Whisper

  Whisper

  Tal Bauer

  A Tal Bauer Publication

  www.talbauerwrites.com

  This story is, in part, inspired by actual events.

  Certain incidents, locations, and dialogue were fictionalized for dramatic purposes. This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  This novel contains scenes of graphic violence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Tal Bauer.

  Copyright © 2018 Tal Bauer

  Cover Art by Ron Perry Graphic Design © Copyright 2018

  Edited by Rita Roberts

  Published in 2018 by Tal Bauer in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Map

  Whisper

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Connect with Tal Bauer

  Other Books by Tal Bauer

  Dedication

  To my husband, the eternal love of my life, in this life and the next.

  To everyone who yearns for peace.

  This story is, in part, inspired by actual events.

  Certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations, and dialogue were fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

  What you think,

  You become.

  What you feel,

  You attract.

  What you imagine,

  You create.

  ~ Gautama Buddha

  Then

  September 11, 2001

  Chapter 1

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  September 11, 2001

  It was supposed to be a good day.

  Kris poured his creamer into his second cup of coffee. He heard feet pounding down the hallway. “It must be an accident.”

  “But it’s such a clear morning. How did the pilot lose visibility?”

  He hurried after his coworkers to the Counterterrorism Center, CTC, housed deep inside Langley. CTC looked like a Vegas sports bar: monitors spanned one giant wall with video feeds showing live TV, news, surveillance from a dozen overseas operations, status of forces deployed around the world, and more. In a pit before the monitors, lines of workstations stretched in rows. One wall was packed with racks of communication equipment. Radios, satellite phones on charging stands, humming servers that communicated with CIA stations around the world.

  Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the wall of monitors.

  Every screen showed the same thing.

  New York City. Lower Manhattan. Smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  Murmurs rose, the ebb and flow of uncertainty. More people padded in. Analysts, officers, the deputy director. Clandestine Special Activities Division personnel.

  Everyone waited for the news anchors to say it, to confirm it was an accident. A tragic, horrific accident, but still.

  An accident.

  One hundred CIA officers watched live as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The fireball filled the whole wall of monitors, stretching from one end of CTC to the other, as if they were right there in the center of the fury. Fire broke over the world, coloring CTC in waves from Hell.

  Gasps rose, followed by screams. Kris dropped his cup. It shattered, coffee splashing his pants and the shoes of the analyst beside him.

  No one noticed.

  No one moved. No one spoke.

  It was like the world had stopped turning, like time was frozen. Breaths seemed to take an eternity. Reality only existed in the billowing smoke, the flames roaring above New York. The desperation in the survivors’ faces as they leaned out of the windows above the impact site and the roaring inferno. As they chose to jump, leap from the building, fleeing one certain death for another.

  Twenty minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s al-Qaeda.” Voices rose, comments over the din of the whispers. “This is their attack.”

  Kris started to shake, violent trembles as flashes of intel cables and reports he’d seen over the past two years came together like a terrible jigsaw puzzle in his mind.

  Too late. We were too late.

  “Will someone please lead?” a voice shouted from the back of the room. “Will someone please fucking do something?”

  Clint Williams, Director of CTC, turned and stared. He blinked, as if trying to visibly restart his brain, as if he remembered he had men and women standing before him. “We’re under attack!” he shouted. “And Langley could be a target! Evacuate! Now! Everyone out!”

  Kris had woken up in a good mood.

  The night before, he had lightly flirted with an attorney while watching Monday Night Football at a little bar in Georgetown. He’d cheered on Denver while the attorney rooted for the New York Giants, and they’d playfully jabbed at each other throughout.

  At the end of the game, the attorney gave him a long, lingering stare over his slim chinos, his tucked-in button-down, open at the neck and showing off his undershirt and his shell necklace, the one he wore when he went out, to his spiked hair.

  He’d bitten his lower lip.

  “Wanna get out of here?”

  Kris had thought he’d never ask.

  They made out in the parking lot, pressed against the attorney’s BMW, before trading blowjobs in the back seat. After, Kris straightened his clothes and headed to his car, going home. Alone.

  He was a professional now, or trying to be. Holding down a job. His college days of waking up in a different bed almost every day of the week were behind him.

  “Maybe I’ll see you next week,” the attorney had called after him.

  “Maybe!”

  Buoyed by the night before, Kris had wound his way through the North Virginia traffic to Langley early in the morning. He’d smiled at the guards who glared at him as he badged his way into headquarters, and then to CTC. The guards had shut up about the Monday night game as he passed. As if him hearing their conversation would somehow mean something. He’d smirked and twiddled his fingers.

  At his desk, he’d read the overnight cables, shaking his head over the reported suicide bombing of General Ahmad Massoud of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Massoud had been one of the better men in the dusty backwater of Afghanistan, a force against the Taliban.

  He’d risen to get his second cup of coffee, wondering about the future of the tiny, forgotten country he was in charge of monitoring. Would the Taliban seize control of the entire nation? Would that be the end of the rebellion against the Taliban’s chokehold? What about al-Qaeda, shielded by the Taliban? In the breakroom, he had to start a second pot of coffee. Everyone always let it run dry, down to the dregs that burned and stank.

  He was pouring his creamer, wondering, for the thousandth time, about updating his résumé and getting out of the CIA when he heard the first whisper of a plane crash in New York.

  The CIA was shaping up to be a rough career. Kris was surrounded by Type A personalities, people who stared unflinchingly into the darkness of the world and believed they could bend the globe’s swirling maelstrom to their own will. Kris could barely get the security guards to say hello to him. Who was he to change the world?

  He stood out, with his tweed sport coats and ascots and crisp button-downs. In a world of clandestine operators in rumpled khakis and polos with coffee stains, he was a Milan fashion model. In 2001, that meant something, in a man. Everyone, of course, noticed. Every
one talked. He could count on one hand the few people who spoke regularly to him, who were friendly.

  Maybe that was why he was isolated on the Afghanistan desk.

  Maybe it was time to start looking for another career.

  Back in 1999, a man had stopped him outside his Advanced Farsi class at George Washington University. He’d hung in the corner of the hallway, keeping obsessively to himself, like he lived in the shadows by choice. He’d had two cell phones on his hip. In 1999, barely anyone had a cell phone.

  “Mr. Caldera? Kris Caldera?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a possible job.” He’d handed Kris a business card with the CIA’s logo on the front.

  He hadn’t known then what it meant that he was being sought out by the CIA. He was a gay Puerto Rican kid on a poverty scholarship to GWU and he didn’t have a single ounce of blue blood in him, not one single connection or friend of his father’s he could call on. It was only four years since President Clinton had rescinded the ban on homosexuals being allowed to hold security clearances, only four years since people like him were allowed to serve openly in sensitive national security positions.

  Not that anyone did serve openly. The closet was still shut and barricaded from the inside.

  “Why me?” He’d stuck out his hip, and he had lip gloss on and smudged eyeliner from waking up in Beta Theta Pi’s frat house that morning.

  “We hear you’re good with languages. Particularly ones we’re interested in.”

  He loved languages, loved the way the mind skipped and danced over converting rules of grammar, syntax, and expression, twists of phrase and linguistic layups. He’d grown up speaking Spanish at home and English at school, and a mix of everything on the streets, where he ran with other brown kids in Lower Manhattan. In middle school he’d crushed on older boys, writing long love letters in French that he dreamed of whispering to the shortstop on the school baseball team. In high school, he’d worn his school uniform the sassiest way he could, his tie just past scandalous, and regularly smacked on enough tinted lip balm to make it look like he’d been kissing for hours. He’d made it a point to stare at the football players until they barked at him. He’d laughed in their faces.

  One had tried to kiss him after school, smearing his lip balm all over his cheeks. He kept the boy’s secret, though.

  Later, he’d crushed on a swarthy waiter from Rome who worked in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant while moonlighting off-Broadway, and he’d learned Italian just to flirt with him. As often as he could, he’d trekked up Broadway, ignoring the stares he got when the wealthy white people watched him flounce past.

  Then one day, the waiter showed up with a white boy toy from the Upper East Side, and Kris never spoke another word in Italian.

  The harder the language, the better he was. He’d taken Arabic throughout his junior and senior years in high school and earned a scholarship to George Washington University in DC.

  Not Georgetown. They’d never accept someone like him.

  But George Washington was only a few blocks away, and they offered as many languages as he could gorge himself on. He’d thought if he did well, maybe, just maybe, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service would accept him for a Masters. He could try to join the State Department, or the United Nations.

  He’d maxed out of Arabic his sophomore year and switched to Farsi, taking courses until he had to do independent study with his professor to go further. He’d spent two summers on an exchange program in the Middle East, first in Egypt and then in Lebanon and Syria.

  He was careful overseas, just to prove his doubters wrong. His professor hadn’t wanted him to go. “It’s too dangerous, Kris. You advertise your sexuality.”

  Of course he did. When the world looked at him, all anyone saw was a skinny brown gay boy, a kid full of attitude and trash. He had two choices. He could live out loud, take the hard world exactly as it came, be exactly who he was. He wasn’t wrong; the world was. People moved out of the way on the streets for him. So what if they moved because they hated him? They still moved. So what if he was a scrawny Puerto Rican with too big a mouth and too little sense? New York was full of old gays who wanted little twinky white boys, anyway. He picked fights with everybody, with anybody. He had a sharp tongue and no patience for the sidelong looks he got. He just lived louder, filling up the space everyone left around him.

  Or, on the other hand, he could try and bury everything, try and erase the gay and erase the brown and try to live a white bread kind of life. Put away the lip balm and stop cursing in Spanish. Learn Frisbee and golf and be like the upper-class private school white boys he saw in Central Park, and not the street soccer and football at his low-income school. He could make his world shades of white and pale, shades of sucking up and always trying to fit in, shades of never being enough, and being told, in a thousand, million, tiny ways, that he would never, ever fit in, no matter how hard he tried.

  Fuck that.

  He’d take his discrimination to his face, thank you very much. The world would acknowledge him. Somehow.

  He’d left New York with the empanadas and platinos his mom had packed him, two suitcases, and a promise to never go back. Not to his father, who hadn’t looked at Kris since he caught him jerking off to a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and not to the rest of his classmates who’d called him princess and fairy and fag. Not even to his mother, who’d dreamed of flying back to the island and living with her sister, escaping his dad and the endless nights of beer drinking and watching TV for hours on end. His mom was made for Puerto Rico, for wind in her hair and a salt breeze, and friends cooking together as music played over the sound of the surf and the birds twittering from tree to tree. She wasn’t made for car horns and subway platforms, the stink of hot urine on Manhattan’s blacktop.

  He hadn’t known where he was made for, either. Not New York. But where?

  He’d never dreamed, never imagined, his path would take him to the CIA.

  But then he’d dreamed of spies in luxury suits, seduction in far-flung lands, meeting a man’s gaze across a crowded bar, swirling a Martini. Adventure. Intrigue.

  And for once, someone wanted him.

  A week after graduation, Kris was at Camp Peary, The Farm, the CIA training center.

  He’d been certain, then, he had made the biggest mistake of his life. He was a bookworm, studious until happy hour, when he enjoyed his vodka and his cocktails and a man to go along. He had more clothes than sense and went to the gym only to show off his long legs in tiny shorts and ogle the beefy guys pumping iron. And for the sauna. And the blowjobs.

  He liked first-world comforts: technology, comfy beds, and hot men waiting for him in them.

  Halfway through the CIA’s training course, he’d parachuted out of a plane and eaten worms for three days while trying to evade his trainers, career military officers, who had spent their entire lives hunting people.

  He’d been captured in a swamp, hiding in the reeds. His trainers had hauled him back to The Farm for the next round of instruction: how to withstand an interrogation.

  Kris had thought he’d be the first one captured.

  He was the second to last.

  During weapons training, he was the only one out of his class of twenty who had never fired a weapon before. Aghast, the instructors had begrudgingly started at the beginning of firearms training, all nineteen others, former military officers and federal agents, plodding along beside him as he fumbled through how to hold his weapon, load an empty clip, pull the slide back, dry fire.

  Eyes slid sideways, staring at him in the cafeteria. The military guys stuck together, as did the LEOs, the law enforcement officers switching over to intelligence, in their own tight-knit fraternities.

  There was no room for a twenty-one-year-old scrawny brown boy just barely graduated from college. Especially a twenty-one-year-old with a shell choker, distressed jeans, and tight t-shirts. He kept to himself, and the others seemed to
prefer it that way.

  The bulk of their training had been in the classroom, followed by the real world. CIA officers, for the most part, spent their time working to recruit foreign nationals to spill their secrets, betray their own governments. Give information to the CIA. That process was purely personal. Psychological.

  Who was a good target to recruit? Were they vulnerable in any way? Reliable? How could they be approached? What aspects of their life could be exploited, for good or for ill, to develop the person into a source, an agent of the CIA? Were they, ultimately, friend or foe?

  Kris had spent his whole life observing people—men in particular—and the exercises on targeting individuals, psychological analysis, the role-play of approach and ingratiation, were child’s play to him. The military officers were too domineering, the former LEOs too interrogative, but he successfully recruited the assigned source each and every time.

  He had excelled at his surveillance detection routes. Walking home from bars alone and being a single gay man in a metropolitan city—

  Well, he’d learned how to watch his back long ago. It had been second nature to run the surveillance detection routes, the more complex the better, and pick out any tails following him. One of the military officers missed three of his tails on his final exam and was sent home that same day.

  Kris didn’t have to ever come out because he was never in. Everyone assumed, at first glance, what he was, and that was just the simplest for everyone. He heard a few comments, ignored the muttered curses. Gritted his teeth whenever “fag” was tossed around, a cultural synonym for idiot or weak.

  It made him work harder, prove them wrong. He’d proven everyone wrong so far. He’d keep going. He’d never stop.

  He excelled in most areas, passed in others. He’d have made a good case officer, going overseas to an embassy and pretending to be a low-level State Department official while trying to flip sources and foreign nationals. Maybe they would send him to Bahrain, he’d thought. Or Lebanon. Or Syria. He could work both sides of Sunni-Shia divide, target Iranian agents operating in Hezbollah and Syria as well as Hamas and Sunni extremists in Lebanon. He knew the culture, how to move around. He even knew how to find the right man in Beirut, or in Damascus. In Cairo, too.