Gabriel remembered the inner thrill he experienced when he first saw the e-mail. This beautiful, intelligent man had made the initial overture. It was only when he saw his response to that first e-mail that he recalled the soldier, Rodney Jones. His answering e-mail, sent on the chunky cell phone less than five minutes after Mohammad’s e-mail arrived, said that Rodney Jones had been airlifted to Germany for treatment. “I think he’ll recover,” Gabriel wrote. Nothing else on Rodney Jones. And then, as Gabriel was now surprised and almost embarrassed to see, his very first e-mail had been a flirt. “Would like to see you.”
It took four days for Mohammad to answer. In those four days Gabriel was in turmoil. Had his e-mail been too blatant? Afghanistan was not Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, still that epicenter of gay life. Moreover, Gabriel didn’t truly know who Mohammad was, other than a man in hospital service who had just one day appeared at the hospital at the Bagram Air Base. As he now read it, he remembered how elated he was with Mohammad’s next e-mail. “How about Tuesday at three at the Red Rose on Zafir Street? Do you know it? Let me know?”
Gabriel let him know in ten seconds that the answer was yes. And so it had started, as Gabriel was reminded when he read through the several hundred e-mails, some as brief as three words, that he was rapidly falling in love. He could see now that anyone reading these e-mails, even though some were terse and appeared coded, could trace the evolution of the relationship and how it continued even after Mohammad first mentioned his wife and children. The disclosure that Mohammad had a family didn’t give Gabriel any pause. He ignored it. He had had affairs with married family men in the past.
And then as he read the e-mails, Gabriel came to their abrupt stop. That’s when the pudgy colonel had informed him that his longing notes to Tom Lathem-his fellow intern and lover at Mount Sinai long before he met Cam-had been discovered. Gabriel had been taken out of Afghanistan immediately and his military e-mail account suspended. During the two weeks it took to process his discharge at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, he did not have access to his personal e-mail. When he did retrieve his personal e-mail, it was easy for him to remember Mohammad’s e-mail address.
Weeks later, it was Mohammad who first wrote about wanting to leave Afghanistan for the United States. He was worried, he said, for his safety. Too many of his neighbors knew that he had friends who were American officers. Those watchful, suspicious neighbors believed he was a translator for United States soldiers, or a nurse who treated only wounded American soldiers and contractors, or an informant.
Gabriel also saw, to his embarrassment, that his own e-mails to Mohammad were self-aggrandizing. There were suggestions that he had the power to bring him and his family to the United States. Gabriel knew he had no such power. Any semblance had been stripped from him with the patches that gave his major’s rank, that ancient status between captain and lieutenant colonel. Some of the e-mails included as attachments the futile letters Gabriel, in fact, wrote to the secretary of defense, the president, and the two senators from New York. In college Gabriel had read Saul Bellow’s Herzog, in which Moses Herzog, the lead character, obsessively wrote eloquent and pointless letters to the famous living and dead. Herzog’s letters were pointless. So, Gabriel knew, were his.
Gabriel could see in Mohammad’s final e-mails a more strident, pleading tone for help in getting out of Afghanistan. Some of the e-mails attached pictures of his attractive wife and children. He even wrote that he would leave them behind.
Suddenly Gabriel discovered e-mails that were addressed to him by Mohammad and had date and time stamps. But Gabriel was certain he had never seen them before. There was a chain of e-mails from Mohammad that asked Gabriel if he could find several men. Gabriel recognized only one of the eight names. Silas Nasar. There were e-mails from Gabriel to Mohammad in which Gabriel asked for information about Silas Nasar, a name he had never seen or heard and other men with Arabic names whom Gabriel had met in Afghanistan and who were friends of Mohammad and Silas, who, Mohammad wrote, were now living in all the boroughs of New York City except Manhattan.
Gabriel had never seen Mohammad’s last chain of e-mails. And he had never seen, and certainly had never written, the e-mails that bore his address: drhauser@aol.com.
And then Mohammad’s e-mails vanished two months earlier. Gabriel’s last, pleading, almost hysterical e-mails to Mohammad asked, Where are you? Can you call? I’m worried. It was, he recognized, the same sense of bewildered loss he’d experienced years earlier when Jerome Fletcher, just weeks before he was stabbed to death, had simply stopped communicating with him.
When he finished his hours of reading, Gabriel restacked the papers neatly on the coffee table and fell back more deeply into the sofa. He realized that anyone reading all these e-mails would know that he had been in love and, while living with Cam, he had operated in secrecy to bring Mohammad Hussein to the United States so that they could be together. For the first time, the collective weight of these e-mails led Gabriel, too, to acknowledge to himself the depth of this attachment to Mohammad, this now-obvious love for him.
He desperately needed to find Cam. There was no doubt that he also loved Cam and needed to explain, if he could, the emotional betrayal the e-mails laid bare. Using his iPhone’s contact list, he called the ten or so friends they knew most well. He reached five of them, three women and two men, and they didn’t know where Cam was and hadn’t heard from him. He left urgent voice mail messages for the others. He called Cam’s office. A recording said the office was closed for the day but that the caller could leave a message in the firm’s general voice mail box.
Cam Dewar was a man who always made himself available. He was in public relations. He had an iPhone, a Galaxy, and an iPad with him at all times. During the course of each day he sent a steady stream of text messages to Gabriel. They were love notes, reminders of things to do or places to go, gentle jokes. Gabriel had not received a text message from Cam in four hours.
Cam was lost in the world, Gabriel thought. His mind raced through the possible wreckage. Cam could be dead, he could have been arrested, he could have decided to sleep in the park along with the thousands of stranded out-of-towners. No matter what else, Cam was certainly hurt in his heart, at that deep emotional level of love betrayed.
Raj Gandhi answered on the first pulse of his cell phone. “Dr. Hauser?” he asked.
“Where are you?”
“Where am I? In my newsroom.” He waited. “How can I help you?”
“I need to see you.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Why?”
“Silas Nasar.”
“I know that name.”
“I know the name, Mr. Gandhi, and I know that person, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
GINA CARBONE WAS standing at Roland Fortune’s left side. Three senior officers, in full dress uniforms, were at his right. In front of them was a table with weapons, such as grenade launchers and M-16s and other assault weapons that Roland had never seen or smelled before. They had the distinct odor of grease and cordite. On a video screen behind them were oversize images in high definition of the three men arrested in the Olympic Tower. Unlike the secret prisoners at Pier 37, these men were now, as Gina had intended, public figures.
Roland Fortune spoke to a press room with at least thirty reporters seated on folding chairs. “I’m pleased to announce that, just two hours ago, elements of the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism unit thwarted at its final stages an attack by rocket launchers and high explosives on one of the most sacred places on the planet, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the heart of Manhattan. This impending assault was not, we believe, a random plot by rogue opportunists. Our best assessment is that the individuals who were on the brink of destroying the cathedral are linked to the despicable assaults on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 9/11 Memorial, the brutal assassinations of our brave police, the bombing of the historic intersection of Wall and Broad Streets, and the war at the George Washington Carver Houses.”