Code of Honor

Kamran spends an hour or so memorizing the emergency phone number Hagan gave him before finally passing out in the back of the van. When he wakes up, Jimmy is driving and Aaliyah is half-asleep in the passenger seat. Dane is in the back, eating an apple, and offers Kamran some food for breakfast.

Kamran finally looks closely at Dane—something he has avoided doing because Dane scares him a little. Dane is hulking and moves very purposefully, and otherwise remains very still. Kamran apologizes for hitting Dane in the face, and Dane reassures him there are no hard feelings. Dane tells Kamran that when Kamran gets into West Point, he’ll learn more about fighting. Kamran insists he won't get in because of Darius, but Dane says that Mickey reassured him that once Darius’s name was cleared, and Kamran's name with it, all would be back to normal: “Dane believed down in the core of his being that my brother was innocent for no other reason than because he was a United States Ranger. It was unthinkable to him that a Ranger could ever turn on his own country” (169).

Dane then teaches Kamran some basic fighting moves, which they practice with Dane's unloaded gun. After a while, Kamran gets better at it, until Jimmy interrupts them to say that Hagan wants to talk.

Jimmy pulls into a gas station, where the team get snacks and then sit down to talk to Hagan through the secure connection on Jimmy's laptop. Hagan looks healthier and more rested. He says that he ran the plan by the agents in charge, and they were skeptical but did contact Superbowl security to inform them there may be a problem. Hagan also investigated the food services angle that Aaliyah proposed about the Godzilla clue in the latest video. He tells the team that he believes something might be happening with Kendall Food Services, a service out of Nashville, Tennessee that is supplying all the food for the Superbowl. Mickey tells the team to check it out, but Kamran protests, asking about Darius, and his safety.

Mickey reassures Kamran that all of this is for the sake of preventing a terrorist attack, and that if they foil the plot, Darius will be safe. Kamran is skeptical: “It’ll be all over, and then they won't need Darius anymore, I thought. We'll kill Haydar Ansari's terrorist plot, and Haydar Ansari will kill Darius” (174). 

At Kendall Food Services, Aaliyah is dressed as a news anchor. She wears the grey suit she wore at the Department of Homeland Security building. She is trying to convince the security guard that she is with the evening news and doing a local fluff piece on the supersized meals feeding the Superbowl. The security guard is skeptical, but Kamran—called Chris for this particular stunt—chooses the name of a public relations specialist off a directory of random names, thereby further convincing the guard. Meanwhile, Jimmy shows up pretending to be a phone line repairman. He gets himself into the building, and as the guard picks up the phone to call, Kamran wonders if their plot has worked: “Somewhere down the hall, not very far from here, Jimmy had patched himself into the warehouse's outgoing phone lines” (177). Jimmy, pretending to be Mr. Murphy, the PR Representative, gives Aaliyah and Kamran permission to go inside. 

Aaliyah and Kamran walk down the hall, toward a large warehouse. Dane instructs Jimmy, through Jimmy’s earpiece, to find records, or anything of interest that might prove something is amiss. Jimmy gets to work on his task. Kamran is nervous and walking a bit more slowly than Aaliyah. Aaliyah reassures him that he is doing a great job. Kamran asks her why she is helping him.

Aaliyah talks to Kamran about her past at Exeter, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire. She was 14 and attending Exeter on 9/11, and after that day, her dark skin and Arabic heritage made her a target, and an outcast among the other students. She insisted that she stay in America after her father heard about her struggles and suggested she transfer, as she loved American culture, and especially American boy bands. She talks about how she made it her mission to work in international relations, focusing on America and the Middle East. Kamran understands this desire:

Living in my little bubble in Phoenix, it had never occurred to me that there could be somebody else out there who got what I had been going through so completely. Somebody who had experienced the same prejudice I did, and was doing everything she could to undo it (181).

As they walk into the warehouse, Kamran almost does a double take when he sees someone he recognizes unloading and loading boxes.