“That’s classified, sir. And even your authorization doesn’t reach that high.”
Tyler exploded, “Goddamnit, I’m the fucking president of the United States!”
Even with the electronic scrambling, Devlin’s voice came across low and clear and confident. “Yes, sir,” he said, “you are. At least until the next election.”
Inwardly, General Seelye smiled. Rubin kept a poker face, badly. Devlin paused for a moment, then continued, “I’ve got your feed on my screen, General. Run the reporter’s tape again. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”
“Cueing it up now,” said Seelye. Once again the tape: the kids, the bombs, the teachers, the shotguns—.
“Hold it. Right there,” said Devlin. “See it?” Seelye paused the feed. What was Devlin talking about? “The guy on the bench there, at click 4,156.07.” A blond man in a sport coat and tie, lying on the bench with the tied-up teachers, his face only partially visible.
“One of the teachers, obviously,” said the president.
“Why, obviously? Look at the way he’s dressed. Look at that sport coat — it’s an Armani, costs two thousand bucks. Middle school teachers don’t wear things like that. General, run an NSA physio scan on this guy. Complete reconstruction—” They could hear the sound of typing. “And match it up with this.”
Tapping into the school’s internal video feeds, Devlin brought up a shot from inside the school: the main hall, looking toward the front doors. A man in the doorway, holding open the door as a boy rushes in, late.
Zoom. The man up close, from behind. Grainy, but visible.
“Full reconstruction — strip him naked and build him back up again.” It wasn’t protocol to give orders to the president, but this was no time to stand on ceremony.
Everyone could see, but just barely make out, the man under discussion. Tallish, powerfully built, with his back to the camera. But the back of his head was clearly visible, including one ear. “That ear will be especially helpful,” said Devlin.
“We’ll get him,” said Seelye. “Mag it up — see his hair?” Closer: light hair, maybe blond.
“Not a lot of blond Muslims, Mr. President,” observed Rubin.
“Which is why he could be anybody,” said General Seelye. “A merc, a Russian spesh-op, a white South African glory hunter.”
“Or a teacher,” said the president, stubbornly.
“This guy’s no teacher,” said Devlin. “He’s the ringleader. He just doesn’t want us to know it. Once we find out who he is, we’ll have some sense of how to handle this thing. Match him with up all NSA motion captures of known terrorists, unrestricted by race, religion, or ethnicity. I don’t want any PC bullshit here. Any tics, any gestures. Run video hair-and-fiber infrared analysis, see what you come up with. Got that, General?”
Tyler bristled at Devlin’s tone. “Listen, Devlin, I don’t think I like your—”
“On it,” said Seelye, intervening.
“Overfly ASAP, let’s get a radioactivity read, just in case. We don’t want any surprises in the basement or the girls’ bathroom.”
“On that, too…”
“And I’ll need our best guesstimates of their weaponry, worst-case. Then, I’ll call you back.”
The president look confused. Was this “Devlin” on the job or not? He wished that America were a kinder, gentler nation, one that didn’t need hard, rough men like Devlin to keep the women and children safe from people with legitimate grievances and misunderstood motives. He swallowed his pride. “Are you in or are you out, Devlin?”
“I’m not sure yet. What about chatter?”
“Nothing specific or credible,” replied Seelye.
“September eleventh was neither specific nor credible until the first plane hit the World Trade Center,” said Devlin.
“So what action do you recommend?” asked Tyler.
“That we await developments. I’ll put a team in place. But things might have to get worse, before I can make them better. As in the level of causalities. It’s a risk-reward situation, especially for me, and under the terms of my employment, not even you get to make that call, sir.”
“That is unacceptable.” Devlin could hear the steam escaping from Tyler’s ears. “I will not sacrifice another innocent person.”
“Then, with all due respect, sir, let the FBI handle it. Just make sure you have enough body bags when they fuck up and the shit hits the fan. In the meantime, you might want to start learning Arabic.”
President Tyler looked over at Seelye and Rubin, absorbing the confident audacity of the man at the other end of the line. A Branch 4 op had every right to refuse a presidential request. With their lives on the line every time, they were the arbiters of their own fate. No choice but to play it his way. “Okay,” said Tyler.
“Also, this really is it for me. If we go red zone and score, I’m out. Last job. I disappear, you never hear from me again, and you damn sure never contact me. Yes or no, General?”
The only thing to do was lie. “Agreed,” said Seelye. “But—”
“One last thing. If I so much as smell a fart wafting from Langley’s direction, I’m gone.” And then he really was gone.
At last, Tyler broke the silence. “You’re sure nobody else knows about this Branch 4?”
Seelye and Rubin looked at each other. Seelye spoke first, “No one except the three of us and, now, your friend, Senator Hartley.”
The president felt the sting. Maybe he had been rash in insisting on political cover. But what was he supposed to do? He was a politician. “But he doesn’t know the details. The specifics.”
“He knows everything he needs to know to blow Branch 4 sky-high,” said Rubin. “And, given his track record, “Senator Sieve’ is just about the last person I’d want entrusted with the combination to my high school locker, much less the national security apparatus of the United States.”
“So you’re telling me I made a mistake?” The question answered itself. “What do we do about it then?”
“We make it work for us,” said Seelye.
The president got up and started pacing around the room. What had he done? “How?” he asked.
Seelye took over. “You heard Devlin himself tell you how, sir,” he said. “He smells a rat here. And he’s right to do so. Here’s why.” Seelye opened his laptop, and as it awoke from standby he placed it on the president’s desk. The White House wi-fi was as encrypted and as safe as the best minds as the NSA could make it, which didn’t preclude an Israeli or Bulgarian teenager from hacking in occasionally. But it was a chance that, for a brief moment, they were going to have to take.
He tapped a couple of keys and an animated dossier sprang onto the screen. Tyler pondered what he was looking at, trying hard to absorb it all, then nodded. Seelye tapped another key sequence and suddenly the electronic version of the dossier was atomized — scattered to the four winds of cyberspace
“The evidence is all circumstantial, but that’s not surprising. These forces have been coming together for quite a while, like a perfect storm. But if our suspicions are correct…”
The president got it. “If your suspicions are correct, then you’ve asked me to send our most valuable operative into a situation that might be — no, is—a trap.”
As Seelye nodded dispassionately, Rubin observed, “A very special kind of trap, sir.”
“And you’re willing to run that risk?”
“Absolutely we are, yes, Mr. President,” said Rubin.
“But why?”
“So we can run the same trap on them.”
“Won’t they be expecting that?”
“Of course they will, sir,” replied Seelye. “Which is why we have to play the hand out. First guy that blinks, loses.”
As a candidate, Tyler campaigned against the “wilderness of mirrors” that was the playing field for America’s intelligence agencies. He had promised the electorate a new transparency. And yet now here he was, in the fun house with no way out
.
“People think intelligence work is complicated, and it is,” explained Seelye. “But what it’s not, is complex. It’s actually very simple. What counts is not what’s true, it’s what you can make the other guy believe is true. So we play these elaborate games of she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not — or perhaps a two-hand version of musical chairs would be a more apt analogy — and the last man standing wins the pot. To mix a whole bunch of metaphors.”
Rubin chimed in. “So they’re going to give us a patsy. That’s who this Drusovic is. A guy meant to deflect attention from the real bad guys. A poisoned pawn, as it were.”
Seelye said: “Which means we have to give them one in return.”
“Who?” Tyler was confused. This was the sort of thing that gave him a headache. He had to think…and he kept thinking until he realized that neither Seelye nor Rubin had answered his question. “You’re not talking about this ‘Devlin’ character, are you?” he asked.
Seelye shrugged. “Why don’t you let us worry about that, sir?” he said.
“But what if we fail? What if they get Devlin? What if…?”
Seelye smiled a weary smile. “I think you’re finally beginning to get the hang of the intel business, sir.”
Chapter Thirteen
EDWARDSVILLE — JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Rhonda Gaines-Solomon lay where she fell. So did the bodies of the dead teachers. Bodies, beyond indignity, and yet undignified, in impossible postures, with impossible expressions frozen on their faces, terrible and pathetic at the same time. Three people, chosen by death at random, as old as they were ever going to get, lying there, reproachful to the living, for all the world to see. Because all the world was watching.
And now a sense of helplessness began to wash over the country, given voice by the talking heads. How long was this going to go on? Where was the FBI, the National Guard, the Army, Air Force, and Marines? Where was the president of the United States? The head terrorist had spoken directly to him, given him an ultimatum — why wasn’t he negotiating? The lives of children were at stake, for God’s sake.
Hope Gardner learned all this listening to the radio. As soon as the news broke, she had rushed back to the school and found chaos. The main parking lot was blockaded, so she’d pulled around behind the school, on the far side of the athletic field.
At that moment, her cell phone rang. It was Jack. “Hope, what the heck’s happening?” His tone was anxious, urgent.
“I don’t know, Jack. I’m at the school now. The place is crawling with cops. Where are you?” She could hear crowd noises in the background, and the sound of Wolf Blitzer’s voice yipping like a small puppy in his excitement over a big story.
“At the airport. They’ve got CNN on here, full blast. Are Rory and Emma okay? Are you okay?” He tried hard not to lose it. “Some nut, screaming at the president about Allah…”
As Hope sat there, as close as the police would allow any of the parents to get, cell phone to her ear, her children inside a building that had suddenly turned hostile, she found herself surprised by how unhysterical she was. Until something this terrible happened to them, most people in the therapeutic society naturally assumed that they wouldn’t be able to handle it — that they would break down almost immediately. But Hope was learning something about herself she never would have suspected:
She wasn’t breaking down. She was getting stronger by the minute.
“Listen, I’m bailing on the meeting. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
“Hurry, Jack. Hurry. And be careful.” She didn’t know why she said that, but it seemed like the right thing to say. There was nothing to do except wait. And pray.
In the interstices between prayers, she thought of her children — of Emma, rushing off, into the arms of danger, and little Rory, hanging back. If only she had heeded him.
She spotted Janey Eagleton and jumped out of her car. They fell into each other’s arms. All around them, chaos, uncertainty, fear. “What are we going to do, Hope,” cried Janey. “What do they want?”
“Nothing,” whispered Hope.
“What do you mean? They must want something — something reasonable.”
“They already have what they want, Janey.”
Janey recoiled, as if the thought had never actually occurred to her.
“No. They must want something. Something more. Something we can give them.”
Until this moment, Hope had never articulated what she was now feeling. She’d been a good American, taught from birth never to resist a mugger, never to defend herself, never to fight back — possessions were just things, after all, and while things were replaceable, your life was not — never to assert herself. She’d been taught from birth never to complain, never to raise a ruckus, to accept everything that fate threw her way without complaint. The government will handle it. The police will take care of it. As a midwesterner, too, she was disinclined by nature to outward displays of negative emotion.
And suddenly, in this moment of horror, she knew all that was a lie.
Her children weren’t things. Her children weren’t replaceable. They were hers. And she’d be goddamned if she was going to give them up without a fight. Because, as she thought back, she hadn’t liked the way that man in the door had looked at her. She began to recall his features, willing herself to conjure up his face, just in case she needed to be able to identify him later, just in case the worst happened.
Now something began to well up inside her — not fear, not horror, not trauma, but an emotion even stronger: hatred. Hatred for the men who could do this to children. Whatever happened, and however long it took, she would see that they would pay, if it took her the rest of her life. The thought of Emma with their filthy hands on her and of Rory tied up beneath a live bomb unleashed a wellspring of visceral emotion she didn’t know she possessed.
She didn’t want to be defenseless any more; she didn’t want to be weak and passive in the name of “understanding” or “tolerance.” She didn’t care about their bullshit grievances, or the “root causes” of their behavior. She wanted this to be over, quickly and, if necessarily, lethally.
She wanted them dead.
“Yes, Janey,” she said. “There is something we can give them. We can give them hell.”
Her cell phone. Jack again. She hugged Janey and got back in the car. “I’m in the taxi, on the way to the school,” he said. “Where are you now?”
“Past the sports field.”
“Go home. There’s nothing you can do there. Go home. Promise.”
“Promise,” she said.
“I love you, Jack,” she said. She flipped her Motorola phone shut and stepped on the accelerator.
The Jefferson Middle School was fairly new, built a little east of town. It was still partly surrounded by farmland, but everybody knew it was just a matter of time before the cornfields turned into subdivisions. Everything was a suburb now — not just of Edwardsville, or St. Louis, but of Washington, New York, and the world.
Still, the old Gondolf farm stood in the cornfields, just beyond to the east. She could park there, hidden from view. It would be dark soon enough, and then she could walk over and see what was happening.
She left the motor running and radio on. Some disembodied voice on NPR was trying to put what was happening in Edwardsville in “context,” blathering on about Israel and the Middle East and the Iraq War and the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s and—
Suddenly she found herself screaming at the radio, pounding the steering wheel and shouting, “Shut up! We are not the bad guys! Shut the fuck up!”
A rap at the window got her attention. A cop. That’s when she realized she’d been pounding the horn in her anger and frustration. It was Ernie Dahl, whom she’d known for years, ever since he’d tried to paw her at the junior prom and she’d slapped his face. Just last week he gave her a ticket for ten miles over the posted limit when she had been doing a good twenty-five, rushing to take Rory to hockey
practice. He was still feeling guilty about trying to feel her up way back when.
She rolled down the window. “Hi Ernie,” she smiled.
“Hope, I think you’d better go home,” he said. He took off his police cap and scratched his thinning hair. “There’s nothing you can do here right now. So why don’t you let us handle this? I’m sure everything’s going to be fine.”
Hope looked through her open window at Ernie, at the out-of-shape local cop, the hopeless look in his eyes, and knew there was no way this thing was going to have a happy ending.
“My kids are in there.”
Visibly, Ernie struggled for words. He never was very good at English. “Hope,” he said, “everybody’s kids are in there. But don’t worry — the FBI is here.” Like that was supposed to make her feel better. “So go on home now.”
Suddenly, a plan occurred to her. It was insane, but it was the only plan she could come up with. “Maybe you’re right, Ernie,” she lied, in a tone she hoped would pass for sheepish compliance. She put the car in gear and began to back away.
“That’s it, Hope,” nodded Ernie. “Go along now. I’ll make sure nothing happens to Rory or Emma.”
Hope could see him in her rearview mirror as she pulled around the corner and away from the school. He was waving good-bye.
Chapter Fourteen
IN THE AIR: DEVLIN
For operational security, Devlin almost always flew commercial. And that was not all. Unless he was dealing directly through Seelye’s office, he paid for everything in cash, including road tolls, and never used a publicly available Web browser. He had no land line that any phone company knew about.
Although he was physically fit, Devlin dressed the part of an average American schlub, in T-shirts and jeans and a baseball cap. To look at him, you would see exactly what he wanted you to see — nothing.
He was the man who wasn’t there.
Devlin had long ago learned that hiding in plain sight was the only way to hide. Afflicted with perceptual blindness, people don’t notice what they see every day — they only notice its absence or its alteration. You could live on the same street for twenty years and not be able to accurately describe the sequence of houses, but you would notice, briefly, that one of them had been torn down. And once its replacement had stood for six months or so, you would likely never remember what had been there before.
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