by Alan Gratz
Mickey! I ran over to him and we hugged. Mom smiled and left us alone.
“I hope you’ve been on your best behavior,” Mickey said, glancing around my room. “I daresay your home is still bugged from before you were detained.”
My house had been bugged! But of course it had been bugged. But why was Mickey telling me now? Then I realized—Mickey was telling me to be careful about what I said to him, in case someone was still listening. And we had a lot to talk about.
“Are you still with the CIA?” I asked him, choosing my words carefully. “Did you get in trouble?”
“It’s a funny thing, that,” Mickey said. “The CIA appears to be under the impression that I had nothing to do with your escape and subsequent adventures until you called the CIA hotline looking for a friendly voice to help you out of a jam. Someone told them that an ex–Green Beret named Dane Redmond was entirely responsible for putting the team together that extricated you from DHS headquarters in Washington, blew up a stash of plastic explosives in Nashville, and confronted the Black Widow in the mountains of Arizona.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say,” said Mickey. He motioned for me to sit on the bed, and took a seat in my desk chair. “Now, where could they have heard such a wild story as all that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. But I did know: it was exactly the same story I’d told the FBI and the CIA and the DHS over and over again.
“And of course, Dane Redmond isn’t alive to confirm or deny any of this.”
“He died a hero,” I said, meaning it.
“And your country agrees,” Mickey said. “They have posthumously upgraded Dane Redmond’s discharge status from ‘other than honorable’ to a ‘general discharge,’ which he would have much appreciated, I know. The upgrade has the added advantage of restoring his benefits, including his veteran’s pension, which will come as a great comfort to his ex-wife and young daughter.”
“He—he has a daughter? I didn’t know.” I’d made up all that stuff about Dane being the brains behind everything just to get Mickey out of trouble. I had no idea it would fix Dane’s discharge status, or actually help the family I didn’t know he had.
“And Aaliyah?” I asked. Mickey knew what I meant. I hadn’t had a chance to tell this version of events to Aaliyah. If she went into her debriefing and told the truth—
“She corroborated the whole thing,” Hagan said. “Thankfully, she has been well trained to receive and analyze information rather than volunteer it.”
I felt like Mickey was scolding me, but only slightly. I deserved it some, too. If I hadn’t been careful, the government could easily have caught me out in the lie, and then it would have been worse for everyone. But it sounded like it had all worked out—even better than I had hoped.
“All’s well that ends well, as the Bard once said,” Mickey said with a smile, letting me know all was forgiven.
“What about Jimmy?” I asked.
“Ah. That’s one that didn’t end so well. Jimmy got away. We’re still after him, but he’s very good at not being found, as you might guess.”
“All part of the game,” I said, repeating Jimmy’s favorite phrase.
“That it is, I suppose,” Mickey said. “That it is.”
MICKEY TAPPED THE BIG STACK OF TEXTBOOKS ON my desk. “Back to school for you, then, I see. No rest for the weary.”
“I don’t care about the schoolwork part,” I said.
“But the non-schoolwork part?” he asked, picking up on my tone.
I looked at my hands. “You’re the only one who ever had faith in me, Mickey,” I said. “The only one who believed me right from the start and never gave up on me.”
“Ah, I see,” Mickey said. “Your friends at school, they weren’t so … faithful. And now they’re back on the Kamran Smith bandwagon, trumpets and cymbals in hand.”
“I’m not sure I want anybody as a friend who wasn’t there for me when things got bad.”
“I can understand that,” Mickey said. “But tell me true, Kamran: How many times did you doubt your brother in all this? How many times did you give up on him, only to come ’round again when you found out you were wrong?”
That stung. Mickey knew better than anybody what it was like to believe wholly and completely in a person and then have him break your heart. But unlike Mickey, I had given up on Darius more than once before I’d finally learned the truth. Mickey had believed and been burned; I’d believed, and disbelieved, and believed again, and disbelieved again, and Darius had been innocent after all.
“I don’t mean to punish you,” Mickey said. “Heaven knows I’ve punished myself plenty enough that I don’t need someone else to help me. Nor do you. I’m only after pointing out that you doubted your brother once or twice even when you were closer to him than any other person on God’s green earth. Now think about your friends at school. They’re not nearly so close to you as you are to your brother. Think about what they heard, and what they saw, and how they felt. Can you really blame them for not believing in you when they barely know you? The real you, I mean?”
“Yes,” I said, just to be perverse. I sighed. “Adam knew the real me. He’s been my best friend since we were kids.”
“And he knows you even better now,” Mickey said. “The real you he’s maybe never seen before. The real you maybe you’ve never seen before.”
There was something to that. Something I hadn’t been able to talk about with anybody since I’d gotten back. I’d been relieved to finally come home, to be normal again, but at the same time … At the same time, I missed it. The excitement. The way I was valued by the team, and not treated like a kid. The feeling that I was doing something important. I didn’t like the thought of good people dying. Of me dying. But the rest of it—the rest of it I found myself longing for.
“Don’t let these fair-weather friends of yours off the hook,” Mickey said. “I’m not saying to do that. They need to know they hurt you. That’s what’ll keep them from hurting you the same way next time. But don’t push them away either, Kamran. What good will that do? Yes, you’ll graduate in a few months’ time, and then you could blow them all a big fat kiss good-bye. But in the meantime, you’ll just be friendless and alone—not to mention missing out on all those beautiful young lassies who will surely want to date the hero of the Super Bowl.”
I blushed and laughed.
“Aha,” Mickey said. “You begin to see the wisdom in it, I think.” He smiled.
“It’s just so hard,” I said.
“And it always will be,” Mickey said wearily. “Some people will always think the less of you for the color of your skin, for the country of your mother’s birth, or for the despicable actions of someone who kind of, maybe, on a good day in the right light looks a bit like you. Which means you always have to be the better man. You go back to school and be all broody and mean and push people away, and they’ll turn on you again just as fast. ‘He’s just what we thought he was all along,’ they’ll say. The best thing for you to do is to keep living by that Code of Honor of yours and proving the haters wrong. You going to West Point will go a long way toward helping do that.”
“But I’m not going to West Point,” I said. “Congresswoman Barnes withdrew her nomination.”
“And yet, like the young lassies lining up to date you, so too are America’s politicians falling all over themselves to recommend you for West Point again,” Mickey said. He took a letter out of his jacket pocket. “Including this recommendation from the vice president of the United States, with whom I happened to put in a good word.”
I took the letter from him in disbelief. Sure enough, it was a glowing letter of recommendation right below the vice presidential seal, signed by the vice president himself.
“If you still want it, that is,” Mickey said. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I said, still mesmerized by the vice president’s signature. “Yes. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“It’s not goi
ng to be easy for you there, either,” Mickey said. “You’ll have even more haters and doubters than before.”
“I know,” I said. Maybe nothing was ever going to be easy for me again. Not now that I’d had my eyes opened. But that didn’t mean I wanted to stick my head under my pillow and hide.
“Good, then,” Mickey said. “There’s good news for me as well. Seems my work in all this business has earned me a bit more respect at the Company, as befits my pay grade. I’ve been put in charge of my own counterintelligence team at the CIA.”
“That’s terrific, Mickey!” I told him.
“It is. I’ve already recruited a couple of people for it, too,” he said, “including Ms. Aaliyah Sayid. Now I’m wondering if I might not entice you to join us.”
My mouth hung open so far, it must have brushed the floor. “What? Me?”
“You’d have to keep up with your studies at West Point at the same time, of course. And that won’t be easy. They keep you busy there, believe you me.”
“Yes! I mean, yes, I’ll join! I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said. I still couldn’t believe it.
“Good, then. That’s settled. First things first, I want you to start training to fight. Pick up where you left off with Dane.” Mickey slapped his knees and stood. “Let’s go meet your new trainer.”
“What, now?” I asked. I had school tomorrow.
“No time like the present,” Mickey said, beckoning me down the hall.
“KAMRAN SMITH, MEET OUR TEAM’S NEW TACTICAL specialist,” Mickey said. “Darius Smith.”
My brother sat on the couch between Mom and Dad, Mom’s hand holding his. Darius’s dress uniform looked five sizes too big on his emaciated body, but he’d bathed and shaved and had a haircut and was starting to look like his old self again. He got up from the couch, and we hugged for a long time.
“Hello, Cadet!” he said, holding me out at arm’s length. “Good to see you again.”
“Good to see you, too,” I told him, which was a major understatement.
There was so much I wanted to say to Darius, so much I wanted to talk about, and I could tell he felt the same way. But it wasn’t a conversation either of us wanted to have with an audience.
“Come on, let’s go outside,” Darius said, nodding toward the backyard.
I looked at Mickey Hagan. “Go on, then,” he said. “I’ll stay here and tell your parents all about our little arrangement.”
I followed Darius outside. It was almost the beginning of February, but it was still sixty-five degrees and sunny. Arizona weather.
“Are you staying for a while?” I asked. “Here?”
Darius nodded. “Until I move to DC to work with Mickey. I’ll still be in the army, just attached to the CIA. Did Mickey sign you up, too?” Darius asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
There were chairs on the patio, but we stood looking out over the small plot of green grass wedged in between brown gravel paths.
“You remember when we used to play Rostam and Siyavash out here?” Darius asked.
“Of course,” I said. “You do, too, or else you wouldn’t have been able to give me all those clues.”
We were quiet again for a while. Maybe Darius was remembering all our silly adventures. I was remembering putting a gun to his head.
“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time.
Darius laughed softly, and I smiled despite myself.
“You first,” Darius said.
“Oh, me first?” I said, half kidding. “How’s that work?”
“Mine’s going to take longer,” Darius said.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“But you did,” Darius said.
I shook my head. “Not all the time. They told me things. Told me you hated the government for the way you were treated after 9/11. That you went to Washington senior year to spy for al-Qaeda. That you were a Muslim—”
Darius closed his eyes and sighed. “Well, obviously I didn’t go to Washington to spy for al-Qaeda. I went because Sofia Ramirez was going, and she was totally hot.”
I laughed.
“And of course I don’t hate the government,” Darius said. “I mean, yes, I hated the way people treated me after 9/11. You don’t know how it was. You were so young.”
“I think I know a little bit how it was now,” I told him. He nodded at that.
“But what about the prayer beads?” I asked. “The Internet searches?”
Darius looked off into the distance. “I need something more in life, you know? Something spiritual. It’s really tough, as a soldier. The things you see. The things you do. I needed to find some kind of meaning in everything. And I wanted to reconnect with where Mom came from. Who we are. So I started looking into Islam. Other stuff, too. Nonreligious stuff. But they probably didn’t mention my poetry books by Rumi or Hafez.”
“No, they didn’t.” I couldn’t believe it. My brother? Reading poetry?
“But why didn’t you tell us that you were starting to become more religious?”
Darius shrugged. “I felt like it was something I needed to do on my own. I was doing this for me, not for anybody else. And what was I supposed to say? I was still seeking. I still am. I don’t feel like I have all the answers, but I feel like I’m on the right path. Does that make any sense?” He kicked a pebble off the porch. “Anyway, I’m not going to apologize for being Muslim. And I shouldn’t have to just because some terrorists somewhere twist Islam to fit their own awful agenda.”
I nodded. He was right. It was the same thing I’d told the DHS when they’d asked me about our mom.
“Now can I say I’m sorry?” my brother said, giving me a small smile. “I came out here to tell you I’m sorry for dragging you into all this. I knew it would be hard for you, but I didn’t know how hard. The alienation, the TV crews, the DHS taking you away in the night and interrogating you for months. And then you having to go on the run, getting shot at just to save me. If I’d known it was going to hurt you like that, put you in that kind of danger, I would have just let them kill me in Afghanistan.”
That hit me like a punch to the gut. I remembered how I’d once wished that Darius had died in Afghanistan, just so I could have my old comfy life back again. I felt sick all over again for having ever doubted him.
“No,” I told him. “No. I’m just sorry I wasn’t strong enough from the start.”
“Are you kidding? Kamran, you risked your life to save me when you didn’t have a single good reason to do it.”
“Yes, I did,” I told him. “You’re my brother.”
Darius clapped my hand and pulled me into a hug.
“It’s you and me against the world, huh?” Darius said, and I nodded. “How are you doing?” he asked, eyeing me seriously. “I mean, just with—everything. Are you sleeping okay? Nightmares? After what happened in the cave—”
I looked down. I knew Darius was talking about that horrifying moment when I had shot the terrorist. Killed him. It was something I still thought of constantly. Every night before I went to sleep, I saw his face. Heard the gunshot. Saw the blood. As terrifying as everything else I’d experienced had been—especially those last moments with the bomb and the explosion—the death of that man haunted me the most.
“I’m not doing great with it,” I told my brother truthfully, but I didn’t like to talk about it. “What about you?” I asked my brother. “You must be worse off.”
“It’s tough,” Darius admitted. “But I’m seeing a counselor. She specializes in this kind of stuff, and it’s really been helping me deal with what happened to me. She’s really good.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You could talk to her, too.”
My first thought was No way. I can handle this by myself. But then I remembered what Dane had said, about how soldiers didn’t like to talk about stuff, didn’t get help when they needed it. And how it eventually ate them up inside. As much as I didn’t want to talk about wh
at happened with someone else, I promised myself I would. For Dane’s sake.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
The sliding door to the patio opened and Mom leaned out, her hand covering the receiver on the phone.
“Kamran, I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “It’s Adam calling again. Are you home?”
Behind her, I saw Mickey Hagan give me a questioning look. I glanced at my brother, and back at my mother.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I am.”
Thanks to everyone at Scholastic for all their enthusiasm and hard work: to David Levithan for saying “yes,” to Emellia Zamani for reading the first draft, to Emily Cullings and Dan Letchworth for reading the final drafts with such eagle eyes, to Nina Goffi for designing such a beautiful book, and to Antonio Gonzalez for helping me get the word out about it. Very special thanks to Aimee Friedman for being such a terrific editor (again), and of course to Grace Kendall for bringing me on board in the first place! Many thanks to my great friend Bob, and to my early readers at Bat Cave: Gwenda Bond, Alexandra Duncan, Rebecca Petruck, Carrie Ryan, Megan Shepherd, Courtney Stevens, and especially Gabrielle Charbonnet and Megan Miranda. I’d also like to thank reader and fan Nick Toosi for answering my questions about growing up Persian American, and Hossein Kamaly, assistant professor of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures at Barnard College, for reading the manuscript and helping me get my facts right. Any errors that remain are my own. And last but never least, thanks again to Wendi and Jo.
All characters and situations appearing in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or events is unintended and purely coincidental.
Alan Gratz is the author of several books, including Samurai Shortstop, which was named one of the ALA’s 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults; The Brooklyn Nine, which was among Booklist’s Top Ten Sports Books; and Prisoner B-3087, which was named to YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults list. Alan lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter. Look for him online at www.alangratz.com
