by James Grady
But now I was here. Not in that future when I’d work my hands through wet slippery things to fulfill my patriotic quest. Not in the next future when I’d call the Op Panic Number and bust cover and break balls and make things happen and DELIVER. I was here, now, bent over the iron edge of the bathtub where my love lay dead.
Plug the drain.
Did it. Envisioned the flight of a Malaysian family to Kuwait; they’d refuse to go to America. Like a foul rapist, I ripped open Derya’s stiffening blue shirt.
The switchblade clicked. Electric shock zapped up its mirror blade as it pricked Derya’s skin at her tan t’ien, that wondrous point below our navel that is home to the ch’i of every living man and woman. I remember insisting that no one was home beneath the tip of my knife. I remember screaming. Trying to make my scream the Kia! karatekas bellow to break boards, but my scream transcended that as I forgot my last sane thought… shoved the knife in.
38
My second suicide began with a 9/11 afternoon helicopter ride from the Castle. Two soldiers who’d come to Maine for me made sure I was strapped tight in that ’copter. Maine’s pine forests slid beneath our whumping chariot. Looking down, I saw a deer run through the trees. The sky reddened as we landed at an Army base where a camo-face painted grunt paced with a Surface-To-Air Stinger missile like the ones we’d shipped to anti-Soviet warriors in Afghanistan. My escorts boarded us on an Army plane. We flew in a sky empty of everything but smoke, birds, and American warriors. Stars winked into view before we landed at Andrews Air Force base near Washington, D.C. We marched off the plane. Red dots from sniper scopes danced on our chests. The soldiers gave me to two men in suits. They opened the back door of a sedan and I scrunched myself between their weightlifter arms. A woman who wore no perfume drove us off the base.
We drove into a Maryland neighborhood outside of the D.C.’s Beltway. The White House was a 45-minute drive away; you could get to CIA headquarters or the Pentagon in less time because you didn’t need to drive city streets. The destruction zone for a tidy nuclear device detonated at any of those three command centers did not extend to this neighborhood. For a tidy device.
The redhead CIA security guard sitting to my right was left handed, or so I deduced from the way the gun on that side of his belt dug into my kidney. He shook his head. “I feel like we’re driving through a whole new world.”
“We are,” said the security guard on my other side.
“Is this what it was like when JFK was shot?” said the redhead.
“I wasn’t born then,” said his partner.
None of us were, I thought. Remembered what Zane who’d been in Junior High back then had said while the five of us in the Castle watched the WTC towers burn on TV. I told the car driving through the night: “This is bigger.”
We drove toward an obvious fortress of American public education.
“Closed this high school last spring,” said the driver. “Busted budget. Now they bus these kids to a school ’bout 30 minutes away where they have trailers for overflow classrooms.”
We drove past two men sitting in a parked car pretending they weren’t covert guards. Our driver radioed call signs and code words, got OK’ed to come in. We pulled into a parking lot filled with vans and cars and green trucks with gray duct tape-covered insignias on their doors. Flashlights bobbed on the roof as techs rigged satellite dishes and antennae. A metal detector arch loomed inside the glass doors to the gym. I figured the odds were 50-50 that the metal detector belonged to the school.
Lights blazed in the girders above the basketball court. Bleachers ringed the game floor. Cables snaked over the blond wood floor. Maybe 40 desks on that wood were already in use, men and women dressed in everything from sweat suits to military camo talked into phones, pounded computers and laptops, poured over documents. Carpenters assembled green plastic walls around the desks, turning this chessboard of work stations into a maze of cubicles. TVs broadcast live shots of the pile in New York, the smoking Pentagon, a spotlit field in Pennsylvania. Phones rang. Hammers clanged. People shouted. The gym crackled with electricity.
“This beehive didn’t exist at 9 a.m. today,” said Redhead.
A man with a clipboard directed us to courtside bleachers. A fat man in a rumpled suit sat five rows up. Two lean men a dozen rows above the fat man kept casual eyes on him, and when Redhead told me to find a seat in the bleachers, the lean men included me in their watchful gaze.
Seemed impolite not to sit beside the fat man. So I did. Wondered if he ever played Santa Claus. Course, he’d need a white beard and no bloodshot eyes. Plus breath mints, I thought as he sighed whiskey.
“Look at ’em,” he said.
You talking to me? raced through my mind like a psycho Robert De Niro.
“Scurrying around like ants,” said the fat man. “Where were they yesterday?
“I’ll tell you where,” he said before I could answer. “Somewhere that didn’t work, that’s where. And you know why? I’ll tell you why. Cause fighting guys armed with box cutters and go-to-heaven plans doesn’t require brand new fighter jets. Jets the Air Force doesn’t even want but that feed tax dollars to the ‘military-industrial complex’ beast President Eisenhower warned us about. Then those beasts shit campaign dollars all over Washington.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said, merely making conversation.
“Fuck reasonable.”
“Did,” I said before I could stop myself.
We truly looked at each other for the first time.
“Ain’t supposed to say who we are,” he told me. “I’m Bureau. FBI. And we’re better than this.”
His sweeping gesture took in the swarm of people on the floor, the hat racks turned into flagpoles for marker-scrawled paper signs: FBI, CIA, CUSTOMS, DEA, SECRET SERVICE, SAC, DOT, MARSHALLS, CTC, FAA, DIA, CDC, NSA, COAST GUARD, NCIS, a dozen more alphabet jumbles.
“Or we could have been better than this,” said the fat man. “Except nobody believed what everybody knew. Last year, I had an informer, Yemeni, born in Jersey, all he wanted to do was prove he could be a patriot so his folks would have no trouble with Immigration. He volunteered to go into the camps for me, for us, go get the Afghan what’s what and who’s who. The desk boys at the Bureau said no. ‘Not cost effective’ to cough up a lousy three grand for expenses. ‘Not our priority.’ Plus real spying scares bureaucrats because it gets messy, and the way to stay clean and out of trouble isn’t to figure out how to do human intell right, it’s to not do it at all.”
My bench partner offered a pint from his inside suit to me.
“No thanks.”
“You against it or you already self-medicated?”
Missed my after-Group pills. Oh well.
But I told him: “Whiskey’s not my thing.”
He squinted at me. Nodded at the basketball court full of uniforms, badges and guns. “If you fire up a joint, at least that they’d know how to bust.”
Had to laugh. Both of us.
“I don’t drink to forget or for courage,” said the fat man. “I drink so I remember I can’t do everything even if they let me.”
He whispered: “So it can’t be all my fault.”
But those words lacked conviction. He took a swig. Put the bottle away.
At 11 p.m., we shared an everything-on-it-but-happiness pizza passed up to us by a Marine. We followed an escort to one of the public bathrooms.
Splashed cold water on my face at the bathroom sink, rose and saw my dripping reflection in the smudged wall mirror.
High school. I’m back in high school. Knowing what I know now.
They led us back to the bleachers to watch the action on the gym floor.
Straight up midnight. Six expensively clothed men and women marched into the gym. Power rippled from them. Spies and cops and techs buzzing on the floor straightened their posture, kept their
eyes on what they were doing yet expanded their gaze to watch the new arrivals stride along the basketball court.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the bishops are in the house,” said my fat buddy.
As they reached the mid-court line, I recognized one of the bishops, the youngest gray-haired man. He stopped; stared out at the basketball court. His halt braked his five companions. Two nearby soldiers laboriously wheeled a bulletin board refitted as an emergency gear station hung with fire extinguishers and gas masks.
Gray-haired man jerked a fire axe off the bulletin board, swung it over his head as he charged onto the basketball court and in front of the whole astonished gym, chopped the axe through the nearest plastic partition wall.
The plastic wall shattered.
A dozen people shouted as the gray-haired bishop stormed down the aisle of desks on the gym floor. He swung the axe like a baseball bat and shattered a second cubicle wall, whirled to backstroke a green plastic wall taped with a flow chart. The woman in that cubicle dove past him and scurried away, but he ignored her, shattered another of her walls and leapt on top of her desk, golf clubbed the axe to blast a hole in the wall between her and the next cubicle.
He stood on the desk, axe in hands.
Mesmerized a gym full of frozen people. Phones rang unanswered.
“Don’t you get it?” he bellowed. “Walls got us here! Blinders! We only cared about what was inside our own fucking cubicles. We didn’t look outside them. We didn’t like it when people somehow got stuff in to us—especially if it didn’t fit with what we believed, what we’d profiled, who we were. We didn’t share what we had or what we knew because our turf was all that mattered. We made plastic walls and the bad guys walked along the tops of them and killed men, women and children who trusted us to keep them safe and we fucking didn’t and they fucking died!”
He threw the axe to the basketball floor.
Yelled: “No more fucking walls!”
Gray hair jumped off the desk, led his fellow bishops to the locker room.
“Follow that man into Hell,” muttered my fat buddy.
“Already there.”
They summoned my fat buddy to the locker room thirty minutes later.
Left me alone in the bleacher.
Zoned out.
Shaking my shoulder, someone’s—
“You OK?” Redhead, the CIA gun.
“Same as I ever was.” The clock on the wall showed 2:10. “Is that a.m. or p.m.?”
“They’re ready for you,” he said, added: “The time is morning and it’s dark.”
We marched down the bleachers, joined his partner from earlier plus a third man whose no jacket/no tie image felt medical. Medical’s left hand held what I first thought was a holstered Glock automatic, but what my closer look told me was a taser—a pistol that fired two wired electrodes 15 feet into the flesh of the target with enough electricity to drop a Brahma bull.
We went to the locker rooms now crowded by men and women at makeshift desks. As we walked, I heard a woman say: “We swore we’d never let Pearl Harbor happen again. But every year, doesn’t matter which President, I’ve heard the CIA Director tell Congress that we’re a billion dollars short of a good anti-terrorist package, and every year, not enough—” That conversation flowed out of earshot. Shower stalls had been converted to a map wall, one map of the world, one of the U.S. cell phones chirped. Static crackled from laptops, FAXes, and other high tech wonders. This tiled room still smelled of ankle wraps, football jerseys and sweat soaked pads, liniment and teenage glory.
Redhead knocked on the door of the glass walled coach’s office. Inside it sat the axe-wielding, gray-haired bishop and five other executives, including a man and woman who, like gray hair, had been at the medal ceremony that preceded my first suicide.
Gray hair beckoned, but my escorts and I all couldn’t fit inside the coach’s office. I ended up in the hard folding chair beside the coach’s desk to face the gray-haired bishop. Taser man leaned in the office doorway. Redhead and my other escort waited beyond the glass. Five bishops of America’s cathedrals of secrets stood and slouched and watched me from the coach’s inner sanctum walls.
“How are you, Victor?” said the gray-haired axe-wielder sitting in the coach’s chair.
“I’m here, Mr. Lang.”
“You remember me.”
“I’m crazy, not senile. You talent-spotted me at that martial arts seminar way back when I was in college at Georgetown. Didn’t know it was you who’d turned me over to Recruitment until they took me to your cabin for my graduation send-off.”
He smiled. “You were Non-Official Cover. We couldn’t bring you to Langley.”
“Oh.”
“Now,” said Lang. “We need you to focus. We need you to remember. We need you to be truly, sanely, all here. Can you do that, Victor?”
“Maybe.”
Lang reached into a file folder. Put a color picture of first one man, then another down on the desk for me to see.
Face shots—not posed and air-brushed out of context.
Two Middle Eastern men, one with a mustache, one clean shaven.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never seen them in person, but—”
“Good work.” Lang laid a long shot candid photo of half a dozen men on top of the portraits. Both those men were in the group, and that photo I knew.
“This is a Special Branch surveillance photo from the al Qaeda summit in K.L., January, 2000. I saw it in an after-action briefing.”
Lang told me the men’s names. My shrug told him the names meant zip.
“Various agencies had alerts and watch-listings for them even before that K.L. meeting. Afterwards, we’d I.D.ed both of them as real killers. Had hard data on their papers. One flew into the U.S. right after the K.L. summit, the other came over that July. Even though they were using credit cards with their real names, even though they were tied to the suicide bombing that ripped up our Navy’s destroyer Cole, no badges scoped them because the Agency didn’t inform the Bureau of our full intell.”
Lang’s silence pulled my eyes to his, then he said: “We didn’t want to go to your asset relocated in Kuwait before we talked to you.”
“She won’t help you. She and her family went down the rabbit hole and nothing will make them come up to help us again.”
The woman bishop said: “Don’t underestimate our persuasiveness. Not now.”
“She never told me anything about anyone that we didn’t already know. It took… It took everything I had to get her to do the data key.”
Lang nodded.
“Who are those two guys?” I asked.
But I knew the core of the answer before Lang said: “They were on the team that hijacked the plane that slammed into the Pentagon.”
“What was on the data key I… recovered?”
“Looks like it could have been the key of keys,” muttered a male bishop as Lang’s expression screamed Keep your mouth shut! The other bishop was too lost in anger and sorrow to catch Lang’s silent message, said: “Al Qaeda guys at your K.L. summit used your asset’s computer to surf web sites with airline schedules, flight school info, hell, specs on jetliners and the two towers and a virtual tour of—”
“You did a magnificent job,” interrupted Lang. “It was us who fucked up. We didn’t recognize the significance of that data, and—in part to protect sources & methods—we didn’t share that data with the Bureau or any other security teams.”
“Nobody—”
“Nobody saw what we all had locked up in our secret boxes.”
“God save us from men with boxes,” I muttered, but it was Derya’s voice.
The youngest bishop said: “Compartmentalization is key to intelligence security!”
“I feel so safe now.”
Lang said: “Thank you for all this, Victor. What
you did in Malaysia was… beyond heroic and valuable. Helping us today, in spite of… True pro.”
“Gotta be worth it,” I muttered like Hailey.
Lang put a comforting hand on my arm. Training snapped my attention to his touch, and martial artist that he was, he sensed my change.
He said: “It’s time for you to go home.”
My answer echoed in that packed glass-walls coach’s office: “Yeah.”
Taser Guy turned me over to Redhead and his partner. The three of them escorted me out of the locker room, back through the gym with its shattered cubicle walls. Redhead walked on my left, his weak side right arm holding my left elbow like he was helping a shaky senior citizen make it through a minefield. His partner walked close to my right side. Taser Guy—somewhere behind me?
The spy in me thought of the perfect thing to say and gave me a conversational voice to say it: “I wonder if I’ll ever see that fat guy again.”
“Beats me,” said Redhead. His grip on my elbow softened.
We neared the exit to the gym. As point man for our troop, it made sense for me to push open the gym door. The glass doors to exit the school for the outside world were 30, 25 feet dead ahead. Five security guards milled there by the metal detector.
With all those armed guards and all that high tech help, who wouldn’t feel safe?
“Elvis has left the building,” I joked.
Redhead and his partner laughed. Relaxed into a slower focus.