Eleven Days (22 page)

“Balance sheets scared him,” he says. And then pauses, indicating his analysis is over.

“War-torn cities lowered his pulse; debts to pay made it rise,” says Sara.

“That’s correct. That’s who he was.”

“He never talked to me about anything,” she says, consciously baiting the hook. “He may have thought I had a brain, but I think once Jason—”

“Yet you stayed.”

“I stayed for a while. I would never leave the father of my child. Unless he—unless he was placing us at risk.”

“I guess it depends on your definition of risk.”

“But he defined it for me, didn’t he, by leaving first. By leaving, then dying. He was good at dramatic exits.”

“He would love Jason. He would understand him.”

“Would he? He would understand how much it costs to train an operator. He would understand the percentage of the annual defense budget allocated to education. He would understand the ratio of blondes to brunettes working at any one time at Foggy Bottom. What would he understand about my son?”

“Sara.”

“David always understood the numbers. Facts. He was less skilled at nuance. And emotion.”

“He understood and valued sacrifice.”

“He never served his country.”

“Sara, he did.”

“He never served his country like my son has done.”

“His son, too.”

“David wouldn’t recognize Jason if he saw him today. David only cared that our son didn’t grow up entitled. He was terrified I would spoil him.”

“And you did not.”

“I did not.”

“I never met a kid with less sense of entitlement. He has a lot of his mother in him in that, that’s for sure,” he says. “Not a kid anymore. It’s his time to get out now.”

“He loves it too much.”

“You don’t—”

“I know my son. He loves it too much to ever leave.”

“How much does it cost to train an operator,” the godfather says after a pause, after motioning to the stewardess to refill his drink, and bring Sara one, too. She hasn’t been counting but however many he’s had, he’s not getting drunk. He must cut the gin with ginger ale, she thinks.

“Five hundred thousand dollars,” she says.

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Expensive.”

“One hundred operators. One hundred operators times five hundred thousand: equal to the cost of this plane.”

*

She wants to know where her son has been and to what extent the godfather may or may not have been hiding the truth of what he’s done from her. She wants to know what he knows about the last ten days, and he tells her what he thinks she can handle.

“Look,” he says, “after ten days the military shifts the status of a missing officer from DUSTWUN to MIA.”

“DUSTWUN?”

“Duty status whereabouts unknown.”

“It’s been ten days today.”

“It’s been ten days today since the mission.”

“And what was the mission?”

“The mission—well, what we know about the mission was that the guys went to find someone.”

“Find who?”

“It was a high-level—at the highest level—it was a mission overseen by and sanctioned via a JSOC/Langley Team, so it was—”

“But why was Jason on it? I thought those missions—”

“I don’t know. I don’t know any of the details.”

“I thought his Team was—”

“What—”

“I thought his Team was somewhere else. When—”

“I got a call telling me the Team number, and I was able to find out who was on the copter. They had to enlist extra guys for backup. And it’s possible that Jason was one of those extra guys.”

“Extra?”

“Sara.”

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“You were notified the minute we knew anything. The navy notified you as soon as they knew.”

“To make something simple is a thousand times harder than to make something complicated. Did you know that?”

“You were notified the minute they knew.”

Although she had never imagined this moment, if she had, she
certainly would have imagined herself better prepared for it. She wanted to present the face of someone strong. That is what her son would have wanted. That is what she would show him when she saw him.

“Sara, it’s very unconventional, this—” And he waves his hand around.

“What?”

“It’s very unusual that we’re sitting on this plane and that you are being brought to your son. This is not protocol.”

“Really? You don’t give a fifty-million-dollar plane to every primary next of kin?”

“Sara.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Someone made arrangements for you, and you will be told all of that, but all I can tell you is that you should appreciate the fact that a lot has been done to try and get you—”

“I appreciate the fact that my son risked his life for something that means nothing.”

“It means something to him.”

“Really? What does it mean? What does it mean?” She pours half her drink into his glass, which he has already half-emptied.

“He didn’t risk his life—he doesn’t risk his life for the politics, Sara. He risks his life for his Team.”

“Is that what he says?”

“I know that’s what he feels.”

And he knows that soon enough she’ll know everything. For the time being, he is trying to manage his own anxiety about what they will find when they reach their destination. Because he does not know. He misses the little line of coke he used to do to relax in these moments, but has decided that for this trip a ratio of two espressos to each drink will keep him stable until they touch down.

Sara asks him to tell her the story of how he met David, a story she has heard many times. He tells her about his days as a young aide for the chief of staff of the air force. He tells her how David used to stop by their rooms regularly for meetings with one or another of the joint chiefs. “He brought a skateboard with him. He used to board down the ramps there on the weekends, and all the girls in the front offices adored him. He hadn’t gotten overweight yet; he was still smoking.” He describes the series of oil portraits of historical joint chiefs lining the long corridor, and the scandal that resulted when David once skated there, too. “He’d hand painted it. He’d painted
LITERALLY EYES ONLY
in red, across its top.”

“He took me my first time,” Sara says, softening.

“When was that?”

“I was pregnant. I told him I’d never been inside the Pentagon, and he was appalled. It was as if I’d told him I’d never read the Declaration of Independence. He said, ‘Oh, let’s fix that immediately.’ He’d picked me up at Healy Hall, and we drove over there. And he drove right up to the VIP parking and a guard came out.”

“And David charmed him.”

“David charmed him, and the guard waved us through.”

“Sounds about right.”

“And then we had this situation at the second security desk because I didn’t want them screening me—”

“God, did they have screeners in those days?”

“They had something, maybe more like a crude metal detector, but I was paranoid about the baby—”

“Right.”

“And so the guard was hassling David, and he asked him, you know, ‘What is the purpose of her visit?’ looking at me. And David sort of laughed, and he looked at me and looked at the guard and
said—loudly—I remember how loudly it was, he said—no, he
announced
: ‘Orientation!’ ”

“Orientation?”

“Orientation. ‘The purpose of her visit is orientation.’ And that was that. They waved us in. And he was really proud to take me around, I think. He was so much more interested in, and reverent about, the history of the place—the military history—than I was.”

“So Jason walked the halls of the Pentagon even before he was born.”

“He did. God’s great plan.”

“David’s great plan, perhaps.”

“I was so in love with him.”

“I remember being in the hospital.”

“Yeah, Château d’Yquem and ice cream—in the
recovery
room. We were—”

“Reckless?”

“We were young.”

“He was proud. He didn’t know how to be a father, but he was very proud of you, Sara.”

They’re offered hot coffee. It’s very bitter, but she knows she won’t sleep again, and drinking it makes her feel like she’s participating in the ritual of being present, so she drinks it and asks for another cup.

*

“Do you think he’s ever killed someone?” Sara asks a little later, having given him a grace period to relax and nap.

“David?”

“Jason.”

“What would be the appropriate answer to that, Sara?”

He’s arranging a small mountain of reading materials poured onto his lap from his Hermès briefcase—a gift from a network news bureau chief:
The Economist
,
Foreign Affairs
,
Financial Times
,
The Washington Post
,
The Wall Street Journal
,
Time
. She can see small pink Post-it Notes, probably from his assistant, placed on the top of each, indicating pages or titles of articles to be read. How efficient, she thinks.

“Pink?” He ignores the observation, so she continues. “The appropriate answer would be the truth.”

“Well, if you cared to read the papers and perhaps the
history
of what your son’s been engaged in, you might find you could learn quite a lot about what he does.”

“And when your son’s in the Teams, you can tell me how often your wife wants to read the papers. Pardon me, when you have a wife.”

“Touché.”

“I’m just curious now. I want to know what happened and what they did to him. You know he’s so … tough, but he’s also so gentle, in his heart. I can’t see him—I can’t see him in those situations.”

“That’s what makes the most effective warrior.”

“What does?”

“Being inconspicuous.”

She reaches over and takes a small sip from his (now newly replenished) FIJI bottle.

“Is it murder?”

“Is what murder?”

“Is it murder when you kill someone? Is it called murder?”

“It’s not murder when you follow ROE, Rules of—”

“I know what ROE stands for.”

“—Engagement. But people die in wars, Sara. And someone is at the other end of the gun every time.”

“So you can kill a man when he’s armed.”

“You can kill a man when he’s armed.”

“But can you kill a man when he’s loading a gun?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re on the Select Committee on Intelligence, and you’re not sure.”

“I believe that you would not kill someone in the process of loading a gun because, technically, that weapon would at that time be unarmed.”

She picks at a hardboiled egg. They’ve been presented on a wide white china plate, rimmed in blue. Blue was the theme here. The eggs were accompanied by an enormous and shiny tin of caviar and cut crystal square dishes of capers, onions, and lemon. Caviar had been a staple of David’s, his sole splurge; he ate it plain, with a spoon. She had not seen it in years; it was contraband.
This one’s probably Persian
, she thinks. And then says, “It all just sounds a bit Potter Stewart on pornography, you know what I mean?”

“You remember the USS
Cole
?”

“Yemen. The boys in the boat,” she says.

“Yes. You know who oversaw security onboard after?”

“CIA?”

“Naval Special Warfare.”

She takes a spoonful of caviar and eats it.

“And you know what those guys were told?”

“No.”

“They were told that no shots would be taken, because the act that had occurred was a crime. It was a crime scene.”

“So.”

“There are rules for crimes and rules for wars.”

“You’re saying that the way we define the threat has changed.”

“I’m saying that we’re attempting to define something that itself is changing. This isn’t Dresden, Sara. This is not Kuwait, ’ninety-one. I mean, thank God for that. You know how many more sons mothers would have lost in these last wars if we still fought the way we did then? The metrics have changed. The strategies have changed. We’re more efficient now. We’re more precise. We’re good at what we do, and these guys—like Jason—they’re good at what they do.”

“Jason’s been good at everything he’s ever done.”

“Of course.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

And as the godfather tries to answer, he realizes that his own current level of clearance leaves him in conflict now, and increasingly, for various reasons. He thinks about the concentric circles of “appropriate” honesty he has come to accept as part of his life and career, the same circles he knows David before him and Jason after him have both been subject to, in diverse ways. Why didn’t they all end up in lines of work more amenable to “normal” lives? They weren’t classic spooks, but they lived in the margins of a world where innocuous policy conflicted with decisions about when and where to drop bombs, a place where obsessions over the size of a madrassa half a world away trumped concerns about the size of one’s own son’s classroom. And often, dropping bombs was a more precise art than drafting policy. The response was immediate, as was the grade. And the grade was not clouded by subjectivity or argument. You hit a target, or you missed. And for hits, everyone was pleased. For misses, someone’s scalp was
served. He saw it every single day: the politicians took ownership of their military’s skills when things went well and took discreet pains to distance themselves from them when things did not.

Just weeks earlier he had sat on another private plane, slightly smaller than this one but just as tricked out. His companions, six extremely rich businessmen, had all played a contributing role in national intelligence and had all seen unique success in their various fields. Someone had arranged for a tour of an SOF training camp, one hidden within a highly classified, undisclosed location on the East Coast. The plane’s windows were blacked out, per protocol, and once the plane left D.C., the men had all melted immediately into the boys they’d been at prep school, playing war games across New England woods. One claimed to have roomed at Lawrenceville with the current king of Saudi Arabia (or was it a brother to the king?), but the story—later fact-checked by the godfather’s EA—proved a stretch. These men were all old enough to possess their own war stories, but none of them had seen combat the likes of which was now being seen by their sons—or grandsons. By simple virtue of their birth dates, they’d missed the century’s grand chapters of battle. Some of their fathers had been generals or spies; most of their sons worked well away from lines of fire.