Riley shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t mean that. What’s happened to you, Sal?”
His former teammate’s closed fist suddenly exploded across Riley’s left cheek. “I said my name is Hakeem! Sal is dead.”
Riley spit a mouthful of blood onto the cement at the other man’s feet and looked at him with disgust. “Whatever. Hakeem will be dead too, soon enough.”
Slowly, a heart-chilling smile spread across Hakeem’s face. “Right you are, old friend. But I don’t think the circumstances of my demise will be quite what you have in mind.”
“Come on, Sa-Hakeem. What’s left to do? You’ve restored your family honor. Thousands are dead. The PFL is in shambles.”
“The PFL? Oh no, it’s not in shambles… yet,” Hakeem said with that same sickening grin.
“What do you mean ‘yet’?” Riley was trying to keep his wits about him, but he felt like he was right on the edge of a downward psychological slide from which he might not be able to recover.
“You know how it is, Riley. No one really cares about the regular season games. They only care about the big ones.”
The sick feeling that Riley had in his stomach was now becoming a sharp pain. His voice became pleading. “You can’t be serious… Please, man. Leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone? Maybe you should be taking your own advice! Maybe if you’d left it alone you wouldn’t be sitting here bleeding all over yourself. What are you even doing here, Riley?”
“I’m tracking down a murderer. I’m hunting for Hakeem the terrorist.” Riley paused. Then he added softly, “I’m avenging the death of my best friend.”
Silence filled the air.
Hakeem stood up again and circled around Riley. “You weren’t supposed to be here, Riley. You’re supposed to be back in Colorado, taking care of Meg and Alessandra.”
“Funny, I thought that was your job.”
A hand came hard across the back of Riley’s head, rocking him in the chair. “You forget your place, old friend!” Hakeem walked around in front of Riley and slowly shook his head. “Why have you come here? This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Yeah, well, surprise. It did. So are you going to kill me, too?”
Anger flashed in Hakeem’s eyes. “I could have put a bullet in the back of your head in that house. And believe me, I’m the only one that’s keeping you alive right now.”
“What am I supposed to do? Thank you? Hey, I guess Sal’s not such a bad guy after all,” Riley said sarcastically.
A fist struck Riley’s face again. The other man’s mouth moved to within inches of his ear, and he hissed, “I said my name is Hakeem.”
Riley turned his head and the two men stared nose-to-nose. Blood and saliva filled Riley’s mouth. He prepared to spit, then turned at the last moment and shot the bloody liquid to the ground, splashing both their feet.
Hakeem straightened and walked to the single barred window Riley could see at the back of the room. He breathed in deeply, inhaling the salty night air that Riley could catch only a hint of through the scent of the blood coating his face. “I don’t understand you, Pach. You go around Afghanistan killing people. You come here to kill people. No one hits harder than you do on the football field. But you’re soft on the inside. There is no hate in your eyes. I mean, you’ve just found out that your best friend has lived a double life and betrayed you. And what do you do? Rather than dishonor him by spitting in his face, you spit on the ground.”
“You’ve dishonored yourself enough already, Sal. You don’t need my help,” Riley said, the swelling in his cheek causing him to lisp slightly. He noticed that the mention of Sal’s name hadn’t drawn a swing this time. “You kill out of hate. When I have to kill, I do it out of duty. And I don’t kill innocents, only perpetrators.”
“Ah, the higher ethics of murder.”
“My actions are not murder. Bombing a stadium is murder.”
“Then what do you call your actions, O virtuous warrior?”
Riley’s temper went over the edge. “You want to know what I call it every time I kill some button-pushing psycho like you? Preventative medicine!”
Hakeem walked back from the window and straddled his chair again. He was chuckling, and Riley knew his temper had cost him an edge.
“That’s quite the high road, Riley-‘Your killing is bad, but mine is good.’” Hakeem’s smile quickly disappeared. “But what do you call it when your government blows up a house, and a ten-year-old boy watches his family die in front of him? Was my mother a perpetrator? Was my aunt a perpetrator? Your president wiped out my whole family. Am I supposed to sit back and say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. Accidents do happen’?”
“Get over yourself, Sal. There’re a lot of people who have had horrible things happen in their lives, but they don’t go turning themselves into a walking mass of C- 4.”
Hakeem started to reach across to hit Riley again but pulled his arm back and stared at him.
Riley realized his temper was about to cost him any influence he might have on his old friend. He forced himself to dial the rhetoric back a notch. “Listen, I’m sorry you lost your family. I can’t imagine what you went through. But this-what you’re doing-it’s just plain whacked.”
“See, there-right there!” Hakeem cried, poking Riley on his bare shoulder. “That’s why I say you’re soft. If you hit me, I’ll hit you back-only harder. That is the answer! If I hit you, what do you do? You just sit there and do nothing. Or you look for ‘alternatives’ or ‘understanding.’ And please spare me your ‘turn the other cheek’ drivel.”
“Wait a second; get your facts straight! If you hit someone close to me-someone I love-trust me, you won’t be doing it again. But if you hit me? Yeah, I’ll ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘take one for the team’ or whatever you want to call it.”
Hakeem laughed derisively. “Well, I’ll tell you what. According to your beliefs, Jesus ended up on the cross because He turned the other cheek. But Muhammad is a warrior; he struck the other cheek. One day Islam will dominate the earth because we fight back. It’s the way of the world-the strong take over the weak. Face it-my religion is one of strength; yours, of weakness.”
“Your religion? What religion do you have? I’ve read your file, Hakeem. You’re a Ba’athist-a worshiper of Saddam Hussein. I’ve got bad news for you, friend. Your god died at the end of a rope in 2006. Don’t go talking to me about religion. You have no more love for Allah than I do.”
Color flushed across Hakeem’s face, but his voice remained steady. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m no Ba’athist. Saddam was a strong leader, but he was not my god. I am a follower of Allah, the one true God. And I am a follower of Muhammad, his prophet. What I do, I do for Islam and in the name of Allah.”
Riley gave a bitter laugh at this religious declaration. “Maybe your own twisted brand of Islam. Most Muslims hate what you’re doing, but they won’t say anything out of fear one of you whack-jobs is going to plant a bomb in their mailbox.”
Hakeem dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Interpretation of the Koran has been watered down in the name of political correctness and world opinion. Tell me, what do these weak vessels do with Surah 5:33, where we are told that the only punishment for those who wage war against Allah and his prophet is that they should be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet chopped off? Why, in Surah 4:74, does Allah promise reward for those who sell this world’s life for the hereafter and die fighting for him?