Purity (28 page)

“I don't mind.”

“Great.”

And he closed his door behind them. The door he almost never closed. A few minutes later, he came out to Leila's work space for the exchange of greetings they ought to have had in his office. She knew she shouldn't ask if he was OK, since she hated being asked this herself and had trained Tom never to do it:
How about I just tell you if I'm ever not OK
. But she couldn't help doing it.

“Everything's fine,” he said. His eyes were masked by the reflection of the overhead lighting on his wire-frame glasses. The glasses were of an awful seventies design and of a piece with the military buzz he gave to his remaining hair; another thing he wasn't afraid of was anyone's opinion of how he looked. “I think she's going to be terrific.”

She
. As if Leila's question had referred to her.

“And … which of my other stories would you prefer that I neglect?”

“Your choice,” he said. “She says she owns the story, but we have no way of knowing who else knows about it. I don't want us to be chasing it after it goes viral.”

“
Broken Arrow II
. That's quite the first pitch from a research intern.”

Tom laughed. “Right? Not Strangelove—
Broken Arrow
. That's our association now.” He laughed again, sounding more like his usual self.

“I'm just saying it seems a little too good to be true.”

“She's Californian.”

“Hence the impressive suntan?”

“Bay Area,” Tom said. “It's like the flu viruses coming out of China—pigs, people, and birds all living under one roof. The Bay Area is where you'd expect a story like this to come from. All that hacker capability mingling with the Occupy mentality.”

“I guess that makes sense. It's just interesting that she came to us. She could have taken the story anywhere. ProPublica. California Watch. CIR.”

“Apparently she has a boyfriend she followed here.”

“Fifty years of feminism, and women are still following their boyfriends.”

“Who better than you to straighten her head out? If you really don't mind.”

“I really don't mind.”

“What's one more person on the long list of people Leila's nice to?”

“You're absolutely right. It's just one more person.”

And so the handoff to Leila had occurred. Had Tom been vaccinating himself against the girl by teaming her with his girlfriend? Pip was by no means the most attractive intern to have worked at DI, and Tom had often stated, in the hard-fact-stating voice he had, that his type was Leila's type (slight, flat, Lebanese). What could it be about Pip that had required vaccination? Eventually it dawned on Leila that the girl might be a
former
type of Tom's, a type like his ex-wife. And it wasn't quite true that nothing scared him. Anything to do with his ex-wife made him nervous. He squirmed whenever someone on TV reminded him of her; he talked back at the screen. As soon as Leila understood that she was doing him a favor by assuming responsibility for Pip, she went ahead and took the girl under her care.

Did Cody talk about perimeter security when you were married? Were you surprised when you heard he'd taken a weapon home with him?

There's nothing so dumb that Cody could do it and surprise me. One time he was stripping paint off our garage and tried to light a cigarette with the blowtorch—took him a while to notice he'd set his shirt collar on fire.

But the perimeter?

They had a lot of parameters that him and his dad used to talk about. Parameter is a word I definitely overheard. Exposure parameters, and … what else? Something with protocols?

But the gates, the fences.

Oh, my.
Perimeter
. You meant
perimeter
and here I'm talking about parameters. I don't even know what a parameter is.

So did Cody ever talk about people sneaking things in or out?

Mostly in. They have enough bombs in there to turn the whole Panhandle into a smoking crater. You'd think they'd be a little nervous and alert, but it's the opposite, because the whole point of the bomb is to make sure we never have to use it. The whole show is kind of a big huge nothing, and the people who work there know it. That's why they have their safety competitions, their softball league, their canned-food drives—to keep it interesting. The work's better than meat packer or prison guard, but it's still boring and dead-end. So they've had some problems with contraband coming in.

Alcohol? Drugs?

No booze, they'd catch you. But certain illegal stimulants. Also clean pee for the drug tests.

And what about things coming out?

Well, Cody had a whole chest of nice tools with a little bit of radioactive in 'em, enough so OSHA said they couldn't use 'em anymore. Perfectly good tools.

But no bombs going missing.

Lord, no. They have bar codes, they have GPS, they have all these sheets you have to sign. They know where every bomb is every minute. I know about that because that's where Cody worked.

Inventory Control.

That's right.

Leila turned off the recording as she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila's headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way.

The Sonic parking lot was empty. She'd decided not to risk spooking Phyllisha by calling her a second time; if she happened to be off work, Leila could come back tomorrow. But Phyllisha was not only there but was hanging halfway out the drive-in window, trying to touch the ground without falling all the way out.

As Leila approached the window, she saw the dollar bill below it. She picked it up and put it in Phyllisha's hand.

“Thank you, ma'am.” Phyllisha levered herself back inside. “Can I help you?”

“I'm Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

“Whoa. I would of sworn you'd be Texan.”

“I am Texan. Can we talk?”

“I don't know.” Phyllisha leaned out the window again and scanned the parking lot and the street. “I told you about my situation. He's picking me up at ten, and sometimes he's early.”

“It's only eight thirty.”

“You're not supposed to stand here anyway. This is for cars only.”

“Why don't I come inside, then.”

Phyllisha shook her head pensively. “It's one of those things that only makes sense when you're inside it. I can't explain it.”

“It's like being a willing prisoner.”

“Prisoner? I don't know. Maybe. The Prisoner of Pampa.” She giggled. “Somebody oughta write a novel about me and call it that.”

“How into him are you?”

“I'm kind of nuts about him, actually. Part of me doesn't even mind the prisoner part.”

“I get that.”

Phyllisha looked into Leila's eyes. “Do you?”

“I've been in situations myself.”

“Well, shit. I don't care. You can sit on the floor, down out of sight. The manager won't see you if you come in through the back. Everybody else back here is Mexican.”

The leading occupational hazard of Leila's job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them. These were always the single-story sources, the “amateurs” whom she seduced by appearing to be whomever they needed her to be. (She also dissembled with the professionals, the agency staffers, the congressional aides, but they used her as much as she used them.) Many of her colleagues, even some she liked, were brutal in betraying their sources afterward and severing all contact with them, adhering to the principle that it was actually kinder not to return a call from a person you'd slept with if you didn't intend to sleep with him again. In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be. And then she felt obliged to return her sources' calls and emails, even their Christmas cards, after she was done with them. She was still getting mail from the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, well over a decade after she'd written a sympathetic story about his legal plight. Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

What Phyllisha told her, while she sat on the floor amid ketchup smears and Mexican music, was that Cody Flayner was an all-hat loser she'd counted the days till she could get away from. Between his fine ass and his soft eyes and his droopy little puppy eyelashes, she hadn't been able to resist getting in the sack with him. But she swore to Leila that she'd never meant for him to leave his wife and kids. He'd surprised her with that, and then, for a while, she was stuck with him. All she'd wanted was a good time, and here she'd wrecked people's lives. She felt bad about it, and so she lived with Cody for six whole months.

“You stayed with him because you felt guilty?” Leila said.

“Kind of! That and free rent and lack of immediate other options.”

“You know, I did the same thing when I was your age. Wrecked a marriage.”

“Maybe if it
can
be wrecked, it
oughta
be wrecked.”

“There are different schools of thought on that.”

“So how long'd you stick around? Or did you not even feel guilty?”

“That's the thing.” Leila smiled. “I'm still married to him.”

“Well, that's a happy ending.”

“Safe to say there's been some guilt along the way.”

“You know, you seem OK to me. I never met a reporter before. You're not what I expected.”

That's because I'm freaking good at getting people to open up
, Leila thought.

Phyllisha interrupted herself to serve a carload of teenagers and then to scold her co-workers. “Hey fellas, no quiero la musica. Menos loud-o, por favor?”

That Cody was the best thing that ever happened to Phyllisha was a conviction of his that she did not reciprocate. The more he tried to impress her, the less impressed she got. He picked a bar fight in her presence to show her how well he could take getting the crap beaten out of him. His wife, the baboon face, hadn't managed to get his wages garnished for child support—count on Big Government to screw things up—and he bought Phyllisha piles of bling and other stuff, including a brand-new iPad, to impress her. The whole idea behind his July Fourth surprise was to impress her. She knew that he worked at the bomb plant and had the most boring of all the jobs there. He could jaw for hours about
variable yields
and
bunker busters
and
kilotonnage
, making himself out to be personally responsible for keeping the nation safe. She finally got fed up and told him the truth, namely, that he was a nobody and she wasn't impressed with these bombs that he didn't actually have anything to do with. She hurt his feelings, but she didn't care. She'd already exchanged meaningful eye contact with his friend Kyle, who lived over in Pampa.

On the night of July 3, coming home late from drinking with her girlfriends, she found Cody waiting for her on the front steps. He said he had another present for her. He took her around to the back yard, where something big and cylindrical was lying on a blanket. Cody said it was a fully armed B61 thermonuclear warhead, and what did she think of
that
?

Well, she was afraid, was what.

Cody said, “I want you to touch it. I want you to get buck-naked and lay on it, and then I'm gonna do you like you never been done in your whole life.”

She hedged by saying she didn't want to get radiation poisoning or whatnot.

Cody said the warhead was totally safe to handle and be around. He made her touch it with her hand and explained to her about one-point safety and permission action links. It was the usual all-hat routine, talking about stuff he didn't really understand and had nothing to do with, except that this time there was an actual thermonuclear warhead on a blanket in his yard.

“And I know how to set it off,” he said.

You do not, Phyllisha said.

“There's a way if you got the codes, and I got the codes. I can wipe old Amarillo right off the map. Right now.”

Why would you do that, Phyllisha wanted to know. She half believed him and two-thirds didn't.

“To make you see how much I love you,” Cody said.

Phyllisha said she didn't see the connection between loving her and blowing up Amarillo. She thought that, conceivably, by saying this, by buying time, she was saving tens of thousands of innocent Amarillo lives, her own not least among them. She was listening out of one ear for police sirens.

Cody then assured her that he wasn't going to do it. He just wanted her to know that he
could
do it. He, Cody Flayner. He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal. He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up in the air for him. Didn't the bomb's terrible, dangerous power make her want that?