Darpa Alpha

“Feel better?”

“I feel like a shower.”

She was nonplussed.

“What’s that special bath the Jews have?”

“I don’t know. A bath’s a bath.”

“No,” said Douglas. “A rabbi told me about it once, when you take everything off that separates you from God, from the purity of the water. Women have to take off all makeup, eye shadow, false nails — everything — so that they can get clean again.”

“You don’t feel clean?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter how you deal with this scum. Some of it inevitably rubs off.”

“Oh, Douglas, you can’t really mean that?”

“I do right now.”

“You’re tired.”

As they returned home the fog was thicker and Freeman, despite his usual disparagement of anything smacking of superstition, took the worsening of the weather as an omen that the world, that time itself, was closing in on him. It wasn’t self-pity but it was a glass-half-empty moment, and on the evidence of the DARPA ALPHA debacle, he felt it was a realistic assessment.

“I’ve been thinking about that note you got,” said Margaret as they entered the house. “What a horrible thing to read. But that man’s pride will be his undoing, Douglas.” She shook her head, tight-lipped and censorious as she took off her coat and headed off to unload the dishwasher.

Freeman felt distinctly uncomfortable, remembering the flashes of immodesty after his famous U-turn against the Russians.

“Yes,” Margaret declared, “that horrid note of his might yet haunt him.”

“If he isn’t already dead,” said the general.

“I shouldn’t say it, I suppose — I mean, it’s not very Christian — but I hope he’s dead.”

“So do I,” said Freeman, but it sounded to Margaret more like an obligatory response than a fervent wish. She straightened up from the dishwasher and fixed him with her gaze. “No,” she charged. “Not truly. You’d prefer — I mean, you’d like to chase him down.”

The general said nothing, topping up his coffee.

“Douglas?”

“What?”

“You like it, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, woman?”

“I mean, you men. You like fighting, don’t you?”

“Well, if that isn’t a blatant sexist remark I don’t know what is. If I said anything like that about women, Linda Rushmein and her night riders’d have me in irons.”

She ignored his comment. “Douglas!”

He met her stare but couldn’t sustain his look of hurt surprise. He blinked first, shifting his gaze to the small, triangular pane of glass high in the kitchen door, out into the darkness. “I love it,” he said gently. “God forgive me, but I do.” He faced her again. “To fight for the right. I suppose that sounds pompous, naive even, but I believe there is evil in the world, Margaret. And what they did up there was evil to the core. Even if I didn’t like the sting of battle, I’d have a duty to pursue them if I could.”

“You did your best, Douglas.”

He was afraid that she might be right. “I’m dog tired,” he told Margaret. “I’m going to grab some shut- eye.”

“Dawn is breaking.”

“So, I’m tired. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s not against the law,” Freeman cut in.

“I merely said—,” she began.

“You’ve got this Anglo-Saxon hang-up about sleeping during the day. Goddammit, half the country—”

“Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Then don’t be so damn pious. You have these damn silly rules. Because your folks were farmers doesn’t mean it’s a sin to do things differently.”

“I was merely surprised at someone who—”

“Don’t be. I’ve had just about all the surprises I can deal with at the moment.”

“It isn’t my fault, General, that you didn’t run those — those monsters to ground.”

“Never said it was.”

“You know, Douglas, you’re right. You do need sleep. A lot of it.”

“You’re a Republican!”

That did it. They burst out laughing at their childishness, a dam of anxiety broken, the tension swept away in a torrent of running giggles, adult normalcy returning only when the full measure of the terrorist attack on DARPA ALPHA was reiterated, albeit reluctantly, in a terse news report they watched on TV, National Security Adviser Prenty having to admit under persistent questioning that not all of the “murderers,” in the administration’s phrase, had been accounted for.

“How many are still at large?”

“One,” she replied tersely.

“Is that hard intel?” pressed a correspondent from Fox. “Or soft intel?”

Eleanor kept her composure. It was a question born of the media’s skepticism following the Iraqi WMD fiasco. “It’s hard intel,” she said. “From the D.N.I.”

“There’s something else,” said Douglas, his arm around Margaret’s shoulder, holding her close.

“What do you mean?” Margaret asked.

“Something’s wrong. I can smell it. They know something else. I’ve known Eleanor Prenty for donkey’s years and she’s got something else on her mind. She’s keeping something back.”

“Well, I would think,” Margaret said tartly, “in that case she would have the common courtesy to let you know exactly what’s going on.”

Douglas Freeman agreed. Margaret had a point, and a strong one at that. Even if the White House didn’t want to inform him, as a matter of courtesy hadn’t it occurred to them that he might still have something to offer by further debriefing?

Belying his present low expectation of the administration, a call came twenty minutes later during the only bathroom break Douglas Freeman had taken all morning, and so it was that the general took one of the most important calls of his life and in the history of the Republic while sitting on the can, the exhaust fan purring softly in the background and he afraid to flush as he listened to the White House operator instructing him that a Homeland Security agent in Monterey was en route, as she spoke, to deliver a packet to the general by hand. After reading it he was to call National Security Adviser Prenty, but not from his home number.

“Well?” Margaret asked, as Freeman, with a preoccupied air, zipped up and buckled his belt, the puzzled expression still with him.

“The White House,” he explained, “is sending me something.” He looked at his wife, who, after handing him his cellphone, had lingered outside the bathroom door. “What in damnation’s so important that she couldn’t tell me on the phone? Whole country knows by now what happened.”

“Perhaps they’ve found the missing terrorist in hiding or something, and don’t want it made public. It could alert him.”

“Huh, he’s already been alerted. Rest of his gang found dead. No, it’s probably something—” The front door chimes sounded, their mellifluous notes in marked contrast to the tension both Douglas and Margaret felt.

It was the DHS agent, a tall African American clad in a dark blue suit. His striped DHS identity card was clearly visible through the front door peephole.

“That was quick,” observed Freeman, venturing a smile, which wasn’t reciprocated. The whole world seemed tense.