My guard was a small, dark CIA officer named Samuel who sat by the window and thumbed through phone messages while I watched local coverage of the day’s Forum. Samuel and I talked a little, mostly office gossip—he had heard rumors about some romantic relationships in Africa section, and I either debunked the rumors or played them up, depending on what he seemed to want to hear.
I spent a lot of time looking out the window. Our room had a view of mountains and the flat, gravel-covered roof of the Congress Center cluttered with rows of solar panels. On the far end of the roof, two ever-present snipers in heavy white coats chatted and peered down into the park on the other side. All I could see of the park was bare treetops, but right below my window was a triangle of snow-covered courtyard between the Congress Center and the hotel, and sometimes Forum attendees stepped out onto the metal stairs leading down to the snow to have a smoke.
We ate room service meals delivered on draped carts by harried staff, and it was at our early dinner that the petite server, a girl no older than twenty, locked onto my eyes as she uncovered the plates. It was a look that I couldn’t quite decipher. Flirtation, or fear? Her eyes self-consciously flicked down to one of the two water glasses covered with cardboard lids to keep out dust. Then she was back to my eyes again, a significant look before taking the signed bill from Samuel.
“Smells good,” he said as the server left, and I took the water glass and drank deeply, flipping over the cardboard disk. On it was a simple message: Come down for a drink. I pocketed it, wondering, and settled by the window to eat. In the gathering darkness I saw the two snipers still on the Congress Center roof, and to the south of the park, along Talstrasse, I saw another sniper atop a low apartment building. There were many more, I knew, that I couldn’t see from my window.
“I need a drink,” I said, turning away from the window.
Samuel looked up from his phone. “What?”
“You need to keep me in this hotel, fine. But I’m going to go crazy stuck in this little room. So will you. I saw a bar down near the front desk.”
Samuel looked surprised by the idea. “I don’t—” he began, then stood up. “Hold on.”
He made a call in the bathroom, and from the defensive sound of the murmurs I guessed he was being scolded for even suggesting a trip downstairs. When he came out, though, he was blinking, surprised. “Well, they said it’s okay.”
“Really?” I asked. “They weren’t pissed off?”
“They were pissed off I wasted their time asking.”
There was no bar, per se, but four stools in front of a counter and guests lounging at low tables, sipping drinks. We took two of the stools, and I ordered a vodka martini, offering to buy one for Samuel. He hesitated, unsure, and shook his head no, but I ordered another anyway. I didn’t want to drink alone, and despite his job I actually liked Samuel.
When he learned I had a six-year-old, he became very interested. He had a girlfriend back in DC who wanted children, but the thought of that kind of responsibility terrified him. So I tried, with as much honesty as possible, to take him through the rigors of parenting, balancing the easily catalogued cons with the less apparent pros. As he began to form a picture of his possible future, he sipped at his martini without shame. Eventually, he looked around. “Know where the bathroom is?”
“I think it’s back there,” I said, pointing to a corner.
“I’ll be right back. Don’t run. You’re not going to run, are you?”
“All I want to do is go home,” I said, and I wasn’t lying.
He grinned. “Wouldn’t be able to anyway. Frank, at the exit, is built like a linebacker.”
When he left, I finished my drink and asked the bartender for another. I hunched over it, trying not to spill my first sip, and that was when I felt a pat on my back and turned to Samuel’s stool. But it wasn’t Samuel. It was Haroun. And he was grinning wildly.
I was lost. Anger and confusion and a lifelong love clashed in my chest. All I could do was open my arms and hug him tightly. He smelled of some sharp, unfamiliar cologne.
“Brother,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I…” I shook my head, trying to clear it. I exhaled loudly. “No, no. You. You’re the one who needs to talk.”
“Fair enough,” he said, then reached casually over to Samuel’s glass and took a sip.
“What happened?” I blurted. “How did you become—”
“Become this?” he asked, setting down the glass. “Come on. I’m the same kid who fought your bullies in middle school.”
“You’re not.”
“You’re the one who’s changed, Abdul. A wife and—how old is Rashid now? Four?”
“Six.”
“See?” he said. “You’ve become part of the machine.”
“What machine?”
“Money.”
I sighed, remembering how frustrating he could be. “Your people,” I said. “They’re the machine. Capitalism run amok.” He seemed to find that amusing, which irritated me even more.
He said, “How is what we’re doing any different from Iraq? Half a million Iraqis and four and a half thousand Americans slaughtered to control a dwindling resource. Next to you guys, we’re amateurs.”
I counted on my fingers: “Schoolgirls kidnapped and enslaved, dozens of sailors drowned, CEOs murdered. And that’s only what we’ve been able to uncover.”
He leaned back. “But next to American history…?”
I was stunned by his coarseness. He’d always been that way, but now his cynicism had gone off the charts. “Who the hell are you, Haroun?”
He drank the rest of Samuel’s martini and glanced around the room. We looked so similar. I was Haroun, if he let himself go, and he was me, if I’d lived an athletic and dangerous life. Around us people were laughing and dealing, and they had no idea what earthshaking events were happening at the bar.
“Right,” he said, a decision made, and turned back to me. “In 2009, I was working for Global Partners in Yemen.”
“You told me about it when you got back.”
“That’s right. Yemen’s like a lot of the world: great people, shitty situation. I’d seen it before—Congo, Somalia, Sudan … but Yemen?” He paused. “Didn’t we argue?”
“You told me the world was falling apart in slow motion.”
“Sounds like me,” he said. “That’s because I’d just been someplace that was heading in that direction fast. Then I come back home, turn on the TV, and there they are, all the signs. The empty political rhetoric. The exploitation of the underclass. The gaudy hoarding of wealth. The roads—Jesus! A land with so much money, and it can’t even keep its bridges up? Everywhere I looked, the edifices were crumbling.”
“You were prime for activism,” I noted. “You could’ve joined the Massive Brigade.”
“Activism, or nihilism,” he said. “Because who the fuck was I? You were always the smart one. The career path. The focus. The faith. Someone like you, if you put your mind to it, might change things for the better. Me? I would only grow angrier, until I exploded. And that, my brother, was when I received a visitor. She invited me to join something bigger than myself. This is real power, she told me.”
“She would show you how the world really worked,” I said, feeling an uncomfortable tingle across my scalp.
“Something like that.”
“Was it worth it?” I asked. “Giving up your family? Me?”
He sighed, then glanced around the room again. “I only have one life, Abdul. Give me a second one and I’ll try an alternate path.”
We were both silent for a short while. I drank, wondering what to say to all of this. There were arguments to be made, but was this really the time for them?
He finally said, “You know, it really is good to see you. Back in Spain, I was terrified you’d end up dead. By us, or by them.”
“Them?”
“Your friends. The Library.”
“I’m with the Agency.”
He furrowed his brow. “Isn’t the Agency working with the Library?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, not wanting to be the sentimental fool who let family milk him for information.
He looked like he didn’t believe me. He said, “Working with the Library would be a bad proposition. Word is Milo Weaver and Ingrid Parker are joined at the hip. She’s apparently in the neighborhood.”
I wanted to tell him about Ingrid Parker’s doppelgänger, but I didn’t. Because he wasn’t my brother anymore. He was one of them. A decade-old decision had placed us on opposite sides of a divide that not even blood could bridge.
“Uh-oh,” Haroun said, rising from the stool. He looked across the restaurant to where Samuel was stumbling out of a corridor, hand on his head, looking as if he’d just woken. Haroun grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “I love you, brother. Please. Go home. You don’t belong here.”
And then he was gone, hurrying toward the lobby.
Samuel found his balance and sprinted past me, chasing Haroun. They were both gone—I could, I suspected, walk out of there—but I didn’t move. I was shook. Again. But not from being face-to-face with Haroun. No. I was shook because of one small thing he had said. Both of our lives had been irrevocably altered by the same promise: You will understand how the world really functions. You will become intimate with secret knowledge scratched onto the stone tablets that run civilization. Haroun and I were the same.
Not just us, I realized, but Sally and Mel. Paul. Milo Weaver, Alexandra Primakov and Leticia Jones—all of us, in each of our secret societies, had been promised infinite knowledge. The Massive Brigade, too—Martin Bishop had promised the same thing, and Ingrid Parker continued that tradition. The BND, GRU, Guoanbu. Not just knowledge but power, the ability to shape human history. Each group, in its own way, promised the same thing. We had all been seduced completely. And we had all been lied to.
Yet we still fought. In our blind devotion and fear—or was it pride?—of admitting ignorance, we devoted our lives to empty promises and even died for them, along the way abandoning those we loved. Haroun had abandoned his family, Milo’s was under a death sentence, and mine … were they any less abandoned as I sat in a Swiss bar having spoken to my dead brother?
Samuel returned, gasping, from his vain chase. He dropped onto his stool heavily, wiped sweat off his upper lip, and reached for his glass before realizing it was empty. “Who the fuck was he, Abdul?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice surprisingly cool and measured. “What happened to you?”
“He attacked me in the goddamn bathroom.”
Only now did I notice the red mark on his right temple. Tomorrow that would be a nasty bruise.
“I think he might’ve knocked me out,” Samuel said. “How long was he here?”
“Just a minute,” I lied. “He was ranting to me about the one percent.”
Samuel looked over his shoulder at the exit. “How did that nut even get in the hotel?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but was thinking, You don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, Haroun doesn’t know anything. I picked up my drink, then set it down again when I saw that it, too, was empty.
“Listen,” Samuel said, now sounding like he really wanted to be my buddy. “If anyone asks…”
“We had a drink, and you never left,” I said, and he finally relaxed.