“What?”
“Look.”
Deirdre opened her eyes. She was annoyed, Angela could see. “What, Angela?”
“Outside.” Angela pointed.
Her mother looked. “Oh good Lord,” she said.
She grabbed Angela’s hand.
“Is something wrong, Mommy?”
“No, dear. Everything’s fine.”
The big jet’s speakers crackled to life. “From the flight deck, this is Captain Hamilton. You may have noticed that we have some company to the left and right. Those are F-16s, the pride of the United States Air Force. They’ll be riding with us into Dulles. No reason to be alarmed.” The captain sounded utterly confident, as if fighter jets escorted his flights home all the time. He clicked off for a moment, then clicked back on.
“However, I am going to have to ask you to remain in your seats the rest of the flight. No exceptions. Not for any reason. And please turn off all your laptops, CDs, any electronic equipment. If you’re in the bathroom now, please finish your business and return to your seat. If you do notice any of your fellow passengers using electronic devices or doing anything that seems…unusual, don’t hesitate to signal the flight attendants. I appreciate your cooperation. We’ve got a little weather coming up, but we should be on the ground in an hour and forty-five minutes.”
“Unusual? What the fuck does that mean?” Angela heard someone behind them say.
DEIRDRE SMART SQUIRMED in her seat and craned her neck to see her fellow passengers. Most of them were doing exactly what she was, eyeing one another warily. Had anyone on the plane struck her as “unusual”? Obviously that guy with the beard and the robe across the cabin. But no terrorist would dress that way, right? He’d get so much attention. Unless he figured that the security guys would think that too. A double cross. Whatever you called it. How was she supposed to know? It wasn’t her job to look for terrorists, for God’s sake.
I don’t want to live this way, Deirdre thought. I want to be able to take my kids to see my parents without worrying if we’re going to get blown to bits at thirty-five thousand feet. She figured she was like most people. In the years since September 11, her fears of terrorism had faded. Sure, she knew the bad guys were out there. Once in a while, like when she went through security checks at the airport, or watched
Now she was flooded by the feeling of powerlessness that had overtaken her on September 11. My family never did anything to any of you, she thought. Why are you trying to hurt me? She supposed that feeling of fear was what they wanted, what they lived for. She’d read somewhere that when planes blew up in the air the force of the wind tore your whole body apart. A second of awful pain. Or maybe they’d be alive the whole way down, until they hit the ocean and got pulverized into shark bait.
Deirdre looked out the window at the fighters shadowing their jet. Dear God, I know we haven’t been going to church every Sunday, she thought. But if You get us through this we will. We’ll give more to charity…. She stopped herself. This was no way to pray. Prayer wasn’t about making deals with God. She remembered what her pastor had said two weeks before: We pray to celebrate God’s majesty and our faith in Him. Not to negotiate. Fine. She wouldn’t negotiate. She began to murmur to herself. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He leads me down into green pastures…
“Mommy,” her daughter whimpered. “I’m scared.” Angela was crying. “I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”
“Hold my hand, baby,” Deirdre said. “We’ll be home soon.”
DAVID MADE A nifty move, sliding the ball between his defender’s legs and carving himself a slice of open field. As the defense closed in on the void he’d created, he passed the ball off and cut toward the goal for a return pass. Perfect, Jennifer Exley thought. Her son was nine, and the best player in the Arlington junior league. At least she thought so, based on her limited experience as a soccer mom. She admitted she might be biased.
“Great play, David!” she yelled, feeling like a real mother for the first time in a while. He shot her a quick look, embarrassed and proud.
Her pager and cellphone went off simultaneously. A bad sign.
“Jennifer?” It was Ellis Shafer. A very bad sign. “I need you.”
“Fuck, Ellis.” Another Saturday with David and Jessica spoiled. Another pathetic call to Randy and his fiancee, asking them if they could take the kids on a weekend when she was supposed to have custody.
“It’s a priority, Jennifer.” That word meant something. Shafer shouldn’t even have used it on a nonsecure line.
“Just let me call my husband—”
“Ex-husband?”
“Thank you, Ellis. I’d forgotten about the divorce. David’s playing soccer. Lemme see if Randy can pick him up.”
“We’ll get the goons”—the internal CIA security officers—“to babysit if we have to. Just get in here.”
“Such a charmer, Ellis.”
“See you soon.” He hung up.
“I love you too, honey,” she said to the dead line. Cheers erupted around her. David ran down the field, his skinny arms over his head, hooting, as the other team’s goalie sheepishly fished the ball from the net. “Did you see it, Mom? Did you see me score?”
Of course not.
“Of course,” she said.
THE VIEW OF the Potomac from the George Washington Memorial Parkway usually calmed her, but not today. She tore down the narrow road, flashing her brights at anyone who didn’t move aside, swerving left to right like a trucker on a meth binge.
She should have been driving a Ferrari, not a green Dodge minivan with an American Youth Soccer Organization sticker plastered to the back bumper, she thought. No, the minivan was perfect. It made the absurdity of the situation complete. Soccer mom by day, CIA bureaucrat by night. Or was it the other way around?
She came over a rise at ninety miles an hour. The van got air, then thudded back to the pavement, springs grinding, tires squealing. A hard storm had passed through in the morning, and the road was slick with moisture. Exley took a deep breath. She needed to relax. Wrapping the van around a tree wouldn’t do her or her kids any good. She eased off the gas.
AT HER OFFICE, she found Shafer standing by her door, cup of coffee in one hand, sheaf of papers in the other. She shook her head at him as she walked in. He set the coffee on the desk and handed her the papers. “One Splenda, the way you like it. Sorry about the soccer.”
“Ellis. You feel sorrow? Did they upgrade your software?”
“Funny.”
The papers were marked with all the usual secret classifications. Exley had long ago grown cynical about the agency’s zest for classifying documents. Secret, Top Secret, Triple Secret with a Cherry on Top — most of it was dreck, and the rest was usually in the
“Tick shipped these an hour ago,” Shafer said. Tick was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, created to amalgamate data from the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, Defense, and any other government agency that might have information on potential attacks. “The latest Echelon.”
Echelon: a worldwide network of satellite stations maintained by the United States, Britain, and friends. Built during the Cold War to listen in on the Soviets, now used to monitor e-mail and Internet traffic as well as phone calls and faxes. The names of Echelon’s stations — Sugar Grove, Menwith Hill, Yakima, a dozen others — were known to spy buffs and conspiracy theorists the world over. They seemed to believe that the network was some sort of electronic god, seeing and hearing every conversation ever held, tracking every e-mail ever sent.
