White: A Novel (25 page)

“Of course Daddy loves us,” Caroline reassured him. “Your daddy loves you more than the earth and the moon and the stars combined. Isn’t that what he always tells you?”

“Well, yeah,” their middle child said, “but why would he love the moon and the sun and the stars anyway?”

Caroline paused for that one. The kid had a point.

“It’s just an expression,” she said. “You know, like you hold your arms out as wide as you can and tell me you love me this much.”

She demonstrated.

“Yeah, but that’s all there is,” Christopher said. “That’s a lot more than the sun and the stars and the moon. That’s more than anything there is in the whole wide world.”

They sat there for a while trying to calculate matters too complicated for moments like this.

“Does your arm hurt, sweetie?” Caroline asked. She had gotten up with him when he couldn’t sleep. Now they sat together in a quiet house as the other two kids slept.

“Nah, not that bad,” Christopher said. His dad may not have been very good at explaining love, but he had instilled a strong aversion to tears. “Dad would be proud of me, huh?”

“Very proud.” Caroline stroked her son’s hair. She wondered about her husband—what danger may have befallen him, whether he was comfortable, what country he had disappeared into.

I killed a man,
she remembered him saying right after the Puerto Rico mission. Caroline had no idea why a thought like that would pop into her head as she held her son in her arms. The words had sounded just as out of place then, though. Jeremy had always struck her as a peaceful man. A kind man.

Before HRT.

The team had changed him, slowly but surely, the way a beard grows in and changes a man’s face. It had started during New Operator Training School, or NOTS—all the endless days that left him beaten, exhausted, and too full of course work for idle chat. Then he had made the team and gone off to Puerto Rico.

The nightmares,
she reminded herself,
and the rage.
Jeremy seemed to have just one emotion now. Living with him was like walking through a minefield. You never knew when a false step was going to set him off and leave the day in ruins.

“You think Dad’s a superhero?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?” Caroline kissed the top of his head. Jeremy had remarkable talents; there was no question about that. If he could only learn to appreciate those gifts.

“I think he is,” Christopher said. “He disappears whenever somebody’s in trouble. He has a gun. He under arrests people.”

“You’ve got a point there,” his mom said.

“He never tells us about his missions. Well, not really. I know he makes up a bunch of stuff ’cause we’re kids and he thinks we don’t know.”

“Could be,” Caroline said. “But that would make you a junior superhero, wouldn’t it? Do you think you have special powers?”

That one required a little thought.

“Nah,” he said finally. “Superheroes don’t break their arms.”

Caroline smiled at the gifts Jeremy had given her: three wonderful children, a fine home, trust. Maybe life didn’t make sense at times like this, but what life always did? HRT wouldn’t last forever. One day, Jeremy would come home for good, and whenever the kids had questions about how much he loved them, the FBI Superhero could answer them himself.

SIRAD ARRIVED BACK
in her office feeling refreshed though no better prepared to deal with a daunting challenge. If what I Can’t Dunk had shown her was true, the people trying to break into Borders Atlantic’s deepest secrets presented enormous complications. Dealing with the physics and math of the Quantis encryption was difficult enough. Dealing with the hair-trigger complexity of the powers behind it scared the hell out of her.

“Where have you been?” Hamid asked. He entered her office without knocking and plopped himself in one of her overstuffed chairs. “That geek, Ravi, from the Rabbit Hole has been calling all over town looking for you.”

“What’s he want?” Sirad asked. She pointed a remote control at a bank of televisions and flipped on the cable news channels.

“He won’t say. Claims it’s for your eyes only.”

Sirad tossed the remote onto her desk as the monitors erupted with FOX, MSNBC, and CNN loop footage of airliner crash sites, bombed-out buildings, and body parts in high-definition flat-screen color. The top right corner of each screen read, WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES. The upper left read TERROR ALERT: ORANGE—HIGH. A slug line across the bottom offered world opinion, White House response, the growing death toll, and stock quotes. The screen—what you could see of it behind the graphics—was split between two “experts” and the respective network’s host du jour.

“It’s a goddamned circus,” Sirad pronounced. “A whole new psychological phenomenon where the networks lure in viewers by preying on some reptilian reflex to fear. Las Vegas meets Anderson Cooper. The news according to Dr. Phil. Only in America could we replace drama with reality in entertainment and replace reality with drama in news. Absofuckinglutely amazing.”

Hamid saw no point in encouraging her. He preferred CNBC.

“What do you know about the Mind Lab?” Sirad asked, changing the subject.

“Just what I’ve been told. Never been there.”

“Ravi wants to sequester a small team there. He wants to close our cell to work in isolation until we resolve this.”

“Why?” Hamid asked. “The Mind Lab is an R & D site an hour outside the city. The seventeenth floor already has access to their mainframes and software.”

“I think he’s afraid,” Sirad said. She stared across the desk at her former lover. It had been almost a year since they’d last enjoyed each other’s flesh. For some reason, that suddenly felt like a very long time.

“Afraid of what? The Rabbit Hole is well protected; impenetrable, really.”

“Did you really love me, Hamid?” Sirad responded, changing the subject again. She didn’t want Hamid to know the truth about Quantis. Not yet.

“I love you still,” he said. He couldn’t hide the pain in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, you know,” Sirad told him. “I never dared to tell you that.”

“If you’re sorry, why have you never explained?” Hamid asked. “Why did you walk away without so much as a good-bye?” All he had ever wanted was a reason.

“It’s not as easy as an explanation.” She turned back toward the televisions. The past wasn’t something she spent much time pondering. “It wouldn’t have been enough.”

“You have never trusted anyone, have you? You’ve never felt secure that one person would give or do anything for you just because they loved you?”

“So Ravi wants me to go with him? How soon?”

“You don’t like it when something hurts, do you?” Hamid asked. “You act tough, but you don’t like pain.”

“I’m sorry about what happened between us,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Are you sorry that it happened or that it had to end?” he asked. Hamid spoke timidly, the way a lover talks when he still holds hope for something more.

“I’m sorry . . . ,” she mumbled, “that I don’t know the difference.”

DINNER CAME NONE
too soon for most of the Homestead students. Colonel Ellis had always shied from being labeled a “dude ranch” and ran his schools hard, the way he had run them in Special Forces. By the time the dinner bell sounded at seven o’clock that night, most attendees wanted nothing more than a thick steak and all the fluids they could guzzle.

“You didn’t tell us you were such a prodigy,” Heidi said, setting her tray next to Jeremy’s at a trestle table made of cedar logs. Instructors ate with the students, as did the colonel and his family.

“The brochure said this was an advanced course,” Jeremy said. He shuffled a bit to his left, giving her room. “I assumed everyone could shoot.”

Ellis looked up at him from a conversation across the room, but Jeremy pretended not to notice.

“They don’t shoot like you.” Heidi smiled. “Pass the pepper, please?”

Jeremy handed her a set of plastic spice dispensers. They ate off trays, but the tables had been arranged with condiments in a family-style setting. The dining hall had open walls, and a cool evening breeze began to rearrange their napkins.

“Ooops!” she said, reaching out to grab a stack of napkins before they blew away. “Derned Texas wind never seems to hush. You spent much time out here, Jeremy Walker?”

He smiled at the way she pronounced his name. Words seemed to roll off her lower lip in little droplets, all moist and glittery.

“I’ve been to Dallas a couple times, with work,” he said. Jeremy felt the colonel’s eyes on him and concentrated on his buffalo steak and beans.

“I hope it’s the colonel you’re shying from and not my company,” she said. “I know he’s eyeing you pretty hard right about now, but that’s ’cause he’s a daddy and a military man. He doesn’t know much about a girl’s taste in men. In fact, I don’t think he ever noticed a cute butt in his whole life.”

Jeremy almost spit out his food. Heidi laughed too, banging her knee against his under the table. Her free-spirited humor felt as big as the country around them.

“You going to get me kicked out of here the first night?” Jeremy asked. Some of the other men had begun to look his way. Heidi stood out to all of them, even in a setting of stunning natural beauty.

“Naw, I want to let you get your money’s worth before I get you to do something really stupid,” she flirted. The woman’s perfume of lilac and honey blended oddly with Hoppes No. 9 gun solvent and barbecue. Dry wind whispered across the room, filling Jeremy’s nose with an intoxicating scent. “You’re not married, are you?”

Jeremy shook his head. The word
no
just wouldn’t escape his lips.

“Girlfriend?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were hitting on me.” Jeremy flirted back. The steak tasted good. His skin glowed from a day in the open air. He felt happy for the first time in a long while.

“Nothing gets by you now, does it, Romeo?” She forked a bite of beans between beautiful lips. Jeremy fought the urge to stare.

“The colonel raised no timid children,” she said after swallowing. “I figure I’ve got one week to work my magic on you, and we’re nearly through with the first day already. If you’re gonna stick to that timid ‘aw shucks, Miss Daisy’ routine, it’s gonna go hard on you.”

Jeremy laughed a slow, easy release. The past few weeks had wound him into a spring-tight ball of confusion, apprehension, and fear. Between the situation at home and the mission ahead, he felt trapped in one of those dreams where you try to run and just can’t lift your feet.

“Is this the part where I stand up, pistol-whip all those guys staring at you, and throw you on the back of my horse so we can ride off into the sunset?” he joked. Jeremy Walker was single, right? He had a cover to maintain.

Heidi checked her watch.

“Well, the sun’s almost set, and I don’t ride on the back of nobody’s horse,” she said, completely deadpan. “But I got a couple hours before bedtime. If you know even half as much about women as you do about shooting, I’d say you ought to pull out that hog leg of yours and commence to whipping.”

XII

Friday, 18 February

01:00 GMT

Vice President’s Ceremonial Office, Eisenhower Executive Office Building

“
DAMMIT, ELIZABETH,
DO
you know what you are saying? You’re talking about treason.”

The vice president sat with her hands folded solemnly in front of her. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the national security advisor, the president’s chief of staff, and the attorney general sat in a small cluster around a massive conference table in an office typically reserved for photo ops.

“I do know what I’m saying,” she calmly replied to the attorney general, Andrew Hellier. “And it is nothing of the sort. I’m merely pointing out that the president of the United States is demonstrating behavior that may become a liability to the national security of this country should we face another terrorist attack. As proctors of constitutionally prescribed rules of government, we have a sworn duty to consider all contingencies.”

“Including mutiny?” Havelock asked. “I’ll have none of it.”

“I don’t feel comfortable talking about this,” Andrea Chase agreed.

“I do,” the only uniformed member of the reluctant cabal announced. The chairman of the joint chiefs was a marine corps four-star named Oshinski who had never shied from conflict. “In fact, I want to remind everyone that the man playing hymns in the Oval Office right now has full authority to unleash the most powerful military forces in the history of the world. At present, he is about thirty feet from the football, and dammit, from what I’ve seen, that strikes this old soldier as troublesome.”

The president’s chief of staff would have none of it.

“He’s tired, for Chrisakes,” she said. “Are we really talking about invoking some arcane provision of the Constitution and altering the chain of command because David Venable needs a goddamned nap?”

“Three nights with no sleep at all,” Beechum argued. “He doesn’t remember what you tell him from one moment to the next.”

“Would you allow him to go on television in this state, Andrea?” General Oshinski asked. “Would you want the American people—or the people of the world for that matter—to see him like this?”

The air stilled as various sets of eyes drifted around the magnificent William McPherson-designed room. Originally built for the Navy Department, the space had been renovated in the 1960s and now served as a dramatic backdrop for important meetings and press conferences. Ornamental stenciling and maritime scenes covered the walls. Mahogany, white birch, and cherry formed a testament to American woodworking underfoot. Grand fireplaces carved of Belgian black marble with gilded overmantels and green marble hearths stood at the north and south walls.

“This is not an easy conversation we’re having here,” Beechum argued. “I am well aware of that. But who the hell said it was supposed to be? We have been entrusted with the care of two hundred and eighty million citizens, and we’re being attacked by enemies we can’t even identify. I’m not playing Alexander Haig. I’m trying to do what history expects of us.”