“Gosh, I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas,” Jessica’s friend Olivia said, the girls joining them at the corner for the Christmas star lighting.
They wound up at Olivia’s house. Olivia produced a bottle of her parent’s J&B scotch, the music was Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, and somehow it was just the two of them, Jessica and Brody, in Olivia’s sister’s bedroom, on a tiny single bed, kissing so hard it was as if kissing was the only known form of sexual expression, and then she pulled off her skirt, telling him: “I’m not wearing any panties.” She handed him a Trojan still in its wrapper from her purse. And all he could think was, she had thought it all out, this was her idea.
He remembered how excited they had been on that narrow bed, how beautiful she was in the slanting light coming through the venetian blinds from the streetlight outside, the exquisite feel of her—when suddenly blinding light and someone shaking him hard.
For an instant, he thought he was back in the house on Goepp Street and it was Gunner Brody, shaking him awake, shouting at him, “Thought you could sneak your report card past me, you little maggot jarhead.” But it was his guard, Afsal Hamid, shaking him awake, hissing, “Wake up, you American piece of shit! Do you know what’s happened? Of course you know. Because of you we have to go. Because of you, you motherless bastard.”
“What’s going on?” Brody asked.
“You know why, you dog. We have to leave because of you,” unchaining Brody and throwing clothes at him.
“You pig-faced son of a whore!” Afsal kept saying. For a minute it was like six years ago when they first captured him. That time they kept beating him until they nearly killed him. And Brody remembered at one point in those first weeks screaming back at Afsal through bloody teeth, “You think you hit hard, you raghead prick? The Marine gunner used to hit me harder with his service belt every freaking time he got drunk, just because he wanted to make sure I didn’t grow up to be a pussy. Harder than that every day, you son of a bitch. I’m immune to you, you bastard. So hit me harder! Harder! Harder! Harder!”
“What are you doing?” Daleel, one of the others, said to Afsal. “We have to leave. Get him ready.” By now, Brody had learned enough Arabic to understand some of what was said, though not all the nuances.
“This isn’t over,” Afsal hissed, pulling Brody close. “First we leave. But today, I promise. Today is the day you die, American.”
He quickly dressed and washed, hurried along every minute by Afsal saying, “You fool the others, pretending to be a Muslim, Nicholas Brody. But you don’t fool me. This will be the last time you will be a problem for us.”
What had gone wrong? he wondered. All around him, everyone was moving, stripping away everything they owned down to the walls—clothes, furniture, pots, bedding, laptop computers, weapons, explosives—and packing them away into a caravan of pickup trucks and SUVs lined up in the street outside the compound. All the lights were on and Brody didn’t know why they were leaving so suddenly and in the middle of the night.
“Ahjilah! Ahjilah!” Hurry! Hurry! Everyone kept telling each other; all of them, men, women, even the children, moving with purpose.
At the last minute, Abu Nazir himself came in and everyone had a quick communal breakfast. Only hot tea and pita bread. When someone started to clear the breakfast dishes, Abu Nazir told them to leave it and headed out to the lead SUV. Afsal and Daleel stayed with Brody.
When they got to the SUV, its engine running, Afsal took out a pistol and put it to Brody’s head. He ordered Brody to turn around so Daleel could tie his hands with plastic cuffs. Although it was the middle of the night, the street was bright from the headlights of the vehicles lined up and Brody could see the heads of people watching from the windows of nearby buildings.
“Is this really necessary, Afsal? I don’t even know where I am,” Brody said over his shoulder.
Afsal didn’t answer, but instead pulled a black hood over his head so he couldn’t see.
“Somebody help me with this infidel,” Afsal said, and Brody felt himself being heaved up and shoved on his side. They squeezed him into the back of the SUV, the compressed air pressing the hood against his face as they slammed the hatchback shut, banging his skull.
It made his ears ring and he was felt dizzy, maybe concussed. And blind inside the hood. For a second or two, he might have blacked out. Then the SUV started up. He could smell the exhaust. They were moving through the streets. Through it all, something told him, this time they weren’t going to hold Afsal back. Why? What had changed? Why did they have to leave? Wherever they were going, he had the sudden realization that he was extra baggage, deadweight they could no longer afford to carry. This time, they would kill him. But it had always been that way with him.
Living on a bayonet edge with Gunner Brody, the worst of it, knowing he was a coward. He had known that ever since one night when he was twelve. Something he had never told anyone except Jessica—and she couldn’t see it. But he could. And nothing could fix it. Not becoming a Marine, not Parris Island and Iraq. Not combat. Nothing.
That night. The night he learned who he was. It was three days after his twelfth birthday. Gunner Brody had bought him a BMX bike, and for a few minutes, it was almost like they were a real family.
“Who’s the best dad in the world?” Gunner Brody had said when he gave him the bike.
“You are, Dad,” Nick had said, wanting it to be true. Then, seeing a sudden dangerous glint in his father’s eyes because his father always insisted on being treated like a Marine officer, added, “Sir.”
Three nights later, Gunner Brody had fallen dead drunk asleep, his .45 service automatic just sitting there on the kitchen table next to the cleaning kit he hadn’t even started to use before he’d fallen asleep, head on the table, mouth open, spittle drooling from the corner of his mouth. Brody’s mother, Sibeal, was doing what she always did; keeping the bedroom door closed. She slept curled to make herself tiny as a snail in a corner of the bed, as far away from her husband as she could get.
Gunner Brody had been celebrating the six-week anniversary of his unemployment benefit checks running out after he got his pink slip from the steel mill. (“They promised me I’d have a job no matter what,” he roared to his best friend, one hundred-proof Old Grand-Dad. “I got the Silver Star. What’d they ever do, those jerk-offs? They promised me!”) Before he’d passed out, he’d used Sibeal for a punching bag, telling her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the little jarhead shit, he wouldn’t be in this stupid fix.
And Nick finally couldn’t take any more. He grabbed his Little League bat from the closet and, coming from behind, swung it at his father, hitting him across the shoulder. Gunner Brody staggered, howling in pain. He turned around and rushed Nick, kicking him in the groin, followed by an elbow jab to the face and a leg takedown.
“Hit your father, you little maggot!” he screamed. “Hit an officer, you little jarhead prick! I’ll teach you!” Banging Brody’s head by his hair against the floor, again and again.
“Gunner, stop it! You’ll kill him! Stop! You’ll kill him. Your own son!” his mother screamed. “Marion, they’ll put you in prison. Is that what you want? For the love of God, stop. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, stop!”
“You don’t get it, you little maggot,” Gunner Brody said, leaning close and whispering in Nick’s ear as he lay there on the floor, helpless, utterly beaten. “When I hit her, she likes it.”
Later that night, something told him to wake up. Wincing, he tiptoed on bare feet to the kitchen, where he found Gunner Brody dead drunk asleep, the loaded .45 and the cleaning kit on the table in front of him, and for more than nine minutes, as he later told Jessica, he stood there in his underwear, holding the gun with both hands less than three inches from Gunner Brody’s head, trying to get up the guts to squeeze the trigger.
“Because