White: A Novel by Christopher Whitcomb

his head back and forth, trying to avoid the water long enough to gasp what little breath his lungs would allow. Second- and third-degree burns covered 25 percent of his now naked body, and they hurt beyond comprehension.
    “What’s next?” another voice demanded. None of these men had given names. None of them had offered ID or read him his rights. This looked nothing like what he had seen on TV. Some foolish show.
    “Where is Ansar ins Allah? What are you planning to do next?”
    The water stopped long enough for him to answer, but he didn’t. What was he to say? Bayad tried to clench his jaw against the relentless shaking. Los Angeles was warm with the Santa Ana winds, he thought. They must have put him in some kind of industrial cooler.
    “Listen, you motherfucker,” the first man said, “you are going to tell us what we need to know. Sooner or later, you’re going to talk; take my word for it.”
    “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!” Bayad yelled, trying to cleanse it all from his mind. This had to be a nightmare. How could he wake up?
    “I don’t know nothing!” he yelled back. His voice had grown small for a time; gut yelling seemed the only way to make his vocal cords work. “I was working at my job when this man steals me at gunpoint. He holds me in his van, and then the van blows up and burns me. I am victim, here. I do nothing wrong. I am naturalized citizen, sworn in by George W. Bush. I love USA.”
    This was the truth. Why would they not believe him?
    “Fuck you, skinny,” one of the men said. “You deserve what you got coming.”
    With that, they stopped the beating, opened the door, and left. Bayad sat in the chair by himself, scared and hungry and cold.
    What will my family think?
he wondered.
They must be worrying sick about me by now.
    He let his head hang down on his chest. The room smelled of urine and mold.
    God is good,
he promised himself.
A just and mighty God. Allah huakbar.
    PRESIDENT DAVID VENABLE had only been there a handful of times, but he already hated the Situation Room. All the noise, the frenzy of information—he hated the way it fed his claustrophobia, how everyone looked to him, demanding answers.
    Answers?
He hadn’t even come up with any decent questions!
    “So let me get this straight,” he said. His immediate circle of advisors followed him up the stairs toward the Oval Office. The cadre had grown and shrunk in the past twenty-four hours, but a core seemed to be emerging. “We have found Islamic fundamentalists at all three sites? Two of them were dead when we got there, but one is still alive. Is that correct?”
    “Correct,” Alred agreed. “He was a local cleric, badly burned when a bomb he planned to set off malfunctioned. He’s undergoing interrogation as we speak.”
    The FBI Director, Havelock, Chase, Beechum, and now the press secretary, a polished former CNN reporter named Noah Engle, encircled the president.
    “Two were found lying next to .50 caliber semiautomatic rifles made by Barrett Manufacturing Company,” Alred continued. “I’m told these guns are capable of piercing the windshield of a 747, which is supposed to be pretty tough. Only someone with specific expertise would know that.”
    “How the hell did they use a rifle to shoot something moving three hundred miles an hour?” Venable asked. He walked deliberately, but slower now. Beechum had begun to think of him as a shark moving relentlessly through the water. He looked menacing and strong as long as he kept moving, but threatened to drown if he stopped.
    “Planes move considerably slower on final approach,” Havelock said. He’d held a private pilot’s license for twenty years.
    Alred spoke up again.
    “They selected buildings that lined up at very steep angles relative to the glide path,” he explained. “That gave them an almost straight shot, which took speed out of the equation. People I talked with on our Hostage Rescue Team say it would not have been really difficult for a competent