Gabriel said nothing.
“So,” Davidson asked, “what did you talk about? Cut the shit. What did you do? What did you plan? This man was completely preoccupied with the planning for all this…” Davidson paused, waving an arm broadly. “All this jihad carnage. Don’t, don’t just tell me you were interested only in his chocolate dick. Same taste as his cousin’s?”
Gabriel continued to stare at him.
“Your time is running out, Doctor. I need information. I need to save lives. In my way, not yours.”
And suddenly a recollection crystallized for Gabriel. “You were in Iraq. I saved your life.”
“What’s that they used to say in New York?” Davidson asked. “That and a subway token will get you a ride.”
“You had a gut wound from a roadside bomb. Men usually die from gut wounds. I cured you.”
“I have another friend of yours even if unfortunately you can’t talk again to Mr. Nasar,” Davidson said.
There was a single bathroom in the underwater fortress. It had an iron door on iron hinges. Both the door and its hinges were more rusted than the rest of the spare, austere place. Like a kid in a school yard, Davidson pushed Gabriel in the direction of the bathroom. Gabriel resisted the impulse to push back. He had met men like Davidson before, one of them, in fact, was Roger Davidson himself. Gabriel knew Davidson was not a Marine, Navy SEAL, or a regular Army soldier, but a killer attached to some federal agency like the CIA, NSA, FBI, or an utterly anonymous group. Gabriel was strong, but not trained in the ways to kill. Davidson was.
When Davidson pulled open the iron door to the bathroom, Gabriel saw Mohammad Hussein. He was sitting on a chair next to an open latrine. Mohammad stood immediately, and just as immediately, Gabriel rushed forward to embrace him. Mohammad was even more slender than he had been in Afghanistan when they had hugged for the last time, in those last hours before Gabriel was taken out of the country. “It’s been so long, Gabriel,” Mohammad said in that slightly accented, almost perfect English that had made him such a valuable translator.
As Davidson was filming them with his cell phone, Gabriel said, “Where did you go? Where have you been?”
“I’m sorry I’ve caused you such heartache. All I can say is that I’ve been here, in this bathroom, for three hours.”
“How are your children?”
“Well, thank Allah.”
With his cell phone camera still running, Davidson said, “Don’t be shy, Mr. Hussein. Tell the doctor why you’re really here.”
“Gabriel, I was devoted to the Taliban. And now to ISIS. I am who I am, so I became an interpreter. I was trusted. I knew you were a special doctor, that you had permission to treat generals, colonels, CIA people even if all they got was paper cuts. My job was to get information. I had contact with you, with generals, State Department people, CIA, everyone, through you. Americans have an aversion to learning our language. I love English.”
Gabriel said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Even before you left, I found out that people like Mr. Davidson here were-how do you put it-alert to me. So after you left Kabul I was arrested by Mr. Davidson and his friends. I didn’t like it. They let me continue to e-mail you for a while as if nothing had happened. Then Mr. Davidson and his friends got the idea that if I escaped from the Americans I would find my way to ISIS. Mr. Davidson liked to beat me in the prison camp, his people raped my wife, they terrified my children. But all of them were still alive. I learned to listen to Mr. Davidson.”
“This person I hear you describing, the person I know as Mohammad Hussein,” Gabriel said, “isn’t you.”
“I was promised that if I was allowed to escape the detention center and went to Syria to join one of the rebel groups my wife and children would be safe. Mr. Davidson said I had a lot of value. I knew the languages, and I hated Americans. It would take time, he said, to establish my credibility. I might not succeed, but if I tried, he said, my wife and children wouldn’t be harmed again. He had his ways, he said, of tracking me and my sincerity. I was even given courses on tactics and ways of acting with groups like ISIS. I’m a good actor.”
“You’re lying to me now.”
“No, Gabriel, not now. In the past, yes, I did.”
“Did you love me?”
“I’m not sure what that means when that word comes from you.” “Why did you just hug me?”
“Why not?” Mohammad shrugged, the inelegant movement of a man Gabriel had always seen as innately, naturally elegant. “I found my way to ISIS. I found love there, mission, revenge. I was the only one there who knew English.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was sent back by ISIS to Kabul. Mr. Davidson was gone. I never found my wife and children. I still had my American credentials as a loyal translator. I still had your e-mails urging Americans to let me come to the U.S. because of all the service I had done for you as a nurse. And so I came to America.” He gestured casually at the dead man. “Silas Nasar was my first contact here.”
“Was he your cousin?”
“Of course not. But I knew you would love him. And I knew, Gabriel, how much you hated what America had done to you. A match made in heaven, you and Silas.”
“This man you are pretending to be now,” Gabriel repeated, “is not the person you are, Mohammad. I know you. You’re not a hater, you’re not a killer, you’re not a liar, not a pretender.”
“I never made you any promises. You never made any to me.”
“That’s enough,” Davidson suddenly interrupted. “Enough of this girlie talk. Let’s just get this done.”
Davidson then climbed a small circular iron stairwell. As though responding to a prearranged signal, Mohammad Hussein followed him. The woman who had unlocked Gabriel’s handcuffs reattached them and in an almost gentle tone said, “Follow them.” With no physical prodding, Gabriel too ascended the iron stairs.
A small door opened. Suddenly he was in the open air on the top of the strange building just above the flow of the vast river’s waters. Three men were already there, each with professional cameras and audio equipment. They wore ski masks revealing only their eyes. They wore black gloves. The cameras and audio equipment were off. Davidson led Gabriel into a makeshift, chain-link cage, large enough so that Gabriel could only stand and not bend over or turn. And then Davidson, too, put on a full-size ski mask and black gloves. He took off his blue blazer and white shirt and tossed them down the door into the stairwell. He dressed in the kind of white robe with a loose belt Gabriel had seen on thousands of normal civilian men in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Slender Mohammad Hussein, also wearing a ski mask he had pulled over his head and face before emerging into the open air, squeezed into the cage with Gabriel. He draped a heavy, professionally printed sign over Gabriel’s neck and chest. In Arabic, a language Gabriel could fluently read but barely speak, the sign read The Angel of Life and Death Defiles Islam. It read the same in English as well. Mohammad, without speaking to Gabriel, slipped out of the cage with a cat’s agility.
Beneath Gabriel’s feet was a slippery, viscous substance. But his keen mind and sensitive body focused on other things as the men with cameras, speaking in English, gave theatrical directions to Mohammad at the side of the cage and another man, unrecognizable to Gabriel, standing on the other side of the cage, also in a full mask.
Once the camera’s eye began to shine, Mohammad spoke: “What you are about to witness is the consequence of disloyalty to Islam. This man, called by infidels the Angel of Life, who in Allah’s eyes is the Angel of Death, joined the slaughter of the faithful in Iraq and Afghanistan. He kept alive those who killed us.”