The Siege

by Stephen White

  “That’s the way I read it. The only option you have is to give this to the cops,” I said.

  “Didn’t I just do that?”

  “It may turn out to be fortunate for you, but no, you didn’t. I’m on suspension from the Boulder Police Department. Long story. I’ll tell it if you want to hear it.” I waited for an indication she wanted me to tell the story. Nothing. If she was curious about my abundant free time, I figured she had already learned the broad outlines of my transgressions—they involved a woman, a sexual indiscretion, and a subsequent serious sin of omission—from my significant other. “Officially, I’m not a cop at this moment. If you decide to show this to Carmen—who despite her current horizontal posture is a cop—she may feel a need to show it to someone else. Kick it upstairs. Her bosses. Then they might kick it upstairs to their bosses. And so on. Pretty soon, the fact that it’s no longer a secret isn’t a secret. If you know what I mean.” I poked at the page. “Here in the middle of the note, it says pretty clearly that wouldn’t be a good thing. Showing it around.”

  “Even to you,” Ann said. “That’s why the are-you-trustworthy part is so important to me.”

  “Showing it to me was risky, Ann. You don’t know me well. Is that evidence of those cojones I referred to earlier?”

  I allowed her a moment to comment. She demurred.

  I moved my index finger close to the note. “Any thoughts about the blue/orange thing. What that means? Have any personal significance to you?”

  She said, “Nothing, Sam.” Then she asked, “What would a real cop do with this? If I walked into my local police department and showed it to someone.”

  I could tell she wasn’t being demeaning to me with the “real cop” comment. I felt no inclination to be defensive back with her. I said, “Probably nothing. The note is too vague. Being ominous isn’t a crime. They would tell you to get back to them if something developed.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. The person who wrote this gave the words and the tone a lot of consideration. He draws lines. Doesn’t cross them. That part worries me almost as much as the content.”

  Smart. “You have no way to contact him?” I asked.

  “There was a Post-it on the letter. It had an Internet address on it. A website. In Africa. Dot-n-a. Namibia.”

  “Namibia? I assume you went to that website.”

  “Under construction,” she said. “I’ve been praying this might be nothing more than some kind of Internet scam.”

  “Christ,” I said. I caught myself. I added, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Watch it around Ronnie, though. He doesn’t approve of taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  I’m a Christian man, but one who believes the Lord is pretty thick-skinned. I don’t see Him starting the next ice age because His feelings are hurt. “I will try to respect that. Tell me about your family, Ann,” I said.

  The crowd in Detroit erupted before she could respond.

  I looked at the screen and said, “Damn.” The Red Wings had scored a shorthanded goal. I hate the damn Red Wings. I flicked off the TV before I was forced to watch someone dressed in red toss an octopus over the glass onto the ice.

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Ronnie and I have been married for twenty-four years. We have two children. This is Andrew’s weekend first, Ronnie’s second. Andrew is head over heels for Dulce, who I think is as sweet as her name. But you know all that. After they graduate from Santa Cruz, they’re going to live in San Francisco while they—hopefully—grow up a little bit and learn a little something about the world. Andrew will be working for Wells Fargo. Dulce is in Teach For America—she’ll be at a school in Oakland. Wedding won’t be until summer next year at the earliest. Longer if Andrew’s mother has anything to say about it.”

  “Off the record?” I said. “You have an ally in Carmen on the waiting-for-the-wedding part.”

  Ann smiled. “I guessed that. She and I had a long lunch together in California. But it’s nice to have it confirmed. Jane? My daughter is a year younger than my son. Twice as mature. She’s in school in Connecticut. She’s smarter and tougher than her brother. You’ll meet her tomorrow.” Ann smiled a momma’s smile. “My Jane.”

  “She golfs? Hurrying home for the tournament?”

  Ann laughed. “No. She has a . . . thing she does on Thursday nights and Sunday nights at school that she can’t miss. She promised her brother she’d get down here in between to help him celebrate. She’ll fly in midday tomorrow, be here for the dinner with the families. She’ll head north again on Sunday.”

  “I look forward to meeting her.”

  “She’s terrific.” Ann did a little dance move with her upper body, unable to contain her motherly pride. Then she stood, retrieved her shoes, and slipped them back on her feet, balancing easily on one leg at a time. She straightened her dress. “I need to get back to my other guests,” she said.

  “I understand. Is this a copy?” I said, raising the note.

  “The original is in a Mylar sleeve, in my jewelry safe at home. It has a few of my fingerprints on it, but after I recognized what it was, I was pretty careful with it. I’m a scientist, Sam.”

  “Good.”

  She opened the door. Before she left, she turned back to me. “Do you think the last line is true, Sam? That he’s a reasonable man?”

  I reread the last line. “Probably thinks he is. My experience is that when people say things like that, though, they’re usually anticipating being unreasonable.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I thought, too.”

  APRIL 17, THURSDAY EARLY EVENING

  Dee and Poe

  “Jerry doesn’t get you, you know. That’s why this”—Deirdre rapped her knuckles on the scratched mahogany surface that started where the bulge of red vinyl stopped—“would drive him crazy.”

  What she left unsaid was If Jerry knew we were here.

  Jerry was CIA, too. Like his wife. Jerry analyzed intelligence. He didn’t generate it. In the world of good guys and bad guys, as in the world of unfaithful wives, it is an important distinction.

  It meant that unless someone reported the fact of his wife’s out-of-town indiscretion, Jerry likely wouldn’t have an inkling that she was having a couple of drinks with an FBI agent in a dive bar on the edge of downtown Philadelphia.

  That’s the knowledge that Jerry’s wife thought would drive him crazy. Given that Jerry didn’t get Poe.

  Since they had originally met in Oklahoma City in 1995, Deirdre and the FBI guy in question—his Bureau ID read Christopher L. Poe; the L was for Lance—had played out some version of the present conversation in at least a half dozen other dive bars across America. Dee and Poe had discovered a few days after their introduction that they shared a penchant for taverns with long histories and infrequent renovations. Deirdre was especially drawn to watering holes with neon martini glasses adorning their signage, while Poe gravitated toward bars with the words “highballs” or “mixed drinks” in their names.

  That night in Philly they’d settled on Bob & Barbara’s Lounge on South Street. The house boilermaker was Pabst Blue Ribbon and Jim Beam. To Poe, that was an indication of modest inn-keeping intentions, always an auspicious sign.

  He didn’t mind listening to Deirdre talk about her husband.

  He loved to hear her voice—on rare, peaceful nights he even heard it in his dreams. To Poe’s ears, Dee spoke the way great singers sing, with nuance and passion and melody, and truth. For him, her tone carried the chords of memory the way that wind makes aromas fly. He’d long before succumbed to the realization that he would never get enough tracks of her voice down in his head. She could be describing the intimate contours of husband Jerry’s privates and the most loving details of what she’d done to him with her mouth and hands on their wedding night and it would not have upset Poe, even a little.

  Poe and Jerry—the occasional cuckolder and the occasional cuckold—had met once. It was at a picnic, of all
things, in Virginia—a Company/Bureau healing event that some out-of-touch geniuses had thought might be a great way to scab over interagency wounds, build interagency bridges, and simultaneously celebrate the tragically conflicted holidays of 2001. Poe recognized within seconds of being introduced to Jerry that the man was too inconsequential a human being to generate any antipathy from him. By the end of the first minute Poe knew that he would never have to invest any spare hate in Jerry.

  That was a relief.

  Hate was a commodity that Poe husbanded like a survival ist hoarded his last few bottles of water, or his final few rounds of ammunition.

  Abhorring Jerry would be like despising garbanzo beans. Who cares if they’re in your damn salad?

  Just push ’em aside, was Poe’s rule.

  For Poe, Jerry was most definitely a garbanzo bean in the salad of life.

  The specific reply that Poe made to Deirdre at the bar in Philly was a version of the same response he’d used with her other times they’d spoken their lines, during prior rendezvous. His only disappointment over the necessity to repeat the dialogue again—his disenchantment had almost always proven manageable—was that the repetition increased the likelihood that Dee would get ambushed by her guilt at what they were doing.

  When her guilt popped up, Poe felt he had to be ready to take it down. Surgically. Like a sniper.

  Shortly after the curtain dropped at the conclusion of an unexpected but amusing drag show at Bob & Barbara’s Lounge, Poe spotted Dee’s guilt lurking in the shadows. A mugger biding his time. Poe took aim. Steadied. He squeezed off a single round that was intended to do the job at hand, nothing more.

  Poe’s one shot was “Dee, what Jerry doesn’t get is you.”

  She scoffed. “You just don’t like him, Poe.”

  Her heart wasn’t in the argument. He knew it. She knew it. Satisfied that he’d done what he needed to do, Poe packed up his weaponry and deliberately swallowed his next line.

  It would have been Actually, you’re the one who doesn’t like him, Dee.

  Poe had once committed the sin of uttering that thought aloud.

  He’d learned his lesson.

  He and Deirdre had met up that time at an almost seedy motel not too far from the Inner Harbor in Baltimore in 1999. He’d whispered the offending words into her hair while they were slow dancing to fast music in a smoky roadhouse a few blocks down the street. A band of aging bikers was pounding out a half-decent cover of Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.”

  There’s always somebody tempting / Somebody into doing something they know is wrong

  In the far corner, near the hallway that led to the bathrooms, three biker-chick band groupies were drinking Natty Bohs, singing along enthusiastically, backing up the song’s chorus, swaying their ample hips, clapping their hands.

  Poe’s open palms were planted on the cheeks of Deirdre’s compact ass. Until he spoke those fateful words, she had been doing all the actual dancing, rocking her fine butt from side to side, riding up on her toes, lifting her shoulders one at a time. He had been monitoring Dee’s moves by Braille. His eyes were closed and his nose was buried in her hair. To him the aroma in her hair after a couple of hours in a smoky saloon was a blend of his father’s Chesterfields and his mother’s Chanel.

  There was comfort there.

  His specific words to her that night—the ones that caused so much offense—were “You don’t even really like him, baby.”

  Deirdre was stunned by Poe’s assertion, or maybe by the fact that Poe would break their unspoken rules and assert it. She pushed him away. Her mouth fell open in vague disbelief. Or maybe disappointment—Poe wasn’t sure. She blinked her eyes twice and shook her head, staring at Poe as though he had just grown fangs.

  He said, “Baby, baby. It’s okay.”

  Dee took half a step back before she wound up and slapped him hard across the cheekbone. Then she marched to their table, grabbed her purse and her jacket, and stormed out of the bar while the trio of biker chicks belted out Bruce’s refrain.

  And have a party in your pink Cadillac

  Poe had mistaken Dee’s assault on him for passion.

  He knew damn well that Deirdre could have leveled him with a left cross or done some serious organ damage with a side-kick. She had the training—Dee had completed the Company’s CT program before choosing to go the analyst’s route—and that night in Baltimore, Poe’s guard had been about as far down as it could be. The slap said everything Deirdre wanted it to say without needlessly altering Poe’s structural integrity.

  He finished his cocktail. Poe drank draft beer or boilermakers when he was out drinking alone; he often enjoyed an old-fashioned when he was with Dee, who had a way of putting him in a mixed-drink kind of mood.

  He made the short stroll to the motel in an insistent, cold, ambivalent drizzle that was falling as slushy rain but clearly wanted to be sleet when it grew up. The icy droplets pummeled his skin like chilled needles. He rehearsed an apology for his sin the whole way back. He told himself that the mini-dart assault was his penance.

  When he got to their room, Dee was already gone.

  A cab, the woman at the desk said, had come and gone in the storm.

  The handprint on his face from her slap didn’t disappear for six days. He began to miss it the moment he realized it was fading away.

  He didn’t get to talk to Deirdre again for twenty-nine months after he spoke those words to her.

  The twenty-nine months came to an end on the morning of September 11, 2001.

  His mobile phone rang. He was in an extended-stay motel in San Antonio, Texas. Dee sobbed, “Poe, did you see—”

  “I did, baby,” he said. “I did.”

  With the exception of the two lonely Aprils that fell during the shadows of those twenty-nine months, he and Deirdre had talked either in person or by phone every April since McVeigh had committed his atrocity. One way or another, Poe and Deirdre almost always remembered Oklahoma City together.

  A few times they forgot Oklahoma City together.

  The only interludes during which he was ever able to totally obliterate the memories of that day in April 1995 were on those infrequent nights when Poe was blessed with dreamless sleep, or on those even more infrequent nights in some year’s April when he was in bed with Dee and their lust temporarily transcended his pain.

  Otherwise, he remembered Oklahoma City constantly and all too well. He remembered every detail. The commotion and the dust. The dark that seemed to last forever and ever.

  The desperation that preceded the recognition.

  The agony that wouldn’t stop.

  The hatred that wouldn’t go away.

  Christopher Poe had been one of the many federal employees trapped inside the Murrah Federal Building.

  Deirdre had been part of the first wave of counterterrorism analysts to hit the red Oklahoma dirt later that evening. Her job was to make sense of what had happened that day.

  She was still doing that job.

  “This isn’t fair to Jerry,” she said to Poe in the funky bar in Philly. “What we’re doing.”

  Dee’s words froze Poe. His drink hovered halfway between the bar top and his mouth. He waited for her to continue.

  “I felt so guilty last month. When you were in the District. We shouldn’t have . . .”

  She tilted her tumbler high, finishing her drink. Deirdre drank her scotch from the well. She couldn’t have picked out the finest single malt in a blind tasting any more than she could have selected the best potential husband out of a lineup of available men.

  Deirdre’s wounds weren’t as visible as Poe’s, but she had not arrived in his life without scars.

  Poe could have chosen to be argumentative with Dee about whether or not they were being fair to Jerry. Or he could have been coy with her. But Poe didn’t possess the necessary will, not with Dee. He tried to save his manipulative talents—they were not unsubstantial—for the job. In his heart, he knew that the two preciou
s late afternoon hours they’d stolen together in the hotel on Connecticut Avenue the previous month had changed nothing, one way or another.

  “Probably not,” he admitted, granting Dee the point about ultimate fairness to Jerry. “But for us it’s usually only once a year, baby, if we’re lucky.”

  Poe had always been prone to rationalization. He was honest with himself about most things; if pressed, he would have included the rationalizing tendency on an inventory of his personal flaws.

  He didn’t have to remind Dee that he wished they could be together more often than once a year, or that he hoped the recent tryst in D.C. was portent, not anomaly. She knew all that.

  But Dee refused to believe that Poe’s professed relationship desire was anything more than a pipe dream. She armored herself with that diminution. She’d written in the journal she kept hidden from all that Poe’s affection for her was “Tinkerbell love.”

  Someplace buried deep inside she suspected how he felt about her. When her guard sank low and she got in touch with that place—it was middle-of-the-night territory—she felt more conflicting loyalties than a tribal chieftain on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

  “Well,” Deirdre said, “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight. Not this whole weekend, Poe.”

  She seemed oblivious to how epic her pronouncement was. She spoke as though she was telling him she had decided not to have pickles on her burger.

  The monumentality was not lost on Poe. He actually gasped at her words. He checked the reflection of her face in the mirror behind the bar to see if she was sincere. He had to tilt his head a little to see her expression between the neck of the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and the neck of the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He thought she looked resolute. “You’re not kidding, are you? Dee?”