Code of Honor

by Alan Gratz

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Haydar Ansari is dead,” she told me. “You killed him.”

  “Me? I—I didn’t kill anybody,” I said. I hadn’t even fired my pistol.

  “Your government did,” the woman said darkly. “Three years ago in a drone strike.”

  I remembered now—back in the motel room, Aaliyah had said the government was sure they’d killed Ansari in a drone strike. I guess they really had. Somebody had just been pretending to be him ever since then, plotting terrorist strikes against the United States in his name.

  “The United States government killed Haydar Ansari, which means you did it,” the woman said. “How does your constitution begin? ‘We the people’? As far as I am concerned, any man, woman, or child who calls themselves ‘American’ is responsible for what their government does. Which means every one of you killed him.”

  I kept my eyes on her, trying to figure out who was under the robe and veil. Her voice was so familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure of anything when Darius held a gun to my head?

  My brother, Darius.

  Darius the terrorist.

  I struggled in Darius’s grip, but he held me tight.

  “But why pretend to be Haydar Ansari if he’s dead?” I asked the woman. “Why do any of this unless—” Then I remembered something from Ansari’s file. The wife he’d had in Syria. What if she hadn’t hated her husband for becoming a terrorist? What if that’s why she’d married him in the first place?

  “Unless you’re Bashira Ansari,” I said. “Haydar Ansari’s wife.”

  “I prefer,” said Bashira Ansari, “ ‘the Black Widow.’ ”

  THEY PUT ME IN THE LITTLE BOLT-HOLE IN THE CORNER, the one Jimmy and I had been assigned to watch. I didn’t know where they put Jimmy, or if he was still alive. I didn’t see him again after Bashira Ansari killed Dane.

  Dane. I couldn’t believe he was gone. Dead. Even though a part of me ached with grief, the part of me wounded by Darius’s betrayal hurt worse. I felt like there was an empty hole the size of that cave where my heart used to be. I was so shocked, so blown away by everything, that I hadn’t even been able to cry. I was like one of those people you see on the side of the road after a massive car wreck, sitting there staring off into space. Distant. Detached. Disconnected.

  All those interrogators back at the DHS building in Washington must have been right. About 9/11 turning Darius against his friends, his neighbors. His family. His country. About America being the big white demon, and him vowing to kill all monsters.

  All these years, and I’d never really known my brother at all.

  So it wasn’t me and Darius against the world anymore. And now I didn’t have Dane, either. Jimmy and Aaliyah were out of it, too. They were captured or dead. Our only hope was Mickey Hagan—unless he was the traitor. At this point, anything seemed possible.

  Which meant it was down to me. Me and our Code of Honor. My Code of Honor. Because whatever code Darius was living by now, it wasn’t the same as mine.

  There was a light knock on the big metal door to my cell, so soft I almost didn’t hear it. Then the big metal bolt on the door slid open slowly, quietly. I stood. I had no idea what was coming next, what the Black Widow had in mind for me, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to take it sitting down.

  The door cracked open, and Darius slid inside holding a gun.

  I put my hands up in mock surrender.

  “You got me,” I told my brother the traitor. “You got me good, Darius.”

  “Cut it out, Kamran,” Darius said. He took a step toward me, and that’s when I struck. I did everything Dane had taught me. I stepped to the side, grabbed for the gun, pushed down and away. I used all that pent-up anger inside me, and the pistol came free in my hand.

  Before Darius could react, I had it pointed back at him.

  “Kamran—”

  “Don’t,” I said, my voice low and mean. “We had a code, Darius. You and me. Be the strongest of the strong. The bravest of the brave. Help the helpless. Always tell the truth. Be loyal. Never give up.” I pointed the barrel of the gun straight at Darius’s forehead. My hands shook but I managed to keep the gun steady. “Kill all monsters.”

  Darius realized I was deadly serious and put his hands up.

  “Kamran, don’t,” he said quickly. “I believe in the Code, too. I always have. I’m not a monster.”

  “Really?” I said. “I believed in you, Darius. When nobody else would. I fought for you. I came to rescue you. And then you betrayed me!”

  The tears came now, the tears I hadn’t cried alone in the dark. The world was just me and Darius now, me and the brother I’d loved. Emulated. Worshipped. The brother who’d taken my affection for him and twisted it. Used it. Crushed it under his boot. Now that Darius and I were alone together, every emotion I’d kept dammed up inside me came flooding out at once: anguish, fear, pain.

  Even as I cried, I kept the gun trained on Darius.

  “Could you shoot your brother if you have to?” Aaliyah had asked me.

  “Of course not,” I’d told her. “I won’t have to. He’s not a traitor.”

  But he was. I pressed the gun against Darius’s forehead and curled my finger around the trigger.

  “KAMRAN, PLEASE, WAIT! IT WAS ALL A TRICK!” Darius said. “I’m not a traitor! You have to listen to me—it was all a trick!”

  I blinked through my tears. I thought my heart had been torn out before. But no. There was enough of it still left that Darius’s words stuck in my chest like a dagger. Why did he keep lying to me?

  “You’re not a traitor?” I said through my tears. “Then explain to me why I’m trapped here in this cell and you’re not. Explain to me why Dane, a real American soldier, is dead and you’re not.”

  “Kamran, I got captured in Afghanistan,” Darius said, quick and quiet. “I was going to escape or die trying, but then I heard them planning attacks on US targets. Big attacks. And I realized I could do more good alive than dead. I knew if I could just convince them I was on their side, I could get word back to America about their plans. Word back to you.” His eyes widened as he looked right at me. “And it worked, Kamran! You got my messages!”

  “No,” I said, refusing to be tricked again. “You used me. You used me to distract the government from the real target. They said you’d hated America since 9/11, that you went to Washington when you were in high school to scout for al-Qaeda. That you joined the Rangers and went to Afghanistan so you could join al-Qaeda and train them to attack America.”

  “I—no,” Darius said. He looked shocked. “I was fighting al-Qaeda, Kamran. I still am. God, if you knew how hard it was for me to say those awful words on camera. To just stand there while they beheaded that poor journalist. How much I wanted to jump in there and try to stop them … But you got my messages! You knew what I was saying! Wasn’t I right about the museum? The Women’s World Cup? The Super Bowl? We saved lives, Kamran! Together. You and me! You have to trust me now.”

  I was starting to doubt myself. I’d been on such a roller coaster—believing Darius, not believing him, believing him again. I was so confused, so mad.

  “I can’t,” I told him. “I can’t.” I steadied the gun against his temple.

  “Kamran,” Darius said. “Kamran, wait. Don’t. Please. I’m sorry. I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I always knew that if there was one person who would never stop believing in me, it was you.”

  Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t know what to think.

  “I’m sorry about grabbing you and holding you at gunpoint,” Darius went on, his own eyes filling with tears. “I was afraid if I didn’t, somebody else would shoot you.”

  I shook my head, trying to deny what he was saying. But deep down, I still wanted to believe.

  “And I’m sorry about the soldier—the man who died.” Darius sagged. “Kamran, you’ve got to believe me. I came here just now to break you out
! I know where they’re holding the woman you came with. We can get her, too, and then we can get out of here.”

  “Aaliyah? She’s okay? What about Jimmy?”

  “That guy with the numbers tattooed all over him? He’s gone. The Black Widow gave him a suitcase full of money and he left.”

  My mind reeled. “She—she gave money to Jimmy?” I didn’t understand. The only reason Bashira Ansari would pay Jimmy was—

  Because Jimmy was the traitor.

  Suddenly, it all fit: Jimmy could have sent information about us to the Black Widow the whole time on his computer, and we’d never have known it. And he hadn’t been with us in the warehouse in Nashville when we were attacked. He’d come to our rescue, but he’d had to—what if he’d left us to die and we’d survived? We would have known he was the traitor, and then Mickey Hagan would have had the DHS, the CIA, and the FBI on his tail. And if we did escape, he’d want to be with us so he could keep selling our secrets to Bashira Ansari.

  But if Jimmy was a traitor, why had he tried to protect Dane in the cave? Was it some shred of loyalty, after all?

  I guess it was all part of the game, as Jimmy liked to say.

  If Jimmy really was the traitor, I realized in horror, that meant he had never sent a message to Mickey Hagan letting him know we were going into the cave. The CIA had no idea where we were or what we were doing. Nobody was coming to save us.

  “Kamran, we have to move,” Darius said. I still had the gun pointed at him, lost in thought. “We’re in Arizona, aren’t we? In the Tonto National Forest somewhere. We can get out of here and go straight to the authorities. Catch these terrorists once and for all. But we have to hurry.” He stepped away.

  “Don’t,” I told him, aiming the gun again.

  Darius lowered his hands in defeat. “Kamran, if you don’t believe me, if you think all that stuff about me being a terrorist is true, then you should just shoot me right now,” Darius said. “Otherwise I’m going to free that woman you came with and get out of here.”

  Darius opened the door and backed out into the corridor.

  “Darius, no!” I said, and I pulled the trigger.

  THE PISTOL SOUNDED LIKE A THUNDERCLAP IN THE small space.

  Darius flinched. The terrorist raising an automatic rifle behind him fell down dead.

  Darius turned at the sound of the man hitting the ground, then looked back at me, stunned. “Kamran! I thought you’d really shot me!”

  When it came down to it, I couldn’t do it. Whether Darius really was a terrorist or not, I could never kill my brother. I knew I’d always have an Achilles’ heel when it came to Darius, the same way Mickey Hagan had for his brother.

  I stared down at the man I’d shot. He’d been raising his rifle at Darius like he was going to shoot him, so I’d shot first. “You know, at some point you’re actually going to have to shoot somebody with that thing,” Dane had told me. And now I had. I had killed a man. When I’d applied to West Point, I figured this might happen some day far in the future. You go to West Point to become a soldier, and I knew what soldiers did. I just hadn’t known what it would feel like to be responsible for another man’s death. It left me hollow and cold inside, like I’d died a little, too.

  Darius picked up the dead terrorist’s automatic rifle. He saw me staring in shock and horror at the dead man, and he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Kamran. Kamran, you’ve got to put it away right now. You’ve got to deal with it later. Understand? I don’t know how many of them are left, but somebody had to hear that gunshot. We have to move.”

  I nodded dully and let Darius lead me along. I still didn’t know if he was a traitor or not, if he was taking me right to the Black Widow, but I didn’t care anymore. My life was his to protect or throw away. I couldn’t hurt my own brother, even if he could.

  Darius led me farther back into the cave. I thought it was strange we never ran into another guard, but I didn’t have much time to think about it. In less than a minute, Darius stopped in front of another bolt-hole.

  “Here, hold this,” he said, handing me his automatic rifle. I held it and the pistol awkwardly while he pulled the bolt on the door free. “I saw them put your friend in here.”

  Darius pulled the door open. Aaliyah sat bound and gagged in a chair in the center of the room. I felt a rush of relief. Darius hadn’t been lying after all! I hurried to untie her, but Aaliyah’s wide eyes and shaking head made me stop.

  Automatic rifles cocked behind me, and I turned. The veiled Black Widow and five of her soldiers stood in the doorway, pointing guns right at us.

  ONE OF THE BLACK WIDOW’S MEN TOOK THE GUNS from me.

  “Kamran, I didn’t know, I swear,” Darius said. He moved like he was going to try and fight his way out of the little cell, but one of the terrorists pointed a gun at his face.

  “It’s quite true,” the Black Widow said. “Darius is more a dupe than you are. I’ve known all along he was faking his allegiance to us, ever since he was captured in Afghanistan. He was so eager to join our ranks. Too eager. We were just going to use him in a terrorist attack at first, sacrifice him to the cause. But then it became convenient to use him to feed false information to the United States government. We have you to thank for that, too, Kamran Smith.”

  That voice. Even muffled by her veil, I knew it from somewhere. But how? And where?

  “But it wasn’t false information,” Darius argued, sounding firm even with the gun trained on him. “Everything was true. The museum, the Women’s World Cup, the Super Bowl. And the US government stopped them all.”

  “Yes, they did,” the Black Widow said. “And now that they are confident the threat has been neutralized—twice over—they will let down their guard. We let you hear only what we wanted you to hear. The rest is still proceeding exactly as we wish it to.”

  “False clues and misdirection, just like your husband was famous for,” I said. “You still plan to attack, don’t you?”

  “But of course,” said the Black Widow.

  “Where? When? What are you planning?” Darius demanded.

  “Don’t worry, Darius. You and your brother will have a front-row seat,” the Black Widow assured him. “An angry nation will have to have someone to blame. Why not two young Iranian brothers?”

  The Black Widow’s men pushed forward to grab us. Darius and I fought back, but there were too many of them, leaving us too little room. The butt of a rifle cracked against my skull, and everything went black.

  I WOKE UP IN THE DARK. I WAS GROGGY. MY HEAD thumped.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  I was lying on my side, my hands tied behind my back. My feet were bound, too. My eyes fluttered, threatening to close and take me back to sleep again, but the thundering wouldn’t stop.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  My mouth was dry. I tried to lick my lips and found a cloth tied across my mouth. I was gagged.

  Gagged and bound.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  I was gagged and bound, and I needed to know why. Where I was. I fought to stay awake, letting my panic fill me. The adrenaline pushed away the grogginess, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that I was in a low room.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  No, room wasn’t right. A box? A coffin? But that wasn’t right, either. It was too wide to be either one. I felt like I was under the bleachers in the gym back at school. There was wood just above me and just below me, and inside, where I was, there were metal struts everywhere.

  And plastic explosives.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  Explosives. C-4. The same stuff we’d found at the warehouse in Nashville. And lots more of it, too.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  I felt a hand grab mine, and I gave a start. I’d thought I was alone. I couldn’t see behind me, so I rolled over, thudding into the plastic explosives. I winced, waiting for the boom, then remembered that it took a massive explosi
on to set off plastic explosives.

  Either that or one tiny electric blasting cap.

  BOOM-BOOM-CHA. BOOM-BOOM-CHA.

  I inched back to where I was, and saw who’d reached out to touch me. It was Darius! He was bound and gagged, too, and just like me he’d rolled over to see who was behind him. His eyes were wide with panic.

  Wherever we were, whatever this was, the Black Widow had made good on her promise. We were right in the middle of something that was meant to go boom. We were going to be sacrificed and blamed all at the same time.

  The thundering sound shifted to a rising roar like a wave crashing into the shore. I realized for the first time that the thudding sound wasn’t in my head. The floor vibrated as the sound washed over us, and something blew like a foghorn or a basketball buzzer.

  Words came floating toward us, pieces of sentences. Big, deep words magnified by stadium speakers: “… two-minute warning! … halftime show!”

  Darius and I locked eyes. In the same moment, we both knew where we were.

  We were at the Super Bowl.

  The thing we were inside jerked. Rumbled. Started to move. And then I understood—we were inside a giant stage. One of those enormous platforms they wheel out during the Super Bowl halftime.

  And we were the halftime show.

  DARIUS’S EXPRESSION TOLD ME THAT HE UNDERSTOOD the same thing: we were underneath a stage rigged with enough C-4 to blow a crater in the football field at University of Phoenix Stadium, killing untold numbers of people in the stands. And we were already moving.

  I struggled against the ropes that bound me, trying to get free. I could see Darius trying to do the same thing. But I could barely feel my fingers, the ropes were so tight.

  Music boomed through the stadium—the new Beyoncé song, I thought randomly. Of all the things to think about when you were tied up and strapped to a pile of plastic explosives.