Practice: Ida, honey, there are things you should know. Your grandparents are dead? The people who raised you, who are the only real family you’ve ever known, died in a car accident? I probably won’t make any of your important events at school this year and might even miss your end-of-term play? Also, of some relevance, your father is wanted by the FBI for trucking in ideas that are anathema to the right wing’s divide-and-conquer brand of governance? Not to mention for consorting with enemy nations? Esme’s heart slammed against her rib cage, and it was like the bones would snap and jut from her chest, because these thoughts were not apropos of nothing. They were apropos of Jim, who was on the phone, yelling the news: “Fucking shit, Esme. Thurlow took them hostage.”
Breathe. Think. Relax. Permit dread of what you have done to paralyze you for ten minutes; then let this paralysis sell indulgences like the Pope. Do not rue your choices. No one could have predicted they’d amount to this. You are an eavesdropper, not a fortune-teller; you can make sense only of what people say, and when did Thurlow say he was going to do this? And how self-destructive can a person be? She felt so defeated. All that effort to protect him in North Korea. The risks she’d taken. And for what? He was in worse trouble now than before.
She held the phone tight. She said, “How long and what are his demands?”
“I don’t know. But I want you where I can see you. Be at the hotel in ten. Fucking shit, Esme. Be here in ten.”
A siege in Cincinnati. This would not end well. No major standoff since Fort Sumter could offer reassuring precedent. And Sumter hadn’t gone that well, either. The kids who had died at Beslan? The fatal vapor that blew through the draw at Nord-Ost? At best, the siege gone wrong provided empirical data. The stuff people were too stupid to figure out in a controlled environment. From Waco and Ruby Ridge: rubber bullets can kill; tear gas is flammable; when your rules of engagement permit deadly force, regardless of who’s in danger, people are going to die. Good lessons, but ones unlikely to preempt every fiasco brinked on a sniper’s mood or the Special Agent in Charge’s bow to pressure to get this thing resolved yesterday. In the crosshairs of a reticle, for a guy who had slept five hours in the last forty, and these in a bivouac tent pummeled by the snows of Cincinnati — for this sniper, whose thermal underwear was frozen with the drench of his labors, Thurlow Dan was a stag trophy and his ticket home.
At last, a legitimate reason to go to Cincinnati. Get dressed, get dressed! She had an emergency bag, of course. Jeans, sneakers, and BDU, which covered most of the bases in a pinch except when you wanted to look presentable, and God forbid a fractal pattern in olive should complement her skin tone. At least, she wanted to look better than her contact on the inside. She had never seen Vicki, but she certainly knew what this Vicki sounded like; she sounded like a donkeywhoreface in whore heels and thong. The microphone up her molars was highly sensitive. GSM technology, an itty-bitty mic plus logic board concealed in the same square of plastic a dentist uses for X-rays. Actually, it was smaller. She could keep it flush against her cheek, so that when it called Esme’s phone — the apparatus was programmed to activate in the presence of what it thought were voices — it was often at a moment of climax, when this braying donkeywhoreface finished her work on Thurlow. Esme was supposed to compete with that? She could have, in her day.
She would need pants — a dress was absurd — maybe leather, but nothing standout. If she drove, she could be there in nine hours. She could jump on a plane, but there were only so many ways out of an airport, and she wanted to keep her options open. It was possible that too much info would leak before she got there, in which case she would be more white whale than white horse come time to figure out who could resolve this mess. If every U.S. marshal was after her, it was easier to get lost on the ground. Of course, there was always military transport, but then, those trips tended to make her sick. Commercial airliners got the quiet corridors, but for military flight, it was the vomit air from takeoff till landing. Her last trip in a C-17 was her and eight men in ghillie suits, which were, in terms of odor, bear shit in the mouth of summer, fungal feet, afterbirth. So, okay, no C-17, just Esme and the Hummer and fifty plates for fifty states.
Jim paced the room. He said, “Why hasn’t the whore checked in, either?”
Esme did not know. Perhaps it was because Vicki was a whore with a whorehead for brains, though she kept this explanation to herself.
They were in their hotel; they had been here before.
Esme stared out the window. She could see, well in the distance, the Capitol Columns — their hats, anyway — which stood out among the gibbets of winter trees in the Arboretum.
Make a plan, revise a plan — this was a gauge of fluency under fire. Reassess for best outcome under amended conditions. She knew the drill, but Jim did not. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. Palms braced on the window, head dribbling against the glass. She let the sequence loop, then said, “Look, just let me get to the house. I will talk him down, and everything will be fine. Don’t you realize what’s happened here? You’ve got a federal case dumped in your lap. Open and shut.” She said this with brio, and for a second she saw Jim thrill to the prospect: Thurlow Dan, in jail, for life.
He flumped in an armchair upholstered in red-and-white gingham and kicked out his legs. He had on a suit, twilight blue, and a red silk tie.
“Don’t you see?” she said, and got on her knees, between his legs. “I just did you a big favor. We couldn’t prove North Korea. We haven’t turned up anything on weaponry or funding for it. So probably I just saved your job.”
Gears turning. “You must be kidding. You planned for this? You are insane. One, my father-in-law. Two, even if we do nail Dan for kidnapping, how are we supposed to explain having sent in these four morons to begin with? I don’t think sacrificial lamb is going to make us any new friends.”
“Just let me get to Cincinnati,” she said. “Once they’re free, no one will give a shit who they are or what they were doing there. Who even knows about ARDOR? Just call in some favors.”
He flapped his legs, clamped them round her ribs. He said, “No one’s heard from that asshole yet, just his fat-fuck number two.”
“Thurlow hasn’t asked for anything?”
“Nope. Maybe he’s done us all a favor and shot his brains out.”
Esme looked at the carpet. There was a limit to what equanimity she could impose on her features in the presence of talk like this.
He palmed her face like bookends. They were eye to eye. “This was all your doing,” he said. “You got no encouragement from me. I came to you for counsel, given your history, but I never sanctioned this operation. You understand? If you do right on this, I know you’ve got a kid who’s going to need some help down the road. I got a daughter, too, remember? I know how it is.” His legs vised tight so that breath became a priority for her. But the message came through: if she betrayed him, the harm would go to Ida.
She ran her hands up his quads and at his groin. It didn’t take a second; he unzipped and folded his arms behind his head.
“I understand,” she said. “But I can talk Thurlow out. And you’ll be a hero.”
There was no action there, so she had to work hard. He said, “You won’t even get close. Lockdown. Half the ops are probably in his bathtub already.” But then his body perked up, and with it his mood. He laughed and said, “Jim Bach, national hero,” which enlisted the perk for darker pleasures. He flanked her neck with his thumbs and dug in.