The Towers (52 page)

It had never worked for long, no matter how charismatic. The lust to destroy was inherent in man. But so was the will to fight back, to protect the fragile structure of give-and-take that, however imperfect, men settled for. And called peace.

He handed it back to Belote and lifted his face again to sheer rock and blue-black sky.

Their quarry had escaped. But he could not feel justified in saying anyone was at fault. Where empires go to die, Provanzano had called Afghanistan. The most remote battlefield on earth. Too high, too cold, too rugged, too far from the wellsprings of US power. And most of all, too vast. Its valleys and mountains had swallowed army after army; never defeated; simply outlasted by those patient enough to hide. Here bin Laden's supporters and friends had hidden and fed him, then spirited him away to some new bolt-hole.

But we'll get him, Dan thought. No question of that.

It was just a matter of time.

Prince Georges County, Maryland

Blair's father held the car door, courtly as ever. Her mother had a headache and had stayed home. It was Blair's first time out of the house, except for visits to doctors. She'd avoided all her old friends. Avoided even church, though her mother had tried to persuade her to go.

She didn't want to face anybody she knew.
Face
them. Yes, exactly. She understood bitterly now just what that meant.

“Coming, kiddo?” Checkie said. Still holding the door.

“Maybe I shouldn't—”

“You need to walk, honey.”

She took a deep breath. Then another, glancing past him toward the bright lights, the high rose walls, the gay logos atop the buildings, each designed to be recognizable from miles distant. “That's okay, Dad. Why don't you go ahead? Here's what I need: Chanel Teint Innocence fluid number forty-five Rose. Or Cream Compact number forty-five Rose. Either Laura Mercier Secret Camouflage SC-2, or LM Silk Crème Foundation—”

His raised hand halted her. “Whoa! Hold on! I'll get the wrong size, or something. Like when I used to send your mom to the hardware store. But, hey, I'll go in with you. Come on, kiddo.”

She started to say again that she didn't want to. Then bit down on the whining and seized the side of the door. Hauled herself up. The cold air was scented with the snow melting in piles in the corners of the lot. The cars all had American flags magnetized on their sides, or zip-tied to the aerials. She turned her head away as people streamed past. Older couples. Young mothers with strollers. Two teenaged girls, laughing, wearing what looked like secondhand bridal dresses.

“They're not looking at you, honey,” Checkie said. “Nobody is. See? Nobody here knows you, anyway.”

Standing on trembling legs, she touched the corner of her right eye with the tip of one finger. Drew it back and down, tracing the numbness. Like touching dead flesh. Dead, but still warm. Oh, the doctors were happy. They said the grafts had taken. But her face didn't feel the way it used to, and she certainly didn't look like the self she remembered. The autografts flamed and itched. She had to rub cream in twice a day to keep them from contracting. Her ear was … just …
ugly.
She was growing her hair longer, to cover it; but she could feel it, a nerveless, reddened nubbin, folded and warped. A small but hideous deformity. They said her hip was healing too, but it hurt like sin whenever she put the slightest weight on it.

“You can do this,” her dad murmured. “Come on. Where's my brave soldier?”

She took a deep breath and forced herself into motion. Her hip stabbed at each step. Too late, she realized she'd forgotten the arm crutch. Checkie was striding ahead, though, over the wet-gleaming asphalt, as if daring her to race.

The air inside was stuffy-warm with central heating. She sank to a bench, dizzy, overwhelmed, and asked her father to go back for the crutch. As she waited, head down, white dunes seemed to roll beneath the floor. Colors swam, voices echoed from the immense atrium arched overhead like a glass basilica. Stores climbed like cliff dwellings toward the distant white radiance of skylights.

She sat feeling washed-out, watching shoppers stroll. There certainly seemed to be a great many obese folks at this mall. Or maybe she shouldn't point fingers; she'd gained ten pounds lying in bed. At least the cutting was over. Although the therapy, as her mother had warned, was even more painful. Still, she was going a little longer between the oxycodone tablets every day.

“Got to be strong,” her dad said, handing her the crutch. “Easy enough to be weak. I know you went through a lot. But you can't crawl into a hole. Can't just stay home. We'd like you to, but I know you. You'd be miserable. Take it out on your mom and me.”

She smiled, though it hurt. “I don't plan to do any crawling, thank you.”

“That's good to hear. But what about it?” he said, not looking at her. “What
are
you going to do? Going to get back in the ring?”

“Politically, you mean?”

He nodded, still looking away, as if it didn't matter. “It'd be easy in District Five. This guy's voting for everything the administration wants. In eleven months, they'll be looking to expand their majority in the House and get control of the Senate. They'll use the war to do that.”

“Not everything's politics, Checkie. There are real enemies out there.”

He wheeled on her, frowning. “Then say that! Show 'em you're a fighter. You look like one, now.”

He looked frightened then, as if he might have said the wrong thing, but she only chuckled. “Yeah. One who's been pounding the canvas with her face.”

He shrugged. “As long as you get back up again.”

“Now you sound like Dan.” She felt her strength returning and lurched to her feet. Fitted the padded aluminum tube to her arm. Hating it. Hating the weakness, the pain, but, yes, feeling stronger every day. It was worth thinking about. Maybe she could even do some good. Put some steel into a party that all too often seemed to lack it. Find some payback, though it seemed that was happening without her help. If the news coverage of the great battle in the faraway mountains was any guide.

“Feeling better now?” her father said, taking her good arm.

She shook his grip off, setting her teeth, ignoring the pain. And, taking one slow step after another, set her course.

New York City

Walking the street in hijab, Aisha felt the stares from the passersby. Some, openly hostile. Well, who could blame them? The great towers had been cast down, a proud city wounded. But the moment she stepped from the gray concrete sidewalk onto the green, she smiled to herself.

Even as a child she'd suddenly felt happy, just stepping onto that then-bright grass color. Like making it home playing tag. Loiterers had jeered at her mother, who'd held her and her sisters' hands tightly. A few even shambled drunkenly after them. But when they got to the green paint, they always stopped. As if sin itself halted here, unable to cross onto that holy color. (Though it might also have been thanks to the burly young men who'd guard stood outside the mosque.) This whole neighborhood had been crack city back then. It seemed to be doing better these days.

“Mommy, why is the sidewalk here green?” Bright chocolate eyes sought hers. Tashaara danced as they walked, skirts whirling. Aisha started to tell her to smooth them down, to be modest, but stopped herself. Let the child enjoy her innocence. How she'd grown, just in the year Aisha had been in Yemen! Nothing like the emaciated, dying infant she'd illegally rescued from a land descending into chaos. Behind the two of them hobbled her mother, using a cane, and two of Aisha's sisters.

She squeezed her child's hand. Someday she'd tell her about that. But not for many years. “It means we're where we belong, honey. Where we'll always be safe.”

Inside, her mother was greeted with hugs by the women from the clinic, where she'd worked for many years. Everyone wanted to shake Aisha's hand and ask where she'd been. When they got free at last, she helped her mother up the painted steel stairs, smelling the familiar smells, to the second-floor mezzanine.

She fell in prostration before Allah with the other women, the worn, wooly-smelling carpets soft beneath her, mother on one side, daughter on the other. It was the same. But she slowly realized it was also different. No one gossiped. She caught side glances. Then she looked down, to where the men sat cross-legged on carpet, to where the imam was beginning to speak.

She stiffened. Two strangers stood against the wall, sides to her as she looked down from above. One was white and the other black, but both men wore identical dark suits and ties. They stood with relaxed insolence, arms crossed, listening as the imam, somewhat hesitantly, began to speak about what jihad really meant. How it did not mean a literal holy war, or at any rate, not primarily that. How it came from the Arabic word for “striving,” or “effort.” Other words derived from the root meant “to labor” and “to become tired, from work.” The men listened intently, one writing occasionally in a notebook. She wondered for a moment what the FBI was doing here, then understood.

She wasn't home now just because she wanted to be. It was the letter she'd written to the director, detailing her suspicions about the Yemenis and the reliability of information yielded by enhanced interrogation. Maybe not a wise career move. But she'd had to speak the truth, even against her best interests. That too was in the Quran.

The deputy director himself had sat her down to explain why she was being pulled off counterterrorism. “This is to protect you,” he'd said, so earnestly she knew he was lying. “Protect you from targeting by ALQ. And your family's in New York too, aren't they? Your daughter.” But the grapevine worked both ways. One of the other female agents had told her the real reason.

It had made her bitter. And why not? When all she'd done was her best.

Below her the imam was reaching the end of the sermon. Saying to them all, the listening men, the women, even the agents, that what jihad really meant was each soul's struggle with evil. The labor of perfecting self in the face not only of one's own laziness and sinful desires, but of outside rejection and misunderstanding—something their community had been familiar with from their very founding. But others—the Irish, the Germans, Jews, Italians, Japanese—had faced and overcome the same persecution. “It will take time to convince America we are as much Americans as those who came before. Who were persecuted and suspected because of their faiths too, each in their turn.”

No bitterness, she thought, quieting her fidgeting daughter with a gentle hand. That did not belong here. All things were connected, and all directed by a wise Creator. As she murmured the words of the concluding
du'a,
asking for forgiveness and divine guidance, peace floated back into her heart. He was with her and in her.

With her, Allah.

Always and everywhere, and forever.

Amin
.

Landstuhl Regional Medical Center Ramstein Air Base, Germany

The man in the darkened room breathed slowly. An external fixator covered his face like a crouching stainless spider. Tubes hung from him, and shining metal rods extended through purpled, puffy skin, screwed into holes tapped into bone and skull. The machines had been rolled back a few hours before, to another bed in another room. He murmured and twitched.

Then his eyes opened.

Teddy Oberg stared up for a while, not really thinking. Then a cold terror shook itself awake and crawled along his bones like hungry worms.

It was coming back. Not where he was, or how he'd gotten there. These things he did not know. But he remembered the mountain. The cold. An old man frozen rigid where he sat. He scratched the sheets with nails that seemed excessively long. The bed seemed to be tilted to port, as if he were on a listing ship. A ship? He listened, tried to sense motion, but couldn't. Still felt that queer leftward cant in the surface he lay on, though. A hard object was nestled into his right hand. The button. He recognized that, somehow. Press the button if it starts to hurt. It wasn't hurting now, though. Maybe he'd pressed it already?

He cleared his throat. Rolled his head.

A silent figure sat in shadow by his bedside. He tensed, squinting, trying to make out who it could be. But he couldn't distinguish features. Maybe just the silhouette of a piece of equipment.

Then a man sniffed, and Teddy caught through the hospital smell something strange yet familiar; a minty tang with a whiff of acetone.

“Who the hell,” Teddy suggested.

“Back with us?” The voice was low, confiding. When Teddy only grunted, it went on, “Chief Petty Officer Theodore Harlett Oberg? US Navy?”

“Uh … yeah.”

“You're in a Level Four treatment facility in Germany. Landstuhl, if you know where that is. You damn near died. But you'll be headed home soon. Back to the States. To Bethesda, probably. Any questions for me?”

“… d' I get here?”

“I don't have all the details. But one of your men brought you down from the mountains. You ordered him to get your wounded down to the LZ. He did that. Then went back up after you. Found you freezing to death. Got a line on you and lowered you down the ridge. Got you down and medevaced you out.”

Teddy lay contemplating this. Fucking hard to believe. Skinny, limp-dicked Swager had come back up, in the dark, and found him? Manhandled him single-handed all the way down that bitch of a mountain, fifteen hundred fucking feet to the extract LZ?

Eventually he found he could manage that. He'd underestimated the newbie, the guy they'd called the Baby SEAL. He was a Team guy, after all.

What he couldn't understand was Sumo being there too. It hadn't been a hallucination. You couldn't hallucinate a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian. “Sumo?” he croaked, then immediately thought, that was a mistake.