The Threat

Then they reached them. Surrounded them. De Bari looked down as they fingered his clothes and gazed at his boots. Some murmured pleas, holding out hands, begging. Others just stared up. A little girl spun in a circle, kicking up the ashy dust in some childish dance. Despite her wasted face, sticklike legs, she was laughing. De Bari seemed transfixed by what she was doing. “They’re just kids,” he said again.

The technicals from the comm van, the Secret Service limo drivers, the camp staff, came straggling up, panting, spitting, slipping on the loose black scree. Yoshida carried his doctor’s bag. The techs hefted tools and lengths of conduit, as if they’d rallied in the last ditch to defend the president. “What the hell’s going on?” a potbellied older guy in a maroon windbreaker asked Dan.

“I’m not sure.” De Bari had been staring at all the kids, yeah. But hadn’t his attention been riveted by the girl?

Hadn’t De Bari lost his own daughter when she was five?

“Jesus, look at this,” the tech said. “My God. Doesn’t this suck.”

“Yeah. It does.”

In a lower voice, glancing at the president: “What the hell’s he doing? Is he okay?”

The president was kneeling. Speaking to the little girl. Fumbling in his pockets. Then turning angrily, cheeks mottled, hair hanging over his forehead, De Bari shouted in a choked voice to bring the lunches and drinks from the cars. He seemed to be crying. He was crying.

Dan wiped his own cheeks. Like the president’s, like those of every man and woman on the hilltop, they were wet with angry tears.

20

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Below-zero temperatures were a disorienting shock after the bitter heat of Africa. De Bari escaped them by flying to his ranch, then to Managua for a meeting with the heads of state in Central America. But it was another mil aide’s turn to accompany him, Major Francie Upshaw’s, and Dan stayed on in the East Wing.

Jazak was doing the postgraduate course at the National Military Command College. He asked Dan if he wanted to sit in. The Greater Washington chapter of the Naval Academy Alumni Association called asking if he wanted to attend a talk by one of his classmates who’d just completed his second trip as captain of the space shuttle. Sandy Treherne called about a reception she was hosting.

Instead he bought a VCR. In the evening he made dinner, then watched movie after movie. Snow blanketed the city, heaping dirty white outside the fence. Blair was in Taiwan. He saw Nan for dinner again, but they didn’t seem to connect. She sent him an e-mail afterward telling him he had to cheer up, she was worried about him.

He drifted in a zone where he did nothing, wanted nothing, felt nothing. He wondered if he was getting depressed. He slept a lot. That was supposed to be one of the symptoms. Wasn’t it?

But he really couldn’t say he cared.

* * *

The president came back the last day in January. When Dan went in the next day the Eighteen Acres was bustling again. De Bari had lost weight. He looked serious. He closeted himself in the Oval Office as senators and ambassadors, speechwriters and cronies went in and out. The first week in February loomed.

Then it was here. The State of the Union address. Dan picked up his service dress blue at the dry cleaner’s. In the aides’ office, he toothbrushed the seams of his shoes, slid fresh ribbons onto his ribbon bar, snapped on a new white cap cover. He pinned on the gold “water wings” of a surface warfare officer, then, centered on his right breast pocket, the presidential service badge. The coat of arms of the president: the gold eagle against dark blue enamel, arrows in one claw, olive branch in the other. He looped and pinned the aiguillette. The routine was reassuring. Like inspection at the Academy. Be on time, in the right uniform, tell the truth … Annapolis and reality had never seemed so far apart.

At 1400 the phone rang. Sebold wanted to see him. The staffer who called didn’t say why, and Dan couldn’t think of any reason his former boss would need him. But you didn’t ask a general that. He hung up that evening’s uniform, sheathed in transparent plastic like the immobilized prey of some alien predator, and went down to the colonnade, intending to take the ground-floor corridor across to the West Wing. But when he reached the Residence for some reason climbed upward again, toward cold daylight.