The agents—one man, one woman—were friendly enough. The woman could have been a real estate agent trying to sell him a house if the breast pocket of her business suit didn’t sport an FBI badge, if the room itself didn’t say trouble. Instead of the flowers, or living-room lamps that real estate offices often used to make clients feel at home, this room had the aesthetics of a vise. Mohammed was becoming depressingly familiar with the bare logic of the interrogator and interrogatee: windowless walls, metal office desk, three chairs arranged as chessmen converging on the king. Two on their side, one on his: Checkmate. Up in a high corner of the room where geckos liked to lie in wait back home was a video camera. Outside, bell-clear skies; inside, clammy palms and the buzz of fluorescent lighting. Funny, he thought, how all of these rooms were the same, whether in Bahrain or America. You’d think the styles would somehow differ—the way a mosque’s prayer rugs differ from church pews—but no—the only difference was that the furniture was better here in America—he’d seen the same chairs at OfficeMax.

The woman agent began politely asking him to state his name, his address—to get a baseline for the lie detector equipment focused on his pupils, he knew. Then the man asked him to describe his work at the lab. Mohammed detailed the process of creating Western Blot Analysis. He spoke eagerly to show he was cooperating fully. He made a point to not ask why he was being questioned; he said nothing to indicate that he was a troublemaker. But then, as he talked, he began to wonder if that was a mistake: would they take his lack of questions as a sign of guilt? Were they on an immigration or terrorism fishing expedition? Or maybe they were investigating a common crime. Or perhaps his imagination had gotten away from him and they were only doing some security clearance on him because he had an H-1B Visa but was working on a project that received military funding. This last idea almost made him laugh, revealing as it had that he’d fallen into the last hope of the truly damned. How many men had stood on the gallows, certain right up until the trapdoor opened beneath their feet, that their case of mistaken identity would be revealed?

It was right at this point that the conversation took a strange turn: “Tell us about your work with honeybees,” the male agent said. It was then that Mohammed noticed that the agent wasn’t wearing a badge from the FBI but from the Dept. of Agriculture. Mohammed explained that he didn’t work with honeybees. Or bees of any sort. The agent became confrontational. No matter what he told them about his job, they kept bringing the conversation back around to honeybees; from their questions he could tell they were investigating something to do with the collapse of the honeybee colonies that were occurring all over the country. Yes, he knew about it. Everyone did. After the bee-colony collapses of the ’00s, all kinds of groups had taken to weaponizing Nature—killer bees were an invasive species in Washington; ISIS had been linked to sterile bees in France…. Anyone with a charge card and kitchen could do it. Anyone with a news feed knew about it. Were they playing dumb? Should he? If he did, would he look like he was hiding something? He decided to say exactly what he knew. Not more, not less. When they asked him what he thought was causing all of these bee colonies to fail, he gave them the pantheon of explanations that had appeared in the journals: the dances bees did to alert others in the hive of sources of nectar were being confused by cell phone transmissions, or climate change, or pesticides, emanations from power lines—so many causes had been proposed that it was the same as not having any explanation at all. “But what would you do if you wanted to bring down a beehive?” the female agent asked.

Bring down.

As if beehives were the Twin Towers. A vision of what they saw when they looked at him snapped into focus and it made his toes clench.