The Command

“Most assuredly,” Yousif said, smiling. “We will share everything we find out with you. Just as we always do.”

He was addressing her as ya saiyyida; formally, but was there an undertone of humor? And if so, what did it mean? Men in white were unloading a stretcher. She waited, but Yousif said nothing more, and a few minutes later she went back to her car.

* * *

Crime happened in every community, and that was true of the military, too. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service looked into any crime involving naval personnel, from grand theft to murder. It conducted criminal investigations, contract fraud, counternarcotics, and counterintelligence work. Its jurisdiction was worldwide. Agents were civilians, not military, federal law enforcement officers, equivalent to those in the FBI, CIA, or DEA.

Aisha was an assistant resident agent in charge in Bahrain. She and the senior RAC, Robert Diehl, provided law enforcement, counterintelligence, and force protection for the thousand personnel on the base, as well as for those aboard the ships that called here for fuel, repairs, and liberty. She also occasionally choppered out to the battle group in the Gulf, though another agent handled most of the shipboard cases.

Ninety-five percent of service people were good to go. Unfortunately, she and Bob and the third agent in the Bahrain office, Peter Garfield, got to deal with the other five. Occasionally she found the work interesting, but more and more recently, she felt it didn’t really challenge her. The best she could say about it was, she got to sharpen all her law enforcement skills, including diplomacy and language, when she got the crime and counterintelligence information from her foreign law enforcement counterparts — like Major Yousif.

There were some people, of course, who didn’t think she ought to be here. Or wondered why she was.

It had started at the Special Federal Agent course. Fifteen weeks in the Georgia summer. She’d done all right on crime scenes, firearms proficiency, hand-to-hand, arrest procedures. Finished the Criminal Investigator segment number three in the class. But she didn’t seem to have a legal mind, and she’d blown the crim law final.

The next day the director had called her in. He’d sat tapping his fingers and looking out at the pines. Then swiveled his chair and said, “I had high hopes you were going to be one of our agents, uh, Miz Ar-Rahim. But we can’t compromise the requirements for graduation.”

“I understand.”

“That’s something I refuse to do. On the other hand, we’re under pressure to increase the number of female and minority graduates we can field. And someone with your — background—”

“You mean being African American, sir? Or being an American Muslim?”

“Both. You’re a — pretty special asset, as far as we’re concerned.”

So maybe she wasn’t DOA yet. She waited.

“We’ve been trying to think out of the box, some other way we could solve this. And maybe we have one, if it’s something you were willing to sign on to.”

Since her other scores were so high, he’d offered her a “qualified” graduation, contingent on her passing a retest on the legal section of the final in six months. Her first assignment was the San Diego field office, with the normal caseload for new agents: burglary, larceny of more than fifteen hundred dollars, suicide. The low point was an au-toerotic death at the marine barracks. The lance corporal had gotten his sexual gratification by tying his web belt around his neck and hanging himself from the transom while watching porn videotapes. Unfortunately, the chair slipped. As a new agent, female, and growing up as sheltered as the Muslim community had kept her, it had been a disturbing investigation. But she’d passed both the retest and her ninety-day probationary.

The NSA at Bahrain was her first overseas assignment. She’d been here just long enough to meet the major players, though she couldn’t say she felt comfortable with them. Especially the locals, like Major Yousif and his boss, the minister. Muslim, like her. But there was a difference. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was. She was still working on that one.

Sometimes she thought it had taken leaving America, to make her feel, for the first time, American.

* * *

Aisha had grown up in Manhattan. Central Harlem, 135th Street. Her father had converted to Islam in 1964, when he heard Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom. Her mother, a Baptist from Worth, Illinois, had become a Muslim when they married. She’d taught her and her sisters to do tasbih with their fingers, and how to make their wudhu.

She’d been three years old when she realized not all the thousands of people on the street that never stopped humming and thundering outside the walls of their apartment were like her family or dressed like her family or prayed like her family.