Brody knelt down next to the backpack. His hands shook. He stuffed them tight in his pockets to contain it but he felt the tremor creeping up his forearms.
"Are you sure you're not a monster, Brody?".
"You are a good person.".
She had said both to him. Carrie's voice rang out in the cabin, alternating between the two sentences over and over. Two verdicts on his character. Brody closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. He didn't know anymore. It was like trying to choose whether to bet on red or black on the roulette wheel. He felt that either outcome was equally possible. He knew that it wasn't healthy that he should be so ambivalent.
He took the gun out of the bag and half dropped it on the cabin floor in front of him, as if it was white hot to the touch. He span it to see which direction the muzzle would point to when it eventually came to rest. Red, black, red, black, red, black, red.
He counted his crimes, lives he had ended or at best just blighted. Tom. The tailor. Walden. Nazir. Jess. Dana. Chris. Carrie. He noted that most of them were in fact his loved ones. That's how effective he had been. Carrie had stopped him from going much further on two occasions. She had saved him from himself twice. She wasn't here to save him now though.
He had been primed to take the lives of Walden and his team in the bunker as retribution for the routine murder of innocents in the War on Terror. They were criminals. He had been willing to die to avenge the death of Isa and 80 other little kids like him, to draw attention to the other drone attacks that devastated schools and villages that were covered up, considered a necessary evil. Shrugged off by the leaders of a so-called civilised, democratic society. He had later colluded with Roya in preparation for the retaliatory mass murder of innocents on American soil. He didn't understand how he had been induced to make that leap.
His own hypocrisy, his own contradiction, smacked him in the face, not for the first time. But that was the difference in him, he could see it a lot clearer now. He was an expert in the absurdity of war from having lived in the eye of the storm for so long.
Carrie claimed that he could right his wrongs by giving them Nazir. So hadn't the score now been settled? Had Brody redeemed himself? Perhaps, but only in her eyes. He was glad of that, at least. They had that, finally. As much as he loved her he knew he could only bring her misery. He wasn't going to get to cook for her, do her laundry, make sure she took her meds. They would never believe her when she tried to prove his innocence and she would never let it go. She would only end up back in the gurney. Brody closed his eyes and swallowed hard, his Adam's apple throbbing at the thought of her smile tethered by lithium, her tiny frame drowned in a hospital robe. Perhaps it would have been better for Carrie if she hadn't chosen to believe him after the memorial, if she had pulled the trigger herself.
Red, black, red, black, red, black.
Everyone else now believed that he and Nazir were one and the same. Perhaps they had been for some time.
When all was said and done Brody had flicked that switch. He couldn't get that out of his head. It was his one defining act. He hadn't confessed that yet, not even to Carrie. She thought Dana had talked him down before he got the chance, that he had made the decision not to go through with it for himself. He wondered if that would change her view of him, the knowledge that he had actually taken that final step. If Allah had willed it, his vest would have gone up, taking Brody, Walden and all the other miserable sons of bitches in that bunker with them. The intent had been there, the will to spill blood, to sacrifice himself in doing so. Brody's suicide video would have played on every news station in every country of the world. The justification for his actions would have been heard by anyone who cared to listen. For every thousand people he horrified, he might have made a handful stop and think for a moment, to ask questions. His kids' lives would have been ruined. Their father would have been gone, leaving them as children of the blue-eyed bomber to face the music. They would have been disgusted by him. Brody wondered if they would remember the Battle of Gettysburg, if they had taken in anything of what he had tried to say to them so pointedly the day they had visited the site. They would have been ostracised for bearing his name, bullied at school. Perhaps Jess would have moved them away some place to start over. Maybe they would have eventually taken on Mike's name instead to hide their shame.
Brody hadn't been responsible for Langley but he asked himself what the difference was. His video was playing on loop regardless. Walden was dead anyway, some of his team would now have joined him in hell. Nazir had got what he had wanted. Jess and the kids' lives were shattered, they would have had to go to ground by now. They thought he had done this. The result was the same.
He may as well have done it and stayed true to his fucking word.
He closed his hand around the pistol grip.
The net difference was that Brody was still alive. And precisely what was that worth now? His heart was still pumping but everything he held dear was lost to him. Brody contemplated a future of cowering in dark corners like this, just him, his hallucinations and his gun. Him and the gun. If not now, then how long before the gun won out?
He thought of his kids, of Jess. He still loved her, of course. Brody had been with Jess so long that asking him to stop loving her would have been like asking his hair to stop growing, demanding that he never blinked again. Even if it hadn't been for Carrie, he knew that he couldn't have stayed with them. Jess understood that things couldn't be fixed but the kids wouldn't have grasped why he had to go. They would just have felt rejected. Of course, they now had an alternative explanation. Plain old rejection by a father figure was something borne by a lot of people the world over, it's capacity to marr a life significant, but not insurmountable. Your father turning out to be a terrorist, a mass murderer and a traitor to your family and entire nation was a slightly different thing, he reasoned. He worried for Chris mostly, not even across the threshold of puberty and already full of rage and self-loathing. Jess would need to watch him.
Hadn't he come too far just to end up this way? Brody slowed his breathing, drawing air in deeply, nostrils flaring, holding it down and then pushing the air back out steadily, eyes closed. The marine in him took over. He needed to think calmly, he couldn't just blow his head off in a jangle of adrenalin and self-hatred. He tried to summon his powers of logic. He noted that his breathing had returned to normal but that his right foot was jiggling uncontrollably.
He thought about turning himself in. Walking to the nearest pay phone and calling 911. They would take him alive but he would never see the light of day again. He would keep Carrie out of it, say he escaped on his own. She would have to stand back and watch it happen. Could he trust her to do that? Maybe he would even take the wrap for Langley. He felt like he deserved it. Would they apply the death penalty? Probably, but he would get a long stay while the examined every atom of what he knew about Nazir and Al-Qaeda. Endless interrogation. Maybe they would let Dana visit him, in return for information, and he could explain it all to her? Brody laughed at himself. Dana would refuse to come within ten miles of him. The CIA, the FBI and whatever other nefarious forces there were lurking would torture the fuck out of him, officially or not. He knew he couldn't take much more and besides, he would be scared of implicating Carrie for his escape, for Walden. She would be an accessory. Languishing in the cell across from his, just like she had said. All for them to put him down like a dangerous dog at the end of it. No, he couldn't have that. That would not honour Isa. He would rather die at his own hand for the things he had done than at theirs for the things he hadn't done. Carrie would understand.
Or he could keep on running. Make his way through Carrie's map's red dots, hope that she'd come for him one day. If he was going he would have to get himself together and leave soon, he would want to arrive at the next dot while there was still plenty of daylight. He didn't feel capable right now, he was still spooked. If he went, he could eventually make his way to the nearest big town or city, stake out the local mosque, beg them to take him in. What was he thinking? They'd hand him in as soon as look at him. Nobody would want to associate with a man like Brody. His first instinct had been to get as far away as possible as quickly as he could. He could try to catch a train maybe, sleeper service in the dead of night. Or a flight to a country with no extradition treaty. He thought about CCTV and border control and the inevitable lockdown at stations and airports in the aftermath of an incident like this, the sheer amount of people milling around travel hubs. Would it be better to let things die down a little first? He wondered how long things would take to die down after the biggest atrocity on American soil since 9/11. He could go live somewhere remote, but hide in plain sight. Brody doubted that 'plain sight' existed for people like him. He bit the side of his mouth.
Sweat beaded at his temples, he was every bit the trapped animal. Brody had read once somewhere that if a coyote got ensnared, come sunrise when it began to feel too exposed and vulnerable it would go as far as gnawing off its own leg in order to get free.
He raised the gun to his head and squeezed his eyes tight shut, clenching his jaw.
Brody had flicked the switch. He was a monster. He asked himself if he dared flick it again now that there was no point to make, nobody to rage against, to punish for all the unfathomable shit he had been through. He wondered how much of it was politics, how much was this noble ideology and how much of it was his own personal spite at the damage his life had sustained through being duped into fighting in a war that turned out not to be what he thought it was. He really was a worthless son of a bitch.
But she loved him. In spite of everything, Carrie saw something in him worth salvaging. Brody thought about all the goodbyes he had ever said. To his mother before he left for Iraq, her clutching on to his shoulders, inconsolable. To Jess the night that they agreed they couldn't continue to limp on together, her hand resting on his over the gear lever out of habit, until she realised that habits would have to change. To Nazir when they had prayed together for the last time, their embrace outside the mill feeling like the most natural thing in the world. To Carrie on that dirt track just the night before, even though she had refused to accept that it had been a goodbye. He could still feel the weight of her in his arms. He could still hear her sniffing back tears, asking him wide-eyed how it could be that this was so painful.
Outside the cabin the clouds brewed, rumbling as if rumour of a fight amongst their number was spreading fast. As they gathered round each other ready for something salacious to begin, the colour seeped out of the forrest, the vivacity in a legion of greens cranked down several notches.
The rising wind flapped a loose piece of felt against the roof.
Brody lay prostrate on the cabin floor, oblivious.