The Day Before Midnight

There was silence. He waited as long as he could, until he could wait no longer.

“Somehow,” he said to her finally, “it was personal with him. That is, between him and me. It was intimate and personal. That’s why you were so important to him. Megan, I have to go where I’m scared to go, and look at what I don’t want to see. You’ve got to take me there, and be strong, and make me see the truth. It’s the most important thing you’ll ever do, do you see?”

Too much emotion tainted his voice, and he struggled to hold the words in proper register. But the words were treacherous; they broke and splattered on him and odd high notes, strange sounds of anxiety, splashed through them. He felt as if he were weeping, but he could feel no tears.

Megan was still silent.

Then she said, “Peter, there are men here. All around me. Don’t make me talk in front of them. Can’t we do it later, in private? I’ll tell you everything in private.”

“There isn’t time. There’s a question I have to ask you. Only one.”

He waited, but she wouldn’t help him.

In the silence, he thought, the sex with Ari. He was good at it? He was really good at it? He was better than me?

Stop it, he told himself.

He’d played the whole thing to get here, and now that he was here, he had a moment’s terror.

You can look at anything, he told himself. You’re a realist. That’s your strength. That’s how you’ll beat him.

“Tell me if I’m not right. I’ve figured out how his mind works. I can read him now. I get him now.”

“Ari?”

“Ari! Ari’s nothing, Megan. Ari’s a tool, a big stud for hire. No, it’s this other guy. He’s the one that’s pulling the strings. Megan, there was a night, wasn’t there, where you passed out? Where you had too much to drink or you were tired or something? Some night where you can’t quite account for four or five hours? In fact, you probably haven’t really acknowledged it in your own mind, because at some subconscious level you’re not quite ready to face it. But wasn’t there a night when … when you can’t really remember what happened?”

Her silence grew, and as it grew it confirmed his suspicion.

Finally, she said, “He said it was the champagne. That I had too much and that I passed out. We had gone to an inn in Middleburg, Virginia, for a ‘romantic weekend’ at a very lovely inn. But I passed out Saturday night. When I awakened I could tell … that it had been romantic.”

Peter nodded.

“When was this?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“After—?”

“Yes. After I had been with you. I went straight from you to Ari. I’m sorry.”

“And that was the last time you saw him?”

“Yes. I took some pictures of some documents you had. I just gave him the camera. We didn’t use the usual routine. And then we went to this inn. And the next morning he left me. Said he was returning to his wife in Israel. He just walked away from me. I cried, I begged. He hit me. Peter, he hit me, and then he just left me in that place, as if I didn’t matter to him.”

You didn’t.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“Peter, is that all? You called—”

“Megan, you should be all right. That lawyer, he’ll get you a walk. Those FBI guys, throw a little charm at them. They’ll melt. They’re men, after all. And when this is over—”

“Peter, God, it’s dangerous out there, isn’t it? But you’re safe, aren’t you? You’re back, far away from the guns, aren’t you? You’re not going to do anything stup—”

He was lost now. He felt it slipping away. He saw her in the room, in the dark, drugged, helpless, and unresistant. He wondered what they used and how compliant she’d been. He knew she’d been utterly, totally compliant. He felt her shame and debasement. The image of it brought the tears at last from him, and he felt himself begin to sob like an idiot child.

“Baby, when it’s over,” he heard himself saying, “we can go to New York. We can have another life, I swear it. We can move to New York so you can be with the people you like and I can teach, maybe, or—”

He could hear her crying too.

“I miss you so,” she was saying. “Peter, I’m so sorry this all happened, I’m so, so sorry and be careful, please, stay away from the—”

“Dr. Thiokol!”

It was the hard voice of Dick Puller punching at him through his grief.

“Megan, I have to go.”

“Thiokol! I need you ASAP!”

“I have to go,” he repeated. And then he said, “Thanks, I think I can take the guy now,” and hung up. The sports coat seemed to constrict him strangely and he pulled it off and threw it in the corner. He felt much better.

He turned, tried not to see the men staring at him in amazement, and discovered Puller bearing down on him like a juggernaut, waving a photograph.

“Peter, look at this,” said Puller. “Tell me if it’s what I think it is.”

Peter blinked to clear his eyes, felt like a fool, an idiot, but noted that Puller was far too intense to notice. As his focus sharpened he saw what he was supposed to see. It appeared to be an extremely high aerial view of South Mountain; he could see the launch control facility roof, the barracks roof, the wire perimeter, and the silo hatch, and the access road leading up. Yet there was something subtly wrong with the photo, in the relationship, say, between the buildings, the angles of the siting, in a hundred little areas. He concentrated, but couldn’t quite;—

“It just came over from CIA. They got it with a Blackbird three months ago over Novomoskovsk near Dnepropetrovsk where Spetsnaz has its big training camp. Damn, if they’d have only read it then. If they were sharp in that damned agency, instead of—”

But Peter just stared at the picture.

“It’s where they prepped the mission. It’s their rehearsal site.”

Peter stared hard.

Something’s wrong with it, he thought. He saw what looked like diagonal slashes in the earth, or sergeant’s chevrons, or a giant tire track rolling across the mountaintop.

“What are these marks? I see these marks in the snow, what are they?”

Puller looked at them.

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? They’re trenches. That’s what’s under that goddamn tarpaulin.”

Peter didn’t get it.

“What you’re looking at, Dr. Thiokol, is his plan. Yasotay’s defense plan. You see how the trenches take the configuration of a V and fall back toward the elevator shaft?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll fall back, trench by trench, toward that last redoubt. When we assault we’re always in a crossfire kill zone from the two arms of the V. You can’t flank it because it’s too wide. You can bet the trenches are linked by tunnels, which they’ll blow as they fall back. It’s the way the Muhajadeem fight in Afghanistan. He must have lost a thousand men trying to take hills like this. He’s the hill expert of all time. Each one of these trenches will cost us an hour and a hundred casualties. In effect, we have to take the same trench, over and over. The attack will never make it. It’ll get hung up in the trenches.”

But Peter wasn’t really paying any attention. He was staring, fascinated, at the photograph. There was something weird about it. He could not tear his eyes away. It was something he knew, yet something he didn’t know. His mind struggled to interpret the competing phenomena; he searched for a theory to unify his perceptions of distress.

“Look!” Peter suddenly shouted. “Look! Look at this!” He knew there was something about the picture that bugged him; he’d been over and over the top of South Mountain before and during the construction. He knew it as well as he knew Megan’s body. No man knew it better.