The Black Hawk straightened up again, the ground righting itself beneath us where it belonged. Wydell folded his hands, leaned forward. His tongue poked at the corner of his mouth. "Let me lay out the facts," he said. "The pool is rectangular, about forty feet deep, built with five-foot concrete walls and lined with stainless steel. Under the high-density water are spent-fuel rods making up one of the greatest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet." His voice remained steady, but he armed moisture off his brow. "The pool houses ten times more long-lived high-penetrating radioactivity than the reactor core. It holds more cesium-137 than has been deposited by every atmospheric nuclear test ever conducted in this hemisphere. There under the water, it's relatively stable and harmless. If that water goes away, bringing the spent fuel to within a few feet of the surface-"
"Like from an explosion." Despite the night air, my T-shirt was damp where it pressed against the nylon seat.
"Like from an explosion. Then the scenario changes dramatically. That pool would catch fire at north of a thousand degrees Celsius. A fire like that"-he shook his head-"a fire like that cannot be extinguished until the burning's done and the radioactivity released. It would render Southern California uninhabitable for half a million years."
Sever lifted a cell phone from inside one of the Pelican cases and extended it to me.
"So," I said, "you need me to call and talk to him."
Wydell said, "We need you to go in there and deliver this cell phone to him."
At first I thought I'd misheard. "I'll talk to him over the phone, bullhorn, whatever, but I'm not a trained agent. Someone who knows what they're doing should go in. What if I make a mistake? Five hundred thousand years is a long time."
"He made it clear he'll see only you, and it has to be face-to-face. We're out of options here."
When I swallowed, my throat clicked dryly. Why would some terrorist want to see me in person? Would he recognize my face but not my voice? Sever held the phone out to me again and shook it impatiently, but I kept my hands where they were. Wydell took it instead, put it in his lap.
I said, "I thought we don't negotiate with terrorists."
Sever said quietly, "We negotiate with terrorists every day."
Wydell didn't seem to hear him. "Facing this level of destruction? What would you do?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm not the one with the policy."
"Listen," Wydell said, "this guy's holding the cards. You claim you're not with him. That means you're with us. And your part of the mission is to get this phone in his hand. Just give it to him when we call. We've got the top crisis negotiator in the state on scene already. Once we have comms, we'll take it from there."
"What if I can't convince him to take it? What if he blows us all up first?"
Wydell nodded solemnly, pulling at the loose skin below his chin. "I knew your old man. I bet we have a fighting chance, as long as you got a few of his genes."
"He was my stepdad," I said, "so it's a safe bet I didn't."
Wydell's dark brown eyes fixed on me. "Frank Durant was a great man. Stepson or not, that gives you something to live up to."
Instead of taking the phone, I released a shaky sigh and leaned back in my seat. A decision was inevitable. In the relative quiet, reality finally began to sink in, and with it a bone-deep chill. What had I woken into? The dark flew by as we whipped along toward a nuclear plant with a terrorist inside.
I thought about what my stepfather would do. Frank Durant. Seventeen years dead. My hero, if such a word can be used anymore with a straight face.
Chapter 3
Seven years to the day after my father died, I met Frank. He was sitting in our yellow kitchen and had his hand on my mom's knee, and I thought, Fuck him.
My real dad ran his truck into a canyon when I was four, barely old enough to store some hazy recollections. I never had to experience his shortcomings, which were considerable, right down to his. 2 blood alcohol level when they pried the steering wheel out of his rib cage. I could just idealize him, plain and simple. I kept a photo of him framed on my bookshelf. In the picture he's wearing a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes cuffed in, his hair's short, and he's smiling. Down at the bottom, almost lost behind the frame, a Camel sticks out from the fork of his fingers.
When I came into the kitchen that morning, Frank took his hand off my mom's knee and stood, a weirdly formal gesture. I tapped the tail of my skateboard, jumping it up so I could grab the top truck. He was tall, maybe six-two, with a tapered waist and a tattoo in what looked like Chinese down his forearm.
My mom hopped up, clearing their cups of coffee, her jangly bracelets making a nervous clatter. "Nicky, this is my new friend Frank. He works in the Secret Service, protecting our vice president. Isn't that neat?"
I thought, My new friend? Neat? Where did adults get this shit?
"Doesn't sound so neat to me," I said.
My mom's mouth got thin, but Frank just looked at me evenly and said, "It's not."
He was working out of the Los Angeles Regional Office, the liaison to the protection detail guarding Jasper Caruthers. Caruthers was from Hancock Park, spent a lot of time in L.A. pressing flesh and fund-raising from Hollywood, and when Caruthers was in town, Frank helped coordinate protective movements.
As the weeks passed, he was around more and more. I watched him with my mom on the couch, her bare feet in his lap, or in his truck out front, laughing together at the end of a date. I watched with that odd blend of jealousy and envy. I couldn't remember my mom smiling like that before.
My mom was an elementary-school art teacher-pretty, casual, a touch of hippie. She was what old people would call a character. Callie Horrigan with her bushy ponytail, her paint-spattered men's shirts, her band of freckles across the nose. Her students called her Ms. Callie, and since I'd spent most of my preschool years tagging along, finger-painting and pasting glitter onto pinecones, I'd developed a habit of calling her by her first name, too.
One morning Callie left early for work, and I caught Frank at the table, hair damp from the shower, suit jacket draped over a chair, shirtsleeves pushed back. The first concrete evidence that he'd spent the night. He was drinking from my mom's coffee cup, steam curling up. I poured myself some cornflakes, sat across from him, and ate in silence. My eyes kept drifting to those weird ideograms on his muscular forearm, faded blue beneath the faint blond hair. He watched me for a while, watched my eyes. And then he said, "You're curious what that says?"
" 'I'm a dumb round-eye'?"
He sort of smirked-Frank never laughed, from what I'd seen-and then he sipped his coffee. I slurped my cornflakes. The Garfield clock over the sink ticked away, pivoting eyes and pendulum tail.
Finally, defeated, I asked, "Okay, what's it say?"
He looked down at it, as if reading it for the first time. " Trust No One.'"
I ate some more, my face burning. "My mom know that?"
He nodded. "After Vietnam I was stationed in Okinawa. A couple of us went out and got these. Thought we were real hot shit. Had it all figured out. Idiots." He shook his head. "I learned a lot of lessons the hard way. And this?" He tapped the tattoo. "As a life philosophy? It doesn't serve. Now it's just a reminder of how stupid I am most of the time."
"Still?"
"You tell me."
I cleared my bowl, reserving judgment.
A few months later, Callie and I moved to Frank's house, a two-bedroom bungalow in Glendale. It was tiny but impeccably finished. Frank had laid down the hardwood floors himself. The crown molding he'd put up was razor straight. The books on the floating shelves above the TV were arranged by size.
My mom rushed around adjusting furniture and trying her framed charcoals against various spots on the wall, and Frank grimaced but held his tongue.
I liked him for that.
While she reorganized the refrigerator, I went out back. A porch, a swing, and a small square of grass, summer brown, not big enough to kick a soccer ball on. My bo
xes of stuff were in the other bedroom, but I held one in my lap. Baseball cards, a trophy that had broken at the base, the Punisher's first appearance in Spider-Man, and the photo of my dad. I stared at that loose, happy grin, the cigarette my mom had tried to hide with the thick frame. I heard the creak of the screen door beside me, and there Frank was, looking down at me.
"There will always be a place for your father in this house," he said.
The rest of the night, I stayed in my room, getting used to the space, the furniture, the view from the high rectangular window. I unpacked a little but kept rearranging my stuff among the drawers, like a dog circling before bedding down. I didn't like the brown carpet or where the desk was or the new smell of a new house.
There was a knock, which I assumed was my mom since it was Frank's house.
I was slouched on a beanbag she'd bought for me at a garage sale and re-covered in corduroy. "Yeah?"
Frank came in, looked around. I was expecting him to be mad that I'd put the desk at a slant in the corner, but instead, he said, "What are you scared of?"
I looked at him blankly. He smelled like aftershave.
He pulled his mouth to the side, then rephrased: "What do you want me to not do?"
So I told him. Room off-limits when I'm not here. Don't act daddish. Don't mess with my comic books.
When I was done, he nodded. "I can manage that."
He closed the door behind him, and I thought I'd probably live my whole life and never be that goddamned wise.
Not that Frank was a saint. He was a little jumpy, a touch paranoid. He had double dead bolts on all the doors and an alarm wired to the windows that gave off a low tone from a monitor by his side of the bed. You could only disarm it using the touchpad in the master or a circular key he kept in a waterproof magnetic box adhered inside the garbage disposal where the blades couldn't get it. And nights he'd make me sleep with the window closed, even when my room was baking. "But it's so uncomfortable," I'd say, and he'd say, "Comfort matters. But security matters more."
He kept his service weapon, a Glock, in a gun safe in his closet, the loaded magazine in a hidden location. You'd think an intruder could kill us all before Frank could unlock and load, but my mom and I'd hear the wind rattle the screen door during Carson and a half second later Frank'd walk out of the bedroom, calm as anything, gun held in both hands and aimed at the ground six inches wide of his right foot.
One day I was digging through his steamer trunk in the coat closet and came upon a picture of him from the war. Tiger-stripe fatigues, aiming a Stoner 63 into the middle distance. He had face paint on and wore a squint and his faint smirk, his cheeks stubbled. It looked like something out of one of my comic books. I wondered hard and long about that picture. Was he posing? Not Frank.
I took the picture and hid it in the frame behind the one of my dad.
There were more photos in that trunk, images of Frank's past, but I didn't look through them. Maybe I liked how Frank was mysterious. Maybe I wanted to keep him that way.
They got married in a backyard ceremony with a few friends and some cold-cut platters from the deli. Callie wore one of those awful wedding dresses with the poofy shoulders, but Frank didn't seem to mind. His voice caught once when he was giving his vows, and until that moment it had never struck me that Frank might need anyone or anything.
When he worked late, which was whenever Caruthers was in town, Callie and I'd eat on the back deck. After, in the moth-spotted glow of the porch light, I'd watch her sketch, leaving charcoal smudges on the glass of Crystal Light that went everywhere with her. It always seemed like magic the way the lines and shading suddenly took shape as a bowl of fruit, an old man's face, a woman's bare body. She'd look over and smile at me a touch self-consciously, using the heel of a hand to shove her curly hair out of her eyes. "Isn't this boring?"
I'd just shake my head.
When Kinney and Caruthers were reelected, Frank's responsibilities in the L.A. office increased. Any chance I got, I'd sit in the garage and watch Frank wand down his truck for bugs. I loved listening to him talk on the radio, loved the protocols and call signs. When the vice president came in for a weekend, Frank'd say, "Looks like Firebird's gonna pull a doubleheader at the west nest." It was like something out of a spy movie-just as cool, just as reassuring.
I made the high-school baseball team and became a pretty good utility infielder. I could go the other way and pull for power, and I had a backhanded pickup worthy of a Venezuelan. If I kept on it, I could maybe be a bench player at a Division I, and my grades wouldn't present a recruiting coach any hurdles. The UCLA baseball coach pushed for me, and Callie prepped me endlessly for the SATs. When I opened the acceptance letter my senior year, she pressed a fist to her mouth and turned away so I wouldn't see her crying.
I worked hard, practiced late. Sometimes I'd come home to find Frank sitting in his armchair in the dark, watching a recording of the Zapruder film over and over, memorizing those twenty-six seconds. I'd always slide past him into my room. If it was anyone else, I'd think I'd gone unnoticed.
One night as I sneaked by, he paused the tape. "What do you see?" he asked.
I froze behind him. Lifted my eyes to the familiar rise of grass, the grainy limo, Jackie's pink hat.
"JFK's head getting blown apart?" I said.
He made a sad, thoughtful noise deep in his throat, and I felt like an asshole. He nursed his coffee-Frank loved his coffee. He used to drink bourbon, but he'd stopped drinking after he hooked up with my mom because he knew that the smell upset her.
Instead of continuing to my room, I walked around and sat on the couch. "Why, what do you see?"
"Clint Hill." "Who?"
He pointed. "Secret Service agent on the left front running board of the Queen Mary. The car behind the presidential limousine."
He clicked the remote again, and the limo coasted forward. The silent horror of the two shots, the mist by JFK's face. But this time I didn't watch the president. I watched Clint Hill sprinting toward the still-moving limousine. He leapt but missed his grip on the trunk, then stumbled a few steps behind, refusing to fall. The limo accelerated. Hill lunged again, grabbing on and tugging himself forward, one foot shoving the bumper. He seized the first lady's arm, forcing her down out of view, then pivoted to look back at the motorcade. The image shook in Zapruder's panicked hands, losing the procession. When the lens swung back, Clint Hill had wedged himself against the spare-tire compartment, trying to lie across the president and first lady. His body was rigid, braced to absorb a bullet, and it stayed that way until the limousine vanished under the Triple Underpass.
I'd never noticed him before, yet there he was, and his actions knocked the snot-nosed cynicism out of me.
The screen went black, and Frank turned off the TV. We sat in the darkness tinged with English Leather and Maxwell House.
"I was a kid when this happened," he said.
"You were older than I am now."
"I was a kid," he repeated in that same distant voice. "They got Jack, then Bobby and Martin Luther King."
"The same guys?" I asked.
His lips pursed, maybe amused, maybe distressed at my daftness. "No, not the same guys. But JFK had a protection detail. That"-he angled a finger at the dark screen-"can never happen again."
"Is that what you think about when you guard Caruthers?"
His chin rustled against his collar. "Every minute."
"Is he worth dying for?"
Frank thought about that awhile. "He is. If people can shoot our elected leaders, we don't have much of a democracy. I protect the Man to protect my vote. And everyone else's. Even the fifty percent of eligibles who don't bother showing up come poll time. But Caruthers, Caruthers is a little different. I respect him."
"Why?"
He took another slow sip of coffee. "Hard to say, really. It's not about platform or policies, though both matter. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people don't damn themselves in an instant, but
with a thousand small decisions. One compromised choice leads to six more, and it goes from there. They decide they can cut a corner, or the ends justify the means, and then since they decided it once, they decide it again. All you can rely on is a man's character. Not what he says or promises, but what he does. What you do is the measure of a man. And Jasper Caruthers, I guess I like what he does. He could be a great man. He's got a shot at being president, too."
"What makes a great man?"
"The man himself." Frank smiled that half smile, but it faded when he took in my expression. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
He studied me. "We say what needs to be said in this family."
It was the first time he'd ever called us a family. My mouth twitched a few times as I tried to figure out what I wanted to say without embarrassing myself. "Why do you think Caruthers's life is worth more than yours? That just seems stupid to me."
He nodded gravely. "No one's life is worth more than anyone else's, not even the vice president's. Caruthers does what he does to serve the country, and this is what I do."
He got up, set down his empty coffee cup, and I rose to head back to my room. As Frank passed, he hugged me. I was stunned-my arms didn't rise from my sides. His shirt was warm with body heat, and I could smell the aftershave mixed with the sweat of a day's work, and I felt my throat close though I didn't know why.
He said, "Don't worry," then wiped his mouth and walked down the hall to his and my mom's bedroom.
That night I moved his picture in front of my dad's in the frame on my nightstand. He didn't say anything about it.
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