The Bug Hunter: A Novel Read online

  “We are committed to fighting the infidel, Adnan. Do you understand that? It’s vital that you do if our relationship is to continue,” she said, grabbing his hand.

  Butterflies in his stomach, brought on by her touch, overwhelmed any doubts he had in his head.

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Over many weeks, Bashera connected seemingly disparate dots of Adnan’s life into a full-throated indictment of the West and its morally debased culture, in which his brother’s heroin addiction was due to the permissive and empty culture of America, one based on consumption and material wealth. “Your brother didn’t have Allah, peace be upon him, as a guide,” Bashera said to him one night after an ISAMO meeting. “Allah would have kept him safe,” Bashera told him, “by giving him guidance and making him a warrior for Islam.”

  “And now you can be a warrior for Islam, Adnan,” Haniya said. “Because we are creating an Islamic vanguard to free our brothers from the infidel.”

  Adnan nodded. He knew that Milestones called for the creation of an army to preach the power of Islam and then to destroy the infidel by force. “But how can this be done? The West is so rich and so strong. I’ve seen how powerful the American military is. It’s not possible to defeat it.”

  Bashera smiled. “Yes, Adnan. They are very strong. So we won’t defeat them by force. We will beat them down with fear, until they succumb to the power of our ideals. We are already doing it in Europe! We are weakening Europe from the inside, preying on their liberal values by slowly getting Shari‘a recognized there. We attack them when we can, make them nervous and scared. And then we push for more accommodation. We claim they are Islamophobic, and they open up to our needs. Already we have huge swaths of Paris and Brussels and London that we control completely. The police are afraid to go there. We will do the same thing here in America.”

  Adnan looked unconvinced. “America is a superpower. And the NSA listens to every conversation, reads every email. It will be harder to do it here.”

  Bashera smiled again. Adnan didn’t yet know about the blockchain network Bashera had set up that protected communication from the NSA. “Harder here, yes, but not impossible. I will teach you how we communicate in secret. America has become more vulnerable, more isolated. There are now opportunities to hurt it from the inside. And I’m not talking about simple martyrdom.”

  Adnan knew martyrdom meant suicide bombings or attacks using trucks or buses. These were the types of attacks that ISIS had been using inside the US to some effect. But while they sowed terror, they weren’t particularly devastating and didn’t have near the impact that 9/11 had. “So what are you talking about?”

  “Targets of opportunity with big payoffs. Last year the US economy imported fewer agricultural products than it has in any year since 1960. Americans are more dependent than ever on growing, producing, and consuming their own food. And there are millions of acres of wheat, soy, corn, and citrus all across the country. In open fields, unguarded, just waiting for us.”

  “How could you possibly attack millions of acres of—” Adnan stopped in midsentence. He looked at Bashera and then to Haniya, who was sitting impassively, making a slight nodding motion.

  Adnan now understood what they wanted from him.

  “I can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “It will never work. I would lose my job and everything I’ve worked for.”

  “No, Adnan. Actually you would be gaining everything you want,” Bashera said, nodding toward Haniya. “And you only have to provide me the technology to do the job. I will do the rest.”

  Adnan took his meaning. If he didn’t participate, there’d be no life with Haniya. Still, he was unconvinced. “The Americans are not stupid. There are only a handful of labs that can engineer a vector to do this kind of attack. They will figure out where it came from. And I will spend my life in jail. Or worse.”

  Bashera smiled at Adnan and put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I will ensure your safety. If the Americans get close, I will get you out, back to where your parents came from, where you will be a received as a hero. You will have a beautiful lab at a university there. You can continue your research.”

  Adnan was silent for a moment. Was this really happening? “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  As if it had been rehearsed, Haniya reached over and grabbed his hands, pulling them close to her face. She kissed them softly. “Adnan, my love. You must. For us to have a life together, this must be done.”

  He looked at this beautiful woman and thought about living with her in Egypt, where his mother had been born and where her family still lived. “We will live in Cairo?”

  “Oh, my sweet,” she said. “It will be wonderful. You will be someone special there, known as the one who brought America to its knees.”

  Adnan was silent for another long moment. He knew he couldn’t say no to her. He wanted her more than anything else in his life. “OK,” he said at last.

  “Mashallah!” Bashera said.

  Adnan was suddenly dizzy. “I—I need to use the bathroom,” he said and quickly got up.

  When Adnan had left the room, Bashera pulled Haniya close to him, grabbing her roughly by the arm. “He is your responsibility now. You must get him over the finish line.”

  She wrested her arm free. “It will be done,” she said. “And never, ever touch me like that again.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  San Francisco, California

  The city had changed so much since Claire Marx lived there that it was almost unrecognizable. In the early 2000s, it had still had some grit left, reminiscent of its days as a working city, when its port had handled cargo ships and every neighborhood hadn’t been taken over by overpaid tech-obsessed millennials.

  “This feels more like Beverly Hills to me than San Fran,” Claire said, walking past picture windows with fancy shoes and dresses on display.”

  Gabriel looked up at the gleaming condos that had replaced the row houses that had once made the city seem quaint. “Yeah, it looks sexy, but now it has no soul.”

  The wine bar on Hayes Street where Claire and Gabriel had met had long since shuttered, taken over by a Michelin-starred restaurant that was too expensive for even a special occasion like their tenth anniversary. When they met, Claire had been working at the wine bar as a waitress after graduating from UCLA, thinking that she wanted to become a sommelier.

  “God you were clueless about wine,” Gabriel said laughing.

  “Hey! I was learning,” she said, slapping his arm. “You were so smug too. I remember you came in and started peppering me with questions about the vintage, the oak in the barrels, the grapes, whether the women had washed their feet before crushing them. You were such a pain in the ass!”

  Gabriel laughed again. “It was my pickup technique. And it worked!”

  “How it worked I’ll never know. But somehow you wormed your way in.”

  Gabriel had come into Claire’s wine bar after interviewing at a few vineyards in Napa. He had been killing time before meeting a buddy from college and had taken a seat in Claire’s section. “Come on. You thought I was adorable.”

  She smiled. “You were cute all right. But you really didn’t make an impression on me until you started talking about bugs. That’s when I fell in love.”

  “Does it every time.”

  “After you left that night, my friends referred to you as ‘bug boy.’”

  “Seriously? You never told me that!”

  “Most of them still do.”

  “Funny girl. Come on. Let’s eat.”

  Dinner consisted of steak au poivre for Gabriel and Dover sole for Claire, accompanied by a bottle of Landmark Chardonnay. Red went better with steak, but Gabriel drank white because it paired better with Claire’s fish. It had been a light evening thus far, the kind that seemed less and less frequent, but the conversation then turned more seriou
s.

  Claire looked at her husband and saw a tired man. It hurt her to see him struggling like this; she knew that he wasn’t sleeping and that his dreams were really nightmares that wouldn’t leave him be. His two tours in Iraq were now a part of their marriage and their life together; she hadn’t had much success getting him to open up to her. It was a problem that many spouses of combat veterans faced. Maybe tonight, with the wine flowing and the laughter they were sharing, would be a different story.

  “You know how much I love you, right?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Should I be worried about what comes next?”

  She laughed. “No. I just want you talk to me. You don’t sleep, babe. And when you do, it’s like you are fighting for your life. It’s gotta be . . .”

  “Exhausting?”

  “Yes,” she said and waited. She knew it was hard for him to talk about it, but she hoped he’d say something. Anything would be better than nothing. She stared at her husband and knew every fiber in his body was to grin and bear it. Showing weakness was not something a marine was ever taught to do.

  “I’m fine,” he began. “OK, I’m not fine. I’m screwed up, actually. I’m angry and frustrated by the smallest things. I get super irritable when I shouldn’t. Yesterday I wanted to punch the wall after an experiment we were working on didn’t go as planned. I . . .”

  She looked at him and reached over for his hand, which was clammy. “It’s OK, babe.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  Claire was beginning to panic; she’d seen him go down this path before, and it had taken everything she had to pull him back from it. And that was at home, not in a crowded restaurant in a city they didn’t even live in. She waited a moment and then saw the warmth return to Gabriel’s eyes. It had passed.

  “How can I help?” she asked. “There must be something . . .”

  “You’re doing it.”

  “Really? I feel helpless.”

  “I need to talk about it,” he blurted out, the words passing his lips before he could catch them.

  She watched her husband and waited. “It’s OK, Gabe. I’m here.”

  He nodded again. He wasn’t sure how to explain it to her. It wasn’t a simple thing, a moment in time that he could point to. Rather, it was a million moments that separately didn’t amount to much, but together were a mosaic of hyperadrenalized fear. “Combat is weird. It’s not like the movies,” he began. “In Iraq, we weren’t fighting to take territory like in World War II. We were fighting an insurgency, an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere. It was hard to tell the good guys from the bad, so you were always on edge. Always scanning. Always pumped up. I lived in a constant state of fear until we made contact with the enemy. Then there’d be twenty minutes of adrenaline. And then more fear.”

  “Must’ve been hard being up and down so much.”

  “It wasn’t at first. It was a blast, to be honest. We were trained to do a job, and we were unleashed to do it. We kicked ass. Killed a lot of bad guys—” He stopped. He’d never talked to his wife about killing. He didn’t want her to see him differently. But she had to know that’s what marines did, right? “Anyhow, we were very good at it. But over time it wore on me. It got to the point that I couldn’t come down, couldn’t relax. I was used to the adrenaline of combat and came to crave it. That’s when I bought the crotch rocket.” Gabriel had owned a Ninja-style motorcycle when he and Claire had met.

  “Don’t remind me. I hated that thing.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I know. But it was the one thing that made me feel normal. When I got back after my second deployment and got out, I really struggled. Besides the motorcycle, school was the only thing that helped. I attacked studying like it was al-Qaeda. I crushed it. But after school . . .”

  “You met me,” she said, smiling.

  “Yes, I met you. What a gift,” he said, meaning every word of it. “And we settled down and life got to be something close to normal, or what I imagine normal to be.”

  “But Iraq came with you. To live with us.”

  “Yeah, it did. It will always be with me. And us. I lost good friends there. Saw them die. I saw women and children die violent, horrible deaths. It will never not be there.”

  “And it haunts you?”

  “Well, it haunts my subconscious. I don’t think about it during the day. But at night it comes and visits me, and I can’t seem to stop it. The only time it didn’t was when I was in Afghanistan with the CIA. I didn’t dream there.”

  She nodded and was silent for a moment, taking it all in. “What does that tell you?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, without conviction.

  “Really? I know what it means. It means you were back in your element.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I want to live a normal life. I don’t want to have to be in Afghanistan to feel normal.”

  “I know,” she said after a pause. “But there must be something we can do, besides drugs, to make you feel better, so you can sleep and really rest. You look so tired all the time.”

  This he knew. He hated the way he looked, the way the years had piled on him like a ten-car wreck on the interstate. He loved the vineyard and the research he was doing, but it wasn’t enough. He needed something more. But what?

  That he did not know.

  Stirred by their dinner discussion, his dreams that night were particularly violent.

  I’m trapped in a building, looking desperately for a way out. Moving from room to room, my M4 at the ready, I see only women and children huddled in fear. Then an insurgent appears behind them, clutching a child as a shield. He raises his AK at me. I have a split second to react. I fire two rounds in quick succession. The child falls to the floor screaming. Blood is everywhere . . .

  Awakening with a start, Gabriel began to get out of bed. Claire reached up to him and pulled him back down. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest; she could hear his heart pounding. He put his hands through her hair and started to softly cry. She crawled completely on top of him and pulled her shirt off so her bare breasts pressed against his hairy chest. She was trying to get as close as she could to him, to become one with his body. He wrapped his strong arms around her, and together they went through a silent emotional dance. No words were spoken, and none were needed.

  It felt like the first night of the rest of their marriage.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Manassas, Virginia

  Haniya’s long black hair fell in Adnan’s face as she writhed on top of him; her eyes were closed, and she was moaning softly, as if in a trance. He peered through the darkness at her beautiful body, her dark skin gleaming with a slight sheen of sweat. He still wasn’t sure if she was there because of Bashera and the “mission” or because she really loved him.

  At this very moment, he didn’t really care.

  Later, after they were finished, Adnan lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for his pulse to come back down to normal. Haniya lay next to him, one leg draped over his. “Why is it that just as you get what you want, life makes it impossible to really enjoy it?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean the future. The life we could have now if we weren’t . . .” he said, his voice trailing off.

  “Weren’t what?”

  Adnan wanted to say, “Weren’t becoming terrorists,” but demurred. Instead he just said, “Working on this mission.”

  She sat up and looked at him. “Adnan, this is the life that I want. I live for Allah. There is no future for any of us if we don’t destroy our enemies.”

  He suddenly was scared that she would doubt him, that she would get up and leave and tell Bashera he was not worthy. He quickly changed the subject. “Why did your parents come to America?”

  She sighed. She was worried about his devotion and knew that it was her responsibi
lity to keep him focused. She would have to work harder. “My parents? They ran a business in Egypt, one they inherited from my grandparents. It was a good business, a carpet and rug shop. They mostly imported from Afghanistan. My grandfather was the main buyer and spent a lot of time in Kabul and Kandahar. After the Americans invaded, he stopped going. It was too dangerous. Many of his suppliers were killed or put out of business.”

  “That’s too bad. What happened to the store?”

  “Eventually they had to shut it down. My aunt had come to America before 9/11, and she helped my parents get a visa for us to join her. That was in 2002.”

  “Where did you live when you first came here?”

  “Brooklyn. We all lived in a small two-bedroom apartment there for a year. Two families with six kids altogether. It was very cramped.”

  “I bet,” he said, waiting for her to continue.

  “We moved to the DC area when my dad got a job at a carpet company. That lasted eight years. Then he got laid off. So they gave up, and we moved back to Egypt, this time to Cairo.”

  “But you came back.”

  “I was sent here.”

  “Sent here? To go to GMU?”

  “Yes. I was sent here by Daesh to help the professor attack America,” she said, using the Arabic term for ISIS. “I went to school at a madrasa in Cairo, where I learned the Koran and the history of our people. How we were exploited and murdered by the infidel. My brother joined the resistance after he left school. He was killed in Afghanistan by the Americans in 2012.”

  “So is that when you joined Daesh?”

  “At first they wanted to use me to have their babies, like the other girls they conscript into domestic servitude. But I wasn’t having any of that. I convinced them that I was more valuable if I used my education and my looks to infiltrate the enemy. It took a while but they eventually agreed.”

  Adnan was quiet. “It’s hard to imagine you as a member of Daesh. You seem so liberal, in your dress and your actions . . .”