by Alan Gratz
Hagan gave me a dubious look. “But he lives, right? He’s your hero. Heroes never die in the storybooks.”
“No,” I said. “No, Rostam really dies. The whole next story is about Siyavash tracking down Syndrome to avenge his death. It turns out Syndrome’s nanobots can rebuild Optimus Prime and Rostam, and they’re brought back to life.”
“So there you go,” Hagan said.
“But—but, Mr. Hagan, there aren’t really nanobots that can bring you back to life.”
Hagan knew that, of course. What he hadn’t considered was what the story might actually mean. Not until that moment. He hadn’t thought what I had: that Darius was telling us he was going to sacrifice himself.
That Darius was going to die.
THE ONLY SOUND IN THE ROOM FOR A FEW MINUTES was the low hum of the computers and televisions.
Hagan leaned back in his chair. “All right. Let’s take them one at a time. As for the first story, I have to say, it’s not much to go on. But let’s see what we can do. All the other clues we’ve figured out have been about events in the Middle East—Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. Clearly that region is their base of operations. It’s still a big area, but it gives us a place to start.”
“Not a lot of people playing football over there,” I said.
“I don’t think we should be focusing on the football angle,” Hagan said. “There’s another part of that story that as a CIA counterterrorism analyst I find highly interesting.”
“The nuclear bomb,” I said.
“The nuclear bomb,” Hagan agreed. “There are only nine countries in the nuclear club right now: the US, the UK, China, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. Israel won’t say if they have nukes or not, but we know they do, so they count. Just don’t tell anybody. State secret.”
“I—I wouldn’t—” I stammered.
“Israel’s for sure not going to give them one of theirs,” Hagan went on, “so the most likely place for our terrorists to get one is Pakistan, which shares a fifteen-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan, most of which is barren, unpatrolled desert and mountains. Easy to sneak across, is what I’m trying to say there. And Pakistan is where al-Qaeda’s leaders go to ground when the drones start buzzing too close to home. It’s their bunker away from bunker, if you will.”
“So, what, you think Darius might be telling us somebody’s moving a bomb?”
“It’s possible. American football is all about moving the ball forward. Gaining … territory.”
Something had clicked for Hagan. I could hear it in his voice. See it in his face. He swung around to a computer to look something up.
“But what about the other story? The one about Optimus Prime and the nanobots? Does it mean what I think it means?”
Hagan found whatever it was he was looking for and leaned back again.
“I think it might mean everything we think it means. Even a game of football.”
I didn’t understand.
“It came to me when I said ‘American football,’ ” Hagan told me. “Your brother, he mentions a story about football, and a bomb. You think it’s one thing, I think it’s another. But what if it’s both? There happens to be a slightly massive football tournament about to happen next summer in Canada. The Women’s World Cup.”
“What? You mean soccer?”
“Yes. Well, the rest of the world calls it ‘football.’ And your brother would know that, being the international traveler he is now. Have you any stories about soccer?”
“No,” I told him. “None that I can think of.”
Hagan nodded. “So he would have had to use your version of football to send his warning. In this World Cup, you have a target truly worthy of a jihad. Infidel women running about outdoors without veils, showing indecent amounts of skin—to a radical Islamist, at least. And what better place to attack? Close enough to the United States to make a point, but not so close as to necessitate actually sneaking a bomb across America’s borders.” He turned the screen toward me, showing me Women’s World Cup schedules and tables. “And your United States team is all set to play Australia in the first round.”
“You think—you think they’re going to set off a bomb at the Women’s World Cup in Canada?”
“I do,” said Hagan. “And I’m sorry, Kamran, but I think the other story means Darius is going to be the one to wear it.”
MICKEY HAGAN SWEPT A HAND OVER A PIZZA BOX and a two-liter of soda. “I come bearing gifts,” he said.
Pizza! I’d existed on nothing but cafeteria food and cartons of milk delivered to me on metal trays for as long as I’d been here. Just the sight of a pizza delivery box and I was practically drooling already. My guard left me in the video room with Hagan and went to stand outside.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
Hagan looked a little embarrassed. “Well, it’s Christmas,” he said.
I sat down in one of the chairs. Christmas. It had been November when all this started. And now it was Christmas. If this had been any other year, I’d be home with my parents right now, opening presents. Watching basketball.
Trying to get through to Darius on Skype.
I suddenly pictured our house. Cold. Dark. Empty. No Christmas tree. No food cooking in the kitchen. No music playing. No friends and family. Where were my parents? How long would it be until we finally got out of here?
“I didn’t know if you celebrated Christmas or not,” Hagan said.
“Yeah. We do,” I told him. I sighed. “I miss my parents.”
“I know, son. I’m sorry. It’s not my call.”
I nodded. I felt like Mickey Hagan was the only person in this whole building who cared anything about me.
“At the very least, your efforts in helping us decipher those messages in Darius’s communications deserve some reward,” Hagan added.
He flipped open the box, revealing a large thin-crust cheese pizza. Right then, it was the most delicious-looking pizza I’d ever seen. He gestured at the pie, and I dug in.
“Not good enough to get me out of here?” I asked between a mouthful of pizza and a swig from the two-liter.
“I’m afraid not,” Hagan said. “If anything, it’s proven they were right to bring you here.”
I stopped chewing. “Seriously? I thought cooperating would help get me out of here.”
“It will,” Hagan said. “Eventually. And more importantly, it will save lives. Possibly even your brother’s.”
“So they’re doing something about it? The Women’s World Cup?”
“The proper authorities have been notified. Security will be doubled. A special team is being sent to look for the bomb. I can’t go into too many details, of course, but rest assured, measures are being taken.”
“And Darius?” I said, sipping again from the two-liter. “What will happen to him?”
Hagan took a slice of pizza for himself. “It’s hard to say, isn’t it? A lot of that will depend on what Darius does, if and when they catch up to him. Oh, wait,” Hagan said. “I’ve got some kitchen paper here somewhere.”
While his back was turned, I quickly closed the lid on the pizza to look at the restaurant flyer taped there. Underneath a picture of George Washington in sunglasses, it said WE THE PIZZA. The address was 1776 51st Street NW. No city. Weird name for a pizza place. I’d never heard of it. Definitely not an Arizona chain. Colorado maybe? California? The area code was 202. I didn’t know that one, either.
Hagan turned back with paper towels, and I flipped the box open again.
“There we are,” Hagan said, handing me a napkin. “Now your mother can’t complain when you see her again.”
Ha-ha. We both knew Mom and Dad and I had plenty to complain about, and not using napkins was about 1,976,242nd on the list.
“So now what?” I asked. I’d been brought to the video room, but we’d already figured out everything we could from Darius’s messages.
“DHS wants us to go back over the tapes,” H
agan said. “Look for anything else Darius might be trying to tell us.”
I sagged. “But we’ve been over those videos dozens of times,” I told him. “What else is there to learn? We’ve listened to them over and over and over again.”
Hagan sat up. “You’re right.” He wheeled his chair over to the computer monitors and called up the al-Qaeda training video again. I groaned.
“No, wait,” he said. He put the video on one of the big screens, dimmed the lights in the room, and hit play. But this time, he muted the monitor.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re right. We have listened to these videos ad nauseam. Now let’s watch them.”
I WHEELED MY CHAIR OVER, BRINGING THE PIZZA and soda with me. It was strange, sitting in the dark with my feet up on the desk, eating pizza and drinking soda and watching Darius put al-Qaeda militants through their paces like I was at home on a Saturday night watching a DVD with Adam.
Adam. He’d be at home with his family today, opening presents. We always called each other later in the day, told each other what we’d gotten. I might even have walked over to his house that night to play our new video games.
Forget Adam, I told myself. He’s certainly forgotten you.
I watched as Darius silently called out commands to the troops, tapping his leg. We’d already figured out that code. More “Danger coming.” I slid my focus from Darius to the men he was training, to the guns they carried, to the obstacles they jumped and ducked and rolled behind. The camera was jerky, like it was being held in somebody’s hand. It moved around the small patch of desert, capturing Darius’s training session from all angles.
“Wait. Stop,” I said.
Hagan practically fell over himself getting to the mouse to stop the video, his wheeled chair carrying him backward as he lunged forward.
“What? Did you see something?” he asked.
“Rewind it. There,” I said. “That mountain silhouetted in the background. I know it.”
Hagan looked at me skeptically. “You can’t. This is Afghanistan. Maybe Pakistan.”
“No. No, I’m sure I’ve seen that mountain before.” I’d seen it a few times, I was sure. Not recently … but I’d thought about it recently. When …? Then I had it. When I’d been remembering playing Rostam and Siyavash with Darius in the desert! Me and Darius, looking down through scraggly bushes at a dry riverbed, the orange sun setting over that same mountain in the background. “Superstition Mountain!” I said. “That’s Superstition Mountain, outside Phoenix!”
“Kamran …” Hagan said.
“No, I know it is. And look. There. That plant. That’s desert sand verbena. Rakhsh likes to eat it.”
“Are we talking now about the stories you and Darius used to make up, or the real world, Kamran?”
“I mean the real Rakhsh. One of the horses at the ranch where my mom works. She named him Rakhsh after Rostam’s horse. I used to go riding those trails in the Tonto National Forest all the time, all around Superstition Mountain. Rakhsh and the other horses love to eat that stuff. And I’m pretty sure the Sonoran Desert is the only place it grows. At least I think that’s one of the plants native to Arizona. We had to learn all that stuff in fourth grade.”
Hagan squinted at the screen. “It’s hard to tell what it is,” he said. “As for that mountain—that could be any mountain, anywhere. You can barely see it.”
“Mr. Hagan, you gotta believe me. Darius is right here, in Arizona!”
Hagan put up his hands. “Hold your horses, cowboy. First let me run this by the CIA’s geologists and botanists, see what they have to say about it.”
“You’ve got geologists and botanists?”
“Naturally,” Hagan said. I couldn’t tell if he meant that as a pun. I think he did. “We’ll see what the rock and plant folks have to say about it, at the very least. We shall leave no stone unturned, as it were. But, Kamran, I’m telling you right now: Darius isn’t in Arizona. No matter how much you’d like him to be. He’s in Afghanistan. That’s where he was captured. That’s where the broadcast came from.”
“But if the attack is going to be in Canada—”
“Then they would have smuggled him into Canada, by way of a seaplane from Greenland. They would never risk bringing him to America just to smuggle him across the border into Canada. Kamran, believe me. When you watch one of these things again and again and again looking for the tiniest of little clues, it’s been my experience that you tend to find them. Whether they’re really there or not.”
I sagged again. But—
“I tried to tell them,” Hagan said. “Told them we’d got all the blood we could from this stone, but do they listen to Mickey Hagan? No. Not anymore.”
I sighed. I was so sure it was Superstition Mountain in that video. But now that he’d said all that, pointed out how farfetched it was, I realized it was probably wishful thinking. The silhouette of the mountain in the video was small. Cut off. Blurry. And the scrub grass was just as hard to see. It could be anything, really.
I was trying to put Darius somewhere else. Somewhere away from all the real trouble. Somewhere closer to home. Darius and I hadn’t gone riding out there in a long time, but he’d have to have recognized he was in Arizona, if that’s where he really was. Wouldn’t he?
No. I was sure. I’d seen the mountain in the background. It was Superstition Mountain.
“It doesn’t make sense, I know,” I told Hagan. “Why would terrorists kidnap Darius in Afghanistan, then bring him all the way back here, through all that security, only to take him north into Canada for a suicide attack on the Women’s World Cup?”
Hagan’s eyes slid to the TV monitor. “They wouldn’t, of course,” Hagan said, his thoughts elsewhere.
“But they did,” I said. “I don’t know why, Mr. Hagan, but they did. Darius is in Arizona.”
NEW YEAR’S CAME AND WENT—I MARKED IT IN THE calendar I’d begun keeping in my head—but for me there were no parties, of course. No bowl games to watch.
I didn’t worry too much about it. All I could think about was Darius in Arizona. When I wasn’t in the video room trying to convince Mickey Hagan, I was pacing my cell, comparing my memories to that video. I was sure now. Darius was in Arizona. It didn’t make any sense, but I knew it was true. But if I knew it, why didn’t Darius? And if he knew it, too, why didn’t he say anything? Was he counting on me noticing, just like I noticed his hand signals and the Rostam clues? I almost didn’t catch those. Wouldn’t have if I hadn’t gone over every second of those videos. If Darius knew he was in Arizona, he would have said something, dropped some clue. Which meant he didn’t know.
Or he did, and he was deliberately hiding the fact from us.
That thought hit me like a sixteen-ton weight. I’d been so sure Darius was an innocent victim in all this. Then the CIA and Homeland Security had convinced me he might be what everybody else thought he was. Then Mickey Hagan talked me down from the ledge. But what if Darius really was messing with us? What if the clues he was feeding us were deliberate fakes? What if he knew he was in Arizona all along, and was dropping these clues to throw me off the scent, knowing I would be the one person in the world who would do anything I could to find him?
I sat down on my bed and put my head in my hands. I didn’t know what to think anymore. The only thing I was sure about was that the mountain in the background was Superstition Mountain, and that Darius was in Arizona. The rest of it—the rest of it made me sick. All this second-guessing would have made Coach Reynolds’s head spin.
There was a knock at the door, and Mickey Hagan came in. He didn’t bring a chair, and he didn’t look happy.
“The geologists have been over the videos, Kamran. They say that mountain in the background could be any of a dozen in Afghanistan’s Chagai Hills—let alone the rest of the world.”
“But—”
Hagan held up a hand. “I know. You’re sure. But these people, they’re experts. They’ve been over every inch of
that terrain on their computers.”
“I’ve been over it on horseback!” I told him. “What about the verbena?”
“Too blurry to tell, Kamran. But most likely another variety of verbena that does grow in Afghanistan. I’m sorry.”
I stood and paced again. “They’re wrong. He’s here, Mr. Hagan. I know it!”
“Well, I asked for a reconnaissance plane to take pictures of the area around your mountain, just to be sure.”
“And?”
“And they didn’t see anything unusual, Kamran. Just hikers and riders and Forest Rangers. And desert. Lots and lots of desert.”
“But there are caves up in those mountains,” I argued. “They could be hiding out anywhere up in there, and no one would ever know! One flyover might not catch them.”
“Kamran—”
I kicked the bed against the wall. It made enough racket that the guard outside came in, his hand on the pistol at his side.
“We’re all right, we’re all right,” Hagan told him. “Just letting off a bit of steam.”
The guard wasn’t so sure everything was all right, but Hagan outranked him. The guard scowled, backed outside, and closed the door again.
“Now, there’s no reason to go giving out, son,” Hagan said. “That won’t do anybody any good, most of all you.”
“Makes me feel better,” I grumbled.
“Well, that it might. But I’m only after what’s best for you. I hope you know that. And what’s best for you right now is to keep a lid on that temper of yours. All right?”
“It just—it just sucks so much to know I’m right and have no one listen to me!”
“I’m listening,” Hagan said. “But the DHS, they have their answer. And the answer is Afghanistan. And they know it for a fact.”
This was new. “How?” I asked.
“The plot we uncovered, the one Darius told us about with your delightful ticking time bomb football story—it’s been foiled.”
“AT 21:52 LOCAL TIME, A NAVY SEAL TEAM RAIDED a building in a village outside Zarghun Shahr, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” Hagan said. “They intercepted a small team of highly trained terrorists with the blueprints for Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada—the location of the United States Women’s team’s first World Cup match—and enough explosives to flatten it.”
