A package waits on his doorstep. A book, he can tell, though he doesn’t recall placing an order. It is late, past midnight, and he has to be back in the operating room at seven. He rips off the tape and pulls back the flaps. Gods of the Rock, by Véronique Six.
It’s been almost four years since her visit to Atlanta. He has tried to follow her career, the meteoric rise after her coverage of the Khandarian secession. Now a foreign correspondent for CNN, she reports from Middle Eastern ‘trouble spots’ so dangerous that she rarely appears on camera without a helmet and Kevlar vest.
He lies in bed with the book. Although they’ve exchanged emails, he has no idea how she might have portrayed him, but if it covers two decades of jihad in El-Khandar, as the jacket claims, he can’t imagine his own experience warranting more than a sentence or two. The cover shows a woman in a burqa against a background of ocean and palm trees. He flips to the glossy pages at the center of the book and scans the blackand-white photographs. There are politicians shaking hands: white men in suits, Arabs in thobes. Jihadists posing with guns. The Aljannah Hotel in its prime and then as a smoldering ruin.
He catches his breath at the picture of himself and Owen. It is that same photograph from their wrestling days – the night Owen won the national championship. A moment passes before he realizes that the image is reversed – like a reflection of the original – such that Owen’s injury, the broken clavicle, is on the right rather than the left. The caption reads: ‘Brothers Ryan, left, and Owen Burkett.’ He finds no picture of Nick.
His eye drifts to a face at the top of the next page. Five men in suits, all of them Arabs, but it is the youngest at whom he is staring. The face was bearded when he last saw it, but there is no mistaking the smug expression, the eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses. It is Tarik.
The caption reads: Yousef Al Bihani, the minister of health, with advisors. The minister is undoubtedly the white-haired figure at the center. Tarik, one of four others, stands at the edge of the picture to the minister’s right.
The index lists no one by the name of Tarik, but he finds several references to the minister of health, this Yousef Al Bihani. A physician trained in the United States, he served on Quadri’s counsel before becoming minister of health under President Djohar. He was responsible for negotiating a brief but well publicized ceasefire with the Heroes of Jihad, a ceasefire that came to an end when the president was killed by a suicide bomber. Burkett remembers the shaky footage from Tarik’s laptop, the suicide bomber strolling up to the line of traffic. Al Bihani now serves on the cabinet of the new Islamic Republic of South Khandaros, which in retrospect might cast doubt on his allegiance to Djohar. He was one of several conservative members of that regime to defect to the south in the wake of the secession.
Véronique’s number is still in Burkett’s phone.
‘The book looks great,’ he tells her.
‘Sorry not to include more of your experience,’ she says.
He hasn’t bothered yet to read the parts about himself. He drops out of bed and pads into the bathroom.
‘Do you remember the man I told you about?’ he asks. ‘The bolt cutters.’
‘The good Dr Tarik,’ she says. ‘We never figured out his real name.’
Absently he opens the medicine cabinet. He checks under the sink. There are no vials of pills, not that he expected any – not that he’s ever had a stash of pills here at his new house – but the habit of checking drawers and cabinets somehow puts him at ease.
‘You have a picture of him in your book,’ he says. ‘Page 190.’
‘Which picture?’ she asks, clearly surprised.
‘The minister of health with his advisors.’
‘Djohar’s inaugural gala.’
‘Tarik is the one on the far left.’
‘Hold on, let me get the book,’ she says. He hears her turning pages. After a pause she says, ‘That is Hussein, Yousef’s son. He was a physician if I remember correctly.’
‘It fits,’ he says. ‘Tarik was educated, connected.’
‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘A lot of people are educated and connected.’
‘Weren’t we assuming all along that Tarik was a nom de guerre?’
‘It seems rather far-fetched, but let me look into it and see what comes up.’
He lies in bed but hardly sleeps. Four hours later, when he rises for work, he finds an email from Véronique: Hussein Al Bihani is still alive. Having obtained a work visa and medical license, he is currently in the second year of an endocrinology fellowship at the University of Louisville.
How does a terrorist obtain a visa, much less a Kentucky medical license? Is he planning some kind of attack? Or perhaps he was serious about the swords and plowshares.
The internet doesn’t turn up anything useful. There is a photo from his medical school yearbook, but it is ten years old, and the face bears only a slight resemblance to the Tarik Burkett remembers. On the University of Louisville’s website, Hussein is listed as a fellow in endocrinology, no picture included, but it seems he’s taking the year to pursue research on diabetes. The lab where he works has a separate website of its own, but the staff photos haven’t been updated in years.
Hussein recently co-authored a paper in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology: ‘Counterregulation of cortisol levels during extreme hypoglycemia’. Burkett scrolls through the text and charts, not sure what he’s looking for. Does he hope to recognize Tarik’s voice in the scientific language? The odds are slim that Tarik contributed to the actual writing of the paper. More likely he earned his place among the ten or so authors by drawing blood from rats or managing a centrifuge.
Another message from Véronique: during the period of Burkett’s captivity, Hussein Al Bihani held a position as a hospitalist in Saudi Arabia. Could he have traveled back and forth, managing his revolutionary activities on top of a medical practice?
Véronique sends the contact information for someone she knows in the FBI. ‘He’s an old friend,’ she writes, which makes Burkett think she probably slept with him. She also suggests that he ‘talk with someone, perhaps a counselor’. Maybe this is her way of asking if he’s started drinking again. He could tell her he’s been sober now for almost four years. And perhaps that is the problem: if he were drunk, would he see the truth of that picture? Is his deep-seated anxiety now expressing itself in the form of paranoia? Has he become the sort of man who finds connections where none exist?
Late that evening, Burkett sits on his couch, the television muted. He’s just eaten a packet of tacos, and the wrappers lie before him on the coffee table.
He’s wondering if that tiny stroke could have distorted his perception and recognition of human faces. Perhaps the scarring, however small, has caused some network to be rerouted. Perhaps there is a disruption of the subcortical fibers that link facial memory to whatever nucleus is responsible for generating an appropriate emotional response.
Again he opens Véronique’s book to the picture of Tarik. It causes involuntary changes in his breathing and heart rate – his sympathetic nervous system responding to an enemy. A phrase from medical school comes to mind: fight or flight. And yet he can’t be sure, not if this man was working in Saudi Arabia at the time.
In the index he finds his name paired with his brother’s. He turns to a passage describing him and Nick as health workers, victims of ‘one of the more brazen kidnappings’.
The men were accused of evangelizing Christianity, which may have been true in Lorie’s case, but Burkett, a surgeon, describes himself as ‘agnostic’.
She goes on to discuss International Medical Outreach and their misleading denials of religious affiliation. She quotes an anonymous source:
‘We have to balance safety concerns with our goal of sharing Jesus – not that our brothers and sisters act out of fear.’
It takes a few pages for her to return to Burkett and Nick. He’d expected an exaggerated account of brutality and ultimate escape, but she avoids sensationalism altogether.
The men suffered torture at the hands of a young jihadist commander known as Tarik, who was also likely involved in murdering the surgeon Owen Burkett, brother of Ryan. Lorie, under duress, read a statement condemning the Christian church as ‘a tool of Satan’ and proclaiming Muhammad ‘God’s highest prophet’.
Under duress? It doesn’t do justice to what Nick endured – or what more he could have endured had Tarik not started in on Burkett, if Burkett hadn’t been there to suffer in his place. How much longer could Nick have held out? If he’d read the statement at the outset – if he’d been practical about torture – Burkett would still have a full complement of fingers.
He wonders if Véronique saw the video of Nick’s renunciation. Perhaps she discovered it on some jihadist website. A memory comes to him: the men and boys at that madrassa gathered around a laptop, cheering the videos of suicide bombs. He wonders if Nick’s apostasy has provided similar entertainment.
Why does he remember – or believe he remembers – the face of Tarik so much more clearly than those of past friends and girlfriends?
He tries to picture his brother, but the face that comes to him is his own. Though genetically identical there were always subtle differences of appearance. In high school and college it was never a problem for the close friends they shared, their wrestling coaches and teammates, to tell them apart. It was never a problem for Amanda Grey. She and those others saw differences in the Burkett twins that went beyond their haircuts and clothes, differences perhaps in the way they stood still, the way their faces relaxed between expressions. Those differences, whatever they might have been, seem to have slipped away from Burkett’s memory, if he ever understood them at all.
He goes to the closet and opens a shoebox of old pictures, mostly from their days of wrestling. He takes a stack at random. Shuffling through them, he’s relieved at how easily he can distinguish himself from his brother, but it doesn’t take him long to realize his need for contextual clues, like Owen’s ring or perennially mismatched socks.
But the face of Tarik he sees with clarity. As he closes the shoebox his eye drifts to the gun safe in the back corner. Fight or flight. He dials the combination and opens the lid and stares at the gun on its bed of rippled foam – the .45-caliber pistol that his grandfather had with him when he died in the Battle of the Bulge. It is one of the few items from his father’s storage unit that he decided to keep.
He sits on the couch with the gun. As his father taught him he pulls back the slide to make sure the chamber is empty. After years the method of disassembly comes back to him. He lays the parts on the coffee table, wipes each with a moist cloth: the spring, the firing pin, the ejector. The simple machinery of killing.