother to knock to you through the wall.”
I did what he said. Pictured myself smaller, younger, waiting in bed to hear the signal from Darius that the coast was clear. Looking forward to sneaking into his room and watching him act out a new story he’d made up about Rostam with his G.I. Joes.
Hagan knocked. Knocked again. Knocked again. I was ready to sneak out, to go see Darius, but—I suddenly knew I couldn’t.
“Mom and Dad are coming!” I said aloud. “That’s what that knock means. Mom and Dad are coming!”
“Brilliant,” Hagan said. At first I thought he was being sarcastic, but he was scribbling notes in a black notebook.
“But—what’s that supposed to mean? Mom and Dad don’t have anything to do with this.”
“No,” Hagan said. “But put yourself in Darius’s army boots for a moment. You’re taken prisoner in Afghanistan. Forced to train al-Qaeda soldiers—or at the very least, pretend to look like you are on film. Yes? This is good. It’s an opportunity for you to get a message to America. Maybe you’ve heard the militants talking about a strike on a US military installation. Or an American embassy. You want to tell us. Warn us. You know you can’t just say it out loud on camera—they’d never post that to the Internet. You have to be sneaky. You have to say it in some way that your captors won’t understand. You need a code. And luckily, you already have one. One that you and only one other person in the world understand. That no one else in the world could ever crack. That’s the best kind of code. Unbreakable.”
“But the knocks, they’re not like letters or words you can rearrange. It’s just, this one means ‘Mom and Dad are coming,’ this one means ‘The coast is clear,’ this one means ‘I’m coming to you.’ ”
“Right. Okay. So your vocabulary in this code is limited. But it’s all you’ve got for now. So don’t take the message literally. Think about what ‘Mom and Dad are coming’ means. At its very core.”
“I don’t know. Uh, look out? Danger?”
“Precisely. That’s it in a nutshell: danger. Right from the start, Darius was warning us. Trouble is coming. And I have to say, he was right.”
It made sense. Even if he wasn’t able to say what the trouble was, it meant something to just say “look out!”
“So you send your message as best you can,” Hagan said, queuing up another video. “And you wait. And you listen. And then, lo and behold, there comes another miracle: they tell you to read a speech directly to the camera. They ask you to talk.”
It was the second video, the one where Darius took responsibility for the attack on the US embassy. Hagan knew right where the Sith Lord reference was, and he moved the slider to the exact minute and second. He’d been listening to me all those times I told them Darius was trying to communicate with me. He’d taken notes. Watched the video over and over again, trying to understand. Trying to believe me. I was so grateful to him in that moment I could have hugged him. You know, if that wouldn’t have been really weird.
“So now you can slip something in, maybe, but you still have to be tricky,” Hagan said, his eyes still on the video. “Here you don’t have a code, not like the one you used on the wall. But you do have a language you and only one other person share. Again, a language that no one but you and your brother can ever understand, can ever translate. The language of a shared childhood. ‘Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord.’ It’s brilliant. It’s so utterly confusing, so random, so cryptic that it makes no sense. It sounds like the delusional ramblings of a prisoner. Or perh
aps someone pretending to be a convert.”
“YOU THINK HE’S DOING THAT?” I ASKED. “PRETENDING to be on their side?”
“It’s an effective way to survive when there is no other option open to you,” Hagan said. “If you can make them believe you. And he may think it will make him privy to more insider information he can pass along.”
Hagan loaded the next video. The third one. It was another rant from Darius, read from a piece of paper. This one didn’t claim responsibility for anything or come on the heels of an attack.
“Here,” Hagan said, clicking ahead. “At the four minute, thirty-seven second mark. Another Rostam reference.”
“Rostam and the Death Eaters,” I said. I knew what it was. I’d watched it again and again, trying to understand what Darius was trying to tell me.
“A Harry Potter reference,” Hagan said smugly. “Don’t look so surprised. Just because I was born a hundred years before you and work for the CIA doesn’t mean I live under a rock. I’ve read each and every one of them,” he said, “Goblet of Fire being my favorite, of course. But I want to hear your version.”
I thought back to the story we had invented. “Okay, so, Rostam and Siyavash are tracking down this Death Eater, Bellatrix Lestrange.”
“A devious and dangerous witch, to be sure,” Hagan said, taking notes in his black book.
“Right. We find out that Lord Voldemort has sent her to capture an old Auror named Reginald Lumpbucket.”
Hagan looked up from his notebook. “Is that a name I should know?”
“No. We made it up.”
“Well, it’s a good one,” Hagan said. “Very English.”
“Do you think that’s the clue? Darius heard them planning something about somebody named Lumpbucket?”
“No,” Hagan said. He motioned again for me to keep going.
“So, we track down Lumpbucket to this old house, where he’s supposed to live. Bellatrix Lestrange is there, too, looking for him, and we fight.”
“Naturally,” said Hagan.
“But while we’re fighting, we find out from his old house elf that he’s not there. Turns out Lumpbucket died a long time ago.”
“Voldemort is foiled, then,” Hagan said.
“No,” I said. “There’s still his portrait.”
Hagan sat up. “His portrait?”
“Yeah. You know how in the Harry Potter books, all the paintings are alive? Lumpbucket’s portrait is in a museum, and Bellatrix Lestrange flies off to steal it.”
“She robs a museum?” Hagan asked. He put down his notebook and swung around to one of the computers.
“She tries to. We stop her, of course. But I still don’t understand it. What Darius means with the story, I mean.”
“I think I do,” Hagan said. He turned the computer screen toward me. On it was an article from Time magazine, with a picture of an American soldier standing next to the charred metal door of a small building. “The National Museum of Iraq has been undergoing extensive renovations since it was damaged during the 2003 Iraq War,” Hagan explained. “While those renovations have been taking place, the museum’s remaining antiquities were moved off-site to a hidden location, guarded by American forces. Only the United States military knew where those objects were being hidden, yet two weeks ago armed militants raided the location, stealing a truckload of Mesopotamian artifacts, some of which were more than five thousand years old.”
“Darius!” I said. “Darius might have known the location.”
“Maybe he was the one to tell them, maybe not. But I think we can definitely say that he was warning us that a museum was about to be robbed. Look at the date on the article, and the date on the video.”
They were days apart—and Darius’s warning had come first.
“Why would terrorists want to steal a bunch of old artifacts?” I asked.
“Money,” Hagan said simply. “Guns and bombs and trucks cost money, and those artifacts are worth a great deal of it on the international art market. That they liberated cultural artifacts from the control of American soldiers probably didn’t hurt, either.” Hagan grabbed my shoulder and squeezed it. “This is a terrific breakthrough!”
“But we’re too late. They already stole the stuff. It’s probably long gone.”
“Yes, yes. There’s a marine colonel still in charge of recovery efforts from thefts during the Iraq War. I’ll pass along who we think perpetrated the crime to him, see what he and his team can do. But don’t you see what this means? We have proof, Kamran. Proof! It’s a dead cert that your brother is sending us coded messages. He dropped the name of a story about a museum robbery, and three days later museum artifacts were stolen in Iraq. That’s proof that we were right. Both of us.”
We were right. I was right. Darius really was trying to talk to me in those videos. I felt awful for ever doubting him. It was me and Darius against the world.
No, I realized. Not anymore. It was me and Darius and Mickey Hagan against the world. I finally had an ally.
“Let’s keep going,” he said.
“So. Goblet of Fire’s your favorite?” I said while he called up the next video.
“Of course,” Hagan said. “Ireland wins the Quidditch World Cup in that one. Closest we’ll ever get to winning the World Cup of anything.”
HAGAN MET ME AT THE DOOR TO THE VIDEO ROOM, where my guard now dropped me off every day.
“Got a new one,” Hagan told me.
“A new video?”
He steered me toward a chair and hit play. It was Darius again, looking dirtier, more haggard. His beard was fuller now, and he wore a turban on his head. I barely recognized him. It had only been what—about a month and a half since the very first video? But for Darius, it had been a lifetime.
For me, too.
We’d been going over the videos for days, piecing together the clues and the events Darius had been referring to. I told Hagan the made-up Rostam stories Darius mentioned, and Hagan used his experience and knowledge of foreign affairs to link them to recent incidents in the Middle East. What Darius meant with some of his references was still a mystery to us, but a new video trumped everything. This was what we’d been waiting for. If Darius dropped a clue in this one and we were able to decipher it, we might be able to stop whatever it was before it happened.
Maybe even find a way to rescue Darius.
I focused on what Darius was saying. Most of it was the usual ranting about America and the infidels.
Then he made another Rostam reference.
I almost stood and cheered. Hagan was excited, too, I could tell. He hurriedly rewound the video so we could hear it again.
“Like Rostam taking on the Joker’s smiling goons, we will score a victory for justice!” Darius said.
Hagan was scribbling in his notebook. “Like Rostam taking on the Joker’s smiling goons, we will score a victory for justice,” he repeated.
“That one? Seriously?” I said. My elation of a moment before was gone, replaced by a feeling of hopelessness.
“Why? What is it?” Hagan asked. “What’s the story?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “It isn’t much of one.”
Hagan waited, pen hovering over a page in his notebook.
I sighed. “One day we were playing football in the backyard, one on one, just throwing the ball back and forth. And Darius had the idea that the football had a bomb in it.”
Hagan looked up. “A bomb?”
“We pretended that the Joker from Batman had put a nuclear bomb in the football, and that Rostam and Siyavash had to score a touchdown with it to defuse it.”
Hagan looked up at me skeptically.
“We were kids!” I said for maybe the hundredth time since we’d started this. All our games and stories were stupid. Everybody’s games and stories were stupid when they were little, because you didn’t know any better. “I’m just telling you what it was.”
“Right, right,” Hagan said. “What else, then?”
; “The smiling goons were Joker henchmen he’d used his laughing gas on. Like … scary clowns with football helmets on. Darius and I—Rostam and Siyavash—had to get past them to score.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. That’s what I’m saying. There’s nothing to it. We just mashed up playing football with our Rostam adventures. I don’t know what good it does us.”
We watched the rest of the video to see if Darius gave us any more clues. Right toward the end he dropped another reference to Rostam. Hagan and I both sat up straight again.
“And then when our work is done and the last heretic is swept from the face of the earth, like Rostam at the World’s End we will go to our final rewards,” Darius said solemnly.
“Okay. Okay! There’s lots more to this story!” I said, happy to once again be useful. “Rostam and Siyavash have to help Optimus Prime steal back the AllSpark from Syndrome, the bad guy from The Incredibles.”
“You’ve lost me on this one, I’m afraid,” Hagan said. “We’ve moved beyond Harry Potter, yes?”
“Optimus Prime is a Transformer.”
“Carry on,” said Hagan.
“So we’re fighting one of Syndrome’s giant robots, and we’re winning, when Syndrome implants nanobots in Optimus Prime and turns him against us. So now we have to fight one of our allies.”
“As you do,” Hagan said.
“We manage to lock Optimus Prime in truck mode, but the nanobots, they activate Optimus Prime’s self-destruct device. If we can’t get rid of him, he’s going to blow up and take out half of Phoenix. So Rostam jumps on board him and—”
Oh. Oh no. No no no no no, I thought.
“And what?”
“And he drives him over a cliff at the World’s End. Optimus Prime hits the bottom and explodes. Rostam dies to save the city.”
