Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  He stopped at Nando’s Peri Peri for take-out chicken, and started to head home with it when the feeling struck him that something was out of place. It took a moment to realize what it was. Usually, on his way home from the station, he would pass by what his neighbor liked to call “the United Nations of Children.” At all hours of the evening, long after what most Americans would consider bedtime, he would see children splashing in the fountains until they were soaked to the skin, while their mothers, in hijabs and abayas, laughed and chatted over frozen yogurt from Yogi Castle. Tonight, however, the lounge chairs on the Astroturf were vacant. Only once did he spy two veiled women, emerging from the Lebanese Taverna and walking swiftly and purposefully away, eyes fixed straight ahead but still scanning the surroundings. The attitude of a traveler in a dangerous place.

  Overcome by a sudden feeling of foreboding, he rushed home and switched on CNN.

  “…a group calling itself American Sharia State. Moresby-Stokes pledged that attacks would continue until the group’s interpretation of Islamic Sharia law was implemented throughout the United States. His demands included…”

  “Oh, God,” Fox said aloud. “Oh, John. Tell me you didn’t.”

  He grabbed his phone and dialed.

  “Adler here.”

  “John, what the hell?”

  “What the hell what?”

  “What the hell do you think what the hell what? How did the garbage Harpo was spouting get onto CNN?”

  “What do you mean? We finally have a name for him, an organization, and a motive. The American people deserve to know. Don’t you think they’ve waited long enough?”

  “Oh, perfect. That is just brilliant. Except for one thing: Did it somehow escape your notice that every word out of his mouth was a lie?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Fox’s palm made forceful contact with his face. “I can’t believe this! You were there. You heard me interview him. He’s no more a Muslim than you are.”

  “Well, of course he couldn’t hold his own in a scholarly discussion with you. Do you have any idea how many wannabe jihadis set off for the sunny shores of Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies in their carry-ons? None of them know the first thing about Islam, beyond what they hear from fire-breathing preachers on YouTube.”

  “For God’s sake, can’t you tell when you’re being played? His whole manifesto could have been lifted straight from some right-wing scaremongering website. He even gave it a ridiculous name, and you still fell for it.”

  “What?”

  “American Sharia State. What are the initials?”

  There was a crestfallen silence at the other end. Fox went on: “That’s exactly what he was trying to make out of us. And you played your part like a you-know-what at the lyre.”

  Another long pause. “If he isn’t a Muslim,” Adler finally replied, “why would he want us to think he was?”

  “I don’t know.” Fox looked back at the screen, with Harpo’s talking points still scrolling across it. “But whatever message he was trying to send, we’ve just become his press secretaries.”

  8

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, MARCH 31

  The Muslim community braced for a backlash. The chief imam at the Washington Islamic Center called a press conference. “We condemn this attack as the work of a twisted soul, and we urge anyone with any further information about the suspect or his group to make it known at once to the FBI. We mourn with our city, and our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The dean of the National Cathedral, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, and the senior rabbi of the Washington Hebrew Congregation each took the microphone in turn after him, urging members of their own faiths to show restraint.

  The president of USAtheists felt the need to weigh in with a press conference of his own. “Be honest, America: does this news come as any surprise to anyone? The barbaric attack on the Verizon Center by fanatical Muslims, and the senseless murder of Thom DiDio by fanatical Christians, are just the two latest additions to the unending list of ways religion incites good people to do bad, and bad people to do the unspeakable. Religious violence is the scourge of the modern world.”

  The Metro Police had set up a round-the-clock watch at the Islamic Center. Predictably, a crowd had already gathered, chanting “Islam is evil!” and waving American flags and placards. Never bow to Islam and No Sharia in America were among the more repeatable ones.

  Forgive us, Fox pleaded silently to the Great Unknowable as he watched the spectacle on television. We knew not what we were doing.

  But the cameras showed other demonstrators there, also with American flags, whose signs read We stand with our Muslim neighbors and America loves everyone. They also showed a vandalized mosque in Brooklyn, where volunteers from a local church and synagogue were hard at work repairing the damage.

  Fox switched off the television and headed to the Metro station. On the way, he saw men and women in green shirts, holding signs reading I’ll walk with you, offering a protective escort to any Muslim wary of walking through Washington alone.

  There’s hope for us yet, he thought.

  ...

  The Reverend Hill was scheduled to meet Harpo that afternoon. As soon as Fox finished his last class, he headed directly to the Hoover Building. Adler briefly glanced toward the doorway as he came in, then lowered his gaze without acknowledging him, just as Harpo often did.

  Kato cleared her throat and broke the awkward silence. “I didn’t get the chance to fill you in on what I heard from Scotland Yard yesterday,” she said. “Our boy is a first-year student at—if you please—Oxford, majoring in biochemistry. One arrest last year, when he got into a drunken fight and broke a window in a pub, but no other priors. And something else weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “After we first contacted them, they called his parents to tell them their son had been arrested in America. They said, ‘We have no son,’ and hung up.”

  “Are they sure they had the right people?”

  “Come on!” said Adler. “How many people named Moresby-Stokes can there be, even in England?”

  Fox had to admit he had a point. And even assuming it was a case of mistaken identity, polite puzzlement—I’m sorry, you must be confusing me with someone else—would be a more natural reaction than a brusque rebuff of the kind Kato had described.

  “His prior arrest,” Fox said. “Did it say where it was?”

  Kato leafed through the file. “Yes. It happened at the Admiral Duncan Pub, on Old Compton Street, in the Soho district of London.”

  “I see.” And Fox did see, a little more clearly now.

  The intercom rang, and Kato picked it up. “Incident room, Kato…All right, send him up.” She set down the receiver. “Hill’s here.”

  An agent escorted Hill to the interview room, and Kato accompanied him inside. Adler and Fox retired to the observation area to watch him through the one-way glass.

  “This strategy of yours had better work,” Adler muttered.

  “Like yours has?”

  Adler shot him a glare, then turned his attention back to the interview room.

  “Mr. Moresby-Stokes,” Kato said, “you have a visitor.”

  She opened the door wider to let Hill in. As soon as Harpo saw him, his eyes widened, and he pressed himself harder against the back of his chair.

  Hill sat down in the chair opposite Harpo, while Kato remained standing.

  “Hello,” he said. “We haven’t met. I’m Isaiah Hill.”

  He extended his hand. Harpo regarded it as if it had just come from foraging in an overripe garbage bin. After an awkward pause, Hill withdrew it.

  “You came a long way, just to hurt me,” he went on. “You must really feel that I’ve done something bad. If you’ll tell me what it was, I’ll try to make it right.”

  He paused to give Harpo an opening, but got only a venomous glare. Fox began to feel that Hill truly had to be un
der divine protection. An ordinary mortal might have withered before the death rays emanating from Harpo’s eyes.

  “And I want you to know that I forgive you,” he continued. “I know you’re feeling a lot of pain, and every day, I’ve been praying for you, and for the healing of whatever it is that’s eating you up inside. Can I say a prayer for you now?”

  Harpo looked as though he were facing a centipede the size of a boa constrictor.

  The Reverend Hill took his silence as consent, turned his face and palms toward heaven, and began to pray. “Father God, I just want to pray to you, have mercy upon this young man. Heal whatever sickness in his heart led him to do this, Father God. Forgive him, Father God, for he knew not what he was doing.”

  He turned his palms to Harpo, and his voice took on an authoritarian tone. “And I cast you out, Satan! Any evil spirits that are lurking in this man’s heart, I charge you right now in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ…” he reached out and laid a hand on Harpo’s head, “come out of him!”

  “Get your bloody hands off me!”

  Harpo’s hands flew up to sweep the Reverend Hill’s aside. Kato moved swiftly to restrain him. Adler and Fox ran out of the observation room and burst into the interview room.

  “Don’t touch me!” Harpo roared, in a voice that resounded piercingly in the confines of the tiny room. “Don’t come in here gabbling about Satan and evil spirits and all that rubbish! I’ve had enough hands laid on me, and enough Bibles waved over me, to last a bloody lifetime. And don’t patronize me with your ‘he knew not what he was doing.’ I knew exactly what I was doing!”

  A moment of silence ensued, during which all the air in the room seemed to be rushing toward Harpo to fill the void after his explosion. Fox broke it by asking gently, “What exactly were you doing?”

  “Using one virus to cure another.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you know what the deadliest virus in the world is?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Zagorsk, Ebola, smallpox—nasty little buggers all, but the worst they can do is kill their host. There’s only one virus that propagates itself by making its host kill anyone who isn’t similarly infected.”

  “And that is?”

  “The virus of the mind called religion!” He thrust a quivering finger at Reverend Hill. “You and your kind belong to the infancy of our species! The time has come for the rubbish you preach to fall out and be thrown away like a baby tooth. And I’m sorry to shatter yet another infantile fantasy, but there’s no Tooth Fairy to turn it into anything of value!”

  Adler laid a hand on Reverend Hill’s shoulder. “Reverend, maybe you’ve done all you can here today?”

  Reverend Hill nodded agreement, and allowed Adler to escort him out. Kato and Fox were left there with the subject.

  “Thaddeus,” Kato began. “Or do you go by something like Tad, or TJ? All right, TJ it is. I understand where you’re coming from. Believe me, I have no use for anyone who tries to force their idea of God down my throat.”

  “And yet, you thought it would be a bloody brilliant idea to bring that here to talk to me!” TJ retorted, with a jerk of his head toward the hall. “Let me ask you something, agent. Do you believe there’s room in this world for religion?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose there are some people who need it.”

  “Bloody accommodationist!” TJ spat the word at her in the tone of voice most people reserve for words like “murderer.” “Then there’s no room in this world for the likes of you either! There’s a virus ravaging the human species, and if you’re not helping us to eradicate it, you’re compromising our immune system. I’m sorry, agent, but I have nothing more to say to you.”

  He returned his gaze to its usual spot on the floor. Fox was afraid he would withdraw into himself again and they would lose their window of opportunity.

  “Agent, could you give us the room for a minute?” he asked.

  Kato nodded and left. TJ fixed Fox in a defiant glare. “And what do you have to say, Mr. Qur’anic Scholar?”

  In the theater of interrogation, Fox had been called on to play many different roles, but he had never been cast so completely against type as he was about to be. If he could put on a performance that convinced TJ, he would consider himself entitled to an Oscar, or whatever equivalent there was that could be displayed in some corner of a Langley basement.

  “What did you think?” he asked. “That a virologist wouldn’t know his job?”

  He took an exaggeratedly wary glance at the one-way window, turned his chair so that his back was facing it, and spoke to TJ in a confidential tone.

  “I still have the scar,” he said, “from when a nun hit me so hard her stick broke, for forgetting one word of my stupid catechism. I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake in my bunk, thinking about what I would do to her if I got the chance. Of course, it never went beyond fantasy. I never thought I would meet someone who had the balls to actually go through with it.”

  He watched TJ’s expression closely, and noticed a slight shift in the proportion of hostility to curiosity.

  “You know what you learn at a school like that?” Fox continued. “You learn that they can control what you say and do, but they can’t control what you think. They can make you say the words and sing the hymns, but the only way they can take away your freedom here.. .” he tapped his head, “is if you surrender it yourself. That freedom is the most precious thing you’ve got.”

  TJ nodded slowly. “You understand, then.”

  Fox had to conceal a sigh of relief. His hastily concocted story had gotten him through the outer gate.

  “Of course, that was just school,” Fox continued. “I could take anything they gave me, because I knew when the term was over, I had a loving home to go back to.” He laid a hand on TJ’s unresisting shoulder. “But where do you go when your own family betrays you? When they cast you out…rather than let you love the one you want to love?”

  TJ looked at Fox through widened eyes, confirming his theory. Fox recalled the polygraph session, and TJ’s reaction to the erotic scene. He hadn’t averted his eyes, as a strict Muslim might have, but neither had he shown any sign of sexual arousal. And the report from Scotland Yard said that his prior arrest had been on Old Compton Street, which enjoyed a reputation as the center of London’s gay nightlife.

  “Home must have been like hell for you,” he said.

  TJ’s lip curled. “There wasn’t a single wall in that whole bloody house where you could look without some cheap picture of Jesus staring back at you. Church twice every bloody week. Bible readings with every meal. Couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t go to movies with my mates, and they watched like bloody hawks to see what I was reading. I could barely breathe in that house.”

  “And then you went to college,” Fox continued for him. “And finally, you could breathe. You could start exploring who you really were. But then one day, you were just out having a good time with your mates, things got a little out of hand, the police got involved, called your parents…”

  He stopped when he saw TJ’s lip beginning to quiver.

  “They actually believed,” TJ said, “that I was possessed by the Devil. They took me to church, and they did some kind of…exorcism on me. They held me down and hit me with Bibles while everyone chanted, ‘Pray out the gay!’ They put me into freezing cold baths, and shoved gay porn magazines into my face and ammonia under my nose. And when none of that worked, they told me that until I renounced my sinful and wicked ways, I was no longer welcome in their house. Actually, that last was probably the kindest thing they had ever done for me.”

  “They decided their principles were more important to them than their own son. Well, all I can say is, I hope their principles take good care of them in their old age.” Fox paused. “There’s someone I wish you could have met. His story was very much like yours. It took him a lot of searching, but eventually, he found a place where he could flourish. He found a way to
be happy…until his life was cut short.”

  A slight smirk appeared on TJ’s lips. “Are you by any chance referring to Thom-with-an-H DiDio?”

  The interview room began to spin around Fox. TJ had been apprehended before Thom’s death, and had no access to news since then. The only way he could know about the murder was if he had been involved in it.

  “You know who killed him,” Fox said through numb lips.

  TJ’s smirk expanded. “Yes. And if you haven’t caught him by now, you never will.”

  Control is Interrogation 101. The instructors at the Schoolhouse had drummed this motto into new interrogators endlessly, meaning that they should always project the image of omnipotent figures who held ultimate power over the subjects’ destiny. In the field, Fox had discovered their words were true, but not in the way they meant. From his experience, the most important quality in an interrogator was self-control. An interrogator who let his emotions get the better of him could undo weeks of painstaking work in a single moment.

  Fox now recited that principle over and over in his mind, like a magical incantation that would lose its power at the slightest interruption of the chant. At the moment, every muscle in his body was yearning to pounce on TJ and choke him, kick him, beat him until he confessed everything he knew. But in addition to breaking all the Interrogation Rules of Engagement, that would ruin their chances of getting any more out of him.

  “Why?” was the only question he could manage.

  “Isn’t it obvious? We needed a martyr. And who better for the job than someone who insisted on dimming the Brights?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He was a traitor. A faitheist! He had a bloody ‘Coexist’ bumper sticker on his car! Please! As if it were possible for reason to coexist with delusion! For a healthy body to coexist with a virus! The human race will never reach the next stage in its evolution as long as even one specimen of this virus remains. We will eradicate it from the face of the earth…even if everyone infected with it has to die, until only the rational ones are left alive!”