That can’t be good, thought Lana. Not if he’s that cowed already. He knows his uncle a lot better than we do.
“Sit down,” Tahir said to him. “You, too.” He pointed to Emma.
Lana saw Don bristle and eyed him to be silent.
Tahir took a deep breath. “Do you love my nephew?” he asked Emma. “I mean really love him. No games now.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Sufyan, do you love Emma?” The first time he’d ever used her name.
“I do, Uncle.”
“Enough to die for her?”
“Yes.” Sufyan answered without pause.
“And you,” he turned back to Em. “Would you die for my nephew?”
“I would,” Emma said, eyes pooling.
Tahir looked at the ceiling. Perhaps he was seeing more than the smooth white surface. Perhaps he had his eyes on whatever he viewed as Paradise. The very possibility had Lana reaching back and placing her hand on her gun.
He shook his head at her, as if he knew what she’d just done, then sat across from the young couple. “I ask you these questions because today you almost died. I know killers. I know your mother and father have killed for their country, Emma. They have not told me that, but I know.” His fist thumped his chest to punctuate the last word. “And I know those men in the van were killers. But I will tell you both something: neither of you is a killer yet. You were both fine fighters out there, but I do not want Sufyan to have to kill. That is not why I came to America. And your parents do not want you to have to kill,” he told Emma.
He looked at Lana and Don. “Do you?”
“No, we don’t,” Lana said. Don shook his head.
“Each generation wants peace for its children,” Tahir said to Emma and Sufyan. “But you two have chosen love in a country that is having difficult times and won’t let you know peace with your kind of love. That is why I ask if you are ready to die, because if you are ready to die for love, then you must be ready to kill for it, or you will surely perish. Can you do that?”
Sufyan said yes immediately. Emma paused. Tears ran down her face. “I don’t want to have to kill.”
Lana wondered if her daughter was remembering the bloodshed on a bus about a year and a half ago, when Emma had tried to murder a madman, and the nightmares she had suffered in the aftermath of that sickening violence. Emma had been so young to learn — with such vicious visceral force — that sometimes you had to try to kill someone or be killed. Em had failed to slay that jihadist, but she’d injured him and saved countless lives with her courage. Now she was learning another side of that macabre equation: sometimes you have to kill for love.
“If you stay with Sufyan,” Tahir went on, “the decision to kill might be made for you. It is better to make that decision now. Your father and I are running around trying to keep you two safe. I am watching you while I am watching him, and he is probably watching me while he is watching you. It is likely that you will get yourselves killed doing this, and you might get us killed, too.
“We cannot keep doing this. You cannot be children running around like this is a game. If you choose love, you must grow up now. If you are willing to die for love, you must be willing to kill for it. That was how it was in Sudan, and that is how it is in America now. Do not try to fool yourselves. Do not play childish games. Or you will die and so will the people you love most.” Tahir settled his eyes on Emma. “You are welcome in my home. My nephew loves you and I will protect you with my life as I would protect him.”
Lana swallowed hard at his apparent sincerity.
He turned to Lana and Don. “We are in this together. I did not want this,” he looked at the young couple, “for their sakes. And I know you did not. But it is life.” He stepped over to Lana. “Now we must survive. All of us. Together.”
She couldn’t have said it better or more honestly.
Tahir took her hand in both of his and bowed his head. He repeated the gestures with Don.
“We three are strong,” he said, “because of those two.” He looked at Emma and Sufyan. “We have such powerful reasons.”
Forty minutes later, they sat at the dining room table and ate their first meal together.
Chapter 13
It’s going to be incredibly tight making the Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Bethesda. I’ve got to catch a flight leaving Seattle-Tacoma International in an hour and fifty-five minutes — and I don’t even know for certain that Elkins will be attending. But she did search for a time and place, then texted her family that she’d be home late. All from a phone that is not the one she uses for work. At least the defense establishment better hope she doesn’t because I’ve had no trouble hacking and tracking it. She’s installed an ad blocker to stop my flow of casino ads, but I changed the content and had them come from a new server. Lana’s clever. She switched to a new virtual private network. It didn’t stop me, though. I sniffed out messages to Emma coming from a new IP address and located Lana’s “gambling phone.” I’ve yet to hack into her work phone, however.
SeaTac is more than an hour away. It’s not a given I’ll make the flight, so as soon as I jump into my SUV I open Waze. It looks like clear sailing, and there don’t appear to be any police lurking in the firs to nail speeders, though I’m not too concerned about them. State patrol officers have been pressed to take on so many additional duties that America’s interstates feel more like autobahns.
People hurry from place to place as though they know how exposed they are to harm when they’re out and about. Major league baseball teams have been playing to empty stadiums for the past few weeks as media-savvy ISIS propagandists threaten “convocations of death,” spectacles only nihilists could enjoy. I am not a nihilist. My agenda is so much richer, if equally crimson. And I know how exposed Americans are, even at home. I know because I make a point of visiting them at random.
I’ll often split my screens into quadrants and turn on computer cameras just to see what strangers are doing as they watch their screens. Mostly, not much. They sit and stare, eyes like glazed donuts, and just as empty in the middle. What’s repugnant, frankly, are the extreme numbers pleasuring themselves. I take no pleasure whatsoever to see boys and girls — or men and women, for that matter — in various states of undress. I have no interest in voyeurism, but I do find cultural anthropology in the age of terror fascinating. Here’s the most curious thing I’ve noticed: Since the nuclear attack, nothing has changed in the privacy of people’s homes. If anything, more of them than ever are sitting in front of their computers touching themselves or Skyping with friends or dawdling over cat videos.
I think one big reason they are at their computers so much now is that unlike the physical world, which no longer proves comforting with fixed shorelines and geological features, the virtual world remains a steady, stable, predictable presence… if eminently penetrable.
My Mercedes averages ninety-seven miles an hour and I make it to the airport in only fifty-eight minutes. With only my computer case and shoulder bag, I’m seated in first class with four minutes to spare. I used to loathe flying when I was consigned to steerage at government expense. But now I deny myself nothing of wealth’s prerogatives. I skim from accounts in the States and abroad. Dollars, euros, Swiss francs, they’re all the same to me. Sometimes I pay the banks back by stymying the efforts of others queued behind me who also want to sack the virtual vaults. But I’ll admit it’s in my interest to keep the banks’ losses to a minimum so that my own efforts can continue as unimpeded as possible. I’m not greedy. I take only what I need to be comfortable. I couldn’t care less if Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, or Banco Santander, to note only four institutions that have endowed me of late, lose a few hundred thousand here or there. It all goes to a good cause, which at the moment is flying me comfortably to Reagan International so I can arrive at the Hope Center in Bethesda, Maryland, in time for Lana’s Gamblers Anonymous meeting.