did without the active cooperation of Americans who were in positions of trust.”
“At least you know Phillips didn’t have anything to do with it,” said Cole.
“Phillips? That lying sack of shit?” said Malich. “I don’t believe anything he told me. Just an aide to an aide? Yeah, if you think of the NSA as an ‘aide.’ He’s running an operation out of the White House and he knows way more than he’s telling me.”
“Then why did you have me give him my email and cell number?”
“Cole, they can get that in four seconds if they don’t already have it. By making him memorize it, maybe I convinced him that I trust him. At least a little.”
They stopped at a drugstore and Malich bought four disposable cellphones and ten ten-minute cards for them. He gave one of them to Cole and they memorized each other’s numbers. Except that Malich wouldn’t let him memorize the one he was activating right at the moment. “No point,” he said. “I’m throwing it away when this card is up. This is the last time I’m calling known numbers, but I still can’t keep this phone.”
Malich called his wife. It was brief. “You go ahead and visit Aunt Margaret without me,” he said. “I’ll get up there as soon as I can. I love you, Cessy.” Then he ended the call.
“So you’re sending her into hiding?” asked Cole.
“No, she’s just visiting her Aunt Margaret in New Jersey. We lived with her for a while when I was going to Princeton.”
“I thought it was a code.”
“I’m assuming our phone is tapped. If Cessy and I had some code, that would imply she’s part of my conspiracy.”
Cole thought: Is there anything this guy hasn’t thought of? Oh, yeah—he didn’t think of somebody passing his plans to the terrorists.
By then, Malich was calling numbers and leaving voice mail. Always the same message: “I always told you I was gonna take this job and shove it. Well, it’s shoved. Drinks?”
“Now that
“My unit back when I was still in the field. These guys had my back a long time. We’re going to meet later tonight near the Delta ticket area at Reagan. Want to come?”
“They don’t know me.”
“But they will.”
“What if I was assigned to you by the very people you’re hiding from? What if I report all this?”
“No.”
“Then stop trying to pick a fight with me. How’s your Farsi?”
“Rusty. I didn’t work with Farsi speakers in Afghanistan.”
“Well, start thinking in Farsi, because that’s what we use to converse when we get together in public places.”
“Right now I’m barely thinking in English.”
“Pardon me while I strip some cash out of my accounts.”
They walked around Arlington, pulling max amounts out of five different accounts. “How paranoid are you, exactly?” asked Cole.
Malich handed him two hundred dollars. “You forget the line of work I was in and the kind of assignments I had. Always a chance I’d have to go to ground.”
“So do you have a car with false registration hidden here in Arlington?”
“No such luck. I wasn’t expecting to be on foot after the assassination of the President.”
“Are we really walking all the way to your house?”
“I’d be surprised if I ever see that house again,” said Malich. He sounded quite calm about it. He looked at his watch. “It stopped being my home about a minute ago, when Cessy and the kids left it.”
“So where are we going?”
“Back to the Pentagon,” said Malich. “On the Metro, if it’s running again on this side of the river.”
“Isn’t that one of the places they’ll look for you?”
“I have to debrief,” said Malich. “So do you. They’ve got to know, on the record, exactly what happened. Most people in the Pentagon aren’t in on the conspiracy. The good guys need to be able to fight, so they need information. Besides, if we go to the Pentagon and choose who to talk to, then some good people will know we’re there. We won’t just disappear.”
Cole was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable his feet were. “Sure wish I’d known to wear different shoes today.”
“And be out of uniform?” asked Malich. “Shame on you, soldier.”
“I want to be in boots and camo,” said Cole. “I want some bad guys to shoot at.”
“So far today, we’re the only ones who got to do that,” said Malich.
“Ten seconds too late,” said Cole.
“I try not to think of every shot that missed,” said Malich. “Every step I might have been able to run a little faster.”
“And if I’d driven faster—”
“Then we might have had to stop and explain things to some District cop and then we’d have gotten there even later,” said Malich. “What happened, happened.”
“And who we shoot at next, other people get to decide.”
“Thank God for that,” said Malich. “Thank God we live in a country where the soldiers don’t have that burden, too.”
Wonk
Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.
Cecily Malich put the leftover cookies on the table for the kids to discover as they wandered in and out during the day. They did home school in the afternoons during summer vacation, but not on Fridays. Fridays were lazy days, and that meant Mark was over at one of his friends’ houses, Nick was curled up with a book, slowly driving himself blind with Xanth or Discworld novels, Lettie and Annie were playing some madcap game in the back yard that would leave them smelling like a compost heap, and John Paul was dogging her heels. Except that he was down for a nap right now so the house was silent.
And then he woke up and it wasn’t silent anymore. He was three and mercifully had toilet-trained himself fairly early, so there was no diaper to change. J. P. got a cooky in his booster seat.
The rest of the cookies disappeared in bunches as the girls came in from the back yard and she sent them up to the tub, where of course they would play almost as hard as they had outside, but at least they had cookies in them to renew their energy and guarantee full saturation of the bathroom floor and walls.
It was only fair to bring a plate of cookies to Nick. It was a good thing that he was reading, even if she thought the books were deeply uninteresting herself. He shouldn’t be deprived of his share of homemade cookies during his growing-up years. And she saved the last three cookies in a sandwich bag for Mark.
None for her, but that was fine. She didn’t like chocolate. Never had. Now, if she had made snickerdoodles… but those took refrigerator time before you could bake them, so there was no way she could have gotten them made before Captain Cole showed up.
She wondered if she had done him any favors by telling Reuben that the boy looked like someone he could rely on. She knew that whatever Reuben was doing, it was dangerous and might be the kind of thing that would someday put him in front of a congressional committee like Oliver North back when she was a kid and watched CNN obsessively.
