them, make them understand ideas outside their assorted upbringings. And students often required from their teachers what they could not get from their parents. They needed a scholar, someone who had all the answers, or knew how and where to find them quickly. Someone who could keep all the blank, staring faces separate but could still get them to work together, no matter what the course, no matter what the assignment. No matter what the mission.
Unquestionably, there was concentrated pressure on being a teacher, and after considerable reflection, Kealey just wasn’t sure he was ready for that sort of pressure test yet. He had put the world’s humanity on the front line for years, and he didn’t think he could manage to “phone it in” for another 180-day school year, at least not as capably as the students really needed. Instead he booked some guest lectures on global issues at the University of Virginia. That was where he’d met Allison’s nineteen-year-old nephew Colin, who happened to attend school there.
Kealey was better adjusted than most special agents, but there were times when the deaths he’d caused and the risks he’d taken gripped his soul. He had said it himself once: “My life is like the old joke about the waiter who serves a matador burger at the restaurant in Vera Cruz one day apologizing to the patron, saying, ‘Sometimes the bull wins.’ ”
Thinking of Colin became an act of synchronicity. Allison reached into the small leather purse under her arm and pulled out her cell phone.
“Hold on a sec,” she said. “I want to see what’s going on with Colin.”
“Didn’t you just talk to him a half hour ago?”
“Yes, but I want to check his posts.”
“He’s blogging?”
“Blogging? You’re so twenty-ten,” she said as she browsed down her queue of updates. “He’s tweeting from the convention center for his student newspaper. It’s called ambient journalism.”
“I see. And how’s that different from reporting?”
“Anyone can do it,” she said.
“So the difference is it’s for amateurs.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Not at all,” Kealey said. “Where’s the editor, the veteran eyes?”
“It’s the public, Ryan. The process has been democratized.”
“Cheapened-no offense to Colin.”
“You’re wrong,” she said confidently. “The good journalists get repeated hits. The bad ones are relegated to Facebook. The worst ones are left to comment on what’s relegated to Facebook.”
“No fair,” Kealey said. “You lost me at ‘repeated hits.’ ”
“It’s no different than all the civilian eyes being used in the war on terror, watching for something unusual. Isn’t that how we recruit in Afghanistan, Iraq? Find the people who have a knack for observing, blending in, collecting images on cell phones?”
“It’s a good thing I’m retired,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why? Technology doesn’t scare you. You’ve used portable uplinks-”
“It’s not the technology,” he said. “It’s the lack of privacy. The exponential noise. What spy would welcome that?”
Allison smiled at something she read on her display. She started pecking out words of her own. “Sorry. As much as I’m enjoying your ‘poor us’ monologue, I have to respond to Col’s latest tweet.”
“My point is made,” he said confidently.
“Your point is beside the…,” she said, typing slowly with the sides of her thumbs, pausing once or twice to check for misspellings before she returned the phone to her purse. “Done,” she said.
“What’s the word from the front?”
“The red carpet is lined with local paparazzi and ready for the glitterati to begin arriving.”
Kealey glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter to four,” he said. “Why don’t we take a leisurely walk back to the car, get my sports jacket and your high heels, and head over to the center?”
“Sounds good.” She hooked her arm in Kealey’s and gave the creature in the tank a final look as they strolled away. The medusa tumbled through the water on an internal current, bumped up randomly, briefly, against another jellyfish, then spiraled away. It was a beautiful, functional life.
But hollow, she thought. You could sum them up in a brochure. They weren’t conflicted, the way Ryan Kealey was, yearning for peace but missing the thrill of the hunt, walking chastely beside her yet caring deeply and wanting more.
She hugged Kealey’s arm a little tighter, cherishing the prolonged contact, and quietly thanked God for the good that came with the bad. It didn’t make life easy, but they at least could actually hold each other.
And walk away from the fish tank.
The petite woman with short dark hair and Asian eyes approached room 306 of the Baltimore Hilton. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. She ignored it and swiped her key card, entering the large, modern room with its panoramic view of the city’s Inner Harbor.
The harbor had come a long way since its taxpayer-paid restoration in the early eighties. Much like Times Square, prostitutes and crackheads were “relocated” or arrested, and their tainted syringes and condoms, which clung to the grates of gutters, were finally cleaned out. Warehouses, crack dens, rotting fuel tankers, and out-of- favor dog tracks were replaced by new shopping malls, fine dining, a world-class aquarium, and a new convention center. These improvements helped draw other corporate entities back into the suddenly decorous setting, bringing tourists and families back into the historic marina and closer to its famous “star-spangled” Fort McHenry. And thanks in part to hometown hero Cal Ripken, Jr.-and his just over 2,000 consecutive played games record, which was quickly sneaking up on record holder Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 games-the Baltimore Orioles got their new brick Camden Yards stadium in the early nineties, nearly completing the once-sagging city’s late twentieth-century facelift.
But somehow, unlike Midtown Manhattan’s redo, no matter how many distractions and special events tried to cover up Baltimore’s seamy history, echoes still hummed from the still neglected canneries lining the shore, from years upon years of painfully obtained sugarcane and oysters-turned-mother-of-pearl that were toiled through and exported by gifted, poorly paid women who needed pennies for provisions and by skilled slaves who sorely needed their autonomy liberated, as is memorialized in the often sightseer-slighted Museum of Industry.
The woman put away her key card as the door clicked shut behind her, went to the dresser, and opened the second dresser drawer from the bottom. She withdrew a black, satchel-style photographer’s bag, pulled it up by the strap, and hefted it over her shoulder. With its bulky contents, it weighed between 5 and 6 pounds, which was substantial but not heavy enough to make carrying it difficult.
She wore a sleeveless champagne-colored blouse and black Capri pants with a damask rose printed on the right outer thigh, and had a wireless mobile headset on her right ear. She also wore trendy sixteen-button gloves. In her line of work, she thought, women had two advantages: they could get close to men of influence, and it was easy not to leave fingerprints.
My line of work, twenty-one year-old Jasni Osman reflected bitterly.
Three years ago, the gifted gymnast was training for the Singapore Youth Olympics. All she had ever wanted was to express herself in movement, revel in the joy of being free. Then her eldest brother, Yusuf, a journalist, was arrested for what the ruling People’s Action Party termed radical activities and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He suggested from his prison cell that she could help him by attending a meeting of Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid at a local mosque. Although she had to pray apart from the men, in keeping with strict tradition, the organization’s religious instructors fully welcomed her as a daughter of Islam, instructing her on the lies and deceit of their government’s rulers and the hateful imperialism of their masters, the United States.
Seven months later she was arrested in a raid on a JAT camp at Aceh, Indonesia, accused of being a courier of illegal funds. Her captors were American agents, and she vividly recalled the terrible place to which she was brought in Jakarta, the suffocating torture by the CIA, the brutal sodomy committed by the BIN, the state’s fearful Badan Intelijen Negara. Before her arrest, she had been interested only in bringing down the PAP and freeing her brother. Now she wanted jihad against all oppressors of the Muslim people.
Captivity and restraint were unthinkable to Jasni. It took repeated assaults from the BIN, in her cell, for Jasni
