Payback

on the active list. But having said that, I must emphasize that no one else on your team can be on the active list either. I’m giving you carte blanche regarding supplies and transport from Special Operations Command in Florida. Given that, when’s the earliest you can go? I can have General Lesand here get you a ride as second man on a Raptor trainer.” The President added, smiling, “If you’re not afraid of heights?”

“I’m ready to go now. Could be at MacDill in Tampa within three hours, Mr. President. But the mission itself, training, equipment, et cetera — earliest would be six weeks. Absolute minimum, given the distances, the—”

“Tell you the truth, General,” the President cut in, “I was hoping for something closer to a month, given the public’s outrage, but I guess we can live with six weeks. If you run into any bureaucratic crap,” he said, glancing purposefully at the Navy, Air Force, and Army Chiefs and the Marine Commandant, “call me.”

When the meeting ended, the telescreens blank, there was some mumbling in the Oval Office about Freeman’s tendentious argument over the make of the third missile and whether it really mattered. Clearly, whatever it was, it had been fired by terrorists.

“That’s unimportant,” commented the CNO. “At least we’ve got a loose cannon out of our hair. And we’ve told him not to take anyone on the active list. If anything goes wrong—”

“If anything goes wrong,” interjected the President, “we’ll be in the soup along with the general. We can deny it all we like, ‘not officially sanctioned,’ et cetera, et cetera, ‘soldiers of fortune,’ but unless Freeman’s team brings back a clearly identifiable launcher and missile from Kosong as proof positive for our allies that we’re up against the North Koreans, we’ll have the U.N. and every other America-hater all over us.” He paused and looked hard at each one of them. “That’s why your ‘loose cannon’ was nice enough to say, ‘I don’t want you guys getting into trouble because of incomplete CIA intel,’ like the Bay of Pigs or another WMD problem. You’re right — diplomatically Freeman is a loose cannon. I wouldn’t make him ambassador to Tonga, but he understands the danger of a credibility gap. He did well to warn us. Some other generals,” continued the President, “would have given me ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full.’ He’s not a yes-man, whatever you say.”

“My apologies, Mr. President,” said the CNO.

“Not necessary, Admiral.” The President smiled. “I didn’t say he was wasn’t a pain in the ass.” The ensuing laughter cut through the tension and fatigue. The President asked his National Security Advisor to stay behind. “Eleanor,” he told her, “you’re to go home, give young Jennifer and that stuffed piglet of hers a big hug, then go to sleep for twenty-four hours. You look done in. I won’t call you unless something urgent comes up.”

Eleanor smiled at the mention of the stuffed piglet, “Billy Bush,” a name suggested to Jennifer jointly by Eleanor’s husband, Tom, an ardent Clinton fan, and Eleanor, who’d voted for the first President Bush in college. It had been a fun political compromise by a couple whose marriage, friends had said, wouldn’t last more than a year because of Eleanor’s stressful position as an advisor in the White House. They were wrong — it had lasted eleven years, five months, and four days, the couple’s mature approach to “no politics at home” having held until the 2003 war against Iraq. The strain over that one was too much. What had begun as a domestic “spat” over what neighbors would cattily refer to as the “flowers” incident, seemingly patched up between Eleanor and husband Tom Prenty, in fact marked the beginning of a fissure in their relationship. In time it became a gulf between them into which poured a flood of recriminations and mutual complaints hitherto put on hold and subsumed by the sheer pressure of Eleanor’s work as National Security Advisor and Tom’s job as critic of the administration for a Washington think tank.

Eleanor and Tom Prenty had tried to stay together for that most ubiquitous of reasons, the children — in their case, Jennifer — but a bright young psychiatrist had emphasized what they already knew, that the effect of the constant guerrilla warfare at home, which had already caused one nanny and two temporaries to quit, was undoubtedly having a much more severe effect on their only child. A trial separation, “to cool down, regroup,” the doctor suggested, might be in order.

“Won’t that hurt Jennifer even more?” Tom had asked.

“Not if you explain your absence as job-related and if you part on amicable terms. Half of upper-income earners in the Beltway spend long periods away from home. If you get back together, fine. If not, we’ll discuss how to proceed further.”

“How about — you know, weekend visits?” suggested Eleanor.

“In my experience,” responded the counselor, “children — Jennifer’s eleven, right?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, well, ironically, they see these weekend visits as the end. Dad or Mom away on business keeps hope of reconciliation alive. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’ve already been weaned somewhat for the divorce. Besides, she’ll be busy at school. St. Andrew’s, right?”

“Yes,” said Eleanor, with a twinge of guilt. She was a big proponent of public schools — publicly — but St. Andrew’s was private.

“And there’s another benefit,” the psychiatrist continued. “Time out will give you two a chance to get things into perspective. Absence may not make the heart grow fonder, but it tells you how important or not it is to have the other one around.”

They had agreed reluctantly and with Valda, a British au pair, age twenty, whom Jennifer adored and who was taking a year off from international relations at the London School of Economics “to see just what Americans were like,” things were working out pretty well. But there were nights — Eleanor’s feeling of loneliness exacerbated by her lack of sleep — when gazing down at her daughter and Billy Bush held tightly to her, she wanted Tom there, just to share the joy of looking at their child, silently reliving the excitement and sheer terror of the first weeks.

She’d read every prenatal book she could lay her hands on, and when Tom had brought her and baby Jennifer home and Eleanor had seen the profusion of congratulatory flowers and cards, she’d taken Jennifer into the luxurious Consumer Reports—prepared nursery, placing her down with exemplary care, and burst into tears. She didn’t have a clue what to do with this little human. Tom had tried to reassure her, but when he picked up his child he did so with such apprehension, so slowly, holding his breath, it looked to postpartum Eleanor that he could have been lifting a bomb ready to go off.

“Oh God!” she’d said suddenly. “Tom — Tom!”

He’d turned, whey-faced. “What’s wrong?”

“Get those flowers out of here.” She remembered a little girl in the French town of Grasse, when Eleanor and the busload of tourists were being shown through one of the small but famed perfume factories in the Cote d’Azur. Suddenly there’d been a terrible commotion. The young girl was frantic. She couldn’t breathe, the perfume aromas, combined with the smell from a purple rush of lavender growing by the roadside, so intrusive that they were overwhelming her lungs, her face starting to turn blue, becoming cyanotic.

“Tom, get the flowers out!”

A neighbor watering his lawn, though loath to interfere in a domestic dispute, hearing Eleanor screaming, dropped the hose and ran to the Prentys’ door to see if he could help. Eleanor opened it. He’d been shocked by her distorted features. “Get rid of the flowers!” she’d shouted.

The neighbor, Nick Jensen, took one look at her face and did as she ordered, rushing past her, grabbing the bunches of flowers, and dumping them on the front stairs, which quickly became festooned with the variegated bouquets. Nick Jensen was fined $225 for disobeying Rockville’s watering restriction ordinance: “failing to attend sprinkler.”

“But it isn’t a sprinkler, it’s a goddamned hose!” Nick told the stern female conservation official.

“It’s a sprinkler when you leave it running by itself,” the resolute officer had replied sternly.

Nick explained that he hadn’t had time to turn it off. “There was this emergency next door—”

“Right!”

“No, go and ask them, miss. Go and ask them.”

She did. It didn’t matter. “You should have turned off the hose first,” the official told Nick. “We’re experiencing a very severe water shortage.”

Nick, a banker, gave up, but Tom insisted on paying the fine. The banker refused. They were good neighbors.

“How’d she know about the hose being on?” asked Tom. “I mean, it was beside the house. You can’t see it from the street. Did someone phone it in?”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nick. “But apparently it was spotted by a police chopper.”

“What? I never heard a chopper.”