The Siege

by Stephen White

  “Hey, if it was our job to track down every student who didn’t sleep in his room and missed a meeting, we’d do nothing else with our time.”

  “That’s a fact. Where did you leave it with the master?”

  “I said we’d coordinate an attempt to locate with the New Haven Police. But that’s it for now. He recognizes the limits of what we can do.”

  “Sounds good. Get the kid’s description out, run the ATL. Get Yale Security up to speed, too. You have contact information for the kid? Parents? Family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

  “Should have thought of that. I’ll check.”

  “Roommate?”

  The officer shakes his head. “Got all his suitemates’ cell numbers. Five of them. But he lives in a single.” He pauses. “We don’t get lists, do we? I mean unofficially. Of the taps?”

  “From the societies? Hell, no. We don’t.” The supervisor grins as he adds, “And that’s probably a good thing. Keep me posted. But I think the kid will surface as soon as he wakes up.”

  The officer turns to leave.

  “Wait. See if the kid has a car registered on campus. Check the lot where he’s supposed to park, see if the car is there. If we can show he’s gone off somewhere, that should end all this. And what the hell, get one of our patrols to eyeball the tombs. See if there’s anything unusual going on.”

  “Boss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How could you tell?”

  The shift supervisor chuckles at the question.

  He doesn’t know it will be the last laugh he will enjoy for a long time.

  Dee and Poe

  “Huh,” Deirdre said. She was sitting up in the hotel bed, her BlackBerry in her hands.

  They’d made it till morning. They’d each kept their promise.

  She’d slept with him. He hadn’t touched her sexually.

  “What?” Poe asked. He had curled his body close to hers when she sat up, so he could imprint a fresh variation of her scent in some primitive structure in his brain. A sweet and savory aroma from above her left hipbone was his current fascination. He was torn about lifting his eyelids. He wasn’t eager to acknowledge the beginning of the day, but he was considering the possibility that if he opened his eyes right then he might be looking up at the sublime line that her jawbone made as it became her chin.

  The light filtering through her morning hair going every which way would be a most welcome bonus.

  That he had something worth waking up for didn’t happen often for Poe.

  He stole a glance at the clock. 9:16. He’d woken after 9:02. For Poe, since 1995, that unremarkable occurrence happened only when he was sharing a bed with Dee.

  “The secretary of the army’s kid is missing,” Deirdre said.

  Poe wasn’t really interested. But he liked hearing her talk. A little Debussy in the morning. “How long?” he asked absently.

  “Just overnight, they think. They expected to hear from him this morning, but he didn’t show, or call, I guess. No cell contact. Nothing.”

  “I hear it happens in the best families,” Poe said, hoping they could talk about something else entirely. Or nothing at all.

  She flicked his temple with her index finger. Hard. “This isn’t a joke, Poe.”

  “Ouch. How old is he?”

  “College. Twenty-one.”

  He made a face that she couldn’t see. “He’s an adult. So . . . What? Why are—What are—Why the hell are you getting an email about this?”

  She leaned across his body, forcing him onto his back. Her breasts were resting on his abdomen. “You think . . . that maybe it’s because we’re involved in two wars and it’s the secretary of the army’s kid?”

  He was hoping the question was rhetorical. He was sufficiently distracted by Dee’s boobs on his belly that he wasn’t sure he could come up with a satisfactory answer.

  They’d argued only once about the nature of the current Iraq war—the night of that debate they had been perched on stools in Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge in New Orleans during the last April before Katrina and Rita. Dee and Poe didn’t begin bickering about Iraq that evening until after they had resolved a dispute about whether or not the presence of washers and dryers in the back room enhanced or diminished Checkpoint Charlie’s—that was the previous night’s aging saloon—credentials as a dive bar. The consensus they reached was that the presence of laundry facilities was no more a dive-bar disqualifier than a beat-up shuffleboard table would be.

  The Iraq war debate was not so easily settled. Their gradual inebriation, inevitable in the circumstances, didn’t help the process.

  They agreed to let it go.

  About the war, Dee had been pro. Poe had been con.

  Poe stated what to him was obvious. “Your missing kid? He’s twenty-one. He’s in college. Jesus.” He closed his eyes and pulled her all the way onto him, maximizing the contact between his skin and hers. He inhaled more of Dee’s musk. He was determined to restart his day a little later. And maybe even better.

  He had begun to allow himself a glimmer of hope that Dee would yield on her no-sex pledge. He was certain that after a few more seconds of intimate contact the most prominent indicator of the state of his autonomic nervous system was going to cast its vote in an indubitable fashion.

  “Huh,” she said, as her BlackBerry vibrated once more.

  She sat up, again. Grabbed it.

  He leaned into her, again. Inhaled, again.

  His hope began fading along with his erection.

  They walked to a breakfast-lunch place that was not much wider than the corridor in their hotel. The diner wasn’t far from the bar where they’d been drinking the night before. Poe had scoped out the location on the walk back to their room.

  The bald guy at the griddle and the two waitresses had probably worked there since the waning days of Vietnam. The storefront had a ten-seat counter, a couple of booths, and five tables—two four-tops and three deuces. Four burners and a wide griddle. An old Bunn coffeemaker. A three-tap soda fountain. It was an eggs and toast, pancakes kind of place. A breakfast-always-served kind of place. A definite no-latte zone. At lunch, it’d be burgers and french dips and turkey sandwiches. Disappointing cheesesteaks. Grilled cheese, tuna salad, iceberg lettuce.

  The fryer was dead. A penciled, thumbtacked sign on the wall behind the defunct machine read, “R.I.P., Halloween 1995.” That meant well over a decade of chips, not fries, with the burgers.

  The establishment was the kind of endangered species that was disappearing from urban habitats. There was no public clamor for federal protection programs for either diners or greasy spoons. Poe considered that a crime.

  They grabbed the only open deuce and ordered without menus. Deirdre ordered scrambled eggs—three whites, one yolk—dry, and wheat toast, dry. And tea. Poe ordered three eggs up and runny, hash browns, and all the varieties of processed pig the short order guy could fit on a single plate. With two english muffins. And a short stack. Extra butter. Coffee. OJ.

  The waitress turned her head toward the griddle and monotoned, “Three beat, dry, hold two eyes. One triple triple suicide, sunny and runny, with a short stack.”

  Poe and Deirdre had each missed a morning meeting at the Counterterrorism Coordination Conference they were attending at the downtown Federal Building. But they were scheduled to attend different early sessions, so she hoped none of their colleagues would notice their mutual absence and connect the dots.

  Poe didn’t care if anyone noticed. He had grown indifferent to dot-connecting when it didn’t involve his job responsibilities. Since he had no personal responsibilities, and his professional responsibilities were circumscribed, he didn’t spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder for the presence of people who might be predisposed to gossip.

  “Huh,” she said. She was focused on her BlackBerry once again.

  He was reading the sports page of The Philadelphia Inquirer while tr
ying to keep his fingertips out of a syrup spill that had drenched the lower edge of the page during an earlier reader’s interlude with the paper. The 76ers were showing some end-of-season life. Who knew? He felt like talking sports, but it wasn’t one of Dee’s things. He respected that.

  “Army kid showed up?” he guessed.

  “No. Another kid’s gone missing. Same college. Same time frame.”

  He lowered the Inquirer. With some tease in his voice, he said, “You’re in the loop for some amazing trivia, little lady, aren’t you? Do you get stuff like this all day long? You do, don’t you? I knew it. Do they cover‚ like, all colleges, or do they only send you stuff from the best schools? Part of me is thinking, I’m so sorry. Part of me is thinking, Damn, you have become somebody—they even send you all the gossipy shit.”

  She liked that he’d noticed.

  Deirdre was a near star in the Agency, one of the rising counterintelligence thinkers of the day, or at least of the moment. Shortly after 9/11 she wrote some provocative assessments of the global terrorism big picture, of the resiliency and patience of the Islamic extremist mind, of the reality that Muslims, like Christians, are defined more by their differences with each other than by their similarities. She continued to generate ideas important people remained interested in hearing. She was one of the analysts who got routine summonses to cross the threshold inside Langley to brief the DDIs. Her actual words found their way into the PDB and into the NIE.

  Dee’s career had upside.

  Poe sipped his coffee. The coffee was bad, only a smidge shy of foul. It was thin and bitter. But it was hot. He sipped some more. With his voice full of affection, he said, “And the Company cares about any of this . . . why? If it’s anything, it’s grunt work. Don’t you guys have like an entire planet to worry about?”

  Dee wrinkled her nose at him instead of answering. Poe lifted the paper again. He moved on to a story about what spring training injuries had done to the depth in the Phillies’ bullpen. Poe didn’t even like the Phillies.

  She leaned forward. Lowered her voice to a whisper. She said, “It’s Priscilla Post’s son.”

  If Poe ignored the lyrics and focused only on the melody, the sounds he heard were like the first notes of a ballad to him. He looked over the top of the page at Dee. “The new justice nominee? Yes?”

  “One and the same. The new nominee for the Supreme Court.”

  He allowed himself a barely restrained self-congratulatory fist pump for his current-events acumen.

  She didn’t share his oversized sense of accomplishment. She opened her eyes wide and held up one index finger.

  Poe thought she was pointing at the ceiling. He looked up.

  It turned out she had been counting, not pointing. She said, “One, secretary of the army’s kid.” She extended her middle finger as well. “Two, United States Supreme Court nominee’s kid.” She raised her eyebrows in punctuation.

  Poe was starting to find all the facial expression kind of hot.

  “Huh,” he said, considering the actual news value of what she reported. Coincidence? Probably, he thought, but . . . He sat up straighter, pulled out his BlackBerry. Powered it up. The first thing he did was check the time. 11:52. His message screen came alive. He started thumbing buttons, nodding his head in an exaggerated bobble-head motion as he scrolled down, hoping to hear her laugh.

  She didn’t laugh. “You got it, too?” she said.

  “I did indeed. What are the odds of that? You and I on the same intel list? And . . . it appears my humble little Bureau email is, well, better . . . than your fancy Company email. Mine says there’s a possible third kid involved. Parents need to reach him, can’t. The college master, whatever the hell that is, has been looking for him, too. They all want to tell him that his sister . . . or his grandfather? . . . has died. That’s an important distinction, you would think the family would have pinned that fact down a little better before raising all this commotion.” He finished the last gulp of coffee in his mug. “All in all, many more details than my brain can deal with right at this moment. Maybe later on, after I take a run and clear my head, this will seem more coherent. And maybe even . . . I don’t know . . . important.”

  He smiled at her because he wanted her to know he was happy to be having breakfast with her.

  “Is the kid’s family connected? The third kid? Like the other two?” Dee asked. She was doing what came naturally to her, trying to draw a straight line through all the data, including Poe’s latest itinerant ramblings.

  He shook his head. “Got nothing on that, Barbara Lou. But I will keep you posted.” He didn’t call her Barbara Lou often—it was a made-up name that had originally belonged to his momma’s best friend during the few years his family had spent in Oxford, Mississippi—but when he did call her Barbara Lou, he could usually count on a smile in return. Not that time, though. Dee was being serious.

  He put his BlackBerry facedown on the table.

  Their food arrived. The waitress—the one of the two who were wearing wigs; the thing was cockeyed a few degrees—splashed more bitter coffee into his mug.

  “Anything else, hon?” she asked Poe.

  Poe winked at her, shook his head.

  Poe was enough of a player in the Bureau to be included in the occasional tangential email loop, but he knew that the presence of his name on whatever distribution list it was on existed solely so that the people who controlled access to the raw data could use him for stain-resistant fabric to cover their asses, should the need arise.

  Or when the need arose.

  Despite the fact that someone in the FBI had thought to alert him about the overnight news from New Haven, Poe remained disinclined to give the situation of the three barely missing kids much thought.

  His initial assessment was that it was way too concrete a set of facts that involved much too high-profile people, a combination that placed it, by definition, far outside his investigatory purview. At the end of almost all days that was a state of affairs that was just fine with him. Poe had long before stopped seeking to impress.

  Early in his career he had earned a faster-than-usual climb up the Bureau’s hierarchical career ladder. That climb had just begun to accelerate in 1995 when it had been almost fatally interrupted by Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols in Oklahoma City. Whatever might have been left of Poe’s ascent had ground to a screeching halt six years later, the day he had accepted an invitation to head the elite—ha!—counterterrorism unit that he had been shepherding since months after 9/11.

  Special Agent Christopher Lance Poe was the first and thus far only leader of a Special Investigations unit that had been foisted on an incredibly stressed and most reluctant FBI by the micromanaging United States Congress in the go-get-’em days after the Twin Towers fell. The role of the unit that Congress legislated into existence—initially robust in size and budget, it had shrunk to the point that it included only Poe; his partner and friend, Special Agent Kelli Moon, who was currently on a maternity leave from which Poe didn’t expect her to return; and one admin aide back in headquarters in the District—was to examine and investigate low-probability, high-risk terror scenarios that had been brought to the attention of the Bureau by various sources, but usually by citizens.

  Average Joes.

  Basically, Poe’s unit was charged with ferreting out truth from fiction in regard to far-fetched plots that had potentially mind-boggling consequences.

  Congress was determined that Poe’s squad should investigate the types of things that the FBI had proven unfortunately culpable of ignoring in the recent past.

  Like the Saudi man who wanted to learn how to fly jetliners but seemed uninterested in learning how to land them.

  That, of course, was prior to September 11.

  Since? Like the guy with the Geiger counter who was certain his next-door neighbor was building a thermonuclear device in his three-car garage.

  It turned out that one involved improperly stored medical waste.

&nb
sp; Like the levee inspector who thought that someone was drilling a tunnel through a dike so that he could empty Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans.

  Poe discovered the suspect indeed had nefarious intent, but alas, no engineering skill. That one was pre-Katrina, pre-Rita.

  Like the spelunker who’d discovered a new cave route that ran perilously close to the back side of the air force installation inside Cheyenne Mountain. The caver had also discovered a blasting cap and some dynamite on the route in.

  Poe never figured out an answer to that riddle.

  And there was the guy overheard bragging at his next-door neighbor’s barbecue about an idea to send hundreds of weather balloons aloft ferrying incendiary devices into the tinder-dry forests of the interior mountain west.

  Poe and Kelli had spent five weeks in Boise, Idaho, examining the plausibility of that risk. The loudmouthed guy who really liked spare-ribs and talked way too much when he was drinking was just completing the first third of a decade-long holiday at taxpayer expense in a federal prison in the great state of Kansas.

  Friends of Poe’s in the Bureau—a club of manageable size—called Poe’s little unit the “Bogeyman Squad.”

  Others, greater in number and less fond of Poe, called the unit more uncharitable things.

  The reality was that Poe chased a lot of ghosts. Poe never denied it. A microscopic percentage of his cases proved to have any merit.

  Dee was occasionally guilty of teasing Poe about his job. She’d been known to call him the “prince of catastrophe.” Her teasing was always friendly. Philosophically, Deirdre was in Poe’s camp—she was one of the most vocal advocates in the counterintelligence community for investing resources not in preventing repetitions of the most recent assaults, but instead in what she called the “evolution of terror.”

  She had coined the phrase in a counterterrorism resources strategy paper she had written in 2002, and if there was one thing the intelligence bureaucracy admired it was the author of an enduring sound bite that they might be able to use to increase their annual budget.