Brodie hoped the Pashto didn’t send him off the deep end.
Mercer said something, and Taylor nodded and replied in what Brodie recognized as Arabic.
She said to Brodie, “Kyle also learned Arabic from a Quran written in both languages.” She added, “While he was a captive.”
Brodie wanted to tell him he could learn ten more languages by the timehe got out of Leavenworth. Brodie knew a few words of Arabic, like, “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” but he didn’t think that would be useful here.
More importantly, there were now three combat veterans having a conversation. That didn’t mean Mercer was going to tell them they were free to go—in Pashto or Arabic—but they were engaging with their captor in a way that held his interest, and that meant they were momentarily safe from the piranha and the monkeys. Brodie had the sense that he and Taylor were playing with a cougar that had once been trained, but had reverted to the wild. As long as they amused the animal and fed him scraps of information, the cougar would let them rub his tummy. Sometimes the cougar purred, sometimes the cougar snarled. And you never knew when the cougar was going to bite.
Mercer asked, “Why did you transfer to CID?”
Brodie replied, “It’s interesting work. You get to ask questions instead of answering them. Can I ask you a question?”
“No.” He looked at Taylor, who said, “I believe in justice and the law.”
“They’re not the same.”
“They need to be.”
“They will never be,” he said.
“They can be.”
“You could be right. I am the law here, and I dispense justice.”
“You dispense punishment.”
“Not every time.”
But often enough to be familiar with disembowelment, cutting throats, severing heads, and feeding people to the wildlife.
Mercer was looking at Taylor. “Civil Affairs. Did you do good things for the Afghan people?”
“I tried.”
“Me too. I sent a lot of them to paradise.” He looked at Brodie. “How about you?”
“I did what I got paid to do.”
“I did more than I was paid to do.”
Taylor said, “Tell us.”
“I think you might already know.” He looked at Brodie. “How’d you get hit?”
“Standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Same as everyone else who got hit.”
“I never got hit.”
“Right. We read your file, Kyle.”
He nodded.
“You served honorably,” said Taylor.
“I did. Then I didn’t.”
“Tell us.”
