The Siege

by Stephen White

  One of the other things I discovered before I meandered through Airport Security was that my new friends, Deirdre and Poe, were no longer taking my calls. That disappointed me. I had come to like them both.

  I flipped through a couple of newspapers and watched a little TV while I drank a decompression pint in a Washington Dulles Airport bar. Compared to MIA, Dulles is, well, dull. All in all, I would have been much happier to be flying back out of Miami. I could have used a dose of pan-cultural Latin verve right about then.

  Some Cuban food, too. Some of that. And a café Cubano or two.

  I read the Afghan twins’ biographies for the first time while I nursed my beer.

  The narrative they’d written and sent to the press was long and rambling, but I found the story of their lives, until the end, oddly American in terms of hopefulness and opportunity.

  They were raised in a small, impoverished village outside Kandahar. Their father was a teacher. Their uncle, who emigrated to Paris, had become an engineer. He paid for the education of his three nephews. The twin I met in the Gulfstream was educated in England and, later, in the United States, at Yale. His brother, the one who surrendered outside the tomb, was educated in Egypt and Germany.

  The twins returned to Afghanistan, to Kabul, after the fall of the Taliban in 2003. Using the entrepreneurial and engineering skills they’d acquired in the West, they started a company that constructed mobile phone towers. In 2005 they sold their business to one of the mobile phone operating companies and returned to Kandahar. With the profits from their business sale, they became investors, primarily in the Chinese stock market.

  They were successful investors. The day their sister was married in the village where they were born, the twins were wealthy young men, even by Western standards.

  The twins maintained that they had been unaware of a firefight between the Taliban and U.S. and Afghan government forces that had taken place the night before the wedding a few kilometers outside the village. They had no idea that the United States government had developed intelligence overnight, human and electronic, indicating that after the skirmish, Taliban fighters had retreated into hiding in the compound where the wedding celebration was scheduled.

  On direct order from Command, a single one-thousand-pound BLU-110 was dropped on the compound.

  The twins survived the bombing without serious injury.

  By their own report, they began planning the siege at Book & Snake one month later.

  They did their own research. Used their own funds. They involved a “handful” of other Afghans for specific tasks, bringing them into the plot for only a few days right before the siege began. They made certain that everyone who assisted them was safely back out of the country before the ongoing siege was discovered by the authorities.

  The country was already ripping into the open wounds of the tragedy. Columnists and pundits and bloggers were demanding to know what the parents of the surviving hostages had revealed to save their children.

  Why was the secretary of the army’s kid spared while the son of a bus driver from Fargo was murdered? What did they want from the Supreme Court nominee?

  Why had the twin terrorists surrendered? Was that their plan all along?

  I had some personal thoughts on that one—my bias was that the two brothers saw pluses and minuses to the alternative outcomes. From a terrorism point of view, a final conflagration would have had a clichéd finality to it. But surviving gave the men access to a big microphone in a society that until recently had prided itself on judicial transparency.

  Terrorists exploit vulnerabilities. The transparency of our justice system was one of our nation’s great strengths. And the transparency of our justice system made it one of our most explicit vulnerabilities. I thought the surrender was evidence of an overtly political motive. The murderous twins were doing what Karl Rove had always preached: Go after the strength.

  The public was acting as though there were simple answers to all the complexities of the siege in New Haven. All I knew for sure was that the speculation would be endless and that it would cause more division.

  That was true because we, as a country, would let it divide us. We actually seemed to welcome the chasms. I didn’t get that.

  The photographs I found in the newspapers from the quasi-crash of the jet at the airport in New Haven were overexposed and grainy. I guessed they were cell phone shots from hundreds of yards away. I saw myself in one picture. I only knew it was me because I knew it was me. Standing in the open door of the jet, with my white shirt and tie, I looked like a ticket agent who had snuck on board the plane to have his picture taken.

  Although the photo had been snapped while I was asking Poe if he had those handcuffs of his, a government official identified the person in the shot as Carlos.

  I couldn’t imagine Carlos was thrilled. The pic wasn’t flattering.

  I promised myself I really would lose those twenty pounds.

  Deirdre and Poe had managed to stay out of the news. The photograph I saw at the crash site included Poe, but he was smart enough to keep the hood of his sweatshirt up while he was pacing outside the Gulfstream. Not even his mother would have recognized him.

  Deirdre never drew any attention to herself. She was that kind of lady.

  I was beginning to think I was going to come out of the weekend with my anonymity preserved. That was the way the U.S. government preferred it, and it was the way that I preferred it.

  It turned out I had a middle seat near the rear lavatory on the flight to LAX. I crossed my arms, yielding the armrests to my seatmates. I was okay with all of it.

  The Calderón kids were alive.

  I didn’t think anything I’d done over the weekend had cost any other kid his or her life.

  Maybe I’d been duped by Ann Calderón in some way I didn’t understand. I could live with that. It was the proverbial end of the day, and I was feeling good about myself.

  MAY 2, FRIDAY

  Sam

  A week and a half after the end of the siege, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that the damn economic collapse had truly changed almost everything for everyone who wasn’t sick rich. That included me and Carmen.

  Once my suspension was over in Boulder, the plan was for Carmen to look for a law enforcement gig along the Front Range in Colorado and for me to look for one along the South Coast in California. We’d weigh our offers and decide whether to live with our new baby in the Coastal West or the Mountain West.

  Carmen knew I wanted to be in Colorado because it would be less disruptive to Simon. If all things ended up looking equal, the where-we-would-live decision would tilt toward the eastern slope of the Continental Divide.

  But every jurisdiction we contacted in both states was cutting back on hiring. I couldn’t get an interview in California, let alone a job offer. Carmen’s doctor-ordered bed rest had been extended—her pregnancy had been officially reclassified as high-risk—so she couldn’t come to Colorado to interview for anything.

  Her sick pay was rapidly running out. We needed money.

  I went back to work at my old job with the department in Boulder. Both my boss and my partner were happy to have me. My captain helped me arrange my schedule so that I could fly to the coast to be with Carmen on my days off.

  Carmen’s sister had lost her job as a bookkeeper with a big box retailer in San Juan Capistrano. She was keeping an eye on Carmen between my visits to California. Carmen and I were helping pay her mortgage so she wouldn’t lose her condo in El Toro.

  The value of the condo was dropping like a rock. Someday soon, she would swallow hard and walk away from it. Until then, we’d help.

  Being separated from my pregnant girlfriend wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but I had serious financial and parental responsibilities in two states and no other way to meet them. Having jobs in difficult circumstances was better than not having jobs at all.

  Carmen and I knew plenty of people in worse situations than us. Some were poor. />
  Some had been rich.

  The Calderóns had contacted Carmen and extended us both job offers—security gigs with their company, or positions in some new field if we were willing to train. The offers were contingent on us moving to Florida. Or Argentina.

  Carmen, of course, didn’t understand the reason for her daughter’s future in-laws’ generosity. She assumed it was a family gesture, with a capital F.

  When I let my gaze settle over the economic horizon, I knew that a time might come when we would have to consider the opportunity. One night back home, after comparing our likely income with our joint expenses, I did some serious examination of our employment options. I sat on my son’s bed in my beat-up little house in North Boulder, spinning his cheap plastic globe.

  I was amazed at the geography of it all. Buenos Aires was as far east as Greenland. As far south as the Cape of Good Hope.

  I knew Argentina was far away. But damn . . . I had no idea it was that far away. I began to get intrigued. I wondered if my brain could actually learn Spanish.

  A whispered voice was telling me I would like Buenos Aires.

  I had gone back to work in Boulder during the week after the siege. From my first minute back on the job, I kept my head down. I tried my best to be a good cop. I knew I had smart enemies in my own police department, and damn smart enemies in the Boulder DA’s office. I had to be vigilant.

  I wasn’t sleeping well. I took no comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone in my insomnia. As a nation, we had just watched a slow parade of tortured parents bury their murdered children. Day by day. One by one. Tear by tear.

  Some New Haven police lieutenant named Haden Moody seemed to show up on every damn news program on television. He became the color commentator of our despair.

  I got tired of the guy fast.

  The fate of the two terrorists, and their unnamed comrades, became a national obsession. That was an obsession I didn’t share. Through their attorneys, the terrorists made clear they were seeking a public trial. To ensure justice? Hardly. A big show would provide an opportunity for them to exploit our democratic system for their propaganda goals.

  As difficult as it was for me, I tried to stay cognizant of the fact that what had happened at Book & Snake had little to do with the two killers. And I knew that whatever happened to them next would have little to do with justice. The national focus on the Afghan twins was, in truth, a distraction. Unfortunately, it was one that I feared my government welcomed.

  There was plenty of speculation in the media, of course. I read everything I could find online regarding the theories—not to mention the accusations—about all the damaging information that the parents of the kids in Book & Snake might or might not have traded for their children’s safety. The consensus seemed to be that, whether the government was willing to admit it or not, a lot of potential ammunition had changed hands.

  The parents’ ethics during the siege were debated by strangers who felt that in the parents’ shoes they would have acted more honorably. The parents’ patriotism, or lack thereof, was attacked by people paid to have opinions about such things. The local cops and the FBI were criticized by somebody for just about everything they’d done.

  I canceled my cable package just so I would never again have to watch cable news. Also because I could no longer afford it. The money I saved on the monthly cable bill was helping to fund my trips to see Carmen in California.

  I missed SportsCenter pretty much immediately. Although I also cut down my stool time at the West End Tavern, I was going to have to find a sports bars if I wanted to watch the Stanley Cup. That was a bummer.

  I was thinking that if the Pioneers from DU and the Bulldogs from Yale ever scheduled a hockey game at the Whale in New Haven, I would figure out a way to get there before they dropped the first puck. That would be one game I wanted both teams to win.

  Simon showed me how to set Google to alert me if any reporter on the entire planet wrote the words “Book & Snake” and “Canary Islands” in the same single news story. I hadn’t known Google would do that. I thought it was nice of them until I realized, too late, that Google knew my secret: I was someone who cared if the words “Book & Snake” and “Canary Islands” showed up in the same news story.

  I had a new worry. Could Google be trusted?

  For my taste, there was far too little debate about how vulnerable we as a nation remained to inventive forms of terrorism. Or about how many inadvertent enemies we created, not through the military moves we made that were essential to guarantee our national safety, but through the occasional carelessness with which we projected our might, and the often unnecessary way we packaged arrogance along with our power.

  On the second Friday after the siege, I decided to run a hypothetical I couldn’t get out of my head by my friend Alan Gregory. He’s the psychologist.

  I was waiting for him in downtown Boulder when he finished his last appointment late on Friday afternoon. He’d offered to drive me to DIA for my Southwest flight to John Wayne for a couple of days with Carmen.

  She’d already let me know the weekend plans: I was apparently going to be giving her a lot of foot rubs. That was going to be a new activity for me. She’d asked me if I knew my pressure points. I didn’t, but I told her I did. On the way to Alan’s office, I stopped at the main library and got a book on it. I learned something immediately: I hadn’t known that rubbing feet was called “reflexology.”

  Or at least it was in Boulder. I would study my pressure point technique on the plane.

  Once I had Carmen’s feet as relaxed as I could make them, I planned to tell her about my weekend in New Haven and the reason we were being offered fine jobs in Argentina.

  I’d gone early to meet Alan so that we would have some time to talk before we headed to the airport. The weather was glorious. The West End of Pearl was beginning to fall into the shadows of the Rockies and the streets had just enough life on them to be urban and interesting.

  I suggested a beer. Alan and I walked the short distance from his office on Walnut to Pearl Street. He thought I was on the way to visit my favorite stool at the West End Tavern, but I kept on going until we got to another restaurant nearby. Centro. The place was lively and, more to the point, Latin. Not Miami Airport lively, and not Miami neighborhood Latin, but it had enough of the right vibe to meet my simple needs that evening. The happy hour crowd hadn’t had quite enough time to get drunk, which also was good news. We found two seats at the bar. Alan bought me a Red Stripe. He ordered some Mexican soda he said he liked.

  I didn’t believe him. He was drinking soda because he was driving.

  I downed half my beer before I said, “Let’s say a patient of yours tells you that she may have just, you know, inadvertently revealed an important government secret to someone. She tells you there’s a slight chance—one in a gazillion—that somebody, a bad guy, could use the secret to do major damage to our country. With me?”

  “So far,” Alan said.

  “Do you break your code—the doctor/patient privilege thing—and tell the government what your patient said?”

  “Depends,” he said. “Is the danger imminent?”

  “No, not at all. But the potential damage is catastrophic, you know, if the stars line up just the wrong way.”

  He didn’t ponder the nuances of my hypothetical as long as I was thinking he should. He said, “I keep my mouth shut, Sam.” He looked at me hard, his eyes suddenly all earnest. “What’s this about?”

  Something to know about my friend: Alan has never once in his life come across a sleeping dog he has ever allowed to just frigging nap.

  I let him see a sliver of my truth. I said, “I can’t get that thing in New Haven out of my head. The corner those parents were in.”

  He shook his head in parental empathy and overall despair about the Book & Snake siege. “I know what you mean,” he said.

  He didn’t, of course. Know, that is.

  He wasn’t even aware that I’d been t
o Connecticut.

  I had already decided I wasn’t going to go any further with Alan about what had happened in Florida and in New Haven. It’s not that I didn’t trust him with the truth. He was as good at secrets as anyone I’d ever met. But he and I already shared one seriously toxic confidence. I felt the weight of it hanging around my neck in some way, shape, or form almost every day. I was sure he did, too.

  I wasn’t going to burden him with another one that he would have to lug around indefinitely.

  Anyway, he had his hands full with events in his own life.

  A woman walked up behind us at the Centro bar. I didn’t turn to look at her; I thought she was a happy hour patron hoping to earn the bartender’s attention so she could score a cocktail and get working on her buzz.

  She spoke to Alan. “Do you mind if I borrow your friend?”

  I recognized the voice. I turned my head. Deirdre.

  I smiled, well, like an idiot. I hopped to my feet. I introduced them while I tried to comprehend what was happening. Deirdre, Alan. Alan, Deirdre. For Alan’s benefit, I added, “Deirdre’s somebody I met back East. That engagement . . . weekend.”

  She shook his hand. Then she gestured to me with her eyes, indicating she wanted to talk outside.

  I said, “Excuse me, Alan. Just for a minute. This is . . .”

  “We won’t be long,” Deirdre said, rescuing me from my stammer. “Would you please order me one of whatever you’re drinking?”

  “It’s . . . pop,” Alan said in that befuddled way he has.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  She took my hand and led me out onto Pearl Street. We turned right. We were heading in the direction of the Mall, a block away.