“Yeah,” said Cole. “The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.”
“They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders.”
“I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world.”
“And maybe we will,” said Malich. “A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.”
“And if we did,” said Cole, “who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them.”
“You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French,” said Malich.
“You think we’ll do it?” said Cole. “Bottle ourselves up and let the world go to hell?”
“Would it be any better for us to get really pissed off and declare war on all of Islam?” said Malich. “Because we’ve got plenty of Americans who want to do that, too, and we don’t have the President anymore to hold them back.”
“I have a terrible feeling,” said Cole, “that some turban-wearing Sikhs are going to die today in America, and they’ve got nothing to do with this.”
They reached the end of the bridge.
“It’s weird,” said Cole. “I always feel like when I get to Virginia, I’m back in the United States. Like DC is a separate country. And not just DC. Maryland along with it. Like the Potomac is the boundary line between the country I love and a foreign country where they hate me because of this uniform.”
“Plenty of patriots in Maryland and points north,” Reuben reminded him. “Plenty of good soldiers come from there.”
“Can’t help how I feel about crossing this river. I know it’s crazy.”
They headed uphill into Arlington.
“You know who I hate today?” said Malich. “This isn’t like 9/11, when they exploited the loopholes in our open society, and we didn’t see it because of pure clumsiness. These terrorists today couldn’t have done what they did without the active cooperation of Americans who were in positions of trust.”
“At least you know Phillips didn’t have anything to do with it,” said Cole.
“Phillips? That lying sack of shit?” said Malich. “I don’t believe anything he told me. Just an aide to an aide? Yeah, if you think of the NSA as an ‘aide.’ He’s running an operation out of the White House and he knows way more than he’s telling me.”
“Then why did you have me give him my email and cell number?”
“Cole, they can get that in four seconds if they don’t already have it. By making him memorize it, maybe I convinced him that I trust him. At least a little.”
They stopped at a drugstore and Malich bought four disposable cellphones and ten ten-minute cards for them. He gave one of them to Cole and they memorized each other’s numbers. Except that Malich wouldn’t let him memorize the one he was activating right at the moment. “No point,” he said. “I’m throwing it away when this card is up. This is the last time I’m calling known numbers, but I still can’t keep this phone.”
Malich called his wife. It was brief. “You go ahead and visit Aunt Margaret without me,” he said. “I’ll get up there as soon as I can. I love you, Cessy.” Then he ended the call.
“So you’re sending her into hiding?” asked Cole.
“No, she’s just visiting her Aunt Margaret in New Jersey. We lived with her for a while when I was going to Princeton.”
“I thought it was a code.”
“I’m assuming our phone is tapped. If Cessy and I had some code, that would imply she’s part of my conspiracy.”
Cole thought: Is there anything this guy hasn’t thought of? Oh, yeah—he didn’t think of somebody passing his plans to the terrorists.
By then, Malich was calling numbers and leaving voice mail. Always the same message: “I always told you I was gonna take this job and shove it. Well, it’s shoved. Drinks?”
“Now that was code, right?” asked Cole.
“My unit back when I was still in the field. These guys had my back a long time. We’re going to meet later tonight near the Delta ticket area at Reagan. Want to come?”
“They don’t know me.”
“But they will.”
“What if I was assigned to you by the very people you’re hiding from? What if I report all this?”
“Are you spying on me?”
“No.”
“Then stop trying to pick a fight with me. How’s your Farsi?”
“Rusty. I didn’t work with Farsi speakers in Afghanistan.”
“Well, start thinking in Farsi, because that’s what we use to converse when we get together in public places.”
“Right now I’m barely thinking in English.”
“Pardon me while I strip some cash out of my accounts.”
They walked around Arlington, pulling max amounts out of five different accounts. “How paranoid are you, exactly?” asked Cole.
Malich handed him two hundred dollars. “You forget the line of work I was in and the kind of assignments I had. Always a chance I’d have to go to ground.”
“So do you have a car with false registration hidden here in Arlington?”
“No such luck. I wasn’t expecting to be on foot after the assassination of the President.”
“Are we really walking all the way to your house?”
“I’d be surprised if I ever see that house again,” said Malich. He sounded quite calm about it. He looked at his watch. “It stopped being my home about a minute ago, when Cessy and the kids left it.”
“So where are we going?”
“Back to the Pentagon,” said Malich. “On the Metro, if it’s running again on this side of the river.”
“Isn’t that one of the places they’ll look for you?”
“I have to debrief,” said Malich. “So do you. They’ve got to know, on the record, exactly what happened. Most people in the Pentagon aren’t in on the conspiracy. The good guys need to be able to fight, so they need information. Besides, if we go to the Pentagon and choose who to talk to, then some good people will know we’re there. We won’t just disappear.”
Cole was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable his feet were. “Sure wish I’d known to wear different shoes today.”
“And be out of uniform?” asked Malich. “Shame on you, soldier.”
“I want to be in boots and camo,” said Cole. “I want some bad guys to shoot at.”
“So far today, we’re the only ones who got to do that,” said Malich.
“Ten seconds too late,” said Cole.
“I try not to think of every shot that missed,” said Malich. “Every step I might have been able to run a little faster.”
“And if I’d driven faster—”
“Then we might have had to stop and explain things to some District cop and then we’d have gotten there even later,” said Malich. “What happened, happened.”
“And who we shoot at next, other people get to decide.”
“Thank God for that,” said Malich. “Thank God we live in a country where the soldiers don’t have that burden, too.”
SIX
WONK
Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.
Cecily Malich put the leftover cookies on the table for the kids to discover as they wandered in and out during the day. They did home school in the afternoons during summer vacation, but not on Fridays. Fridays were lazy days, and that meant Mark was over at one of his friends’ houses, Ni
ck was curled up with a book, slowly driving himself blind with Xanth or Discworld novels, Lettie and Annie were playing some madcap game in the back yard that would leave them smelling like a compost heap, and John Paul was dogging her heels. Except that he was down for a nap right now so the house was silent.
And then he woke up and it wasn’t silent anymore. He was three and mercifully had toilet-trained himself fairly early, so there was no diaper to change. J.P. got a cooky in his booster seat.
The rest of the cookies disappeared in bunches as the girls came in from the back yard and she sent them up to the tub, where of course they would play almost as hard as they had outside, but at least they had cookies in them to renew their energy and guarantee full saturation of the bathroom floor and walls.
It was only fair to bring a plate of cookies to Nick. It was a good thing that he was reading, even if she thought the books were deeply uninteresting herself. He shouldn’t be deprived of his share of homemade cookies during his growing-up years. And she saved the last three cookies in a sandwich bag for Mark.
None for her, but that was fine. She didn’t like chocolate. Never had. Now, if she had made snickerdoodles . . . but those took refrigerator time before you could bake them, so there was no way she could have gotten them made before Captain Cole showed up.
She wondered if she had done him any favors by telling Reuben that the boy looked like someone he could rely on. She knew that whatever Reuben was doing, it was dangerous and might be the kind of thing that would someday put him in front of a congressional committee like Oliver North back when she was a kid and watched CNN obsessively.
What kind of ten-year-old watched CNN? She was glad none of her kids was as strange as she had been. Such a loner. Didn’t have any real friends till she was in high school and found a group of proud-to-be-geeks, though now they’d be called wonks. Who but a wonk like her would even be attracted to the studious young ROTC officer who wore his uniform every day as if he was just daring politically correct students to say something snotty. Which they did. And which he always answered with a surprised look and the same chilling little phrase. “I’m willing to die for you,” he’d say, and then go back to whatever he was doing. How could they answer that?
He’d die for his country; and I spend my life taking care of his kids and making his life worth trying not to die.
She remembered those two glorious, hideous years as an intern and then a paid staffer in a Congressman’s office, where she saw what went on behind the scenes, the stuff they never showed on CNN because reporters and cameras were never present when the real work was being done. It’s not that her Congressman was corrupt—far from it. He was a squeaky-clean Mormon from Idaho who never drank or smoked and treated male and female staffers exactly alike. But he knew how Congress worked—it drank campaign money and breathed publicity. He was an expert in finding and using both.
LaMonte Nielson. He had a conscience and strongly held ideas, but not for one second did he let that get in the way of making whatever deal would get things done and make him indispensable to other Congressmen. Now he was Speaker of the House. Not bad for a smalltown veterinarian who got bored with putting old dogs to sleep.
He had liked her. Gave her a job after her internship. Offered her a huge raise when she said she was quitting. But when she explained she was leaving to marry a soldier, he smiled and said, “That matters more in the long run than anything we do in this office. Go for it.”
Today she might have been a senior aide to the Speaker of the House. Instead she was listening to J.P. in his booster seat at the kitchen table, babbling on about garbage trucks, his obsession of the moment. He was explaining the rules of recycling. She wasn’t sure whether he could read yet or not. Could he really have memorized all this after getting one of the older kids to read the brochure to him?
Getting to know these kids was a lot more fun than getting to know a bunch of Congressmen and their aides. Negotiating with them about bedtime and videogame use was a lot more satisfying than wrestling with other wonks about what would and would not go into the legislation. Not just because at home she had all the power (she and Reuben, when he was home) but also because she could actually change things. Help them overcome their weaknesses. Help them discover and develop their strengths. Make them feel better when they felt bad. Rejoice with them when they were happy. Like Congressman Nielson said—this was what mattered in the long run.
Except . . .
Except she had to hide from the television. Whether it was CNN or, when Reuben was home, Fox News, she’d find herself filled with yearning—no, be honest, she told herself—frustration. Because things were happening and she wasn’t part of it. All these years later, and she still had the disease.
The front door banged open and Mark ran into the kitchen yelling something. She was only half listening as she got his bag of cookies out of the fridge—he liked his cookies cold.
“Turn on the television!” he shouted at her.
“What?” she said.
“They blew up the White House,” he said.
All the channels were showing the same pictures: the White House with a gaping hole in the south wall of the West Wing, people in suits and people in uniforms, emergency vehicles and military vehicles all around. Reporters explaining that all air traffic was grounded so they couldn’t give us aerial shots—thank God, she thought, that’s all we need, the sky around the White House cluttered with choppers—and promising that as soon as they could get confirmation they’d tell us who died.
Because people had died. That much they knew.
The information bled out, each bit savored and discussed till the next one surfaced. An apparent terrorist attack. One or more rockets launched from a distance. From the Mall, then from the Washington Monument, then from the Tidal Basin. That’s the rumor that stuck.
And then there was the video clip—sold to the highest bidder?—on CBS and then picked up by everybody else (but with the CBS logo in the corner—capitalism continues!) taken from a car on the eastbound lane of Independence Avenue, where it bridged the Tidal Basin. The footage showed the terrorists on the asphalt of the westbound lanes just past the retaining wall of the Tidal Basin, and two rocket launchers.
The camera was shaking—obviously a digital snapshot camera with only a short video capacity. But there were pops of gunfire and some of the terrorists turned to fire . . . almost right at the camera. Was this tourist insane? He should be down inside his car, not vidding the whole thing.
Then a dark shape moved right in front of the camera in a blur of motion. A man in a suit. But with a weapon. And then another, only in uniform. And a voice saying, “Get down inside your car!”
Of course the camera stayed where it was.
Pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. One of the terrorists went down. Another. One of the launchers was knocked out of alignment and tipped over. But the other one fired and then the video ended.
Mark pushed a button on the remote and things started rewinding.
“What are you doing?”
“Rewinding,” said Mark.
“This is all a tape?”
“It’s DVR, Mom,” he said, like she was kind of dim. “We’ve had this for two years now. You can rewind anything if you haven’t changed the channel in between.”
“But I want to hear what they’re saying.”
“Mom,” said Mark. “Why do we have to listen to them when we can see?”
And then he added, softly: “I think it was Dad.”
The moment he said it, she knew he was right. Dad in a suit. And that was Captain Coleman in the uniform. Somehow they were at the Tidal Basin with rifles and they were shooting at the terrorists only they hadn’t been able to get them all in time.
The video didn’t prove anything. Everything moved too fast and blurred too much. But she knew it was Reuben.
“Again,” said Mark.
“No,” said Cecily. “Let me hear them talk. I have to know what they’re saying.??
?
A lot of babble about unidentified early responders and then some idiot talking head saying that the range had been quite short and these must not be trained soldiers because those weren’t hard shots. Right, thought Cecily, not hard at the firing range, but damned hard when somebody was firing back at you and you were running from cover to cover.
Then the talking heads were interrupted by a bulletin from the reporter standing just outside the White House grounds.
The President was definitely in the room where the rocket exploded, along with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Mark pushed another button and suddenly everything jumped on the screen. “What are you doing now?”
“Going live,” said Mark. “We were a minute behind because of the replay.”
“The President is confirmed dead,” said a man inside a briefing room that she recognized immediately—it was in the Sam Rayburn Building. Why would he be in the Rayburn?
Because the White House briefing room wasn’t available, of course. But . . .
There was Congressman LaMonte Nielson with his hand on the Bible. Raising his right hand. Why was he taking an oath of office?
“Apparently the Vice President was killed in a traffic incident only a few minutes before the rocket attack on the White House. I say ‘incident’ because it is hard to believe that this was an accident, a mere coincidence. By the time the President died, this country had no living Vice President. So the law of presidential succession is clear. After the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and—but here’s the new President of the United States, just sworn in. President LaMonte Nielson. Most Americans don’t even know his name, but he’s all we’ve got right now.”
His last words overlapped with Nielson’s. Looking straight at the camera—Cecily remembered how hard it had been for him to learn how to do that steady gaze at the lens—he said, “Fellow citizens, our enemies have done a terrible thing today, and good people have been murdered. They clearly intended to strike a blow to our hearts, and they succeeded. But we still have—we must keep our heads. Our Constitution still works.