David Lawrence Cade

Copyright 2008 by David Lawrence Cade

SYNOPSIS

Early July 2007, Louis O’Connor (age 27) and Larry McIntire (age 31) – a gay couple living in northern Virginia – attend the premiere of an experimental anti-war play by Karim al-Din Muhammed at The Bright Star Theatre in Alexandria. They enjoy the cryptic dialogue – oftentimes in foreign languages. The play is observed from the back row by two FBI agents who are as interested in the audience as in the drama. The night ends with Louis confiding to Larry that he was molested by a priest while a teenager in New York.

Also in the Washington D.C. area that summer, in late July, are Akbar and Ramesh, two would-be terrorists whose cover is to be doctoral students at the University of Vermont. Akbar is the brother of Nabih Hunarfar, a close friend of Louis’s father, Omar Aboudi, a native of Iraq and since the 1980’s a professor at the University of Michigan. Akbar and Ramesh consider their plight: funded by a secretive al-Qaeda network with ample credit funds available to sustain their image of being Middle Easter students, upset about the failure of their fellow terrorists to accomplish much, their view of the world being rather skewed. They attend an evening lecture at George Washington University also attended by Louis, and - to the surprise of Akbar - his brother Nabih, who is also a professor of Farsi at MU and happens to be in the capital that week. Louis knows Nabih, greets him, and makes the acquaintance of Akbar and Ramesh, suggesting to them that their goals are hardly akin to his own, or to those of Nabih.

Omar, who has been in Iraq since June 2004 trying to help rebuild in Basrah, has returned to Ann Arbor by August 2007 to teach another semester. In September, he meets several graduate students and young professors at a coffee bar where he tells them about the previous three years work remodeling a mansion in Basrah to give work to some of the unemployed. His movements around the Detroit area it turns out are being monitored by the NSA: agents Lyeforth and Beltmann having been obsessed with Omar since 2003.

Thanksgiving week, and Louis and Larry are to host Larry’s parents, Louis’s half-brother Habib and his wife and son from Iraq, Omar, and Omar’s fiancée Melinda whom he met in the marshlands of Iraq. The day before Thanksgiving is almost spoiled when Louis and Larry learn – alerted by Ramesh whose computer hacking skills rival those of anyone in the world – that the NSA has planted an electronic listening device in their home. Larry, who has disagreed at times with Louis about the war, is finally coming to see the futility of it all, as well as the treachery and threats to civil liberties posed by the American intelligence services and the FBI.

Early December finds Louis’s secure world beginning to crumble. He learns that his mother Catherine – who had a brief affair with Omar in 1980 that led to Louis being born out of wedlock – has breast cancer. That is followed up the same day by the discovery of a suspicious mail parcel at their doorstep which the police retrieve and find contains a bomb, apparently sent by extremist ex-FBI agents who consider Louis’s family and their anti-war, even anti-American views, a threat.

Louis drives up to New York City on December 11^th, only to realize that he is being followed by a cadre of protectors: the artistic directors of the Bright Star Theatre, a neighbor’s college age daughter who wants to have a child by Louis even though he is gay, and three young Arab men who ram the side of an SUV that is being driven recklessly by the two former FBI agents who had sent the bomb and who planned to crash into Louis’s SUV at high speed in the hope of ruining him, saving Louis and killing the ex-FBI men – all along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

Louis spends several days with his mother at her Brooklyn hospital, returns to Washington, spends Christmas in New York with Larry and Louis’s family, flies to Austin for the Muslim wedding of Omar and Melinda, and spends New Years Eve day with Larry at their home, the two of them secure for the time being, wondering about what moral authority remains for America in the world.