The Threat

by David Poyer

  Meilhamer murmured that it had been nice to meet him.

  Outside, a small lot was parked solid with freshly waxed black Lincolns. Sebold said this was West Executive Drive. The white awning ahead, flanked by small evergreens and flower plantings in heavy cast-concrete pots, was the staff entrance to the West Wing. A blue-carpeted lobby was hung with framed art. Dan recognized a World War II battle scene by Tom Freeman. A vase of roses stood on a side table, their perfume mingling with the odors of frying pork and coffee. Keyboards rattled in the offices they passed.

  At the corridor intersection of the Roosevelt Room, the Cabinet Room, and the steps Sebold said led up to the Oval Office, the general grabbed his arm. “Just a minute. Someone’s coming.”

  Dan saw them, young guys in suits, walking purposefully abreast. A hefty black man with round, babyish cheeks examined him as they neared. His look was impersonal, yet observant. His eyes flicked to Sebold, but they didn’t exchange any greeting. Dan looked after them as they went away down a corridor which had, he noticed, suddenly gone empty.

  His mind formulated a sentence along the lines of “What’s going on.” But when he glanced back, mouth open, he was looking into the president’s eyes.

  Robert De Bari looked much as he did on television. Only the screen didn’t convey how tall he was, nor how blue his eyes were. He wore a beautifully tailored suit, gleaming, wedge-toed cowboy boots, and a sky-blue silk tie. Two more agents flanked him; another, a compact and expressionless young woman in a gray skirt and blazer, trailed the swiftly moving party.

  Beside him Sebold said, “Good morning, Mr. President.”

  “Hello, G-man. Who’ve we got here?”

  “New staffer, sir. Dan Lenson. Going to counterdrug.”

  The president stopped, braking his entourage, and put out his hand. Dan flinched as a static spark zapped between their meeting palms. “Good to have you with us, Dan. I need somebody to shake things up in that job.”

  Dan couldn’t seem to think very well. But looking into De Bari’s eyes, feeling the strength in his grip, he suddenly felt both totally known and completely accepted by someone he could trust. It was the feeling you got sometimes with a brother, or a best friend.

  He felt he should say something back, but couldn’t get the words out. Having the Secret Service basilisking him didn’t help. Despite himself, his eyes dropped to the president’s right hand. The famously missing fingers. De Bari had lost them years before, as a firefighter, carrying a black child through the broken window of a burning apartment building in Carson City. The president nodded in a friendly way, as if he understood how Dan felt. He slapped his arm and bounded up the carpeted steps, taking them two at a time.

  He got a breath at last. He said to Sebold, “Sorry—should I have said something?”

  “You could have, but don’t worry about it.” The director waved him off. “Don’t forget. Sit Room. Ten tomorrow.”

  2

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  The house was within walking distance of a new Metro station, down a street that still had maples and elms and an afterglow of the sleepy peace of the 1950s, when most of the homes along it had been built.

  Blair had found it while he was in the hospital. The tan brick colonial was surrounded by flagstone walks and the yellow poplars the locals called tulip trees. Three bedrooms and a family room in the basement with floor-to-ceiling shelves he planned to fill with the hundreds of books he’d accumulated and had never been able to winnow down. Oak floors, and a kitchen where two could sit for breakfast. Blair had brought her furniture from her apartment in Crystal City, pieces from the country antique stores she made him stop at when they drove out to visit her parents. Azaleas burned like sunset under the front windows. There were tulips and peonies too, and butterfly bushes and lavender. There wasn’t a lot of yard, which was good. He could polish it off in half an hour with the Snapper. At the end of the street was an assortment of shops, including a German delicatessen. One of Virginia’s oldest churches was a mile away. George Washington had served there as a warden, and the gravestones had been used as targets by Union cavalry.

  It was enormously more comfortable and spacious than the house, the town, the life he’d grown up in. He felt like an intruder. That didn’t mean he wasn’t happy things had turned out this way. Just that he didn’t always feel he belonged.

  He figured some of that was posttraumatic. The same reason he couldn’t sleep without a weapon within reach. But knowing why didn’t change the feeling.

  When he swung up the walk it was almost dark, but the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Brawridge, was still out. They exchanged waves and smiles. She was in the yard every day, trimming plantings or tending a decorative fish pond in shorts so abbreviated he could see the bottoms of her cheeks. Which were on the decorative side too … The garage doors were closed, so he couldn’t see if Blair’s car was there. She had a government sedan and driver, but drove herself in and back. When she wasn’t on travel. But the lights were on in their bedroom and the paper wasn’t on the lawn. They should probably cancel it: They both got the Early Bird at work and read the Post and Times there. When he threw his briefcase on the couch he could smell dinner.

  “I’m home,” he said, wondering how it could sound so commonplace and yet so nice.

  She came out of the kitchen for a garlic-flavored kiss. “I figured you’d want something good after your first day at work. Then we can go look at beds for the guest room. How’d it go?”

  Blair Titus was almost as tall as he was, with shining blond hair and the rangy relaxed way of moving so many people had who’d grown up with horses. He’d met her in the Persian Gulf, back when his career was in the tank and she’d been adviser to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Blair had been asked to brief De Bari, elected but not yet in office, before he addressed the annual meeting of the National Guard Association. He’d invited her to serve on his transition team, then appointed her undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. This was the first time they’d actually lived together, and he was still getting used to it. Even in his first marriage, he’d never spent more than a couple of weeks home at a time.

  “All right, I guess … but they switched me from threat reduction to drug interdiction.”

  A metallic crash from the kitchen, and a curse. He went in to offer help. His skills were limited to casseroles, chili, burgers. Guy cooking. She tended to attempt dishes that were beyond her actual level of skill. Usually they turned out okay. When they didn’t, you saw her temper. Blair looked passionless but wasn’t. She intimidated a lot of men. Not with anger, but with a probing intellect. She did the same thing with him. Forcing him to examine his motives. Confront his self-questioning.

  “You can peel those. But I thought they promised you TR.”

  “Not exactly promised.” The frustration he’d felt in Sebold’s office came back; he bit his lip as he scrimshawed a potato. “He said he’d try to get me on a working group, though.”

  “That’s where things get done. How’s your neck doing?”

  “Okay.” Actually he was feeling some pain again, but he didn’t want to get dependent on the pills.

  She slid a pan into the oven and sighed, pushing back damp hair. “Boy, I hope this comes out the way it’s supposed to. Anything else I ought to know about?”

  “Ran into the president.” He told her about their meeting.

  “He zeroes in on you, doesn’t he?”

  “The charisma thing. He’s got it, all right.”

  “We were prepping him before the debate. Midnight session. We figured he’d get zinged on the conscientious-objector issue. Like, how could he send men to war if he wasn’t willing to go himself? He said he’d answer it when the time came. Then the mike failed, remember that? And he made that quip that made everybody just sort of laugh and shake their heads.

  “And when Ted Koppel hit him with the question, he said he’d thought long and hard about what to do. Fight in a
war he didn’t believe was right? Go to Canada, desert his country? In the end, he’d told his draft board that if his number came up, he’d just have to go to prison. He stood by that choice now. No teleprompter. No prepared remarks. And it came across.”

  Dan remembered the coverage, and remembered wondering at the time whether it hadn’t just been a clever evasion. And whether a guy with an attitude like that should even want to serve as commander in chief. But the incumbent had been no hero either, snuggled into a deferment his wealthy daddy had arranged. De Bari was the first Italian American to make it to the top, as remarkable in his way as John Kennedy had been. “Bad Bob” (a nickname from his firefighting days) had scored with ethnics, Catholics, fellow Westerners, and the unions. But the recession—punishing, endless, grueling—had put him in office. The other candidate had seemed embarrassed about it, but not really concerned—an impression that had doomed him at the polls.

  “So what’s going on across the river?” he asked, admiring her long bare legs as she bustled here and there.

  She told him about her ongoing feud with the comptrollers. “The force just isn’t getting the money they need. I don’t mean for weapons or force levels. I mean what keeps people in—health, housing, the no-glamour issues.”

  “So put it in the budget.”

  “I tried to, but what we keep getting back is ‘We’re already putting too much into defense.’ I wish the service chiefs were focused on the issue. Or just more responsive when you point out that a sizable percentage of our junior enlisted are on food stamps.”

  “They ought to listen to you,” Dan said.

  “Why should they? A woman. Never served in uniform. Working for a president who didn’t either.” She frowned into the distance. “But it’s not just me. They’ve never liked the fact civilians get to tell them what to do. I just have to get used to that.”

  The phone rang and she answered it while he set the table. When they sat down it was full dark, and kids were rattling down the sidewalk on skateboards. The salmon was just right, the young asparagus tender.

  After dinner they went to look at beds. He saw pieces he could live with, but they all seemed flimsy and overpriced. Especially considering his daughter was starting college that fall. Finally Blair asked him what he thought of one suite. He said he didn’t have an opinion.

  “Dan, this is your house too. You’ve got to have some idea what you want.”

  “It’s furniture, hon. As long as it keeps your ass off the carpet, who cares what it looks like?”

  Which only seemed to irritate her more. They left without buying anything. It occurred to him that they usually did. As if she too wasn’t sure and had doubts about the life they were trying to build.

  * * *

  But they made up on the way home. That was one thing he liked about her—she didn’t hold a grudge.

  That night they made love in the new queen-size for the first time. Or, more exactly, tried to. But cervical injuries didn’t help erectile function.

  At last he gave up and rolled off. They lay facing away from each other. His neck burned. His arms pulsed as if he were gripping a power line. He smelled her scent and hair spray, his own stale sweat … He wondered why women even bothered with men, exactly what they got out of it.

  When she turned back her fingers slipped around him, dropped between his legs. But it was still no good.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “It’s just not going to work. I can do something else, though.”

  She didn’t answer. His fingers traced the curve of her hip, of her cheek.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry too. I thought it was supposed to come back.”

  “Well, it did there for a while.”

  “You said the doctor told you things would improve. The nerve pathways, or whatever.”

  “That’s what she said. But it just sort of … it’s there, then … it isn’t.”

  “Well, don’t let it get to you.” She groped for the sheets. “I married you, not your dick, okay? It’s not a big deal. Just give it time.”

  In the light that came through the blinds he could see her face close as she kissed him good night. Some might say her nose might be a little large. But not him. He put his hand against her cheek. “You’re so beautiful.”

  She murmured, “But there’s something else going on, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: I thought you’d like living together. But sometimes you don’t seem to. Like that remark at the furniture store.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Then why’d you say it? It’s as if the harder I try to make things nice, like a home, the more it threatens you.”

  “Well—I’m here. Aren’t I?”

  “But are you committed to it? Sometimes I’m not sure you are, Dan.”

  He told her he was, but actually he was trying not to groan. The pain felt like augers drilling down all the way to his wrists. He rolled out at last and took a pill. Drank some water and came back to bed.

  He lay waiting for the drug to work. Or for her to say something else. But she didn’t. He wondered if he ought to apologize again. No, fuck that. He felt angry. Then frightened. He felt things trying to come into his mind. Instead of letting them in he visualized the pistol in the nightstand. Remembered how it fit into his hand. It was loaded. He took a deep, slow breath. Let it out. Then another. Not thinking about Iraq, or the way the flash had lit the faces in Horn’s pilothouse, or anything at all. Not thinking of anything at all.

  Without quite meaning to, at last he fell asleep.

  3

  THE WEST WING

  The next morning he filed with others whose names he didn’t know yet down a blue-carpeted corridor narrow as a frigate’s passageway. It ended in a windowless conference room. He’d thought from Dr. Strangelove and The President’s Plane Is Missing that the Situation Room would be far underground, paneled with sophisticated terminals and displays. And much, much bigger.

  But it wasn’t belowground, though they called this the “basement” of the West Wing. Their living room in Arlington was bigger than this cramped, damp-smelling space. And as the lead-lined door sucked closed, he didn’t see any screens at all. Just polished cherry paneling. A folding easel. And the table, with eleven leather-upholstered chairs.

  He found a seat along one wall, balancing his briefcase on his knees. Not much in it yet. Reports Meilhamer had given him to read. A Brookings book. He shrank back to let more men and women crowd in. The air started to get stuffy.

  Sebold noted his presence with a nod and settled in halfway up the table. Dan recognized the deputy national security adviser. Brent Gelzinis wore rimless spectacles. His jet-black hair was slicked back like Robert McNamara’s had been. The rest were the deputy assistants, the regional and functional senior directors, other directors like himself, and a few twenty-somethings he guessed were interns. The room quieted. He glanced toward the door, started to his feet. Then sank back, catching an amused glance from Sebold.

  Mrs. Nguyen Clayton was slight, with a close bowl of dark hair. The assistant to the president for national security affairs had been evacuated from Saigon as a child; her native accent was overlaid now with Harvard and New York. Her tailored blue suit had filigreed gold buttons. Heavy bracelets and earrings pushed the envelope of Washington taste. Still young enough to be attractive, she brought with her into the room something most of those there found far sexier: the consciousness of power. She’d made a hundred million dollars in Silicon Valley before meeting Robert De Bari, when he was still governor of one of the emptiest, most crooked states west of the Rockies, and managing his campaign. The deputy adjusted her chair, and she descended among them.

  “Let’s get started,” she said.

  Gelzinis cleared his throat. His low-key briefing was so packed with acronyms Dan was lost from the first sentence. When he was done the deputy assistants had their turn, then the senior director
s. Clayton said little as she listened. Occasionally she asked if they’d checked with State, or Commerce, or the CIA. Once she said sharply, “No, we’re not letting it lie. They have to have access to that technology. I’ll speak to the appropriate people about it.”

  When his turn came Sebold said, “We’ve got a new join at counterdrug. Dan?”

  He got to his feet. Some looked up; others didn’t. “Commander Dan Lenson. Navy,” he said, trying for terseness. “Glad to be here. I’ll try to get up to speed as fast as—”

  “All right, thank you, everyone,” Clayton said, rising. They all got up with her and followed her out. Leaving him looking around the empty room.

  * * *

  Room 303, in the southern wing, third floor of the Old Executive, was one of the “split-level” suites, so called because to shoehorn more bodies in, the nineteenth-century’s fifteen-foot-ceilinged offices had been divided with a false floor at the seven-and-a-half-foot level. This and gray cubicle partitions made a two-story suite out of what had been several very tall rooms. As an added benefit, the false floor included ductwork for central air. The effect might have been claustrophobic for someone as tall as Dan. But it wasn’t as tight as the cable-overheaded passageways of the typical destroyer.

  His people were gathered at a table behind the receptionist’s desk. Meilhamer had explained that given counterdrug’s limited manning and worldwide responsibilities, he’d divided them up among the assistant directors by geographic area. Asia/Europe was Marty Harlowe, major, Marine Corps, a rail-thin blonde Dan trusted on sight. He noticed she didn’t wear a wedding ring. South America/Caribbean was Luis Alvarado, a Hispanic Coast Guard lieutenant commander. The continental U.S. belonged to Ed Lynch, an Air Force major. Interagency liaison was Miles Bloom, Drug Enforcement Agency. Bloom was younger than Dan, fit-looking, with a heavy black mustache and leathery skin that testified to a lot of time in hot climates. The staff assistant, Elise Ihlemann, was an Army Guard sergeant. At the moment she was at the waddling stage of pregnant. All were in civilian clothes, suits or sport coats, corresponding office attire for the women.