LITMIR.BIZ

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they’d expedite a new duty station for him but they didn’t want him as their intel, didn’t want his kind, whatever that meant. But he knew what it meant: a risktaker, a man who thought that out on a limb was where intel was done best.

       He was out at the site, watching the goats, the odd Bedouin. Nothing was happening. He was thinking that they didn’t need him there at all. Right at that moment, they didn’t need him anywhere. Then his cell phone rang and the world changed. It was Sully, a CIA security thug who was a bully but the right man to have if people started shooting at you. Sully pushed people around verbally by saying the things that you didn’t say when the dynamics among people were fragile or explosive—sex, politics, religion—and now he said, the very first thing he said, “Al-Qaida just re-elected George Bush to a second term.” Then he had explained that a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and other passenger aircraft were missing and bad shit was going down.

      The event had jerked him from the job at Fifth Fleet to one as a Temporary Additional Duty case officer at Central Command, Qatar. He had been twice to Afghanistan since then, three times to Kuwait, once to Pakistan, once to Iran, all in the four months since that remarkably, perhaps fantastically, lucky, successful, outrageous al-Qaida hit. He had gone from vengefulness to resignation, then to a kind of skeptical sadness.

      “Penny?” Rose said.

      He took her hand. “I was thinking that al-Qaida did things right, and we’re going to do things wrong.”

      “Still chewing on it.”

      “Aren’t you?”

      “I don’t want to go rushing back to a squadron to throw myself at bin Laden, if that’s what you mean.”

      She’d been really hurt, he knew, by bailing out of the astronaut program. The Navy had lost some of its zest for her; he thought that it was that loss that had let her get pregnant again, driven her, maybe, back on her kids and on him. “There’ll be plenty of time to go to a squadron,” he said. “Years.”

      “Another war, you think?”

      “Oh, yeah. Lots of them.” He stood up, kissed her. “Bin Laden has arranged our futures for us.”

      “We make our own futures.” She believed in self-determination.

      “I thought so until this happened, but now—” He shook his head. “I keep wanting to look up to see who’s jerking my strings.” He straightened his clothes, pulling on himself as if he were rearranging his body, and they went to the elevator. He told her, in a different, heavier voice, that he was going to run Dukas’s errand while she shopped for presents for their kids. “I’m going there now and I should be done by two, and we’ll have a late lunch and then I’ll mosey over to the embassy and arrange to have them send the stuff to Mike.”

      “I want to see a movie. Let’s go to a movie.”

      “In Hebrew? Anyway, I’ve seen Harry Potter as much as I can stand.”

      “It might be more interesting in Hebrew.”

      On the street, he warned her for the third or maybe the fifth time of what to look for to avoid car bombs; he told her to duck if anybody started shooting, because half the crowd in any given spot would be armed; he told her to be careful of the baby. She told him he was a fuss-budget and she loved him and she’d see him at two o’clock.

      He was back to thinking about September eleventh. “Everybody’s scared here,” he said. “Scared people scare me.”

       Naples

      Mike Dukas flicked a paper across his desk to Dick Triffler. “What the hell is an Office of Information Analysis?”

      Triffler studied the paper. “It’s a secret office in DoD to do an end run around the intel agencies.”

      “What the hell?”

      “Folks who don’t like it call it the Office of Intellectual Paralysis. Folks who do like it think it’s the latest thing in what they call ‘intelligence reform,’ which means doing the Alley Oop around worn-out old shitkickers like the CIA, the FBI, and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. We are, and I think I quote, ‘tired, old, liberal, and nitpicking.’ It’s do-it-yourself intel.”

      “How come you know all that and I don’t?”

      “I read The New Yorker.”

      “Some secret.”

      Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”

      “I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”

      Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”

      “That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”

      “No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”

      “I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”

      “Sounds right.”

      “Check it out, will you?”

      Triffler sighed. “If I say ‘Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”

      “No time.”

      Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.

      “Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”

      “My word for it would be ‘elegant.’”

      “Your wife is so lucky.”

      “Tell her that.”

      “Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”

      “There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”

      “This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”

      “You’d win my undying gratitude.”

      “That your best offer?”

      “At this distance, I’m afraid so.”

      “I’ll see what I can do.”

      What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.

      “What’re you offering, chickie?”

      “Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”

      He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”

      She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.

      “You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”

      “Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”

      The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta

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