Chapter 6

Brandon’s apartment felt more like home than it ever had before. Maybe it was his uncertainty that he’d ever see it again, or maybe it was the calmness he’d been experiencing in the aftermath of the adrenaline flood of the past few hours. Regardless, it felt good to be back in his dimly lit dungeon of a home. Ramon seemed disappointed to see Brandon again so soon, though he admitted he was pleased to see he wasn’t dead. Brandon sat down at the same counter he always used as a desk and opened the manila folder. Inside he found a stack of papers with a thick paperclip binding them. It was late, too late perhaps to truly retain anything he read, but he wasn’t ready to surrender the night away just yet. He perused the documents, hoping to glean the broad strokes then return in the morning to get a better grip on the details. At first glance, the terrorist threat seemed awfully run of the mill. The group was called “Al-Hejaz,” a common enough seeming title. Their leader was an Arab man of Kurdish descent, Muslim, and born in Iraq by the name of Zareeq Lal. Brandon wasn’t aware of an abnormal amount of anti-American sentiment among the Kurdish people of Iraq, though his knowledge of Middle Eastern history told him they would wouldn’t be unfounded in having at least some. The Kurds were not recognized by the western powers that sliced up the Middle East into nations when imperialism was no longer in vogue. As a result, their region (referred to as Kurdistan) was split between Iraq and Turkey, separating their people to be ruled by different governments and eventually dooming them to a good amount of prejudice, corruption and even ethnic cleansing. Despite their raw deal, many Kurdish aided the United States and their allies in the Iraq wars. The man’s Kurdish background, however, was not the only thing that stood out as slightly different as most terrorist files: the only picture of the man showed him in a tuxedo, clean shaven and wearing sunglasses that looked expensive. The photograph was obviously taken at an event of some sort. What made it so unusual is that Islamic fundamentalists rarely dress in such ways, seeing it as representative of the corruption of the west. This man seemed to harbor no such concerns about westernization. The next page provided a bit more insight into the man; he attended college in the United States, earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Columbia University on a scholarship. His father was a high level interpreter working for the Department of Defense during Operations Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn. So far, this seemed a rather unusual background for a terrorist leader. Brandon scanned down the page a bit and it suddenly came into focus… During the pull out of US forces in Iraq, a number of interpreters requested visas to bring their families to the United States. Without the presence of American troops, they would be vulnerable to retribution for aiding the Americans. Lal’s father, like many others, was denied his request. When Lal lost contact with his family, he returned home to find that his mother, father and two younger sisters had all been murdered. No suspects were cited, but it was clearly attributed to their allegiance to the United States. Lal returned to Columbia, completed his final semester and left for Iraq without walking at graduation. Two years later an American Embassy in Guinea, Africa was attacked. Three Americans were killed (including two Marines, Brandon noted) in an explosion that originated in a Ford Fiesta that had been parked alongside the gate closest to the building. Two days later, Lal claimed responsibility for the bombing via e-mail to Al-Jazeera News. He later claimed responsibility in the same fashion for six more bombings in the year thereafter, but nothing in the past four months. Brandon closed his eyes for a moment and they burned with longing for sleep. He decided it was best he left the rest of the reading for morning. He slid the papers back into the envelope and carried it with him to his bed. He’d keep it beneath him overnight, just to be safe. He threw the envelope on the bed while he undressed, then climbed in wearing only his boxer-briefs. The cold envelope felt good at first against his back, but as he rolled onto his side the crinkled envelope stopped being a welcome addition. Brandon pulled it out from beneath his side and slid it half under the pillow between his face and the wall. Good enough, he thought. He was asleep almost instantly. Brandon awoke with a start and grabbed for the envelope. It wasn’t there. Panicked, he jumped out of bed and threw the blankets on the floor. The envelope was gone. Flustered, he rummaged through the pile of blankets, praying that somehow it had simply stuck to them as he pulled them off, but found nothing. As his terror reached a boiling point, he saw the corner of the envelope hanging down past the bed frame on the wall side of the bed. It had simply fallen in the crack between the mattress and the faded, light blue paint of his wall. Brandon wasn’t sure he knew what a heart attack felt like, but he could guess it was something like waking up to find the secret files your seemingly omnipotent spy boss handed you in a clandestine meeting the night before had gone missing. He sat back down on the bed and collected himself for a few minutes. His heartbeat was slowly returning to its normal gate. Brandon opted to forgo this morning’s workout in favor of an earlier start on committing as much of the file to memory as possible. He still had his report to complete and he knew Eve would be back in town tonight. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to see her again until lunch the following day, but that was no reason not to obsessively pine in a public place over dinner, was it? Brandon shuddered at how pathetic he was, but appreciated the distraction his crush provided from the seriousness of the task at hand. He allowed himself to revel in her thought only long enough to get back into his chair. He placed the laptop on the counter and turned it on. He’d have three pages read before the operating system was even loaded. Two hours later, a freshly showered but substantially underdressed Brandon stepped out of his apartment door. He was wearing a pair of dark blue basketball shorts and a plain white tee shirt. Flip flops provided the barest of barriers between his feet and the dirt that was supposed to be a road. He had the manila folder in one hand and a small metal can of lighter fluid in the other. He stepped down off the cinderblocks that made up his front step and took a right, followed by another into the narrow alley separating his building from the one next door. His small grill was still in the backyard, along with piles of rusty metal and garbage the owner of his building had left there. One of the piles, stacked seemingly on purpose in front of the back door, was what kept Brandon’s back door from opening. He was still unsure if having eliminated one point of entry was a tactical benefit or not, but his uncertainty was all the excuse he needed not to spend a day moving the pile of potential tetanus. He removed the lid from small, charcoal grill, dropped the envelope on the grate and began to spray it with the lighter fluid. Once it was sufficiently saturated, he produced a zippo lighter from his shorts pocket and lit the edge. Within a few minutes, there were no identifiable remnants of the file left in the black metal container. Brandon returned the lid to its position, knowing the embers would keep burning for a bit but should be safe within the grill, and headed back inside. An hour later, mind abuzz with the information he’d read in the file and with thoughts of what he’d decided could only be compared to a junior high school crush, Brandon sat in front his of his computer screen with barely half of his report written. Given the developments of the past day, much of his information seemed unnecessary or even superfluous. Clearly the powers that be had bigger things to worry about than the general sentiment of the local Honduran tourist industry toward American investors. Then again, he realized, the information he provided could certainly be of use to those American investors and to assume only intelligence officials were privy to the information provided in his reports was foolish to say the least. The intelligence field was part of the military industrial complex, something comprised of both government and private sector elements so deeply interwoven that you simply couldn’t have one without the other anymore. He was aware that this concept had led many to lose faith in the American government, claiming too much control was coming from corporations and not enough was coming from the voters. Brandon didn’t concern himself with opinions on contemporary politics. His job was to serve his nation in the way he was asked. Discourse about the morality of its finer points wasn’t his concern. It wasn’t that Brandon was void of any opinion on the subject really. If prodded, he might even be able to produce some decent argumentative points, but he saw the world from a different perspective than your average tax payer. Just as he was certain his country needed nay saying cynics that were certain the country was headed toward its own destruction and cultural critics pointing out the weaknesses in how America pursued its ideals, it also needed men like him. Men who knew their country was capable of making mistakes, or worse, doing evil things intentionally, but always with the greater goal of keeping its people safe, happy, and ignorant of the world’s harsh reality. When Net Neutrality was overturned, Brandon remembered reading scathing editorials about the American people’s concern about slowing Netflix streaming speeds. That same week, revolutions in Venezuela and the Ukraine claimed hundreds of lives. It wasn’t that Americans didn’t care about the plight of the rest of the world, it was a testament to the solidity of America’s government that such turmoil seemed so impossibly distant to your average American that they were comfortable publicly lamenting a delay in their reruns of “Glee.” It was men and women like Brandon that saw the country for what it really was, and loved it not despite its flaws and imperfections, but for them. The idea that was “America” was making a society so Utopian, so safe, that the pressing concerns on the minds of most involved prime time television and cutting things like gluten from their diet. Brandon could recall in the years before he left the states the “caveman diet” sweeping the country – wherein you would only eat the things cavemen would and forgo processed and complex foods. It seemed logical to your average Land Rover driving Oprah watcher, but in Brandon’s years deployed to third world countries where the people were forced into a much closer facsimile of the caveman diet (namely eating anything you can in hopes of surviving) he knew such things tended to yield a rather low life expectancy. Only in America would people pay extra to eat like the poorest people on the planet. He wondered briefly what the current fad must be; maybe eating rocks and paying ten thousand extra dollars for the covered wagon option at the Lexus dealership. Again, negative as it may sound, this type of foolishness was truly what Brandon and many others in the know wanted for their country: a nation with so few problems, the residents would have to produce their own. He’d let them fight about it from within the safe borders of the States. Meanwhile, people like Brandon would keep their eyes on preventing a scary dose of reality from reaching the homeland from their posts in places like Roatan Island. All this thinking did little to progress Brandon’s report. The blank space at the bottom of the page glared at him with a judging sheen. Procrastination, he realized, didn’t seem to end in college. He took a deep breath, reigned in his thoughts and proceeded to type. It would be another two hours before was able to submit the report, and by that time he’d already begun drinking. He decided it would be best to make an appearance at Ramon’s coffee shop before he made his way into town to buy some groceries for the evening. He needed to set the tone for how their interactions would progress, make sure Ramon didn’t feel as though they were partners in anything. He got dressed and made his way there, forcing a cheerful demeanor to his walk, complete with occasionally whistling and waving to children as they passed. Had anyone noticed his sneaking around the night prior, it was important that it seem as though his world hadn’t changed a bit, despite the swirling of terrorist plots and geopolitical concerns in his head. In reality though, it wasn’t hard to fake it. Again, Roatan Island really served very little tactical or economic purpose in the big picture of the Western World, the chances of an attack on his watch were so slim by his estimation that last night’s events would soon just be another good story he couldn’t tell anyone: nothing more. Of course, that didn’t stop him from taking the concept seriously, it granted his mind reason to be paranoid and provided him with a renewed air of importance. One cannot underestimate the sense of superiority that can be found in feeling like you’re secretly the last bastion of hope for the security of his little world. It certainly helps the coffee go down. Brandon walked in the open door to Ramon’s and made eye contact with its owner. He was hurriedly brewing fresh pots of coffee and doing his best to ignore the elderly woman in filthy clothes sitting at Brandon’s usual table. She didn’t look up from the cup of water Brandon assumed was all Ramon was willing to provide to her free of charge. Ramon smiled at his entrance and the two nodded to one another as Brandon closed the gap between himself and the counter. “What’ll it be, amigo?” Ramon was the first to speak. “The usual.” Brandon replied, eyeing Ramon for any sign that he may want to publicly discuss the previous night’s events. Fortunately, he saw no such inclination. “Coming right up.” Ramon produced a small white mug from a shelf below the counter and poured a cup of steaming black crude while Brandon counted out a few bills onto the counter. He left enough for the coffee and a solid meal for the vagrant, whom he knew would probably receive only half his money’s worth. It was still better than nothing. Ramon saw the bills and his shoulders slumped a bit. He’d take the business, but was no happier about continuing to propagate the myth of his charity. Brandon smiled slyly and Ramon relented and smiled back with a shrug, “Business is business. Gracias.” He counted the bills into the register and headed back toward the kitchen to produce something for his only other customer. With Brandon’s usual table occupied, he took the only other seat with a full view of the coffee shop and a back facing the wall. The newspapers had coffee spilled on them, but Brandon found one in the pile dry enough for a read and with what felt like welcome familiarity for only the second time in the past two days, he sat and began to read. A few customers came and went as Brandon went about his usual business, but as he finished his second full run through, he heard a familiar voice from outside the open windows of the coffee shop… Eve. A young man (young enough that he may have only recently graduated beyond the use of the term “boy” to describe him) was speaking to her in angry Spanish. With some languages, Japanese for instance, anger was difficult for a Westerner to differentiate from surprise, excitement, or in some case, just regular speech. Spanish was no such language; for whatever reason, this young man had clearly taken issue with Eve. She was responding much slower, in academic Spanish, Brandon thought to himself. She’d learned the language fluently from teachers and students, in controlled settings and pleasant classrooms. Nothing in her training had prepared her for the angry, slang ridden ranting of a Honduran cab tour guide. Brandon knew the appropriate thing for a man to do was intervene… he also knew the appropriate thing for an agent to do was blend in with the crowd and not get involved. In an instant, Brandon decided to side with the man. He stood up, subconsciously correcting his posture to ensure all six feet of him was on display, and walked out the coffee shop door with intent. “You can’t just do that!” Eve rose her voice a bit while still speaking in perfectly articulate Spanish. “The price is now five hundred US dollars. You didn’t tell me you were here for business, and the business price is five hundred dollars.” The man had relaxed his tone to demonstrate his absoluteness. It was a good argumentative tactic, making it seem as though there was no room for debate. “We agreed to one hundred dollars and I’m going to pay you one hundred dollars. I don’t even have five hundred I could spend on transportation!” Eve was clearly growing anxious at the possibility of losing this argument. “If you can’t pay with money, you’ll pay me somehow!” The man retorted and reached for her arm. He wrapped his hands around his forearm at precisely the same moment Brandon approached from his right and grabbed the collar of his shirt. “You wouldn’t want to start a fight with a lady,” Brandon said in English. The man used to work on one of the approved excursion tours until Brandon had to remove them from the list. He’d never spoken to him personally, but he’d seen him around enough to know he’d understand. Using Spanish was just another tactic to keep his mark, Eve, at a disadvantage. “Hey! Let me go!” He yelled, but not to Brandon. He was hoping the locals in the area would intervene at the sight of a white man assaulting one of them. It didn’t seem to work, but he wasn’t going to give up on trying just yet. As a precaution, he let go of Eve’s arm. “Brandon! I… what are you doing here?” Eve was caught utterly by surprise at his sudden involvement and she seemed rather embarrassed. “Just in the area. Excuse me for a minute,” Brandon may not have spent too much time lifting weights these days, but he was still a formidable figure. At around two hundred and ten pounds, he was easily forty or fifty pounds heavier, and six inches taller, than the angry Honduran. He used the leverage his size permitted him to guide the smaller man backward a few steps and let them speak a little more privately. “You let me go! I don’t want trouble!” The man hollered to no one in particular again, his eyes now growing wider. “Seems like you just don’t like fighting anyone but girls to me,” Brandon half whispered through clenched teeth he made sure were only inches away from the young man’s face, “do you know who I am?” “You’re the gringo, the American, the man that runs the cruise ships,” he corrected himself in an attempt to seem respectful. “What do you think the police would do if the man that brought the tourists broke your jaw in the street?” Brandon didn’t break eye contact. “You’d go to jail! They won’t side with a gringo!” He was yelling differently now. Panic had set in. “Is that what you think? Because I think you’d be handcuffed to a hospital bed while they praised me for taking a bite outta crime,” Brandon let a subtle smile creep across his lips. “Okay, okay, you win, but the bitch still has to pay me…” He was now scrambling for whatever he could get. “You’ll get fifty dollars American,” Brandon shoved hard with both hands where they had an instant ago been clenching his shirt. The force left his opponent stumbling backwards and onto his rear end. Brandon reached into his pocket and threw a few crumpled up bills onto the man’s lap who looked up at him like an angry child being put in timeout. “You think you’re such a big deal! You’re nothing!” He spat at Brandon as he picked up the bills, flattened them and then slipped them into his pocket. “And you’re done here. Get back to whatever hole you crawled out of.” Brandon turned his back on him intentionally, making sure he knew how little a threat Brandon deemed him, and looked to Eve. She began to speak, but Brandon was really using her face as an indicator of whether or not he should expect to be attacked from behind. When he saw no indication of that, he spoke first. “You okay?” He tried to transition to a more empathetic tone. “Y.. yeah. I am. Thank you… I’m sorry, I just…” She still wasn’t sure what to say. That was fine, there was as good a chance she’d be mad at him for interfering as there was she’d be grateful. He’d settle for grateful and inarticulate. He glanced back to find the man on his feet and walking away with clenched fists. “Come on, let’s get you something to drink,” Brandon said as he gently took her hand and guided her toward Ramon’s. Ramon was standing in the door, watching silently with a strange smile. “I think I have just the thing for the lady!” Ramon announced as they walked closer. She looked up at Brandon and smiled. Her blue eyes shimmered with what could have been gratitude, even affection. Could also be nothing, Brandon tempered his wishful thinking. It didn’t matter anyway. Her hand clenched his tightly and she mouthed the words “thank you,” to him before looking back toward Ramon. “I hope you’ve got something stronger than coffee beans in there.” She spoke up so Ramon could hear. “For a beautiful woman like you? I’ll draw from my personal reserve.” Ramon smiled broadly. Brandon secretly admired his confidence; the scars on his face and arms did nothing to dissuade his charm. “I might even have enough for your friend,” he added with a wink to Brandon. Thank god, Brandon thought. He could definitely use a drink.