“With respect, James, he’s a British national who made a choice and has to face the consequences. As any other British national would.”
“There’s something else the media will get soon. It went online just a few minutes ago.” The little folder James was carrying under his arm turned out to be his tablet. He proffered it to Karamat, who shook his head and got out of bed, reaching for his dressing gown. A man couldn’t be prone in his pajamas when something important happened. James followed him into his office, and although there was a desktop computer with a large monitor he set up his tablet on a stand on Karamat’s desk.
“So bad I shouldn’t look at it in large scale?” Karamat said, and James didn’t meet his eye.
In that way the mind has of focusing on trivial details to avoid the enormity of what it has to bear, Karamat spent the first seconds of the video feeling irritated that his son hadn’t sat down with a journalist but had decided instead to speak directly to a camera and upload the whole thing to a website. It was the kind of choice that wanted to come across as honest and direct but was really just controlling. Or lazy.
“There’s been some speculation about my whereabouts these last few days,” Eamonn said, handsome and well rested. The close-up shot showed nothing of his surroundings, only a white wall behind him, his shoulders broad and trustworthy in a button-down navy blue shirt. His eyes moved—to whom?—then settled back on the camera lens. “I admit, I’ve been paralyzed by indecision”—he made it sound like an actual ailment—“caught between the two people I love most in the world: my father and my fiancée.”
“Ah, no,” said James, moved beyond expletives by the damaging awfulness of the word “fiancée.”
“I had hoped my father would change his thinking about this, but I understand now that won’t happen. Let me clear something up. Aneeka Pasha didn’t come looking for me. I went to her house looking for her. While carrying a gift of M&M’s from her sister, who I had had the privilege of spending some time with in America.”
Nice touch there, the M&M’s. Who was it behind the camera whom Eamonn just looked at again?
“It’s true I didn’t know right away about her brother, but I did know that her father had been a jihadi, that he’d gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, was held—and possibly tortured—at Bagram, and died on his way to Guantánamo. Like almost any other Brit, I despise the choices Adil Pasha made, and I despise the manner of his dying. But the indefensible facts of his life and death make Aneeka and her sister, Isma, extraordinary women. In the face of tremendous difficulties—including the death of their mother when they were very young . . .”
How earnest he looked, how good, as he continued to speak of the trials and glories of the Pasha sisters. Faith in human nature positively rolling off him. Silly clot, as if this were a time in which anyone would trust the idealistic.
“We fell in love. God, all my friends are going to have a go at me for that—we don’t just come out and say things like that in public, do we? But there we are. It’s my truth.”
When had this phrase become so popular, “my truth”? Hateful expression, something so egocentric in it. And something so cynical, also, about all those absolute truths in the world.
“I don’t know why I was lucky enough for her to feel that way about me—my father, who knows me well enough to know that I don’t deserve a woman that wonderful, tells me she must have been pretending—”
“Ouch,” said James under his breath.
“—but there was never any pretense between us. And that’s why she told me about her brother when she agreed to spend her life with me. I can’t tell you how hideous it’s been to see how that admission—which took so much courage for her to make, and showed such trust in me—has made people paint her as . . . as . . . I can’t really say the words.”
Embarrassing. That’s all this was. “How much more of this is there, James?”
“Don’t know, sir. Didn’t seem right to watch it before you did,” said James, furiously examining the pattern on the carpet.
“It’s true that I went to my father, the home secretary, almost immediately to talk to him about Parvaiz Pasha. Not because my fiancée had asked for any favors but because, as a son, I felt honor-bound to tell my father that my personal life and his professional life were bound to collide. You see, I knew Parvaiz Pasha was trying to get to the British consulate in Istanbul—not for some act of terrorism, but because he wanted a new passport that would allow him to return home. I have shared this information with Counter Terrorism officials—I’m sure Aneeka has done the same—and it’s unclear to me why the British public has been allowed to continue thinking that terrorism was his motive for being where he was at the time of his murder—which I’m sure was carried out by those he almost succeeded in escaping.”
Oh don’t, son, don’t make him out to be a hero. They’ll never forgive you that.