“Some bullhockey, huh? This al-Yerassi stuff,” says Ethan’s companion at the counter. The man is wearing a uniform, a blue windbreaker with matching pants. “ ‘We’re knocking ’em out one by one,’ they tell us. Then thirteen months later they come back with an, ‘Oops, sorry. We blasted a convoy but missed the target.’ ” The man shows Ethan his phone as if he can read its screen text across five feet of space.
“I hear you,” Ethan says, abashed that his current fantasy is to make money from what pisses people off. At UIB, when he actually was profiting from military destruction and screw-ups and had felt a twinge of shame, he’d told himself that if he wasn’t writing the programs someone else would. “Doing God’s work,” John Guan used to kid. But Guan was dissing an even worse justification by many of their co-workers—that their work was if not exactly divinely mandated, then close to it. But the true justification, for everyone, was the bonuses. The revelation of the al-Yarisi miss might have netted him four thousand dollars. For a midlevel quant that’s more than a decent day’s pay.
“So now this guy, Yerassi, he’s back from the dead, pledging death to America from his spider hole,” says Ethan’s companion. “Some muck-up, huh? Fog of war for a whole darn year? Sure. How dumb does Washington think we are?”
“Plenty fucking dumb,” Ethan says overloud. Maybe it’s his oversugared blood. Maybe it’s about being screwed out of his imaginary bonus. And who might be getting it now. Hoke?
Ethan’s interlocutor lifts his hands in arrest. “Whoa, pal. You lose a brother in the towers or something?”
The man’s comment is rhetorical and exempts Ethan from responding. Yet, in fact, Ethan is pondering a loss, not familial but financial. Fucking Hoke, he thinks. It was him! Ethan has an impulse to call John Guan and pry facts out of the man, ask if it wasn’t Hoke that set him up, had moved that decimal point. But Guan probably wouldn’t say. More likely Guan wouldn’t even answer his call. Because of Ethan’s lawsuit, the bank has forbidden his former co-workers from communicating with him.
Ethan packs up his laptop and goes out into the humid, rancorous odor of taxi exhaust. He is midtown on Avenue of the Americas, yet flashing inside the dark of his brain an explosion launches his ex-boss through the glass of the UIB tower. A burning Dwayne Hoke, framed against a starless sky, is scrambling in midair . . . and then, sickeningly, is falling. What Ethan is left with is what Hoke himself had planted in his head. It is almost always before him now, blocking his path. A horror of charred flesh that appears to be half a man.
CHAPTER 24
Florida
Dear Jessica,
Ever heard that Elvis song Return to Sender? I did every time San Bernardino General Delivery sent back my mail. I was ready to give up on these longshot letters just for the quiet. But then a miracle happened. My March letter did not boomerang and I figured your reply was on the way.
One month and the next passed and I waited. Then three. Then five months. And now my patience has paid. I am holding your package. Though it has no return address I know it is yours by how you loop the D in Don.
So I want to play a little game. When and if you read this letter I want you to imagine that you are handing your package to me in person. For as I open it now on this fifteenth day of August I am pretending you are here in front of me. Maybe by imagining hard enough we can come together across space and time. It is worth a try since today in my time is my birthday. And hearing from you is the best gift I could have got.
Jessica. I have opened your package and I kiss your cheek for the CD. But I will not blame the prison authorities for confiscating your letter because I dont think you included one. After all that has happened because of our writing I know you cant risk sending me words. Sometimes anyway music is a better way to talk. I am putting in earphones now to hear what you sent.
WOW. The Malagueña my cellmate strums flows steady as a river, but your Roy Buchanan version is real Hendrix at Woodstock. A wild ocean of sound. You can bet I will be celebrating today by playing your disc until the grooves wear out.
Guess what. Ector reading this over my shoulder says CDs have no grooves. I guess he should know since he is educated. He also tells me that he spells his name with an H as in Hector.
Your loving father,
Don
P.S. Hector has finally gone back to his guitar so now I can quick finish this letter. Dont worry about not giving me your address. I am guessing you are not wanting to be found. Is it the VA chasing you for walking out of their hospital? If so I expect you wont be checking in again at San Bernardino General Delivery anytime soon. Which means for me another serenade from old Elvis. And for you this letter to read in some maybe time to come.
CHAPTER 25
Nevada, Pakistan
Two weeks ago the Pentagon announced what Voigt has known for over a month: al-Yarisi is alive, has been in hiding for a year after the drone strike thought to kill him. As the local commander in charge, Voigt has been getting an earful. But recordings of what went on in the operations trailer have pretty much cleared his actions. The order to fire had come straight from Langley and only through him. Jessica, he knows, without that command, and after seeing those girls hop from the SUV, would not have pulled the trigger. He’d been right to make her a pilot.
Clearly she’s in hiding. For what else can it be when these days you leave no trace of your whereabouts, for a good ten months. More power to her if DC wanted her shut up in a psych ward; after the al-Yarisi revelation, Washington would have buried the key.
The situation is such a live grenade that the FBI agent assigned to find her doesn’t even know the full story. Voigt was directed to tell Tom Daugherty as little as possible and nothing about the collateral damage. Talk about government dysfunction. But, then, Voigt doesn’t really want Jessica found, certainly not to be a victim of some Beltway bureaucrat’s damage-control campaign.
His aide in the outer office buzzes. “Colonel?”
“Here,” Voigt says, taking the phone. Reading Don’s last letter to Jessica, he’s thinking about picking up that Roy Buchanan CD the convict mentioned. But then again, he might be getting too close to the Aldridge situation.
“We’ve got a Pred down in Waziristan,” the aide says.
Voigt would like to curse but he doesn’t. “Who’s crew?”
“Shadow.” They go by code names even here.
“Black box still transmitting?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve got coordinates.”
“This was a recon flight?”
“Yes sir, no payload.”
“Well, that’s something anyway. Who else is in the area?”
“Newport, trailer ten. A Reaper east of Kandahar.”
“Full payload?”
“Paveway and Hellfires.”
“All right. Retask Newport to the crash. Get Shadow over to ten. I’ll be there in sixty seconds.” Voigt secures Don’s letter and is out the door.
They’ve gathered tightly in trailer 10, behind the crew at the monitors. Newport is Lieutenant Dunbar, one of the good younger pilots, if a little rich for himself, Voigt thinks. His tag, Newport, or Nieuport, is the biplane World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker flew. But Dunbar’s air of pride about drone duty is generally good for morale and Voigt would not deflate it.
“What failed?” Voigt asks Shadow, aka Major Hollis, an Air Force lifer who came up with Voigt during the first Iraq invasion, flying F-16s out of Dhahran.
“Unknown. Power out over Sikaram.”
“That where you brought it down?”
“Glided it onto a ridge.”
“How accessible?”
“By air, probably. By ground, yes. It’s just above the tree line.”
“Dunbar, ETA?” Voigt says.
“We’re six hundred klicks out. Seventy minutes at red line.”
“Let’s go get it,” Voigt says. They’re on another search-and-destroy mission, but for one of their own machines.
Twenty minutes later, a
t sunrise there, the drone has a view of the peak. Sikaram. A crag on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s barren, seemingly inaccessible, three miles high, but near the pass where bin Laden likely escaped in ’01 after Tora Bora. Forty minutes later the Reaper is close enough to sight where the Predator’s black box is signaling. There is smoke. And on the ground, a half mile from the crash, at the periphery of the drone’s camera, ants navigating the side of an anthill.
“You see those?” Voigt asks. Dunbar’s sensor does and zooms. The ants are men. “Can we beat them to it?”
“If not, no problem, sir,” Dunbar says.
“Unless they’re shepherds?”
“Then they wouldn’t be above the tree line, sir.”
“That was a joke, son,” Voigt says. Still, he doesn’t want to be blasting blindly at unknown targets. And the men, or their fathers, might actually have been shepherds once.
Fifteen minutes later, the line of men and the Reaper are converging at their ground zero.
“I’ve got it,” Dunbar’s sensor says and zooms onto the dull metal tube that was the drone. One of the wings is gone. “I can have a laser on it in two minutes.” The laser will guide the five-hundred-pound Paveway to its target, incinerating just about all evidence, melting it into Sikaram’s rocky face. At least then it won’t be carried down the mountain and trumpeted as an American atrocity among the tribespeople.
“Zoom out, operator,” Voigt says. For all their sophistication, UAVs have a clumsy field of vision. Voigt’s experience is that their cameras take in only about ten percent of what an airborne pilot can observe from a cockpit.
And there they are, coming around the ridge. The shepherds. Or militants. They don’t carry staffs. Their slung rifles are clearly visible. A show of weapons like this is all that’s needed to justify an engagement.
“Shall I get a go on this from Langley?” asks Dunbar’s mission intelligence coordinator. She’s on speaker, not in the trailer, but monitoring the situation before her own screen. She can see the Paveway won’t be launched before the men arrive at the drone. She’s ready to compress the kill chain.
“Wait,” Voigt says. He’s studying the men. “Zoom to the two in back,” he says to the sensor.
“Shit,” says Dunbar.
The two are smaller than the other men. Boys. Perhaps ten or eleven. No doubt, following after their fathers and uncles.
“We’re in launch range,” the sensor says as the men and boys on the ground hurry across a boulder and come in sight of the wrecked drone. In twenty seconds, the time it would take for the Paveway to hit, they will be on it.
“Negative,” Voigt says. He is looking at the men on the screen. They are excited. Victorious. Firing their rifles in the air. “Let them take the damn thing.”
CHAPTER 26
New York City
“I’m thinking about buying that,” Sergei Sokolov says of a large Picasso, a curtain the artist had done for the Ballets Russes. He leads Ethan and Juliette through the atrium on Fifty-Second Street and into an art deco dining room, where they are seated.
Ethan doesn’t know what to think about Sergei. Juliette has arranged the meeting. Sergei is one of her clients. She has been helping him find art for his dacha in Sevastopol. Alex, after his opening next week, is going to fly over there to do a mural.
“Juliette tells me you are at war with UIB,” Sergei says to him.
The Russian is neat, trim, alert eyed, pleasant. He looks nothing like the oligarchs of Ethan’s fancy—stocky men with red faces in askew business suits. He doesn’t even resemble the billionaires Ethan had glimpsed at UIB—men who dressed down in hoodies and sneakers if they were young; attempted business casual with shirts deeply unbuttoned Richard Branson – style if they were midlife; and blossomed with the full camouflage of bespoke suits and Windsor-knotted ties if they were seniors. Sergei is wearing a windbreaker that might have been bought at Target. Not that Ethan is dressed any better. The maître d’ had slipped him into a wrinkled blazer.
“They’re trying to claw back my bonuses. But that’s not what’s motivating me now,” Ethan says.
“Ah, revenge,” says Sergei and picks up his menu.
“Our friend is using all his money to fight them,” says Juliette, touching Ethan’s arm. “But it may be a losing battle.”
Ethan looks at Juliette. Alex has been telling her more than he would have expected. But, then, they are a couple now.
“I hear you have been working on very sophisticated algorithms, currency related,” Sergei says.
Now Ethan looks at Sergei. This is not something he could have learned from Alex. Even through all this, especially through all this, he has kept his UIB confidentiality agreement. Ethan then becomes aware of a fourth place setting at their table that the waiter has not removed. “It’s not work that I’m proud of” is all he says to describe what he did.
“I hear you were accused of a decimal point error,” Sergei says. “But that your fundamental knowledge is deep.”
The flattery is succor. “If I made the error, that’s bad. But what I mean about not being proud is something else.” He knows that he can’t get into the specifics of his work in currency-volatility exploitation; UIB would really have a right to sue him then.
A commotion turns Ethan’s head. Someone who’s entered the dining hall has crashed into a table. Silverware clatters. “John?” Ethan says.
“Ah, here’s Mr. Guan,” says Sergei, rising and extending his hand.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” says Guan, looking nervously about. He stares a moment at Sergei’s hand before taking it. “Hope no one from work recognizes me,” he says.
Yeah, that’s real likely, Ethan wants to say; if anyone else from UIB was here, they’d be executive level management or beyond. Such a person noticing Guan would be like a pharaoh identifying one of the thousand stonecutters building his pyramid. “What’s going on?” he asks Guan sharply.
“Don’t be angry with your friend,” says Sergei. He takes some documents from his windbreaker and asks a waiter for pens. “I’ll explain everything. But, first, if you will kindly sign these nondisclosures . . . just in case, you know, you decide not to accept my job offer.”
CHAPTER 27
New York City
Outside Medusa Gallery a queue, held back by a doorman with a clipboard, snakes down the sidewalk. The crowd, Zoe is guessing, is lined up for some art star’s opening. She takes out her phone to recheck Alex’s e-vite.
She had holed up in Marla’s apartment for almost all of August—turtle-sitting Harry, ignoring Porter’s emails. She was ready to break her solitude, and not in the least because Alex’s invitation signaled the end of a general communications embargo. After her grandparents’ funeral, after she had slept with Ethan and then raced back to Washington, after the reprimanding email from Alex, she’d become a persona non grata to both of her ex-lovers.
The address in the e-vite, she sees, does say the Chelsea Medusa. The subject line had even been personalized with a “Please come, Zoe.” Her address hadn’t just been swooped up by mistake from one of Alex’s old email lists. Still, she is wary as she approaches the doorman.
“Leston . . . Zoe,” she says quietly.
“Uh-huh,” the doorman says, but he checks his list.
Medusa’s glass maw parts for her. Zoe’s mouth opens nearly as wide. She sees people whom she recognizes from movies and music videos. Then her eyes rise to the pretext of this vanity fair—the art. The walls are hung high with monumental paintings—some collision between Matta and Twombly if she is accurately recalling her freshman art history. But what she sees next just cannot possibly be. And then she is grinning in pleased amazement. She has not slipped down a rabbit hole. The exhibition’s title, in foot-tall letters, proclaims ALEX CARR—NEW WORK. Alex has made it.
Zoe had always taken Alex to be three-quarters the hustler leavened with one-eighth the charmer. She had granted a mere eighth-part of him, a mere patina over
the pretense, as having anything to do with artistic ability. But here he is, not in his person for she has not yet glimpsed his corporeal self. Zoe means, here he is, alive and transcendent in his work.
“Champagne?” a man asks, and suddenly Zoe is holding a flute while experiencing a deeper thirst for the line and color of Alex’s painting. Her eyes drink and drink, like camels watering after a trek. And then she feels shaken.
Why had she not seen Alex’s potential before this? Was her vision deficient, her brain ossified, her heart unreceptive? Or was what her art professor had argued true—that “it is the occasion of true art to make its need felt most desperately only after repeated encounters.” Those paintings that hung in Ethan’s apartment must have been preparing her for this moment of aesthetic hydration.
“I just bought that,” the man says, pleased with her attention to the canvas. It is not one of the biggest in the show, but it might be the most seductive. The man and Zoe part the crowd before the painting and it alters. Zoe can no longer see the large S or dollar sign that centers the image from afar. This close up she sees glistening shards of impasto licking up from an elsewhere flat surface. The brushstrokes, rising in small bloody wavelets, seem a critique on the commodification of this painting, of art in general. Then she pushes aside all this interpretation—the influence of her professor’s astute but distracting theorizing—to soak up the image as image. She is even able to ignore the painting’s title, Money Shot, which she hates. She inhales the smells of turpentine and oil paint and worries that the image is already hardening, mutating away from the wet, liquid perfection of its birth.
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