Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  “Do you ever think of your emergence from the cellar as a kind of rebirth?” Major Dell asked.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “It was more like mitosis. I split off a new me.”

  The sixteen years that Phair had stayed in Iraq, learning from Sunnis, Shiites, Yazidis, Nestorians, and other religions, he felt his devotion to Catholicism had been enhanced. He had affirmed that the goals of charity and good were fundamentally the same from group to group, as was the ultimate destination of a beatific afterlife.

  As was the desire to foster one faith over all others, often through violent means among the radical elements.

  While Phair found the rituals and hierarchies instructive and inspiring, he came to believe that no one group had a monopoly on the Way. Not even his own. It was no different than when he would watch the soldiers train in various martial arts disciplines. Judo was different from karate was different from kung fu. All were valid and the end result was the same: self-preservation. Understanding this, there had been no need to question his Catholic faith. It served and continued to serve as his unfaltering conduit to God.

  “This new you,” Major Dell said in a way that suggested a weighty preamble. “How much overlap does it have with the old you?”

  “In what respect?”

  “Any.”

  “Let me answer that bass-ackwards,” he suggested. “I can guess the reasons for these ongoing sessions. The DoD wants to know if I’ve been brainwashed, either by design or association. Correct?”

  “If that’s a concern, it’s not mine,” she answered semi-truthfully.

  “How does the military view me?”

  “I can’t speak for them,” she replied.

  “You know they debriefed me there,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “They prodded me to recall everything I’d seen and heard as what they wanted to call their ‘undercover observer. ’ They wanted to know about the unguarded lives of Iraqi citizens, what the black market was like, how often and in what way the Iraqis were bullied by insurgents or the police or the military and how they responded. I saw a lot of that. I told them what I could remember. That the people are afraid. Of insurgents, of local authorities, of Americans, of despots, of anyone from outside their villages. They shook my memory like they were panning for gold and frankly, I remembered things I had forgotten.”

  “Except for the first few weeks you were away from your unit,” Major Dell said.

  “That’s right.”

  “No dreams or fragments or déjà vu that might indicate what happened?”

  He shook his head.

  It bothered her superiors in the Army Medical Corps that Phair seemed to have been brought back from post-traumatic stress—literally shell shock, from the hammering he took in that cellar—by fraternizing with “a population that might include enemy sympathizers or activists.” Phair remembered coming out into dusty daylight from the shelter beneath the bombed building. He remembered hearing an argument among the Iraqis about sparing his life, but he recalled little else until three weeks later, when he was learning Nadji Arabic from a schoolteacher.

  The question that remained to be answered was: had he “gone native”? Had he begun to assume the prevailing view of Americans as invaders? He didn’t appear to have done so. By identifying with their spiritual rather than political needs, he regained his own center. Though he stayed in Iraq to educate himself and others, he remained fundamentally the same James Phair who was last seen running off during a firefight—but now his own twin, with a new set of experiences and influences.

  What would happen if he went back? That’s what the top brass wanted to know.

  “Are you having difficulty remembering aspects of your stay that used to be clear?” the psychologist inquired.

  “The details are still clear,” he said. “It just seems a little odd to me that I don’t think in Mesopotamian Arabic or Kurdish or Farsi the way I used to. When I look in the mirror I see sunburned skin and silver hair where I once saw pale and brown, but I have seen that before, as a teenage volunteer working in different missions. I could just as easily be looking at one of my faces from Veracruz or Ethiopia as one from Mosul. The original James Phair is back. It doesn’t feel as though I’ve been away.”

  “That’s because your core beliefs didn’t change,” she remarked. “You collected ideas and experiences without being altered by them. You made them subjective instead of objective, though those can be reversed by changed circumstances. We have a medical term for that.”

  He looked at her with a look of patient, clerical inquiry.

  “We call it ‘the switcheroo,’ ” she explained. “Faith can move mountains.”

  He smiled back. “I am a modern-day Mohammad. Shall I change my name? Would the DoD appreciate that?”

  A twisted grin was her answer.

  “There is actually some truth to that,” she went on. “These experiences have made you more connected to those distant prophets. They had moved among people who were very much like the ones you met. Their awe was your awe, their humility your humility. The difference is, all the faiths you encountered were cumulative in you. Each of those old prophets only received what each of them carried. They had an agenda of stamping out multiple faiths.”

  He settled back in the armchair, his mind skipping back. “You asked about my teaching post. The one thing that has changed since I started is how I feel about the students.”

  “How do you feel?” Major Dell asked.

  “I see me as the old me, but I see the students as religious militants.”

  “You effectively began your career in the clergy as a teenager,” she said.

  “It was a haven.”

  “Were you a militant?” she asked. “I’m sure you saw and felt passion when you studied at the St. Charles Seminary. Isn’t faith your own backbone and heart?”

  “I felt safe there, and wanted,” he said. “And I had faith but not certainty. These young people—and I have not been around them since I was a young enlistee here—but they seem to be not distractible in their beliefs, just like the Iraqis. Enlistment in the Chaplain Corps is up. I think, or at least I suspect, that some portion of the American youth is hungry to become zealots. Maybe that’s a response to what they consider a threat to our way of life from the Middle East—I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps they only seem that way against a backdrop of war,” Major Dell suggested.

  “No, these kids are different,” he insisted. “They ‘blog’ about polarizing community issues and they get angry about things they read in other blogs. They bring cell phone cameras to rallies and post recordings of objectors on video websites. All of it is not only legal but they say it is justified, given the fervor of an adversary who challenges their faith and homeland.”

  “You’re saying they target Muslims and you feel uncomfortable about that?”

  “They target everyone, Major. Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists. This environment that should be inspiring is very unsettling.”

  “Any religious collective goes through phases, influenced by charismatic people or events,” she said. “Students or acolytes in particular tend to be reactionary. We’ve seen that before, dating back to the Crusades—”

  “They were waged with swords and arrows,” he said. “The Inquisition, horrible as it was, was waged with primitive implements in a geographically narrow realm. But you’re right. My students are like Raymond IV, Godfrey, and Tancred. They possess a level of aggressiveness that makes me feel like an outsider, or somehow a betrayer of the faith.”

  “Do you find yourself emotionally drawn to their side? Or are you being pulled in the opposite direction?”

  “I’m paralyzed,” he blurted. “I guess that’s what bothers me. I can’t move in any direction. I don’t want to root for one side over the other.”

  “You want everyone to get along, like the truest Christian.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been to confession sinc
e you’ve been back?”

  He nodded.

  “How did that make you feel?” She wouldn’t ask what he had said, but hoped this question would tell her.

  “Like I was back in that Iraqi bomb shelter,” he said. “I closed the door of the confessional and I sat down and I wanted to scream.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It was a packed chapel, and only the priest is required to honor the seal of confession.”

  Major Dell scowled out a question. “Is that why everyone whispers in the confessional?”

  He nodded.

  “I never knew.”

  “Make a note for your superiors,” he added. “That’s the only religious secret I know.”

  The analyst gave him a disapproving look but let it pass. It wasn’t the confessional that had made him feel trapped, she suspected. But what situation weighed most heavily on him? The students? Being home and bound to the base? The sixteen years he’d been lost and wandering? Or sixteen years of feeling not lost at all?

  This was going to take a while.

  He looked at her. “That wasn’t a joke, Major. Is the army still worried that I’ve been turned?”

  “I honestly can’t say.”

  “You know, maybe it’s not the captivity that scares me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as a kid, the church and my faith provided fuel to keep me growing. While I was in Iraq, I needed others to survive. Now that I’m back, the army has decided to give me everything I need until I don’t need it anymore or they don’t need me. What happens when I become self-sustaining?”

  “Let’s not fly before we’ve poked our beak over the edge of the aerie.”

  “Am I that bad off?” He laughed self-consciously.

  “Not at all,” she replied. Then, trying not to sound augural, she added, “But let’s not assume that the army wants to toss you, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, looking at her with a little smile. “Though that’s one thing that is very different in Iraq.”

  “What’s that?” she asked with interest.

  “The people were provincial,” he said with knowing eagle eyes. “No one ever had to pretend they didn’t know more than they knew.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

  Ryan Kealey was standing in his living room with the TV remote in his hand and his mouth open. He was staring at Dr. Hanif al-Shenawi on his 4K television. The channel was Al Jazeera America, which he’d reluctantly flipped to after catching a brief flash of the doctor on CNN. He figured they’d give the bastard all the coverage they could. Only the most basic facts would be reliable but this was a definite basic fact: the man who disappeared into a San Antonio mosque just before the mayor was assassinated was now going to be the top-level manager of a nonsectarian hospital in Basra that would be under joint stewardship of Iraq and Iran.

  The news coverage did not include an interview with the doctor, only footage of him walking around the large, flat, dusty vacant lot where the hospital was going to be constructed, chatting and smiling with his colleagues, motioning in the air at future wings and floors. News of the hospital would have been staggering enough. News that the man who traveled an opium route out of Iran through Iraq only six months ago was going to be the public face of this project . . . Kealey wanted to sit down and spend the rest of the evening researching this, but the doorbell rang.

  He was expecting her. After a few perfunctory phone calls, the courteous coolness of which made it clear that Kealey did not want to rekindle anything with Allison Dearborn, it had come down to the stupid, unavoidable fact that he still had a pair of her earrings. They were emeralds, they were antiques, they belonged to her grandmother, and she would have been heartbroken if anything happened to them in the mail. Even overnight mail couldn’t be fully trusted. It made simple, aggravating sense for him to hand them to her, and since his neighborhood was on the way home for her from the office, her stopping by was preferable to being caught up in dinner somewhere. Kealey had no patience for small talk these days and an aversion to anything deeper, and dinner with her would surely strike deep. With this arrangement, even after the doorbell rang his mind could still be hovering on the broadcast, barely thinking of her.

  He opened the door of his newish townhouse, virtually identical to every other townhouse in the area, brick in the front, vinyl siding in the back, no exterior decorations. In this neighborhood, it was a fair bet that any house without a summer flag in front or a red-white-and-blue-ribbon wreath on the door or children’s toys out front or out back was the residence of a CIA employee. They were temporary leasers, counting down until they were reassigned as if the neighborhood were a helicopter pad, and Allison knew it. There was a trace of pity in her expression when he opened the door. He could have told her that he now owned the property on the mountain in Connecticut but he chose not to. The ownership was abstract. He hadn’t set a foot on the land since the day he wired the down payment. And telling her might have complicated their simple ending.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He shook his head, unwilling to engage in surprise that she could still read him so easily. He just walked back over the newish, beige wall-to-wall carpet to the living room, letting her close the door and follow him to the TV. The channel was now showing footage of Dr. al-Shenawi clucking over the crowded, unsanitary conditions in an existent hospital in some remote location in Iraq.

  Allison looked at Kealey’s face, looked at the TV. “It can’t be the hospital that’s the problem, so it must be the man,” she said.

  “I’ve been trying to find him for six months,” Kealey said, choosing his words carefully as always to avoid giving too much information. “He was in a hot zone, let’s put it that way. And he vanished. Even factoring in the help of his extremely powerful friends, the complete absence of clues for how he got out and where he went has been. . . .”

  “Disappointing?”

  “It’s been a kick in the teeth. And suddenly here he is, fully publicized. We had no hint he was involved in this.”

  “So this is good, you found him.”

  Kealey laughed shortly and Allison glanced at him. He had never laughed at her for any flash of optimism before.

  “The hospital is a problem,” he said.

  “Because it’s Iran working with Iraq? It’s surprising for old enemies but surely it must be a good omen.”

  “Iraq and Iran have been cozying up for a few years now,” Kealey said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “It was one of the unforeseen consequences of the sanctions against Iran for their nuclear program. They started to realize that they needed at least the semblance of friends and allies, so they started courting Iraq as soon as our troops pulled back. They started with one of the richest offerings they could make: natural gas.”

  “A trade agreement?”

  “More fundamental than that. They ran pipelines into Iraq to make the exporting as easy and cheap as possible. Mutual assistance has been proliferating ever since. This isn’t even the first joint hospital. The Iranians have been building clinics for their pilgrims to certain Shiite holy sites in Iraq.”

  “So this is a problem because our foreign policy has been assuming a natural state of distrust between the two of them?”

  “Our foreign policy doesn’t assume anything. Look, there have been instances where Iran has worked together with Al Qaeda. That’s like yoking a shark and a crocodile together and watching them pull a plow. They hate each other, yet it happens, every now and then. So there are no illusions being shattered here. A hospital in Basra, a hub on a major opium route? No heads spinning over that one, either. But Iran publicly, proudly helping to build a nonsectarian hospital? That’s a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense. Iran still throws non-Muslims into jail for years whenever they feel like it. Christians and Jews are barely tolerated; everyone else is tormented at will. The regime isn’t going t
o back off of that any time soon. So why? What are they gaining? What do they think they’re doing?”

  “Maybe Iraq made it a requirement of the joint partnership?”

  “Sure,” Kealey said, in a tone of voice that said, not likely. “And then they put this man at the head of it.”

  “He could be involved in opium?”

  “A bit more than that.”

  Kealey abruptly turned off the TV, strode to the air conditioner gauge and turned it off, strode to the table next to the door where he picked up Allison’s earrings, and placed them in her hand without looking at her. He refused to allow his mind to observe, at any level of remove, that this was a woman he’d once come very close to loving. He cut his mind into manageable surfaces like her emeralds.

  “You’re heading out, too?” she asked.

  “I need to access some databases.”

  He reached for a cap from the coat-closet shelf. She put a hand on his other arm. “Ryan, I’ve never seen you like this. I’ve seen you in mission mode and this is different. You are locked off and locked down.”

  “I’m focused, Allison, that’s all.”

  “No, I’ve seen you focused, too.”

  He made a move toward the front-door handle, but she stopped him.

  “I don’t need a Cassandra, Allison. I know what terrors the world holds in store.”

  “Yes, and you also know how you respond to them, which is why it’s important for you to know when you’re responding differently. If I had to guess, I would say that you are deeply confused at something, by something, over something . . . whatever it is, it is eating at you at your very core. And you look like you’re going to pick up a ball-peen hammer and smash it because you don’t understand it.”

  Again, he would not let himself feel surprise at her insight, but this time it was harder to sequester the reaction. She really was outstanding. He wanted to tell her about Hernandez, about Isobel Garcia. He wanted to confess to her that yes, it was driving him crazy, trying to figure out why the hired killer of the drug dealer would have assassinated the youngest Hispanic mayor in the United States. They had checked Garcia’s history and it showed no reason why Hernandez would have any particular grudges against her, no indications that somehow she would be a more formidable opponent for him than anyone else had been. No connections at all. It was possible the killer was a mercenary and had simply been hired by someone else, but then Dr. al-Shenawi had been in San Antonio, too, after just meeting with Hernandez. The drug dealer had to have been involved. None of it made sense and they had no leads, because Hernandez had disappeared as completely as the doctor had. Every day Kealey cursed his assignment because he should have been the one to go after Hernandez. Instead he had wasted six months only to find another unfathomable event.