Brother's Keeper

by C. E. Smith

  Late that evening, Burkett sits on his couch, the television muted. He’s just eaten a packet of tacos, and the wrappers lie before him on the coffee table.

  He’s wondering if that tiny stroke could have distorted his perception and recognition of human faces. Perhaps the scarring, however small, has caused some network to be rerouted. Perhaps there is a disruption of the subcortical fibers that link facial memory to whatever nucleus is respon­sible for generating an appropriate emotional response.

  Again he opens Véronique’s book to the picture of Tarik. It causes involuntary changes in his breathing and heart rate – his sympathetic nervous system responding to an enemy. A phrase from medical school comes to mind: fight or flight. And yet he can’t be sure, not if this man was working in Saudi Arabia at the time.

  In the index he finds his name paired with his brother’s. He turns to a passage describing him and Nick as health workers, victims of ‘one of the more brazen kidnappings’.

  The men were accused of evangelizing Christianity, which may have been true in Lorie’s case, but Burkett, a surgeon, describes himself as ‘agnostic’.

  She goes on to discuss International Medical Outreach and their mislead­ing denials of religious affiliation. She quotes an anonymous source:

  ‘We have to balance safety concerns with our goal of sharing Jesus – not that our brothers and sisters act out of fear.’

  It takes a few pages for her to return to Burkett and Nick. He’d expected an exaggerated account of brutality and ultimate escape, but she avoids sensationalism altogether.

  The men suffered torture at the hands of a young jihadist commander known as Tarik, who was also likely involved in murdering the surgeon Owen Burkett, brother of Ryan. Lorie, under duress, read a statement condemning the Christian church as ‘a tool of Satan’ and proclaiming Muhammad ‘God’s highest prophet’.

  Under duress? It doesn’t do justice to what Nick endured – or what more he could have endured had Tarik not started in on Burkett, if Burkett hadn’t been there to suffer in his place. How much longer could Nick have held out? If he’d read the statement at the outset – if he’d been practical about torture – Burkett would still have a full complement of fingers.

  He wonders if Véronique saw the video of Nick’s renunciation. Perhaps she discovered it on some jihadist website. A memory comes to him: the men and boys at that madrassa gathered around a laptop, cheering the videos of suicide bombs. He wonders if Nick’s apostasy has provided similar entertainment.

  Why does he remember – or believe he remembers – the face of Tarik so much more clearly than those of past friends and girlfriends?

  He tries to picture his brother, but the face that comes to him is his own. Though genetically identical there were always subtle differences of appearance. In high school and college it was never a problem for the close friends they shared, their wrestling coaches and teammates, to tell them apart. It was never a problem for Amanda Grey. She and those others saw differences in the Burkett twins that went beyond their hair­cuts and clothes, differences perhaps in the way they stood still, the way their faces relaxed between expressions. Those differences, whatever they might have been, seem to have slipped away from Burkett’s memory, if he ever understood them at all.

  He goes to the closet and opens a shoebox of old pictures, mostly from their days of wrestling. He takes a stack at random. Shuffling through them, he’s relieved at how easily he can distinguish himself from his brother, but it doesn’t take him long to realize his need for contextual clues, like Owen’s ring or perennially mismatched socks.

  But the face of Tarik he sees with clarity. As he closes the shoebox his eye drifts to the gun safe in the back corner. Fight or flight. He dials the combination and opens the lid and stares at the gun on its bed of rippled foam – the .45-caliber pistol that his grandfather had with him when he died in the Battle of the Bulge. It is one of the few items from his father’s storage unit that he decided to keep.

  He sits on the couch with the gun. As his father taught him he pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is empty. After years the method of disassembly comes back to him. He lays the parts on the coffee table, wipes each with a moist cloth: the spring, the firing pin, the ejector. The simple machinery of killing.

  27

  The laboratory occupies a five-story building in downtown Louisville, near the campus of the medical school. Burkett takes the elevator to the top floor and follows the corridor to room 506, where he gazes through the window in the door at the polished counters and faucets, mouse cages, and cluttered desks and computers.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A woman stands behind him, waiting to enter. She is young, probably a graduate student.

  ‘Just looking for a friend of mine,’ he says, thinking he might have worn his white coat and scrubs just to give an impression of belonging.

  ‘Hussein,’ he says.

  ‘Oh.’ The name makes her smirk. Perhaps Tarik has shared his feelings on female scientists in tank tops.

  ‘He’s at lunch,’ she says, glancing at her watch. ‘You’re welcome to wait.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll come by later.’

  At the end of the hallway he finds an alcove with vending machines and a table and chairs. The window offers a view of the courtyard and main entrance. There are other ways to enter the building, but from where he sits he can hear the elevator well enough to keep track of its coming and going.

  Less than half an hour passes before he spots Tarik crossing the courtyard. He carries a briefcase by a shoulder strap and wears a plaid oxford shirt buttoned to the throat. He shaved the beard, but the same wire-rimmed glasses sit crookedly on his face. The tattered khakis look familiar as well. An image of Tarik’s face flashes before him: a look of sur­gical concentration as he works the clippers.

  A ding signals the arrival of the elevator. Instead of going straight to the lab, Tarik makes a stop at the bathroom. Burkett waits before following him inside. Tarik stands at a urinal, keeping his eyes fixed on the tiles as Burkett passes behind him to the farthest sink. Burkett holds his hands under the warm water, and before long Tarik approaches the counter and bends over the second sink down. Their eyes meet ever so briefly in the mirror. Burkett is certain it’s Tarik, even if Tarik shows no sign of recognition.

  A nametag hangs by a Louisville Cardinal lanyard:

  hussein al bihani, m. d.

  Fellow, Endocrinology

  If Burkett were holding a gun, he could kill him without remorse. There would be justice in it, a life for a life. He imagines doing the job with his bare fists: blunt, repeated trauma. He feels an ache, a pressure building in his chest that can only be relieved by the crack of bone under a cushion of flesh. Tarik’s brittle facial bones and hollow sinuses seem to have been designed for the sole purpose of being ground to bits by Burkett’s knuck­les. He thinks of Owen’s broken metacarpal, the boxer’s fracture he might well have sustained against this very face. The desire to do harm feels deeper than any idea of hatred or vengeance, and it takes all his strength to keep his balled fists from the course laid out in his mind.

  Tarik dries his hands at the towel dispenser and exits the bathroom. Burkett studies himself in the mirror. What drove him just now to risk being recognized by Tarik? Burkett hardly bears any resemblance to that bearded, emaciated prisoner back in Khandaros, but if he had to follow Tarik into the bathroom, why couldn’t he simply observe him from inside one of the stalls? Is there a part of Burkett that wants to be recognized? He’s come here ostensibly to confirm Tarik’s identity, but on a deeper level it’s clear that he yearns for some kind of physical confrontation. And how close they came to it: if Tarik, standing at the sink, had only taken a second look – if he’d uttered some word of recognition – perhaps Burkett would have tried to beat him to death.

  Passing the laboratory, Burkett pauses again at the window in the
door. The woman is seated at a desktop computer. Tarik dips his hand into a cage and lifts a squirming mouse by its tail.

  The official reason for Burkett’s visit to Louisville is a conference on bariatric surgery, a subject that holds little interest for him, but he needed an excuse to make the trip. He returns to his hotel and changes into his suit for a cocktail party with the other surgeons from the conference. Wearing his name tag he glides among the guests, his eyes seeking out the one or two youngish female surgeons, but instead finds himself in tedious conversation with some gray eminence from Mass General who sips an old fashioned. More than once a waiter comes by with a tray of drinks, but Burkett declines.

  The following afternoon he sits in his car watching the entrance to the research facility where Tarik works. When a policeman chastises him for blocking the fire lane, he circles the block and pulls into a Taco Bell. He buys his usual four tacos and forty-ounce Coke and takes a table with a view of the research building.

  Not till dusk does Tarik emerge in the courtyard. He makes his way down the sidewalk. Burkett eases his car to the curb across from a parking struc­ture. He shifts into park and turns on his hazards. A disheveled vagrant, obviously schizophrenic, paces the sidewalk and shouts at some imagined foe. Burkett risks provocation by clicking his automatic locks, but when the man turns the confusion and anger seem to fall from his grimy face.

  He almost misses the Red Honda Accord. On the highway Burkett holds back two to four car lengths, vaguely irritated by Tarik’s strict adherence to the speed limit, his formal use of blinkers. He lives in a nondescript, two-story house. Tarik parks and climbs his front stoop and fumbles with his keys. Burkett watches him in the rearview mirror while NPR plays at a low volume. Tarik stands for a moment in the open doorway, shuffling through his mail, before he disappears inside.

  Véronique’s friend in the FBI, Peter Gorman, shares with Burkett the privilege of being a minor character in her book. Having been stationed in Khandaros at the time of Owen’s murder, Gorman served as a liaison during the investigation. He still regrets the lack of progress in that case, which to Burkett’s mind makes him the perfect man to bring justice to Tarik.

  Burkett tells him about the picture in the book, how Tarik is prac­ticing medicine in Louisville. If Gorman, during their conversation on the phone, doesn’t respond with quite the outrage Burkett might have expected, he makes up for it with swiftness of action, sending a text message in less than twenty-four hours. Subject in police custody. The cour­tesy of a text likely owes something to Véronique, but Burkett sees too an abiding commitment on Gorman’s part to tracking down Owen’s killer.

  And now that Tarik is in custody, all Burkett has to do is wait for the inevitable. He imagines Tarik in an interrogation room with two-way mirrors while forensic experts overturn the contents of that house, uncovering maps of so-called soft targets, blueprints of some stadium or shopping mall. It is only a matter of time.

  His next contact with the FBI comes not from Gorman but from a woman in her forties with short, gray-streaked hair. She sits facing his desk in a business suit while he studies a recent mug shot of Tarik. He assures her that they have the right man, the very same sociopath he knew in Khandaros, a doctor by training who took time off to pursue side interests in kidnapping and terrorism.

  ‘Why would a physician become a terrorist?’ she asks in a disingenuous tone that all at once makes Burkett feel like he’s the one under suspicion.

  ‘Aside from being a religious fanatic? The question you should be asking is how a terrorist could obtain a license to practice medicine in the United States.’

  ‘Please,’ she says with a conciliatory smile. ‘I know this is a sensitive subject, I know you’ve been through quite a bit. But if we could just sort out the facts?’

  Sound travels all too easily through the walls and doors of his clinic, so he’s almost whispering when he says, ‘What did you find when you searched his home?’

  ‘I’m sorry but I can’t comment on that.’

  ‘Will he be deported or tried here in the States?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Is he even still in custody?’

  ‘We’re following every lead,’ she says, as if this were an answer to his question. ‘You might be aware that his father is a prominent figure in the newly formed government of South Khandaros.’

  ‘And no doubt their family got rich through the secession. Have you looked into their bank accounts, their investments?’

  ‘We’re exploring every angle,’ she says. From her briefcase she draws a sheaf of stapled pages. ‘This is the text of the statement you gave four years ago. You describe Tarik as having brown eyes and a beard, but no distinguishing marks on the face.’

  He shrugs. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Hussein al Bihani, as you might know, has a prominent mole on his left cheek.’

  ‘It was covered by the beard!’ Burkett says, exasperated. ‘Surely you wouldn’t see that as an inconsistency.’ He jabs his finger against the mug shot on his desk. ‘This is the guy, no question.’

  ‘In a case like this,’ she says, ‘we can’t leave any stone unturned.’

  A week passes before he hears from Gorman. From the voicemail he can tell things aren’t going as planned. It is not anything Gorman says, just the tone of voice, hints of vexation and apology. He returns the call that same afternoon, as soon as he has a break between appendectomies.

  ‘This guy’s clean,’ Gorman says.

  ‘You have to search his house,’ Burkett says. ‘Sit him down for an inter­rogation. Turn up the heat.’

  A ridiculous cinematic cliché: he imagines the faint static on the line as the sound of Gorman’s eyes rolling.

  ‘Just so you know,’ Gorman says, ‘we have searched his house, we’ve interviewed his contacts abroad. There is documentation of his work in Saudi Arabia during the time of your captivity.’

  ‘He has to be in the United States for a reason.’

  ‘Apparently he’s interested in doing a fellowship in endocrinology,’ Gorman says, as though pointing out the obvious.

  ‘How noble,’ Burkett says.

  ‘It’s not at all uncommon for foreign physicians to study here. He says he plans to open a diabetes clinic at the new children’s hospital under con­struction in South Khandaros.’

  ‘I should go up there and talk to him,’ Burkett says. ‘I could wear a wire.’

  ‘That’s the last thing you want to do. He’s got the best lawyer money can buy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going to court,’ Burkett says.

  Burkett’s pager goes off: his last patient, a routine appendectomy, is complaining of chest pain. He logs into the medical record and checks the latest vitals and labs.

  ‘Will you continue investigating him?’

  ‘We’ll keep an eye on him, sure.’

  ‘Do you still even believe me? Do you believe me when I say this guy’s a terrorist?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ Gorman says. ‘It matters what I can prove.’

  Burkett sighs. His pager goes off yet again – the same patient, now short of breath.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ Gorman is saying. ‘You should think about getting some help.’

  Some help. When he goes upstairs to see his patient, the phrase echoes in his mind, adopting the rhythm of the heartbeat in his stethoscope. The psychiatric euphemism might be annoying, but he has to wonder if he could be wrong about Hussein, if his history of drug abuse and head trauma have made him susceptible to delusions. Perhaps it isn’t unusual for crime victims to see their assailants in the faces of strangers.

  But the man in the bathroom was Tarik, no question. Gorman and probably Véronique both seem to suspect him of being delusional. He lost his brother, suffered trauma, witnessed the murder of his friend. No surprise that he should i
magine his chief tormentor living just a few hours away. An individual who can become the focus of all blame, a fitting target for revenge.

  He recalls that his brother had a brush with mental health during their first year of medical school. The dean and several of Owen’s classmates had expressed concern over what they called ‘excessive religiosity’. It was a fleeting controversy – Owen was given a clean bill of health – but Burkett had always been embarrassed for his brother, that he would jeop­ardize his reputation among the faculty and students.

  28

  Tarik’s house stands out for its lack of Halloween decoration. Through a lighted window Burkett can see him in a reflector vest lifting his arms overhead in what looks at first like some prayer ritual but in fact rep­resents an exercise routine. He’s preparing for a jog, which is convenient for Burkett: it will give him a chance to reconnoiter the house.

  It is almost eight p. m. and nearly dark. Burkett worked all day in Nash­ville. He has to be back in the operating room at seven a. m. to take down a colostomy. He is wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He left his phone in Nashville should someone later pull the record of its location. He has a disposable in the console but doesn’t expect he’ll need it.

  The yards on either side of Tarik’s display all manner of gore and dismemberment. A boy of about ten brandishes a severed arm while a man, presumably his father, hoists some kind of bloodstained corpse or zombie into a tree.

  Tarik emerges in sleek running tights, his arms and legs sheathed in Lycra. It is the look of a serious runner, a marathoner perhaps. He never imagined Tarik as a runner. Even if he has no intention of challenging Tarik to a foot race, it bothers him how little he knows of his personal life, this physician and jihadist who runs with brisk, loping strides.