After four weeks, his doctors had discharged him from acute care and moved him across town to NRH, where an award-winning team of therapists helped him to recover his mental acuity, long-term memory, and motor skills. The more alert and energetic he became, the more the past took shape in his mind and the more he regained muscle control—maintaining balance while standing upright, walking over uneven surfaces, holding a toothbrush, dressing and feeding himself.
But there had been bumps in the road. Quentin’s capacity for language, his ability to make decisions—known as “executive function”—and his memory of the days preceding the shooting were significantly impaired. At first he seemed unaware of his disabilities. But the more his body and mind healed, the more agitated he became about his limitations. He was especially disturbed by his aphasia and amnesia. When he struggled to string words together in a sentence or identified another blank spot in his memory, he would pace his room like a tiger, muttering to himself. Sometimes when Vanessa came to visit, he refused to talk to her.
For Vanessa, however, the hardest part wasn’t the stuttering pace of Quentin’s recovery; it was the depression into which he slipped when she confessed to him that his father was gone. He had asked about Daniel many times, but Vanessa had dissembled as if he were a small child. “He’s not here right now,” she told him. After a week of rehab, Dr. Greenberg cautioned her against extending the illusion too far. So she summoned her courage and told him the truth. His response confirmed the worst of her fears. She watched in agony as his face fell and his mouth hung open, as the light faded from his eyes and he lapsed into a different kind of coma—a coma of the heart.
For two days he lost all interest in human interaction. He stayed in bed, wrapped in blankets, and ignored everyone. Music didn’t soothe him. Neither did Ariadne’s messages. Vanessa interrogated his therapists, searching for a way to save him. They told her to be patient and to give him space; he would return to her in time. At some point she realized that he wasn’t just struggling with grief. He was struggling with guilt—that he had survived and that he couldn’t remember how Daniel died.
It was then that she had an epiphany: for Quentin to escape the tunnel, he had to find a way to bury his father on his own terms. So she retrieved Daniel’s postcards and letters and read them aloud to Quentin. The postcards were a travelogue of their port calls in the Caribbean, Panama, and the South Pacific. Daniel had written his first letter on Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, after Quentin met Ariadne. As Vanessa revived Daniel’s memories, speaking them with her own voice, they became like threads in a tapestry, weaving together the narrative of Quentin’s redemption.
He started to talk again, to add to Daniel’s stories, filling in details that his father had omitted. He asked Vanessa to read the Rarotonga letter twice and then told her about Ariadne—about the days they had spent circling the island on mopeds and hiking across its mountainous spine, about the nights they had walked on the beach beneath the stars, talking about everything in the world. His therapists informed her that his openness was a symptom of his brain injury. But she regarded it as a gift. For the first time in his life, she had an unobstructed window into his soul.
A week later, in a therapy session with Dr. Greenberg, Quentin had started to talk about the hijacking. His memories were inchoate and disorganized, but the neuropsychologist encouraged them, evaluating the consistency of his story and his capacity for answering questions. In time, the doctor told him about the investigators who wanted to talk to him. Quentin agreed to an interview, and Dr. Greenberg made the arrangements.
Upon reaching the hospital, Vanessa parked in the garage and walked through the lobby to the elevator. Soon, she emerged on Quentin’s floor and strolled down the hallway to his room. Dr. Greenberg met her at the door. A jovial man with a balding head and a scraggly beard, he looked more like a lumberjack than an expert in brain medicine. But he was as sharp as they came.
“He’s in good spirits,” the doctor said. “He really wants to do this. I’m going to limit the initial session to half an hour. I’ve made that clear to the agents. They can explore his surface memories, but I don’t want them to go too deep until we see how he responds.”
“Where will you be?” Vanessa asked, feeling a twinge of anxiety.
“I’ll be down the hall. If at any point you feel uncomfortable about the way it’s progressing, you can terminate the interview.” He touched her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right.”
When he left to get the investigators, Vanessa opened the door and found Quentin sitting upright on the bed, watching television. He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a Naval Academy sweatshirt, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
She kissed him on the forehead. “Hi, sweetie. How are you today?”
He stared at her a moment before smiling. The therapists called it “brain lag”—the second or two his mind required to adjust to something new. “Hey . . . Mom,” he replied, hesitating slightly between words. “I’m good . . . I want . . . to get this . . . over with.”
“I know you do,” she said warmly. “You’re going to do fine. Just take your time. There’s no need to rush. It’s okay if you don’t remember something.”
His eyes shifted to the bed, and he rubbed the hem of his blanket, as he did when he was nervous or upset. “I will . . . tell them . . . what I know.”
Vanessa placed a chair beside him and arranged two more at the foot of the bed. Then she turned off the television and took a seat, squeezing his hand. A minute later she heard a knock at the door, and Dr. Greenberg brought in the agents. She knew them from her own interview. Ben Hewitt was a Harvard-educated attorney who had left a lucrative job in New York “to do something good for a change.” Carlos Escobido was Hewitt’s opposite—a hard-charging, chain-smoking detective from the Bronx who had busted drug dealers and Mafia dons before 9/11 prompted him to join the feds and hunt terrorists. Both were dressed casually in shirts and slacks. They shook Quentin’s hand and took a seat, placing a digital recorder on the bed.
Hewitt took the lead. “Quentin,” he began, “I want to tell you how sorry we are for what you’ve gone through. We’re going to make this as easy as we can—a few questions today, maybe a few more tomorrow. Is that all right with you?”
Quentin processed this. “I will tell you . . . what I remember.”
“That’s all we ask.” Hewitt sat back and folded his hands. “Do you recall when the pirates came aboard the sailboat? Can you tell me about that?”
As Vanessa watched, Quentin turned away from Hewitt and stared at a spot on the wall. “It was night,” he said with a frown. “Or morning . . . It was dark. I was . . . on watch . . . I fell asleep. I heard shots . . . then my dad came . . . from below. We didn’t fight.”
“How many were there?” Hewitt asked, as Escobido made notes.
“Seven.” Quentin grimaced and closed his eyes. “I know . . . their names.” Suddenly, he blurted out: “Mas.” He thought some more. Then: “Liban . . . Their leader was . . . Af . . . Af
yareh
.”
Hewitt waited a few seconds before asking: “How did you know Afyareh was in charge?”
“He told us,” Quentin replied. “And . . .” He looked lost in thought. “And . . . we saw . . . the way he talked . . . to the others. He spoke English . . . he . . .
negotiated
. . . with the Navy.”
With deftness and a gentle touch, Hewitt led him through the major events in sequence: the arrival of the
Gettysburg
, then the
Truman
and
San Jacinto
the next morning; the planes and helicopters the Navy put in the air and then grounded after Curtis—“Grandpa,” in Quentin’s words—intervened with the government. When Hewitt inquired about the ransom negotiations, however, Quentin drew a blank. Vanessa watched him wrestle with himself, saw his brow furrow and his shoulders tense. She traded a glance with Hewitt and shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“Why don’t we change gears?” he said, taking her cue. “With the time we have left, let’s focus on Afyareh. Is that okay with you?”
The muscles in Quentin’s face relaxed. “Okay.”
Hewitt softened his tone. “Did Afyareh ever point his gun at you?”
Quentin looked into the distance again. “I don’t . . .” For a moment he seemed confused, then his expression clarified and his eyes filled with sadness. “Afyareh . . . pointed his gun . . . at my dad. He said—” A tear spilled down Quentin’s cheek. “He said: ‘Do you . . . want to die?’”
Vanessa took a breath and held it, transfixed by her son’s words. She imagined the scene—Daniel’s hands flying into the air; Afyareh shouting his threats; Daniel pleading with the pirate not to shoot; Quentin watching the confrontation, at once horrified and afraid. She felt the rage again, stirring in her gut. Then, in an instant, her anger branched out and encircled her heart like a malevolent vine, blocking out the light. There at the core of her something else began to grow—hatred.
Hewitt made a note to himself. “Those were his exact words: ‘Do you want to die?’” When Quentin nodded, he asked: “Do you recall when he said that?”
Quentin began to fiddle with the edge of his blanket again. “There was a . . . boat that came . . . No, that was . . . another time . . . The ships were nearby . . . He was angry . . . He wanted them . . . to go away . . . I don’t . . . I don’t remember when that was.”
Sensing Quentin’s agitation, Hewitt became gentler still. “Was it during the day or at night?”
Quentin closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, trying to work out the puzzle in his mind. Seconds passed in silence, and then, without warning, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He was wobbly at first, but he stabilized himself against the wall and refused Vanessa’s offer of assistance. She watched him like a hawk as he rounded the bed, worried that he might fall. But he stayed on his feet, taking steps as hesitant as his speech, until he stood by the window and looked out at the winter sky. He touched the glass and faced Hewitt again.
“I don’t know . . . if it was . . . day or night. When I remember . . . I will tell you.”
Ismail
Chesapeake, Virginia
January 18, 2012
The dream came to Ismail again in the night. He saw the parade ground in the midday heat, the earth beneath the stomping feet of the Shabaab fighters sparkling like desert quartz. The sky above was so pure that it looked as if it had been painted blue and glazed by the sun. He was standing in a line with the others—mostly boys, but a few girls, Yusuf on his left, Yasmin on his right. The contrast between his fifteen-year-old brother and seventeen-year-old sister could not have been starker. Tear-stained and hunched over, Yusuf looked like an old man. Yasmin, on the other hand, stood like a warrior princess, her head erect and her eyes aglow with scorn.
Dressed as she was in a flowing gold
abaya
, it was no surprise that Najiib spotted her from across the camp. All of the other girls were swaddled in black from head to toe. Black was the safest color for a woman in Mogadishu, but Yasmin didn’t care for the monochromatic palette of the Islamists. “God made the world colorful,” she liked to say. “A woman should reflect that.”
She didn’t blink when Najiib examined her through his designer sunglasses, his black headscarf blowing in the wind. She stared straight ahead, her eyes boring holes through the Shabaab militiamen who had raided their school, murdered their father and three teachers, crammed as many students as they could into their technicals, and delivered them to the camp as “new recruits.”
“What is your name?” Najiib asked, as the noise of the fighters filled the air around them.
Yasmin ignored the question, and Najiib glared at her. “Are you deaf? Do you not hear me? It is unlawful for a girl to disrespect a man.”
When Yasmin answered him, her tone was fraught with bitterness: “It is also forbidden to murder a believer, yet you do not think twice about killing a righteous man.”
Najiib stared at her, calculating how to respond. At last, his lips curled into a devilish smile. He turned to the militiamen and laughed. “The girl has religion; it is good.” His men laughed with him. He faced her again. “I have killed many men. Which of them was righteous?”
She pronounced her father’s name reverently. “Adan Ibrahim Abdullahi.”
Najiib’s expression became deadly serious. “Adan Ibrahim Abdullahi. He was an apostate, an enemy of the
mujahedeen
. He was warned and he did not repent. I ordered his assassination.”
Suddenly, Yasmin’s defiance crumbled. She broke down and began to cry silently.
“You are related to him, aren’t you?” Najiib said, taking hold of her chin. “Yes, I see the resemblance. You are his daughter.”
Terror gripped Ismail. He wanted desperately to intervene, but he knew it would only endanger them. He had heard about Najiib in whispers spoken by the men of Mogadishu. Some called him “Azrael”—the Angel of Death. Apart from Godane, the elusive emir of the Shabaab, there was no
mujahid
more dangerous in all of Somalia.
“What is your name?” Najiib hissed.
“I am Yasmin Adan Ibrahim,” she finally admitted.
Najiib smiled again. “
Ha
. It is wise to be honest with me.” He took her by the arm. “Come, I will show you the righteous path.”