The session ended on a speech she delivered with wit and passion: “Australia should be a nation deeper than just a coal mine for China.” At that point she climbed up into the public gallery and dismissed their guide to lead the group herself. This act of hands-on egalitarian democracy blew the minds of his fellow tourists and gave a frightened Terry Flannigan an excellent idea for how to save his life.
Those fit-looking Parliamentary Security Service officers with radios were responsible for the personal safety of their lovely legislator. Surely they would extend protection to her new friend when he was in her presence.
Politicians were difficult—being equal parts exhibitionist and narcissistic—but fortunately he knew how to handle them, having had a long on-and-off thing with a Texas congresswoman. The trick was never to show you liked them. The second you showed a politician that you liked her, she was looking for the next one to like her. Look at me. Aren’t I wonderful? Think so? Good-bye.
So, having made definitive eye contact, now when the comely senator smiled his way he looked away. Which only made her smile harder. It was like taking advantage of fish in a barrel, but people were trying to kill him, after all, so he really had to do what he had to do.
The senator invited the entire group on a private tour, which included a stroll through the office of the prime minister. Then she quietly invited Flannigan to join her for lunch in the Members’ dining room. Her people peeled him deftly loose from the group headed for lunch in the cafeteria. As they did, the sweet little blonde, who saw exactly what was going down, slipped a folded piece of paper into his pocket with her cell phone number and the information that she would be in Canberra for the rest of the week.
Admiring how fully the senator filled her skirt as she walked ahead to tell her staff that she would be tied up for the afternoon, Terry Flannigan recalled Sigmund Freud’s famous question: “What do women want?”
Write this on your notepad, Dr. Freud: I am fifteen pounds overweight, losing hair and gaining jowls, with a roving, if not predatory, eye that should warn any woman with a brain to steer clear, but for some reason, bless their hearts, they want me. I am not saying I deserve it, but I am grateful.
* * *
DANIEL, A STURDILY built former U.S. Navy SEAL intelligence officer, resigned his commission after three tours in Iraq to quadruple his salary with a private security contractor. He was disdained by regular military as a showboat and overpaid hired gun, and his last memory of Baghdad was of leading a State Department convoy at high speed through narrow streets.
He had awakened with a titanium plate in his skull a month later on the coast of Cornwall, England, in the Phoenix Foundation wing of a Methodist nursing home. The security contractor had gone out of business. Phoenix had paid the therapy and shrink bills, and when Daniel had felt capable of making his way in the world he fled to the Mediterranean island of Corsica and opened a dive shop for tourists.
Today he was back in Cornwall, visiting a buddy, Rafe, who hadn’t been as lucky. Rafe, a former British officer, was still stuck in rehab. Daniel had bumped into another private contractor buddy, Ian the Brit, a tattooed bodybuilder who was living in England and visited Rafe regularly. The three men were bound together, as Ian put it, “by one bloody big bang.”
The facility in which Phoenix rented its wing served what the Brits called the healthy demented, people who had lost their minds to Alzheimer’s and ischemic strokes but were still capable of walking. It was a pretty place built in a Roman villa style that embraced the sun. Even when the sea breeze was too cool to venture outside, the sunlight brightened the public rooms clustered around three sides of a courtyard that opened to the south.
Elderly ladies dressed for an excursion were gathering outside the dining room, remarking that the restaurant appeared to be doing a brisk business today and inquiring how soon the bus would leave for Exeter. That such a vehicle was as fictional as the restaurant only became apparent when the staff opened the dining room doors and the residents took their accustomed chairs for lunch.
“You never see old blokes in this place,” said Ian.
“Men die young,” said Daniel.
They were standing in the doorway watching the old ladies because Rafe had started crying and a counselor was trying to talk him down. Daniel and Ian looked back to Rafe’s room, where a salty wind made white curtains flap in the sunlight. Their eyes met and slid apart. Rafe was a mess. They’d been sketching maps of the shoot-out, kinda going through how the insurgents’ fire had channeled them straight into the mother of all improvised explosive devices, when Rafe started crying.
This was Daniel’s first visit to the poor bastard, and he was thinking he could not wait to get the hell home. He knew that on many levels he was personally so distant he might as well be living on Mars, but at least he was out. And Ian was getting better, too, since he “graduated,” driving an intercity bus between Birmingham and London, hoping to meet a girl.
Out of nowhere Daniel heard himself saying, “We kept Coalition officials alive while Iraqi officials were the star attraction at a turkey shoot.”
“Coalition paid better,” Ian replied gloomily.
“I read,” said Daniel, “that an IED blast changes how your brain works, if you’re close as Rafe was.”
“We weren’t that far, either.”
“But Rafe was closer.” Rafe had been leaning off the running board at ninety miles an hour firing warning bursts at civilian vehicles when the lead car detonated the IED. “It screws up your prefrontal cortex. That’s the part that makes you who you are. Rafe was a happy guy, before.”
Ian’s expression said he could not bear to talk about Rafe’s prefrontal cortex, which could have been his prefrontal cortex. He changed the subject, with a bitter smile.
“You know what the Old Man calls us?”
“What?” Daniel asked with sudden interest. The “Old Man” from Phoenix had dropped in once while Daniel was still in rehab. If the Old Man asked him to lead a convoy into Hell, Daniel would ask only if there was time to suit up or were they going in naked.
“I heard him tell the head doc.”
“What did he call us?”
“Banished Children of Mammon.”
“Did he really?”
“I didn’t get what he meant,” said Ian.
“It means contractors like you and me and poor Rafe get no vets hospital, no pension, no health care.”
“I know that. And I know ‘banished.’ What the fuck is Mammon?”
“Money. We did it for the money and now we get zip.”
Ian nodded. “Yeah, I get that. ‘Mammon’ means ‘money’? How come?”
“Like a money god.”
“So we prayed to the fucker and got our asses in a sling.”
Daniel was surprised to feel his face break into a smile. “Exactly…You hear anything on the Old Man?” he asked.
“He was putting feelers out the other day. He’s looking for Iboga.”
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t you watch the news?”
“I don’t watch the news,” said Daniel. “I don’t read the papers. I don’t surf the Internet. If I walk by TV in the airport, I look the other way. Whatever is going on out there, I don’t give a flying fuck. Who’s Iboga? Why’s the Old Man hunting him?”
“He was an African dictator who stole the country’s money when the insurgents kicked him out. The Old Man must have hired on to get it back.”
“African? What does he look like?”
“Big black bastard weighs twenty-five stone at least.”
“Give it to me in pounds.”
“Three hundred.”
“Does he sharpen his teeth?”
Ian looked at Daniel. “Why do you ask?”
“I seen him.”
“Go on!”
“I did. Didn’t get a good look, but how many three-hundred-pound guys are black with pointy teeth?”