Suddenly, I could hear a roving hum. It was a smooth sound, but clearly mechanical. It mounted and faded and mounted again, as if something within it were rotating. I knew that Trent must have reached the center. A light began to rise from the ground. It was a long, slender light that twisted around a large clear cylinder like the red stripe of a candy cane. The cylinder was large enough for a man to fit inside. Was this the door? My heart was pounding. I was terrified but confused and awestruck. I stepped forward without thinking about it. I didn’t know if I should run or scream for Trent to come back. And then I realized that I could not take another step. My back leg was stuck up to the knee in mud, and the front leg was sinking fast! I screamed and fell back. I struggled to roll over and pull my body over the deceptive surface. The tree where Trent had left me posted was only a few feet away. It must have been seconds, but when I finally reached the tree and was resting on somewhat solid ground, I felt as if I had been fighting for hours. I could hardly catch my breath as I pushed myself up, leaning on the tree. I tried to refocus on Trent, and at that moment, I heard a horrible sound. It almost sounded inhuman, but it wasn’t. It was the sound of a man screaming—a heart-wrenching shriek.

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“I thought that’s what we’ve been doing?”

“Stop this nonsense, you’ve gone too far! That bit with my father’s picture. I won’t stand for it!”

“I am not the one doing this. What picture?”
Fatima reached in her pocket and shoved the picture at Jacob. He took the photo and examined it. He walked into the next area of the hallway where there was more illumination.

Fatima followed him, her voice raised and biting, behind him. “You’ve been following me. Manipulating me!”

“Following you? I didn’t know you existed until—”

“How did you know I could solve that puzzle?”

“What are you talking about?”

“So, the number pad just happened to be a number that could be solved with an understanding in numerology? I didn’t even study that in school. It was a personal project.”

“I had no idea—”

“Then who? Who’s been watching me, investigating me?”

“I explained this to you. This place—”

“I don’t want to hear about this place and its mystical properties. It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Why? Why doesn’t it make sense? Because you don’t understand it?”

Fatima was stunned for a moment by Jacob’s defiant response but then decided to continue. “And what about the door inside? Greek letters? And that Lumumba actor? French?”

“Okay, Fatima. I’ll play this game with you. You’re pursuing a doctorate in Anthropology. Why wouldn’t you know the fundamentals of a classical language such as Greek? And many people who live in Europe know French, so sure, I thought you might know it too. I’m the mastermind. This is all to manipulate you, to trick you, deceive you!”

“So it was you?”

“Why not? That’s the easy thing to believe, isn’t it. Or maybe all of this is coming from you?”

“From me?” Fatima attempted a cynical smile but failed.

“Lumumba wasn’t my creation. You mentioned him. I brought him up because you did.”

“Oh please. You expect me to believe—”

“He is an example of what can go wrong when the truth is revealed before we are prepared to defend it. You are the reason he was here.”

“What are you talking about, he was here? That man couldn’t have—”

“What happened in that closet?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Jacob said incredulously. “You looked like you saw a ghost.”

“There was a woman in there on the floor hidden. She had a gun on me. She told me to leave, or she would shoot me in the head.”

Jacob’s eyes widened at this admission. “Who was she?”

“Don’t you know?” Fatima glared at him. The accusation was clear.

“I don’t know who she is. But you do, don’t you?”

“I recognized her. Yes. From photographs. From news reports.”

Jacob looked squarely at Fatima. There was no certainty in her eyes. Her pride was waning. He stepped in closer to her. He reached out as though he would grab her shoulders. As though, he would embrace her, but he didn’t touch her. “Fatima listen to me. You can choose this to be the moment. You can decide right now not to be willfully blind.”

“What the hell do you mean willfully blind? I want answers. I’m asking you for the truth right now!”

“What answers? What truth? That you give your father credit for all the good you have accomplished, but you also blame him for every failure, don’t you?” At this, Jacob held the photo of her father up to her with the mysterious woman. His face scratched out.

Fatima snatched the photo out of his hand, her face red with anger. “Now you wait one goddamn minute. You have no right to say that to me. You don’t even know me. I just met you yesterday and you think you can say something like that to me?”

“Oh, I know you. I know you and a million girls like you. I can see the measure in your eyes. The yardstick, the branding. It doesn’t matter what language you use, whether it’s English, Greek, or French. It’s in your eyes that you matter so much. The letters behind your name. Your Oxbridge status. Your leather satchel. All the trappings of a meaningful life measured and poured into a meaningless place, in the world you never wanted to live in.”

Fatima stood still, eyes wide, her mouth agape. She managed a cynical smile this time. A sound, almost a whisper, escaped her, disguised as a laugh. “Well,” she said breathlessly. Her next words came out low and sharp. “One can hardly fault the intellectual rigor of that argument. Since you have me all figured out, let’s hear it then. Don’t stop now.”

“Say the Creed Fatima.”

The smile dropped from her face. “No!”

“What will you do with that fancy degree? Will you change what’s happening out here on these streets Fatima? Will you stop the elite from creating a worldwide oligarchic system?”

“You mean the one that already exists?”

“And you just want to go, then go? Leave! If you can.”

“What has it mattered? The fighting, the bloodshed, the—”

“The dying? Like your father?”

“Fuck you, Jacob!”

“Speak the words.”

“No.”

“Why, Fatima? Why won—”

“I don’t like being manipulated.”

“What are you talking about? You think this whole thing is a mental manipulation. But you’ve been going along with everything else against what you think is better judgment. Why this one thing?”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me! I’m not going along with any of it! That’s a lie!”

“Is that right? What brought you here? How many Georges have you talked to? How many plane rides and coded messages? Who even knows where you are right now?”

Fatima’s eyes became dark and wild with anger. She couldn’t deny what he was saying, and she was too angry to be afraid. She didn’t want to say the Creed. She knew it wasn’t because she didn’t believe in it. She turned away from Jacob’s relentless gaze.

“Say the words and be done with it!”

“From the grave!” The words bursting from her. Her hands grasping her hair. Quickly she wiped the few tears escaping eyes that burned with frustration.

“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.” Jacob positioned himself in front of her, seeking and then finding her eyes, angrily accommodating. “What do you mean, from the grave? Your father?”

“Shut up. I want to get out of here!”

“Even if you do get out of here, you will never escape him. He controls you even now, doesn’t he? From the grave.”

“That is none of your business! You show up in my life yesterday thinking you can judge me because of one conversation. You don’t know me. Who I am. What I have had to live with.”

“Everything I know about you, I learned from you. Your life because of your father. Your search because of your father, but I didn’t hear about your mother. Or anyone else. Just him.”

Fatima stood silent. Her face a stone mask. It was the closest thing to composure she do.

“He dictated your every move, didn’t he? And you think you recited the Creed because he wanted you to. Daddy’s little girl. Just a cliché dressed up in a button-down shirt. You’re so humble, so brilliant, and quietly confident, but scared to death that you will never be enough?”

“I want you to shut your mouth about him!”

“Then say it.”

Fatima glared. She knew what Jacob was doing but that knowledge wasn’t enough to quell the rage she was feeling. She shook her head.

“He controls you from the grave. You said that!”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Oh, but you meant it. And now he’s got you running around risking your life for what? A sister you didn’t even know existed. Where was he when he was away? He didn’t have time for you because he was busy taking care of your sister. She must be so important. Maybe she was the one who really mattered, more than you ever could—”

“No!”

“Then say it! Prove that you did one thing in your life because you wanted to do it! You don’t just say the Creed! You trained. You fight for the right to say it. You bleed for that right. You almost died, Fatima say—”

“Into the…” Fatima had lowered her gaze to the floor as Jacob thundered his request.

“What? I can’t hear you!”

She raised her head and then her eyes still full of rage met his. She spoke. “Into the darkness. My father goeth before me.”

Jacob stepped away from Fatima as if to give her command of the room, an audience of one. He moved back into the shadows, his eyes locked, unblinking, waiting for her to finish.

“Go on,” he said, as if it were an order.

“Should his life be taken from him, I must take up his place. I must instruct others even as my father instructed me. I must act with dispatch for the sake of liberty. I must act in secrecy for the sake of preservation.”

“Come on!”

“I must hold fast to what is true for the sake of my own soul. Remember, it is by hard trial that the truth is established. It is indeed a great day to know oneself and to know one’s enemy. We shall be sifted not unto our destruction, but unto our perfection.”

“Do you believe in those words, Fatima Adar?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in the Creed?”

“Yes, damn it, yes!”

“Don’t you forget this.” Jacob took measured steps, approaching her as though she were an opponent apt to strike. His tone was calm but intense. “You are the one who believes in the Creed. You are the one who dedicated your life to it. You are Sura. The chapter. The wall of the temple. You are the high rank. You build a way for the future of nations. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now. Let’s go.”

As soon as she laid eyes on Jacob standing in the hallway, she ran to him. “Jacob, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Just a little sore.”

“That’s odd. You were bleeding. Are you sure?” She looked at him, reaching out to touch his jacket where a bullet wound should have been.

He instinctively stepped away to avoid her, looking confused. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve got to see this. It’s Patrice Lumumba. Well, uh, he introduced himself as Elias because that was his given name, but it was him.”

Jacob looked at Fatima, puzzled. “You saw Patrice Lumumba?”

“Yes. Yachin! Where is Yachin? He saw him too.” She called out, looking down both directions of the corridor in which they stood.

There was no response.

“Yachin?” she called out again. “He must have gone back in.” Fatima looked at Jacob and frowned, confused. “He just brought me to you. He was right behind me.” Fatima craned her head from one direction down the corridor to the other. Yachin had all but disappeared.

“Okay, wait, Fatima, I need to explain some—” Jacob was suddenly being pulled by the coat sleeve toward a closed door.

Fatima let go of his coat as if she had forgotten her manners. “Pardon, please, right through here. Elias! He must be meeting with—”

“Oh, my god. No!” They had entered the same room, but it was barely recognizable. Only the light from the hall beyond illuminated a dust-covered floor and plastic sheathing clinging to the walls. The place where Elias stood was empty of the chairs and desk he had paced beside as he examined his documents. No one was there.

“What is it?” Jacob asked, his voice nearly a whisper.

“I’m hallucinating. I was so convinced that this was a performance that he was an actor. At what point did he become real to me?” Entering the room, Fatima slowly looked up. In the dim light, scaffolding riddled with dried paint towered to the top of one column. She walked up to it and cautiously touched the cold steel bars near the bottom as if testing to see if it were real.

“Listen to me,” Jacob started, as if he knew she wouldn’t hear him.

Fatima interrupted. “It was a five-minute conversation. How could I be so naïve?”

“Fatima! You are not hallucinating. It’s the mystical properties of this place. It makes you see things. I meant to warn you before I got knocked down.”

“You mean shot?”

He didn’t answer. He just looked at her; his expression was unreadable.

“What are you saying makes you see things? That sounds like a hallucination.” She trailed off as if distracted, looking towards the hall.

“No, the things you see are real, but they are real for you. That doesn’t mean they are unreal for others. Just not for others.”

“What sort of blithering nonsense is that?” She shot a disapproving glance at Jacob and just as quickly looked away. “What was that?” Fatima headed toward the hall.

Jacob followed as he tried to reason with her. “It’s not nonsense—”

“Wait. Did you hear that?”

“Yes.”

“So, are we both hallucinating?”

It was a muffled sound, like movement within an enclosed space, as if the walls held a prisoner. The sound was strange and close to them. It stood out in the wide space where echoes of emptiness made more sense.

The halls began to close in as they moved past columns and archways of limestone carved in beautifully intricate patterns. Fatima marveled at the high stained-glass windows and dome ceilings. The tops of columns were adorned with various coats of arms, also carved into the limestone, natural patterns fossilized into the designs.

“I hope this place really exists.” She glanced back at Jacob, who only offered a dispassionate smile as an answer.

They passed into a smaller corridor, then another still smaller one. With every step, the Parliament’s grandeur fell away. Limestone became eggshell-white plaster. Oak and brass became plain doors, like ones within a house. The echoing institutional silence softened into the hush of an upper hallway. Fatima glanced behind them. The long corridor to the inner chambers was gone. She stopped walking and turned completely around, stunned by what she saw. At the end of this new hallway, sheer white curtains framed a window, and a small potted plant sat on the windowsill.

She looked at Jacob, who appeared unconcerned by the transformation of their surroundings. “What the hell is going on here!”

Jacob crossed his arms and pursed his lips.

“Are you seeing this? Are we mad?” She began stalking toward him like a cat about to pounce. Jacob instinctively backed away from her. “Did you bring me into some kind of psychedelic nightmare? Am I on something? Did you dose me—”

The sound came again from behind a closed door next to them. Fatima grabbed the doorknob and looked at Jacob fiercely. He shrugged, arms still folded as he leaned against the wall. His eyebrows rose in a noncommittal expression that suggested she could do whatever the hell she wanted. He wasn’t going to stop her.

She went in. Jacob followed.

The room was just what should have been attached to the hallway they had walked in from. It was a bedroom. Simple décor with light blue bare walls. No pictures, no sentiment of any kind. A queen bed stood in the middle of the room. Matching contemporary metal-and-glass nightstands stood on each side of the bed, with matching lamps, each painted with an array of butterflies. One simple mahogany table stood under a window on the opposite wall from where they entered.

“Whose room is—” Fatima started the question and looked in Jacob’s direction. Reading his expression, she fell silent.

(Thump)

The sound came from inside the bedroom closet. There was no reason to ask whether it was the same sound. It had reached them in the halls of the Canadian Parliament and led them here. Through disappearing corridors, they walked less than half a mile, yet it seemed the passage had carried them across space and time into a house neither of them knew.

Fatima approached the closet. Carefully, she took hold of the door handle. The closet was large and double-sided. Dark-colored dress suits of navy and black hung on the left side. Casual wear—T-shirts, jeans, and activewear—hung on the right side. Fatima backed out of the closet, found a light switch on the wall, and flipped it on. She cautiously moved back in, turning her attention to the side with the casual wear. Without a visible cause for the strange sound that had brought her into the closet, she felt it was safe, at least for the moment, to look around. She ran her fingers across a selection of colorful T-shirts hanging together, sleeves ironed and creased. The owner of these clothes enjoyed wearing legendary bands and solo music artists, and a single Smokey Bear T-shirt with the phrase Only you can prevent forest fires.

Something on the shelf above her caught her attention. The edge of a piece of paper, which lay flat on the shelf, poked out just enough for her to notice. She took the item. It was a photograph; one she was familiar with. A woman leaned into the embrace of a man. The woman rested her head on his chest. The man’s face was scratched out.

But Fatima remembered it when it was whole. She admired how handsome the man was, comparing the lines and features of his face to her own. He was her father, and someone had defaced his image. She asked her father more than once about the photo. He would only tell her that the woman was someone he had been close to before her mother.

“Jacob! Why is this—” As she called Jacob’s name, something in the background behind the picture she studied came into focus. It was the steady barrel of a Sig Sauer pointed directly at her head. Beneath it, eyes glared with the clear intent and untethered will to use the weapon, and a single finger was pressed to the lips of the woman she had spent months searching for.

Jacob approached the closet. He nearly collided with Fatima as she backed out and closed the door. Her hands shook. Her eyes, wide with fear.

“Let’s go. There’s nothing here.”

Jacob followed her into the hallway. “What happened?”

“Should we go back the way we came? Maybe there is a wardrobe that will magically take us home.” Her voice trembled as she spoke.

“No, we should always avoid going back into the tank.”

“What do you mean? Never mind. I just want to get somewhere else.”

Jacob led them down the stairs and out what should have been the front door of a house onto a street. As he opened the door to leave, Fatima looked out the triple-pane glass window of the living room. Daylight filled the room. Laughing schoolchildren walked by outside with backpacks and lunchboxes. Jacob stood to one side of a doorway that opened onto an area that didn’t match the scene.

Illusion. Fatima was trying to force the idea to take root.

None of this is real. She told herself. As she repeated the mantra silently, she thumbed the photo in her pocket. Anger was welling up inside her. They acquired a photograph of her father and defaced it to get an emotional response. Her dead father, used for mind games.

Their departure took them into the narrow hallways of the tank. Fatima decided she had had quite enough. They walked down the hallway in silence for a few steps, eventually entering a chamber of black stone, carved and smooth like the bedrock. The energy of the chamber felt electric, the scent of a charge in the air. On the other side, the hallway continued as before. The light from either side provided enough illumination for them to see each other clearly. Fatima stopped and put her hands together at her lips as if she were going to pray. Instead, she ran her fingers through her hair in frustration.

Jacob stopped walking and turned around to face her. He remained quiet, but took a deep breath and folded his arms, looking at her, waiting. His expression was one of patience wearing thin.

Fatima looked at the black walls of the chamber, gesturing at them. “What is this? I want to get out of this place.”

We passed a sign that read, “Welcome to South Carolina.” Immediately, Trent announced that we were almost there, though he still refused to tell me more than that. I sat up and began to collect information. What highway were we traveling? What landmarks had I seen? Times, distances—anything that would help me remember. I was shaken about the dream. The last time I had that dream, the worst ordeal of my life happened, but again I discounted it as a thing brought up by my reflections. If only I had... but there is no time for regret, is there? Let’s just say that I do not ignore my feelings anymore.

We arrived at an intersection, with the street that crossed us shooting diagonally off into some kind of thick paste of a road. The farther into it we drove, the smaller the road became. At the end, it opened up into a small patch of earth that was barely large enough to turn the car around. The land also tilted so that, as we entered it, the car pitched forward at an angle toward a moss-covered bayou. I braced myself because the car picked up speed, threatening to enter the water just as Trent put on the brakes. I looked over at him, and he was trying to press a smile off his face. I promptly told him he was an asshole for trying to scare me.

Just at the edge of the land was a dock of sorts, and a small rowboat was fixed to it with a mangled piece of rope. I sat motionless in the car, wondering if Trent actually expected me to get in that thing. A stream of scenarios shot through my brain of what would happen if I did get in that thing and what would happen if I didn’t. Neither looked good, but the deciding factor was my promise that I would go. However, I was highly touched that he would take me into this desolate place.

“You have got to be kidding.”

“What? It’s perfectly safe, Nadia. And the gators don’t really bother you unless you bother them.”

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I tasted the salt in the air. I heard the boat horns and felt the change in the wind as evening approached. But I saw no shoreline, no distant horizon on the water beyond the buildings and trees. We were somewhere near a harbor. You told me about your life, your pain, as if it meant nothing to you. But I could feel a pressure building. It was behind me, though it came from you. A pressure of sobbing, of long-suffering. As I stepped away, you continued to talk about your life, your father, and his important work. You told me about your time at Oxford and how proud your parents were. Parents. The word stuck. Your mother was oddly missing from all that you shared, except then. And you kept talking, sitting, smiling a perfect smile as I continued to walk away. Your voice became distant, soft chatter, softer than notes on the wind, more bitter than the air. But you kept talking as if your life depended on it. And then I saw someone I knew across the street. It had been months since I laid eyes on her. The tank decides, you see.

I could feel her wanting to speak to me.

I knew I needed to be with you, to listen to you tell the secrets of your past. I knew I was there to help you, but time had brought my duty to you and my love for her together in a moment of impossible choice. My love for her. I could never say it. She was not the one I should have ever loved, yet I did. I knew it to be true long ago, but it was in that moment that I no longer hated the fact that I loved her. She stood there waiting as I walked away from duty. I reached out to her, just as you did to me, and I felt a piercing pain, my body knocked back with a force that took the air from my lungs. I woke up in the grotto to battle the unknown man within. And after I disarmed him, you were there, reaching out for me, asking me if I was okay. And I withdrew from you, evading a kind touch that most would want.

Amid the confusion and pain when I was hit, somehow, she spoke to me. And I remember what she said. She told me…

I am so alone without you in my life. You were my dream, my fantasy, the star I could always reach for, and that was enough. That was my way to the love I will never have. I was walking, slowly, lovingly, to you. I was hoping we could be more. I was hearing your voice and living in the pauses. I dreamed that the questions you asked would become declarations of all you wanted. You were my dream, a forever of wanting, wishing, hoping. You were a dream of never, and that had to be enough. Because you could never love me. You took away my never because I became your could-be. I will always love you. Goodbye, Jacob

.

“Hello?” A young man with a tan complexion, short curly hair, and deep-set eyes stood in a room that looked like a large waiting room of a doctor’s office. Fatima glanced around at the windowless gray walls with beige and white accents. The wall art and furniture looked as if they had been plucked from the early ’70s and arranged evenly about the room.

“Did you hear me yelling and screaming out there?” Fatima asked impatiently.

“I heard the door close. Is everything okay?” The man’s polite disposition seemed genuine. He approached Fatima but stayed outside of arm’s reach.

“I was with someone. Do you have a phone?”

“No phones here.”

“No phones? Sorry, who are… what is your name?”

“My name is Yachin.”

“Yes, well, Yachin, we were being shot at out there.”

“That sounds serious.” Yachin had a clear look of concern, which made his statement seem unintentionally sardonic.

“Uh…and what if you need help? Fire department, police in case there’s a crime?”

“We have it covered. Believe me, it would be unwise for someone to enter that door with bad intentions. But what about your companion?”

“Yes. He’s outside, I think. I tried calling to him, but… I don’t know what happened. He was bleeding last time I saw him.”

“I’ll see about helping him. Why don’t you wait in this room? It’s safer.” Yachin gestured to a door Fatima had not noticed until this moment. He walked ahead of her and turned to face her, still maintaining a polite distance.

“Right through this door,” Yachin said, again gesturing as he pushed the door open. He then held it open with his body. “It was good to meet you, Fatima.” Yachin held out his hand to shake Fatima’s. She obliged. He continued to cradle her hand as he welcomed her past the threshold of the doorway, only letting go once she entered.

Hesitantly, Fatima entered the room. Although “room” was understated for this area. It was more like a cathedral. The ceiling was a high, ornate dome adorned with stained-glass windows. Six large columns flanked each side. There was a hint of an echo from each page a single occupant turned while examining documents he held in his left hand.

“Who is that?” Fatima asked Yachin.

“He’s waiting, just like you. No need to worry.” Yachin backed away and exited the room through the door they had entered.

At the far end of the room stood a thin man, dressed in a grey tailored suit. His hair was a short, cropped afro parted on one side. He paced across the floor, taking slow steps while adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses with one hand as he read a document he held in the other.

Fatima recognized the man as soon as she was close enough to see his features. She cautiously approached while trying to figure out how she could be seeing him at all, for the man who stood in the room before her was Patrice Lumumba.

Could someone have faked his death? That wouldn’t make sense. This man was in his thirties. Perhaps this could be his son. She moved closer.

“Hello.” She spoke cautiously, as if she expected the man to be a ghost, disappearing at her notice.

The man looked up. “Bonjour.”

“Oh yes, French.” Fatima then cleared her throat, as if that would help her switch languages. In French, she addressed him. “Who—my apologies. My name is Fatima. May I ask you your name?”

“Yes, of course. You may call me Elias. It is very nice to meet you, Fatima.”

Fatima noticed the documents he held. “Are you here for work?”

“Oh yes, work.” The man raised his eyebrows and drew in a breath, looking at the documents. “This is definitely work. I plan to appeal to the Canadian government for help.”

Fatima’s heart sank. This man was supposed to be Patrice Lumumba. Elias was a name he was given in childhood. Jacob’s odd reference to her father teaching her about Patrice Lumumba made sense now. She figured somehow, they found an actor who looked so much like him at such short notice. And he speaks French with a Congolese rhythm. Was this all for her? She decided to play along with the charade. Now she knew it had all been about her reintegration. Fatima thought about the shoot-out. She still found it difficult to believe Jacob being shot was a performance.

“Why do you need help?” she asked Elias.

“Imperialism is a disease the body of Africa is sick to death from. I thought once we acquired the independence our people fought so long for, died for, the hope for a united Congo, a strong Congo, would build the momentum we needed to overcome those among our people who are driven only by greed and self-interest. But I was very wrong. And here I am today, with my hands open, asking for help. Asking yet to be dependent again.”

Fatima was in awe. She had seen videos of Lumumba, video lectures, and the horrible sight of him being arrested, humiliated, and brutalized while he was already in binds. She knew exactly what he looked like. This man was him, yet she knew he couldn’t be.

Elias sighed. “But we both know that the Canadian government will not help the Congolese people.”

“How do you know this?”

“It would not be to their benefit. This is a world of benefits. I come with none for Canada. However, I must try.” Elias sat his documents down on the wooden table he had been standing next to. He interlocked his fingers and turned to Fatima. “May I ask, what has brought you to the Canadian Parliament? Similar business?”

“No,” Fatima smiled kindly. ‘Canadian Parliament?’ she thought. “To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“Hmm, this is not really that type of place.”

“And that is?”

“No one arrives here without motivation or intent.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Regretfully my motivations will lead to a very dark place. But there is always light. Remember that.”

“What dark place Elias?”

“Very soon, I will be killed by my own brothers, backed by the Belgian authorities and the American CIA. They will hunt me down, torture me, line me up in front of a firing squad, and shoot me. Then they will make my body disappear. They will deny my wife, my family, the right to bury me.”

Shocked, Fatima stared at the man. “You know what’s going to happen to you?”

“Does that make you angry, Fatima?”

“Furious.”

“Good. There is much to be furious about, but be strategic. Be very strategic, especially with your words.”

“If you know this will happen, then why are you here?”

“I think the question is, why are you here?”

“I’m here because someone brought me here.”

“Really? You were brought here you say?”

“Yes. I was. I mean, someone let me in. What I mean is, someone showed me—”

“It seems to me that you have brought yourself here. But to answer your question: I chose my place in history. I will always be where I am. I am here for you and future generations. But what is your place? Where will you be? What will you choose?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

“I suspect that is not entirely true.”

“Fatima, I found your friend.” Yachin stood at the other side of the room near the door.

“Oh yes, but… okay.” Fatima began to walk toward Yachin hesitantly. She knew this man was not the real Patrice Lumumba, but she still felt his strength, his presence, as if the historical figure for whom she had so much reverence was her companion for a short while. She felt as though she had truly witnessed history.

“Please come,” Yachin urged. “He’ll be fine for now, but I think a doctor should examine him.”

Fatima turned right before she reached the doorway with Yachin. “C’était un plaisir de vous rencontrer, Elias.” She spoke with a regret she didn’t care to understand or apologize for.

“Au revoir, Mademoiselle Fatima,” Elias said. His voice reverberated through the large room before the door closed behind them. It was a sound she would never forget.

“It doesn’t matter; I want you to come with me.

“What! Where?”

“You know.” He held the object up and motioned to it with his cocked head.

“Aw, hell naw, Trent. Are you crazy, man? I have too much to do. I don’t know how you sail through these classes without even looking at a book, but I don’t have that particular talent, babe.”

“C’mon Nadia, I promise you it won’t take more than two days.”

“Two days? No!”

“Don’t you want to see it? It really exists…all that stuff we were reading about. The cave, the men—they come in the middle of the night. They meet there every third full moon, Nadia.”

“We can go and come right back. I just want you to see the door. It is amazing. You will never see anything in your life like this.”

“I want to see my graduation Trent. That’s what I want to see.”

“Are you kidding, Nadia? The way these people party up here every weekend. You’re too hard on yourself. A lot of these jerks will make it, and they’re not even close to your performance. You will definitely pass and in the top five percent, I’m guessing. I need you to come with me. I am crazy about you, and after we graduate, we both know what’s going to happen. Please, Nadia.” He saw me smiling, and he went down on his knees. He pressed his hands together as if he were about to say a child’s prayer and shuffled toward me on his knees. “Please, please, please.”

“Get up Trent.”

He laid his head on my lap. I had the urge to run my fingers through his curls. Suddenly, I realized what was happening. I was about to panic when he put his arms around my hips as I sat on the bed. He pulled his body close to me. His face was inches away from mine.

“Uhh, Trent, we can’t, uh, do this,” I said, leaning back away from him.

“Do what, Nadia? Anything? Everything? You know that you want to do it all. I see it in your eyes. It’s like a little spark trying to bring you back to life, but then your fear, your reasoning, arrives like the freaking grim reaper, and then, ‘No, Trent, I can’t. I have to study,’ and, ‘No, Trent, we can’t. I’m black, and you’re white.’”

“That’s not it Trent. I just think of you as a friend…”

“Oh, that is bullshit! You want me…I know you do!”

I could not help but laugh at this arrogant statement but he was still able to carry it off and be completely adorable. He was smiling, but it was more of an embarrassed smile.

“You are so full of yourself,” I said, trying to stop laughing. I fell backward on the bed, and he just remained in the same position on his knees, his hands resting on my thighs.

“I just told you I wanted you, Nadia, and you are laughing at me. I admit my ego is pretty big, but this still hurts.”

“You moron. You didn’t tell me you wanted me. You told me I wanted you.”

“Same thing.”

“Okay, Trent. Damn you… I will go with you, but I am taking my case file with me.”

“Yessss…now how about a kiss?”

“No.”

It was strange enough knowing how Trenton felt. But what he said about me, about a spark trying to bring me back to life. Was he saying that a part of me was dead? And why would he say back to life, as though it were there and then something destroyed it long ago? I had never told him about the rape. But I would say that something did die that day.

I always thought that it was my wild thinking that led me to the abandoned playground and the lonesome anger that conjured dreams of vandalizing the school. I would have done it too. I would have grown into that wild spirit, and it would have taken me over. It was a spirit to destroy. But every spirit has its purpose. Dawuud had said that it was a spirit to create or destroy, didn’t he? No, this spirit in me was not dead but dormant. I knew it would live again.

Is this what Trent could see?

He wanted to go sooner than I expected. The next day, actually. It was really the best time, if any, to do it. We would have two full days, and if we got back early Sunday night, I would still have time to study a little more for the final installment of tests.

We left early that morning, and I felt that foreboding that I have recently become accustomed to, but back then I had only felt it once, and so I attributed the feeling to the leveling words Trent laid on me the night before. It made me think of those days after I did what I did to Mario and his flunky for revenge. Had they changed by the time I took their lives? Had they kneeled before God in the darkness and asked for his forgiveness? Had they become different men than those that committed such violence in the kissing corner? And if these things were true, should I have considered them?

Trent was in a fever of concentration when he arrived to pick me up. I spied some rubber boots when he put my bag, packed sufficiently for two days, in the trunk.

“Rubber boots? Very long rubber boots. What the hell for, Trent? Is this place in the sewer?”
“Nope, but you’re close…nature’s sewer…the swamp!”

“The swamp? I don’t do swamps.”

He responded with a smile.

It was all he would tell me of the destination, except the promise he made that the drive would not exceed eight hours. It ended up being six. We filled up the time by quizzing each other on materials that would be on our exams and trying to solve each other’s cases.

I fell asleep, and it was that dream again, the dream of running in the pitch of night, but it was stronger this time. I was closer to something…to light, perhaps. For in the dream, I did not run from one thing or person that pursued me, but from the darkness itself, and then I came to a certain realization and awoke at once. There was someone else there in the darkness with me.

I glanced over to Trent. He was driving in a focused state. Dreamily, I stared out of the window at the hillside, a bright green landscape of rising oaks and palmetto. The postcard houses with actual picket fences and ancient barns looked like candy as I was coming out of sleep.

The sun burned bright that morning. She could hear the car, feel the motion. The mechanical hum, her body vibrating with every acceleration. Energy, effort, the fire moving tons of steel forward. But that sun. Silent. Unrelenting. It powered the earth forward to another day no matter what. Yet no sound, no motion could be felt. Just life and loss.

As Fatima sat in the hotel lobby, she thought of the quiet of the car that morning: the darkness kept close enough to feel but not hear, Jacob’s voice, and the sunlight glowing red through her eyelids, refusing to let her sleep. Life kept going. The sun kept shining. Inevitably, her mind returned to the coded message: Into the darkness. She sat with the discomfort of those words and let them swell inside her. “Into the darkness,” she said aloud, as if speaking them might release the pressure. Instead, she found it was better to push them away.

The rendezvous point was the lobby of the Windsor in Ontario, not far from the border. It was a massive structure with a parking garage nearly the size of the hotel itself. Fatima sat waiting. For the tenth or fiftieth time, she looked from one side of the lobby to the other. No one had arrived to meet her. At least an hour had passed since she reached the hotel and sat where she was told to sit. Jacob told her to look for a man who looked just like him.

This is a slipshod operation, she thought. “Fatima, we don’t make mistakes,” she whined mockingly under her breath.

So far, she wasn’t impressed with her first not-George encounter.

He forgets his passport? What kind of operative does that? Now this brother of his is late, after sending me alone to meet with him for God knows what reason. Forgets his passport. Doesn’t make sense.

“Where is he?” Jacob came from behind, almost whispering the words close to her ear. He grabbed her hand and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Behave like you expected that, please.”

“He hasn’t shown.” She fought the urge to wipe off the moisture on her face from his lips. The act seemed unnecessary. No one was paying any attention to them.

“What? No,” he whispered. “Let’s go.” Jacob’s face was blank.

“Wait, where are we going now?”

“Something’s wrong.” He smiled and held his hand out. “Give me the car keys, please.”

“Here.”

“I’m leaving. You coming, or not?”

“You’re leaving? How did you get here?”

“Dropped off. Where is the car?”

Fatima walked beside Jacob, trying to list all the reasons she should trust a man she had known only a few hours. The list was short. Everything was moving too fast, and she still did not know why.

1. He knew her name when she arrived.

“You drive,” Jacob said, unlocking the door and getting in on the passenger side.

“Are you daft?” Fatima hopped into the driver’s seat and continued. “Why did you take the keys if you wanted me to drive?”

2. He had the custom Bazeries cylinder. Only someone from SURA would possess that.

“I don’t have time to explain everything right now, Fatima. I needed you to follow. Do you notice at all that I am somewhat alarmed? Let’s go!”

Fatima got in quickly, annoyed with being bossed around. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine wouldn’t turn over. She tried again.

3. He knew about the creed. But any of that could have been tortured out of a man, or gathered over years of investigation and collected intel. Doubt filled the gaps. Was this man really Jacob?

“Wait. Wait. Get out. Get out!” Jacob shouted the command as he ripped his seatbelt from around his body and jumped out the passenger side.

Fatima unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for her purse in the back seat. As she turned toward the dashboard, a man’s voice seemed to scream from far away. A strange scent filled her nose, sweet and benzoin-like. She knew at once it was nitrous oxide coming from the dash. Too late. She was not completely unconscious when she felt her body being lifted and pulled from the car, but she was slipping away.

Regaining consciousness, Fatima was uncomfortably seated. Her arm was wedged under her body in the front seat of a strange car. She repositioned herself. She began to panic, feeling for her handbag. “Oh my God!”

“You nearly got us both captured.”

“Where is my purse, Jacob? My journal is in there.”

“We’re in trouble. That’s just one more thing.”

Fatima noticed wires hanging beneath the steering column, no keys in the ignition. “I assume you stole this. Stealing cars?”

“Look at me. I know you don’t know me that well, but our lives are in danger right now. Trust SURA if you don’t trust me. You were knocked out. If I meant you harm, I could have done it by now, don’t you think? Does that add up? Use your knowledge. Calculate. Remember the teachings?”

“I don’t need a SURA history lesson. Where are you taking me?”

“We’re going where you were always going, just a little sooner than I expected. We call it the tank. We should be safe there. It’s well hidden, quite a slice of life.”

“The tank?”

“Shit. We’re being followed. Get down.”

Jacob sped up and turned off the main road. Fatima tried to look behind them to see who was following.

“Get down, Fatima!”

She obeyed, though her patience was thinning. From her hunched-down position, she watched the rooftops of a rural neighborhood pass by: houses spaced wide apart, large trees breaking up the sky. “Do I have Canadian enemies?”

Jacob laughed. “Maybe.” He whipped the car into a tight circle, sped down one road, then settled into a steady direction for a few minutes.

“It’s fine. I lost them.”

Fatima sat up and noticed how late it had become. The dashboard clock read 3:17. She had lost an hour. Outside, the houses were gone. They followed a long road bordered by wild greenery and trees, then pulled into an unpaved area on the shoulder.

“Is this private property?”

“Let’s get out here. We walk across the field to that building there.”

They both exited the car, looking around, surveying the area. They walked a few feet into the field, and Fatima stopped.

“Jacob, wait. I’m not going.”

“What do you mean?”

“What is this? I meet you, and suddenly I’m being chased by invisible men? My rental car is booby-trapped with laughing gas. Now we’re in the middle of a blasted corn field somewhere, and you want me to go in there?” Fatima gestured toward the building across the field. “A secret fortress?”

“This isn’t corn.”

“I don’t care!”

“Corn is taller—Fatima, listen.”

“No. I’m done. You have put me in harm’s way. Reintegration be damned. I want out of this!”

Zip.

Fatima heard it twice. Something visceral inside her went still. Jacob jerked backward, his left shoulder snapping with the force of the impact before his body dropped into the grass. He grunted in pain.

Fatima went down and crawled over to him. She touched his shoulder. Blood seeped from a hidden wound. Jacob pointed toward the building. “I’m okay. Get to that building and use the number pad to get in.”

Jacob reached inside his jacket and produced a gun with his free hand. “I’ll take care of them.”

Fatima looked in the direction of the building. “Number pad? What is the code?”

“Now, Fatima!”

Terrified, Fatima stayed low and ran toward the lone edifice. For a moment, she heard nothing. Then two gunshots cracked from Jacob’s position. She crossed the remaining field as fast as she could, her heart pounding, her mind turning into a machine of survival. Logic began to force its way through the chaos. Was this real? Who was following them? Was it the same person who had taken her journal? Jacob had been shot. That was real. She witnessed his body jerk back with force. She saw him bleed.

She stayed close to the structure. The building was strange, built into the side of a naturally formed rock face. There seemed to be no way around it except deeper into the canyon on either side. A paved walkway, carved into a wedge of stone, led to a single door. The door was steel, painted red, smooth, and handleless. It was the only entrance she could see. There was no time to distrust the man who had not been shooting at her. A number pad was mounted on the right side.

How the hell would she know the code? she thought.

Is this another misstep of Jacob’s? Did he intend to give it to her? She considered differently.

What if it wasn’t? What if none of the mistakes made were mistakes at all? She had one piece of information he would know she had: the coded message.

Into the darkness. Numeric? The number of letters in each word, perhaps? She punched in the numbers.

438

The number pad lit up red and blinked five times. She recognized the model and sequence. Two more wrong tries and the pad would lock up for a time. She and Jacob would be stuck outside. And if the danger was real, they could both end up dead.

Three more gunshots rang out closer. She glanced behind her to see Jacob running, and then she could hear a bullet hit the rock face near her. She spied Jacob diving into the grass as she went down too, her hands shaking. She froze.

“Fatima, open the door!” Jacob yelled.

“Okay, okay. Into the darkness. What did he say about this place? Well hidden. A slice of life. Come on, dammit, you’re a smart girl. Slice. Pythagorean, not Greek. Hidden could be occult, must mean numerology. Into the darkness would be 22, 15, 28.” She tried the numbers: 22, 15...

Again, the number pad lit up red on the fourth number. She had one more chance. Three numbers only. She reduced the numbers for each word: 22 15 28.

4…6…1

The number pad lit up green. She shoved the door open and turned back, calling for Jacob. The field was empty. The only answer was silence.

The red steel door closed with a heavy metal thud. There was no sense in going back out to search for Jacob. She didn’t have a weapon to defend herself and he wasn’t responding. She stood in the doorway for longer than she should have, yelling his name, calling attention to herself.

She turned to study the room. It was dark, almost pitch black, as if the walls themselves had been painted black. A single hallway, carved from the bedrock, glowed dimly with red light. The passage was cylindrical. Fatima approached cautiously, touching the wall and feeling the uneven surface, cut from stone and polished to a shine. Under the red light, it reminded her of a birth canal.

“Hello!” she called out once, hoping someone was monitoring the building, possibly listening on an intercom. She looked down. Beneath her feet, water flowed toward her under the metal grating she walked on, though it wasn’t rising. “What is this?”

At the end of the hall stood another door, with a number pad mounted on the wall to its right. The light seemed to come from a continuous strip where the constructed wall met the rock. The wall and door might have been red like the outer entrance, but under the glow of red luminance, both appeared black.

Above the door was a plaque with letters in Greek. To her dismay, again the same phrase.

εἰς τὸ σκότος

Into the darkness

“Hmm, I’m starting to hate this phrase.”

She punched the code in.

461

The number pad flashed red five times. “Damn!” She hit the door with an open palm. In frustration, she ran her hands through her hair. “Hello! If this is a test, I want out.” She stared at the plaque again.

Wait. They’re not using English anymore. Greek letters are also numbers. What if…?

She did a quick calculation in her head using Greek numerical equivalents. She entered the reduced number.

1445

The number pad flashed green. A mechanical click sounded as the lock disengaged. Fatima pushed the door open and entered the place they called the tank.

Ten weeks into F.B.I. New Agent training, and I was worn down to the bone. Six weeks stood between me and graduation, but all I could think about was how sick I was of Trent and his endless energy. I only listened because I was too tired to tell him to shut up and go back to his room. He was ranting about the simulated bank robbery from that morning and how badly he thought he had screwed it up. But Trent was glorious, as always, smiling the anguish away like a good sportsman who had lost this round but not the next. And he wouldn’t lose the next. I knew he wouldn’t. He talked about the weapons instructor, Barrish, and his obsessive attention to detail, then tried to drag me into the conversation with questions. “So what do you think about this class?” and “How is this instructor treating you?” I indulged him with grunts that meant yes, no, and I don’t know. But he kept going. He talked at me through the pillow over my face as I lay on the bed, his voice melting into one long, excruciating stream of noise that would not let me rest. I gathered what little energy I had left to sit up and snap.

“Will you go away, Trent? I am tired!” I threw the pillow onto the floor and stared at him deadpan. That was when I realized this was the moment he had been waiting for. For the first time since he started his tirade, I really looked at him. His head was cocked to the side, and a devious smirk curled across his face, telling me something else was on his mind. Something bigger than the day’s classes or the morning’s disaster.

“What?” I said. “Why the hell are you looking at me like that?”

“I thought you would never ask,” he said, like a child who had watched too much TV. He held up a dull gray square, stone-like and thin enough to fit in his palm. I noticed it, but waited for him to explain. Instead, he lifted it higher, displaying it as if I should already understand what it was.

“See this?” he said.

I took a longer look as he handed it to me. Markings covered its surface, a maze carved into the thin slab. It looked like granite, or something close to it, but the grooves held a metallic liquid that moved like mercury. It flowed through the channels without spilling beyond them, even though I could see no glass, casing, or seal to hold it in place.

“Is it a game?” I said.

“No,” he said. “It’s not a game. It’s a key.” His voice dropped into something almost like a warning.

“A key? To what?” I said. Trent’s grin widened, and he bit his lip as if he were savoring the moment before giving me the answer. I let my face go blank, making it clear I was tired of the bullshit. Then his eyes brightened with that same dangerous wonder, and he began to speak.

“I’ve seen it, Nadia,” he said, taking the object from me. “The place where they meet. And I think this can get me inside.”

I met Trent Thorn during my second week at the academy. He was a shiny white boy who seemed never to have been denied anything. His father was a big-time accountant, and his mother was a flower-child lawyer. His high school years, and the stretch into college, seemed like one blessed summer. Many of our conversations were honey-kissed with memories of camp and surfing at Zuma Beach.

He spoke often about his mother, and I’m sure she was the reason he managed any humility at all. Trent was not one to be upstaged, even in his ignorance. He loved being the best and the center of attention, but he also loved people—except those as arrogant as he was, because they usually lacked the good nature that made him tolerable, if not lovable. He stood five feet eleven inches and had the slim, athletic build of the surfer he was. His hair was cut close in luxuriously thick black curls, and his amber-brown eyes shone red in the afternoon light.

To me, he just looked like a white boy. It wasn’t until later that I allowed myself to notice his beauty, and by then he had annoyed me so thoroughly that attraction was impossible. I found him in my weapons defense class, assigned to me by the Great Barrish. Some of the guys hated him out of sheer envy. The two other girls in the class happened to be straight and became blithering idiots whenever he said two words to them. I treated him like any other white guy I had met. And to me, that was all he was until he began to show a preference for me.

He would position himself near me in class and try to partner with me whenever possible. Piece by piece, he extracted my entire schedule from me, though I would never have given it to him all at once. One day, he happily proved it when I lied about having to study for a test I had actually taken the day before. For kicks, he even recited my upcoming week. He would appear at lunchtime, once with something I had mentioned liking but did not remember telling him about. This freaked me out until he finished entertaining himself and admitted I had told him I liked navy bean soup with cheese toast. He stalked me in the study hall. I could hardly stand the sight of him in the beginning. I didn’t understand why this guy liked me so much or what he wanted. When he saw me, his eyes would light up, and I fretted over what that meant. It wasn’t in my nature to trust anyone white, and the attention I got from him was unwelcome and troubling, to say the least. But it appeared to be genuine, so I was hesitant to object beyond being aloof and a little cruel with him at times. He ignored my seeming disinterest and continued to enlighten me with his view of the world. Naturally, the man began to grow on me. It was inevitable with Trent, the way he was. He could fill a room completely with his mood, which was almost always good. I would have hated to admit it then, but I do believe I loved him.

“They weren’t hard to find. They were hangin’ out at the park as usual, on the bleachers by 86^th Street, where there is little light at night… four of them. I don’t know who the other two were, but I saw Mario and his sidekick, the one who laughed at me.”

“They were drunk, Mario was handling his liquor better than the others. I watched them from across the street, from between two houses where the shadows were darkest. I watched them go to the car for a bottle, and I watched them toss empty ones into the ball field. Time passed. I’m not sure how long. Mario even left once, driving off in his new truck. I continued to wait for a while since he left the skinny one behind with two others. I had begun to give up and go home, but he returned with a fresh forty-ounce just as I was about to step out of my hiding place. I noticed that he left his door open on the driver’s side before for easy access to the liquor. So my plan was to sneak into the back door on the side and grab him from behind. I admit I have watched too many movies.”

Needless to say, Dawuud was not amused at this last statement. He continued to listen with a furrowed brow. I went on.

“I ran low to the truck, which was in plain view, and attempted to enter through the front passenger door. To my utter shock, the alarm went off! The horn was honking and the lights were blinking, but I wasn’t afraid; I just changed my plan and stayed low next to the door. He came to the car, cursing and shaking his keys. I think the remote wouldn’t work properly. He entered the vehicle, and so did I. It was a strange moment. For what must have been a second or two, we sat next to each other perfectly still, looking at each other as if we were friends. He bent over, and I knew he was going for a gun or something. I struck him in his Renying pressure point. It was a clean hit. I then lifted myself and kicked him hard in the face. He fell stiffly out of the car into the gutter. The other one approached alone. I looked over his shoulder as I climbed over and out of the driver’s side to see if any others were coming, and to my amazement, there were no others. Everyone else was gone, and he was laughing at Mario, thinking he fell from the drink, until he saw me. I found the gun under the seat by the time he realized what had happened and had it pointed in his face.

“Help him up!” I said. He dropped his bottle and stared at me like I was a ghost.

“Help him into the car, or I will shoot you right now.” It was the same dumb, gaping expression he wore at Lucky’s. He moved like he was in a trance the whole time; he never closed his mouth. I sat in the back and made him drive to the school. We parked in front of the playground. Mario was coming to and began to threaten me, cussing and spitting blood as he got out of the car. I told them to go there, where it happened. I walked behind them.

Mario swayed and leaned on the skinny one who tried to help him walk. Mario snatched his arm away from the man and called him a scared little bitch. For a brief moment I felt sorry for the little one but then I remembered him slamming me to the ground. Mario stopped walking and turned to me looking like a cornered rat. He was more afraid of being afraid than anything. I thought he needed humbling.

I threw the gun on the roof. Mario smiled, but the other one kept his distance. I stood ready, and he went for me. I turned into him and hyperextended his elbow with a joint lock. He screamed with his mouth closed and dropped to the ground. I slammed his head to the ground and punched him. I started to gouge his eyes, but I wanted to see the eyes, Dawuud. And I wanted them to see me. The other one started to back away. He wasn’t even interested in helping his friend.

“Come here, come here,” I said. He started to run away. Mario screamed for help, and he stopped.

“Don’t leave me here, man!” he said. “Use the blade!”

The skinny one took it out of his pocket; it was the knife from that day. And I wondered why they would hold on to it for all this time. I felt overcome with rage as it occurred to me that it was some kind of trophy. The black-and-silver handle flashed in the moonlight. I was glad to see it. He held it as if it agonized him, but he opened it and drew toward me in hesitation. I stood still, looking at him, his eyes, his body language. He was no match for me.

He swung once through the air missing me and then again, with one move I had his arm behind him pushing it into his back until he released it. I put him down and broke his leg. He screamed but for some reason I didn’t care. I felt so alone with them as if we were the only people on earth just like that day. And no one came and no one cared. I bent down to get the knife. I looked at it. Mario laughed.

“He lay on the ground laughing and cussing at me, and he continued to as I cut him. He coughed first, and blood popped from his mouth as he cursed me, gurgling violent curses until he died. His eyes became so peaceful. I felt I had set him free of that savage truth.

The other one cried on the ground. He tried to scream, but fear and pain forced his screams, hissing soundlessly, vacant from his mouth. “What are you?” he said. “How did you come?”

I cut his throat deep and quick. he was horrified to death. But his suffering was shorter than Mario’s as a minion’s should be to his master.

Dawuud shut his eyes. He hunched and rested his elbows on his knees as though he had just lost the big fight. I was struggling with so many feelings. Why would he do this now? Let me be with him and then bring this to me after? I didn’t know what to think. He had to know about it before last night. I loved and hated him then. I was proud of my strength and ashamed of my brutality. What was he doing to me?

“There are things that you do not know, Nadia,” he said, dropping his head and then raising it to peek at me. Still so seductive. “But there is a spirit here, a thinking in you that can create or destroy. This was destruction Nadia. It was murder.”

“Then why do you teach ways to kill?”

“Sometimes you kill to survive. That’s not murder; that is survival.”

I was shocked by the sense of it. Simply, it was true. You can’t wait four years to survive.

“I told you: never the aggressor. No murder, survival only. You could have come to me.”

“No, I couldn’t. I tried, remember? But when you were ready to fuck me… oh, then it’s okay.”

Dawuud was visibly shocked and hurt when I said this. He stopped cold and sank back into the chair, squinting his eyes a little.

“Dawuud I’m sorry I didn’t mean that you were—

“Your grandmother will be worried, Nadia,” he said, cutting me off.

I didn’t argue. I dressed and left with him. How could I have done it? How could I have made him out to be a savage and become that damaged little girl, all with one self-righteous rant?

He drove me home without a word and walked me to the door. I could see tears pool in his eyes when I looked at him. He kissed me gently on my cheek and then he held both my hands together and kissed them one at a time.

“I love you, Nadia Combwood,” he said, gazing into my eyes. He smiled regretfully and turned away and into his car. I would not see him for years after that. I convinced myself over time that I meant nothing to him. But as I write this now, I know that he loved me.

Jacob drove as he promised. The dark back roads became golden highways as dawn approached. Their route was bathed on either side in the colors of fall. The morning light lured Fatima away from the real sleep she so desired. She coasted along the edge of REM, lazily stealing glimpses of the world passing around them as they moved from the quiet beauty of the countryside to the asphalt and concrete of a Michigan highway. She imagined they drifted through some fantastical archway into a real world of trucks and rude drivers. The secret world of coded notes, clandestine organizations, long-lost sisters, and dead fathers was behind them… for now.

‘Into the Darkness’

She couldn’t understand why the decoded message had set her off. It was the beginning of the first article of the creed—the same creed Jacob had asked if she remembered. She thought of something else he had said: reintegration. She should have been asking questions like What does reintegration involve? or Does he know what the decoded message was, since he brought up the creed in the first place? She knew he wouldn’t tell her. In the brief time she had spent with him, she had realized that Jacob talked the most when he wasn’t saying a damn thing.

“I know you’re keeping a journal.”

Fatima was dumbfounded. Until now? she thought.

“It’s not the smartest practice, you know, keeping notes on a secret organization.”

Fatima straightened in her seat. She cleared her throat, trying to collect her thoughts. “I suppose I need notes to keep my facts straight.”

“Your notes have already been compromised.”

“What? How? I always keep the damn thing on me.”

“Continue to keep the notes. It will look suspicious if you stop now. The exposure is minimal compared to some of the hits we’ve taken lately. You can even use my name.”

“Who—”

“Don’t worry about who.”

Fatima was exasperated. How could anyone have gotten to her journal?

“You will make an entry tomorrow. What you report cannot include anything that happened after we left the club. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry about this.”

“Don’t be sorry. We’re going to use it.”

Jacob began fumbling through the inside pocket of his jacket. A look of annoyance grew more pronounced across his face as he searched the other pocket, switching hands between steering the car and feeling around his coat.

“So someone is following me?”

“We are all being followed. We are all being watched. The moment something happens that catches their attention, you’re on their radar. And because of your father, you were basically born on their radar. I need to pull over. I can’t find my passport.”

“Do they know about Nadia being his daughter?”

“No. And it’s important that it stay that way.”

“Why?”

“Now that, I can’t tell you.”

Jacob took the next exit and pulled into a gas station. After searching the car, he determined that the passport had been left in his room.

“You’re going to have to go alone. I can meet you at the designated spot.”

“Now I’m supposed to go meet this person alone?”

“He can’t wait, and I can’t call him. It’s the way it works. We keep phones to a minimum.”

This just keeps getting better.

“I won’t be far behind.”

“You’re staying here? At a petrol station?”

“Yes. And I’ve been in worse places. But before I get out, I want to hear you recite the creed.”

“What? You’re not serious.”

“Yes. If you would, please.”

Fatima’s face flashed hot with blood. Anger quickly displaced the shock of Jacob asking her to recite the creed. She said nothing. Her gaze turned cold.

“Okay.” Jacob turned abruptly, opened the door, and got out. He waited for Fatima to come around into the driver’s seat, then closed the door behind her and gestured for her to roll down the window.

“Have you ever been through the Windsor Tunnel?”

“No.”

“I left some cash in your sun visor for the toll. You won’t have to show your passport until you get to the other side in Ontario. If they ask, tell them you’re meeting a friend for a day trip.”

“I don’t like this.”

“Do you prefer freedom with poverty or wealth with tyranny?”

“What the hell does that have to do with—”

“I will see you there Fatima.” Jacob said cutting her off. “Use the map, not the GPS. That’s important.”

Fatima became lost in thought almost immediately as she watched Jacob’s reflection disappear into the gas station in the rearview mirror. What was she doing? Going alone into Ontario to meet a man she didn’t know?

Then again, it was what she had been doing all along. She didn’t know any of these people.

But the idea that someone had been following her, reading her journal—that was the thing she couldn’t let go of. Who the hell could have read it? She wondered if Jacob was lying. How would he know? He wouldn’t explain. And that last bit—asking her to recite the creed like she was a child. How dare he?

Her father was the last person she had recited it for. Perhaps it was meant to stay that way.

I was in a place that could be second to none on earth: in his arms, in his bed. How soon the end would come to my heaven.

We did everything together the next morning. We showered and made love again. I asked for breakfast, and he fussed at me for forcing him to eat his one meal for the day so early, but he wanted to be with me in everything. We lay in his bed again, holding each other and laughing at our toes.

Awakening again, it was noon. Dawuud was seated in a chair that faced his bed. He was hard to look at; he was so fine. The afternoon filter of light was like something turned on to reveal his color and emotion. I reveled in the sight, but I could see that something was bothering him.

“Did you do it?” he said. I knew immediately what he meant. He was cautious, but direct. I said nothing.

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She watched him closely as he ate his sandwich, spilling lettuce and peppers every time he lifted it off his paper plate. Between anecdotes and humorous commentary, he watched her just as carefully. When their eyes met, he wouldn’t look away, as would be appropriate. It would seem he consumed her along with his sandwich, and this last bland and meaningless statement that dropped out of his mouth like another piece of lettuce brought the room and the air between them to stillness.

“Why will I meet your brother?”

Between short glances away to finish the last of his meal and reach the conclusion of their talk came a quick smile and a drink of water. He followed up with an aggressive wipe of his mouth and beard with a napkin. Jacob looked at Fatima, a straight line of solid, unbreakable focus, which intrigued her with stronger interest. She almost thought he didn’t intend to answer her question.

“Assume from this point on, that if someone is put in your path, they are meant to be there.”

“And what should I assume about the absence of an answer?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Hmm, may I know when I will meet your brother?”

“Soon. Promise. Now let’s, uh, clean up this mess. And lock up.”

“What now? I’m exhausted.”

“Are you a bad car sleeper? Don’t tell me you’re a bad car sleeper because I can drive.”

Fatima smiled. She wanted to laugh but she couldn’t wrap her head around having to be in a car again. “Dear Lord. How long is the drive?”

“Long enough. Not too long.” Jacob spoke dismissively, as he picked up a paper bag and a balled-up napkin, tossing them into a small wastebasket.

Again, she noticed how handsome he was. She noticed his eyes the most. He had amber eyes. Not quite brown. She was able to catch the color when he turned on the lamp in the room. But it wasn’t just the color of his eyes, but the fire behind them. She wondered if he had a life outside of this clandestine operation. Did he live and work in this now-defunct but historical town? She realized they had spent much of the conversation talking about her. She quickly reviewed the details of the conversation. How much had he extracted from her? She was distracted by the thought that she was about to enter a vehicle again. It vexed her. She closed her eyes briefly in a pointless attempt to just accept it. Another hour or more on the road. Moving, travel, going, going, going.

“Fatima, I understand you’re tired. Once we get to Ontario—”

“I beg your pardon. Did you just say Ontario?” Fatima rose up from her seat.

“Yes.”

“I’m, wait, I’m not going to Canada.”

“Fatima, please listen.”

“No, I don’t understand. What is this? Why Canada? Is she there?”

“You will never get what you want without us. Do you understand that? You will never find your sister. At best you will be sent back to England with your tail between your legs or at worst you will be arrested for obstruction. Say goodbye to your fellowship if that happens.”

Fatima stared at Jacob. He got everything he needed, she thought. She was exhausted from travel, deprived of sleep, hungry. He swept in at the end of a journey beginning with loss, grief, and struggling through the self-inflicted torture of an endless search, and then Jacob Riki gave her his real name and a sandwich. She gave him her life on a platter.

“And we won’t help you if you don’t take part in the reintegration.”

“Reintegration?”

“Yes.” At this Jacob walked over to Fatima and stood in front of her. She could sense the shift in him. She didn’t move but she could feel her body tense up as he drew near. I can’t force you to go. If you’re done, then you are officially done with all of us.”

“What do you mean by that? Are you saying I will be anathematized?”

“No, not that severe. More like excommunicated.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is not a social club, Fatima. If we’re compromised— you told me your father taught you the real story about Patrice Lumumba. There were many like him here in the States. You remember the creed.”

“Yes, I remember it. Jacob, all I really wanted was a moment to rest.”

“You think that’s all you wanted.” Jacob paused, considering his next words. “But that’s not what you’re asking for by pursuing this, and not even close to what you’re going to get if you keep going. So, I am asking you again, right now. Are you going or not? There are no second chances.”

“Of course I’m going. I didn’t do all this to be abandoned in Black Eden.”

“What are you?” he said to me. “How did you come—

I didn’t allow him to finish. They laid in a puddle of black blood beside each other. Like the black of infinite space surrounding that giant moon. As above so below. I stood quietly with them. Together as we were that day. Blood and body.

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Grand Rapids, MI
October 17, 2002

I met a man from SURA last night. His name was not George. That is the first thing I noticed. Well before I met him.

I have been anticipating this meeting since my brief stay in Texas, and with all the intrigue surrounding my search, this new detail—not being named George—has ignited a fire within me.

The purpose of this quest is clear now. I am being tested.

My time in SURA was years ago, when I was still in high school. My mother did not want me involved in the work and took me to Manchester while my father was on mission. He followed us there eventually, but I know he never fully forgave her. He continued to serve SURA until his health prevented him from doing so. This is my reintroduction to the group. He always intended for me to be a member.

I received my instructions from the George in Texas. I would be meeting Jacob Riki. I was so surprised by this new detail that I asked him to repeat it.

Jacob Riki?

Why not George? Why break the anonymity of the chain at this time?

I chose not to ask the question.

He gave me a sealed envelope and told me Jacob would have what I needed to understand the message. He then gave me this man’s phone number. This man who is not called George.

I called him when I arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After an overly enthusiastic greeting, he explained with great certainty that he would meet me at midnight outside the Flamingo Club. I was to come alone, and he would have what I needed.

The stretch of road that led me there reminded me of home. I drove through rural towns surrounded by land bathed in color. Corridors of trees buried the roadsides and, beyond them, the glistening still waters of countless lakes. I passed through imagining an entry into a new world, though I was approaching an old one.

Idlewild, Michigan, was called Black Eden in its heyday. Black Americans went there to enjoy themselves, to take a holiday without entering through the back door or worrying about which bathroom they could use. It seemed my father wanted to give me a history lesson while I searched for my sister. That was not lost on me.

As the sky transformed, I watched the cattails, painted by a peach-colored sunset, become black silhouettes. Night was approaching, and I was close.

When I laid eyes on Jacob, I was astounded by how handsome he was. He had a light voice with a bit of pep to it, but the look of him was intense, demanding. Then he smiled, and I found myself wanting to trust him.

He told me we could go inside the club. It was under renovation, but he had prepared a room for us that was perfectly secure.

We ate a meal he had also prepared, and then he handed me another Bazeries cylinder. He called it a Jefferson cipher wheel and told me to decipher the note.

I asked him how the hell I was supposed to do that.

He told me to use the ten-digit code I had memorized.

I looked at him again, astounded.

He smiled and said candidly,

“We don’t make mistakes, Fatima.”

The

SURA

Directive

C.M. KIGH

I The War Plan (Behind enemy lines)

1. Infiltrate the structure.

2. Sabotage enemy plans from within.

3. Weaken the enemy defense system.

4. Identify key positions of leadership.

5. Strike at the heart of the leadership.

6. Commit to open battle.

II The War Plan (Self-Development)

1. Identify areas of weakness.

2. Identify the cause.

3. E…

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Travis County, Texas
October 14, 2002

I’ve come to understand that the network of sleeping car porters operates through a linear chain of information, each link isolated from the rest. This structure keeps everyone safe, but it’s slow—frustratingly so. My father once explained that this method was essential for security, though he never revealed its full workings. Now, living through it, I find the uncertainty taxing. There’s no telling how many links there are; five Georges or fifty. Only the last knows the destination. I must persist.

So far, I’ve met three Georges and am enroute to the fourth, here in Texas. The previous two were in South Carolina. It appears SURA’s roots are here, among families who settled near the Rio Grande—many biracial. Some sent their men to join the Confederacy as double agents, monitoring slave catchers who, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, targeted both runaways and free people of color.

I suspect SURA maintains a house in Hidalgo County, where my next meeting will take place. I doubt it’s the original site; SURA would never risk such exposure.

The connection remains clear. From memory, a man named John met with the Webbers and the Hicks to establish the underground organization my father devoted his life to. The Second Underground Railroad Association.

Dawuud Morris’s earliest memory was that of death, but the first time he actually saw it, he was too young to know what it was. He was the son of Chicago’s famed drug dealer, gang leader, and self-styled activist Angelo Morris, AKA Lomo.

Lomo was in the first generation of El Rukns. The El Rukns were originally a group of youths that were inspired by the movement taking place in the sixties. Inspiration that turned to rage as they watched Black leaders violently plucked from the earth like unripe fruit. Within a four-year period, all possibility of a rise of a Black messiah had been effectively destroyed by a silent though deadly force now known as Cointelpro.

But the martyrdom of the dead Black leaders spawned an explosion of brave, fearless youth. Youth determined to see the dreams of King by the means of Muhammad. Instead of the destruction of the body, they had created more heads. Therefore, a strategy in addition to Cointelpro was used. One that employed our own greed and self-hatred. They would simply have us destroy ourselves. This was the strategy used on the fledgling El Rukns, and the catalyst was drugs, money, and territory. It was so easy it was sad.

These organizations, though founded on the basis of positive goals for community improvement and even religious morals, quickly became engulfed in the quagmire of excused hypocrisy. Lucrative offers, criminal or not, were accepted for the greater good of much-needed ‘funding’ until the people could stand on their own. They never did.

Eventually they became servants of the very system they sought to fight against.

Lomo would look back on his life and see the perfect reflection of that El Rukn reality. He was meant to do so much more. But now he was locked up, serving that system, and would be until he died. And though he had foreseen this end long before it would happen, he had decided at that same time that his son would not.

It would be impossible to shield Dawuud from the life or the knowledge that in his veins flowed the blood of a criminal. But he would show him that this truth would not seal him into the same fate. That the promise and possibility he passed up could be embraced by his boy.

Dawuud was born in the El Rukn building on Drexel and 64th at the same instant Lomo took another man’s life in the next room. He held Dawuud, rejoicing at how the boy could focus so well. Dawuud looked right into his father’s eyes, not like the eyes of other newborns that floated searching through shades of light and colors. No, little Dawuud could see. And then the midwife called his attention to a drop of dried blood resting firmly on his chin.

As Angelo stared into the mirror, wiping the blood from his chin, he began to cry. Dawuud had barely made it into the world and he had already seen death. How could he save his son if he was blind to himself?

After that he tried to get out of the game, but he had spent a lot of time making himself nearly indispensable, and baby Dawuud soon became the subject of too many conversations of what could happen to him. The major players could not forfeit. So Lomo stayed and tried to lead Dawuud with ‘how-to’ instructions and finger-pointing. But his example won out, and Dawuud had committed his first murder by age twelve. He was slingin

’ by fifteen, and within a few months he was helping to run his father’s business.

Lomo had failed. It happened so gradually, without a single plan. It was too late for Dawuud. Or was it? He knew the mistake he made. He had forgotten to look at himself. He had not done it since the day his son was born. And now instead of a spot, he was covered in blood, but he would look anyway. He sat on the edge of his bed and forced himself to look at everything he had done that had multiplied that spot into thousands. Every ounce of coke he sold and the lives it ruined, including his own sister’s. Every man he killed and every dollar he made from death. Every woman he destroyed, people he led astray, and those he betrayed. Before he had reflected on half his adult life, he was sobbing uncontrollably with the realization that even his closest and beloved family rose up like ghosts of judgment among the people he had wronged. For money.

He looked down at his clean, bare hands. No part of them had been free from the touch of someone else’s blood at one time or another. He considered what evils he might have forgotten and what he might not know. He cried and begged God for forgiveness. How could he ever be redeemed? How could he be worthy of more than hell? The answer came as an omen, gripping him about the collar. He staggered to the bathroom as he reached the day, in his memories, that Dawuud was born. A half-dead man at the summit. And it was at that moment that he saw the thing that made him go directly to the District Attorney’s office and confess to a crime he had committed sixteen years earlier.

“The day I was born.”

(The following is transcribed from the field notes of Fatima Adar)

Myrtle Beach, SC

October 4, 2002

09:15

I am exhausted. The journey from Haiti has left me feeling as though I have been passed from one threshold to another without ever properly arriving. Island to ferry, ferry to air, and back again. Too many crossings in too short a span. My body has obeyed, but my mind has not yet caught up.

Today I met with a woman called George. Better, perhaps, than the names once forced upon Black women who labored in service of the railways and the households built around them. Better than “girl.” Better than the false intimacy of “auntie.” There is a cruelty in the names history permits, and an intelligence in the names people choose for themselves.

She told me her people once worked the rice fields near Myrtle Beach, though work is too clean a word for what was done there. Some of her family had been sold farther south, where they were made to tend sea island cotton and indigo. Others remained on land shaped by tidal systems they themselves understood better than the men who claimed to own it. Her ancestors were engineers before anyone here would have granted them the dignity of the word. In West Africa they had cultivated rice with a precision the colonists did not possess, and so they were taken not only for their bodies, but for what they knew. That, perhaps, is one of the cruelest thefts of all: to be robbed of your home, then robbed again of your own expertise, and told all the while that you are inferior to the ones profiting from it.

The island where some of her family were brought is now called Sandy Island. Before any plantation laid claim to it, the land belonged to the Waccamaw and the Pee Dee Indians. Europeans did what Europeans have so often done—first disease, then violence, then policy dressed up as inevitability. By the time of the Indian Removal Act, much of the destruction had already been accomplished. The rest was merely formalized. There is always an official language for these things whether presented as law or interest owed. It does nothing to lessen the blood beneath it.

George herself was delightful, though I suspect terribly deliberate in how she allowed herself to appear. Under different circumstances I think we might have become friends. But neither of us was there for friendship. After she had spoken of her family and of the histories folded into this place, she asked me to check my phone. There was a long string of numbers in my notes. I had not placed them there. She insisted I look, and then, with a calm that suggested either confidence or habit, produced a cylindrical device and decoded the message in front of me. I am certain she was not meant to do so. It was a Bazeries cipher, far from unbreakable. So I did the only sensible thing. I accepted her “mistake” without comment and committed the entire ten-digit cipher to memory.

After she was done she gave me my next destination.

It had been almost a year since I had the baby. School was almost out and I was becoming a sophomore instead of a junior. I had lost a year to the trauma of the rape and the depression I fought through after the birth of my son. Being a grade behind all my friends was just another reminder of what happened so I avoided them.

But they got together and forced me to get dressed and go out with them. And I mean I thought they were going to physically harm me, especially Jean who could be quite overbearing anyway. They showed up at my door geared up, and ready for the world. Tisha had on a lime green Girbaud T -shirt with matching blue jeans and Jean opted for a DK red sundress. Coach purses were in effect and hair? no contest. Tisha had her signature A-symmetric bob and Jean was sporting her classic feather shag. Tears welled up in my eyes, I was so happy to see them, but I still wasn’t going to go out. Of course one hour later I was in the back of Tisha’s red Ford Escort, bumpin with the sounds of Too Short down the Dan Ryan express. They had thrown some jeans on me and a tank. Don’t know what Tisha did to my hair but I put a baseball cap on top of it to her dismay.

Rennigan’s was the destination and they treated me to the best processed food and Virgin Daiquiri’s I had had in two years.

Tisha talked about her latest boyfriend and the stupid things he would do. Already at sixteen this girl had a pattern with men. Assholes all! She didn’t like the nice guys. I think because nice guys couldn’t handle her abrasive honesty, plus she could out cuss them.

Jean talked about some girl at school that deserved a beat down. And another one who was stalking her and her boyfriend and I think another one right in the restaurant with us for looking at her to hard. Together they made me completely forget my life for just a little while. I swear those girls could make me laugh hysterically before certain death.

After they finished entertaining me with their latest stories, Jean asked me how I was doing. I knew what she meant.

“I’m alive, you know.” I said.

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