Alone
Karam's Legacy, Chapter 13: No backup. No trust. Just the truth.
Hey there!
This is Chapter 13 of my serialized novel - Karam’s Legacy
If you’re just joining in, catch up here:
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12
The silence on the line stretched just long enough for Amir to wonder if she would hang up. Amir could hear her wipe her tears and try to recompose herself, “I’ll bring the letter to you tomorrow, Ma.”
He could sense his mother nodding her head, her heart struggling with both excitement and fear. Amir had spent the weekend going through boxes and boxes of files and journals left behind by his father. Pressed neatly into one of the journals was a stapled set of pages. A letter. Handwritten. By his father, to his mother.
Possibly the final words before his father was tragically killed.
Almost as if he knew he was going to be killed.
Or perhaps, and this made more sense, his father had written the letter for Shanti to find, just in case something happened to him.
Either way. Amir had started to read it, but then realized he really shouldn’t be reading this. He quickly folded it back into the journal he’d found and called his mother.
“Thank you, beta.” That was all she said. She waited for him to respond. When he didn’t, she hung up.
Amir held the phone in his hand for a moment, just in case she called back. When he was satisfied that his mother wouldn’t call back, he placed it back down on his desk and moved on to the next file.
The weekend had been emotional, to say the least. Most of what his father had left behind were common things you’d need for a dojo - records of all his students, lesson plans, martial arts books, his notes on teaching, and pictures of him with his students at the dojo and various tournaments.
In another box, Amir found VHS tapes labeled "Tournament 2003," “Karate – Black Belt Tests,” and another box marked “A+ Amir.” He smiled. His father had collected all of Amir’s exams and projects.
Then came the documents.
Notebooks. Spiral-bound, yellowing. Tabs marked in Karam’s handwriting: “ICE,” “Leads,” “MTA Footage,” and “Harith H.” The pages were dense. Coded in places. But Amir recognized a name repeated often: Wakil.
There were cross-references between names: Harith Hassan, Savatier, something called "Asset ID: M3/CTD/27." Others were harder to pin.
“Junaid - gone.”
“Hassan - call never returned.”
“Wakil - worried. Mentioned son.”
As Amir flipped through a section titled “Harith H.,” he noticed his father’s handwriting grew sharper, almost angry. There was a full page with just one line at the top:
“Real name: Fatin Ibrahim.”
Below that, bulleted notes:
“Former officer. Muslim. Recruited by Savatier 2002.”
“Used to infiltrate Astoria mosques. Undercover.”
“Too soft. Tried to warn Wakil. Too late.”
“May have kept records—possible ally.”
Amir exhaled through his nose, rubbing his temples. He needed a break. He hadn’t stood up in over two hours. His hands were dusty with old paper, and his chest ached from the weight of what he was learning—not just about his father, but about the web he was investigating. He still had no clue what any of it meant.
He stood, stretched, and walked into the living room. He turned on the TV, flipping through channels until the familiar rhythm of the local evening news filled the apartment.
“…armored truck crash in Astoria earlier today…”
Amir froze.
The screen showed the mangled remains of the truck, flipped on its side, emergency lights flashing red against the asphalt.
“…one guard injured, treated at Elmhurst Hospital. The other, identified as Fatin Ibrahim, is currently missing. Authorities say the vehicle’s contents are unaccounted for, and are investigating the possibility of an inside job…”
The words hit Amir like a slap. Fatin Ibrahim.
He stepped closer to the TV. A photo flickered onscreen—Fatin’s DMV headshot. Older. Heavier. Beard shorter. But unmistakable.
“Harith Hassan,” Amir muttered.
He turned back toward the bedroom, heart racing. His father's notes. His father was investigating him.
The news anchor moved on to the weather, but Amir no longer heard it. The pieces were shifting again. And he was back in the game.
The hum of a flickering bulb echoed faintly through the back office of a shuttered mechanic’s shop. Rashid sat at a circular table on a folding chair, chai steaming in a paper cup between his palms. The news played softly from an old TV in the corner, the name Fatin Ibrahim crawling across the ticker like a ghost he’d already buried. He’d brought a large thermos full, hoping he would be able to share it soon with his guest.
Just a few feet from him lay Fatin Ibrahim, bound and barely conscious, his breathing shallow beneath the flicker of an overhead bulb.
The room smelled faintly of engine grease and old pine cleaner—the back office of a mechanic’s shop in Astoria. The shop owner owed Rashid a favor, one of many he'd quietly collected over the years—this one for scaring off a crew that used to shake down local businesses for 'protection money.' Now the shop was closed for the weekend, and no one would be checking the back room until Monday.
Fatin stirred with a groan, his head rolling to one side as the dull ache behind his eyes sharpened into pain. His wrists burned from the zip ties, and every breath came with a hitch, but he was alive. The cold floor beneath him and the sting in his ribs made that much clearer.
He blinked slowly. The light overhead flickered.
“Welcome back,” Rashid said.
Fatin tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. He coughed, wincing as pain bloomed across his chest.
Rashid looked up at someone that Fatin couldn’t see. He suddenly felt two hands on him. He instinctively shoved them away.
“He’s trying to help,” said Rashid.
Fatin squinted and let the man help him up. The man guided Fatin to a seat next to Rashid.
“Thank you, Alex.”
Fatin winced in pain as he tried to turn his head to see the man who had helped him.
Rashid reached for his thermos. “Would you like some chai?” he said, almost casually. He poured a cup and slid it over to Fatin. “Let me know if you need more sugar.”
Fatin stared at him, breath shallow. “You are…” He paused. Took a breath. Looked at the cup of chai and tried to grab it with his zip-tied arms.
Rashid noticed Fatin struggling and nodded at Alex. Alex walked over, took out a knife, and freed Fatin from the zip ties.
“Better?” Rashid asked. As Fatin took a sip of the chai, trying to understand what kind of predicament he was in, Rashid raised the volume of the television set. “Hey, look! You’re a fugitive.”
Fatin paused.
Then it all came back to him—the shriek of the tire blowout, the truck jerking violently to the side, Victor yelling something he couldn’t make out, the sound of metal grinding against asphalt as the vehicle tipped. He remembered the harness cutting into his chest, the blur of broken glass, the copper taste of blood. Then the rear doors kicked open. Him lying on the ground as a shadow stepped through. A voice. “Hello, Harith Hassan.”
“Now you remember,” Rashid smiled, carefully studying Fatin’s changing expression.
The air in the room turned heavier. Fatin’s eyes widened, and his pulse quickened.
“I just want to talk,” Rashid said, his voice low but even. “You owe my father that much.”
Amir didn’t know when he’d started pacing, but the floor beneath him was warm from the friction of his steps, and his mind refused to sit still. He reviewed the facts in his mind:
He kept circling back to the page in his father’s notes—Harith H. scrawled at the top, underlined twice. Real name: Fatin Ibrahim.
Karam had written that Fatin had been assigned to Astoria post-9/11, part of the NYPD’s Demographics Unit, tasked with surveilling mosques under the guise of community policing. Undercover. Embedded.
And now, fifteen years later, the same man—Fatin Ibrahim—was all over the evening news, allegedly vanished after an armored truck crash, with authorities whispering about a possible inside job.
Could it be the same person?
The coincidence was uncanny. The name. The neighborhood. The alias.
Harith Hassan.
His father had flagged him for a reason, but he also wrote:
“possible ally.” So, according to his father, Harith or Fatin may have been one of the good ones.
Amir’s mind raced with all the possibilities. He wondered whether he should be bringing this to Mason.
He stopped pacing and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees. He took his phone out and was about to call Mason.
His thumb hovered above the call button.
Amir's jaw clenched. Mason should be the next step—by protocol, by common sense, by every part of him that still wanted to believe in the system. But then came the memory like a punch to the gut: Conners’ voice, cold and clipped. “You’ve been skating by under Mason’s wing. Since you are a Detective, you think the rules don’t apply to you.”
And that IAB officer— “One wrong headline, and someone’s going to start asking what happened with Karam Kashyap. You want that unsealed?”
Mason had stayed quiet. Worse, Mason had been hiding things about his father from him all this time.
The phone screen dimmed. Amir didn’t move.
He set it down.
His father worked in the dark—notes, scraps, trails no one else could follow. He hadn’t trusted digital. Or anyone.
Amir decided it was time to go to work. He’d finish what his father started.
Alone.
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