The Zero Hour

Jared had invited a friend of his, Colin Tolman, for dinner. The two eight-year-olds sat on the living room rug, an assortment of baseball and superhero trading cards spread out around them. The radio was blasting techno-rap. Both of them wore Red Sox caps, backward. The brim of Jared’s hat had been bent into a tube shape. Jared was wearing Diesel jeans and a Phillie Blunts T-shirt. They had their Mighty Morphin Power Rangers backpacks beside them. Both had seen the movie twice and loved it. But eight-year-olds are nothing if not fickle. In a month Mighty Morphins would more than likely be gonzo, dead meat, history, as Jared liked to say.

“Awesome!” Jared shouted as she entered. “Look, Mom, I got a Frank Thomas rookie. That’s worth three-fifty at least!”

“Will you turn that off, or at least down?” she said. “Hi, Colin.”

“Hi, Sarah,” said Colin, a pudgy blond kid. “Sorry. Mrs. Cronin.”

“She wants to be called Ms. Cahill,” Jared said, lowering the volume. “Even I’m not supposed to call her Sarah. Mom, Colin has a whole binder full of SpiderMan and X-Men.”

“Wonderful,” Sarah said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Colin, you collect baseball cards too?”

“Nah.” Colin smirked. “No one collects baseball cards anymore, except Jared. Everyone else mostly just collects basketball cards or superheroes.”

“I see. How was the last day of school?”

“Jared got thrown out of class,” Colin reported.

“You did? For what?”

“For laughing,” Colin went on, delighted.

“What?” Sarah said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jared said. “You made me, you jerk.”

“I didn’t make you,” Colin said, laughing. “I didn’t make you do anything, dickwad.”

“Hey, watch the language,” Sarah said.

“Get out of here! Tell her what you were doing, dickwad,” Jared said.

“Jared’s always bossing people around,” Colin explained, “like telling them to do their chores and everything. And Mrs. Irwin was asking us about what we thought about what it’s like to be old, and I said I’d love to see Jared a hundred years old in a wheelchair, drooling and everything, and still bossing people around, poking everybody with a cane.”

Sarah sighed, shook her head, didn’t know how to reply. Secretly it pleased her to think of Jared sent to the principal’s office for laughing, of all things, but she also knew that sort of thing shouldn’t be encouraged.

“Can we watch Nickelodeon?” Jared asked.

She looked at her watch. “For fifteen minutes while I get supper ready.”

“Cool,” Jared said.

“Cool, dude,” Colin amended. “What’s on? Salute Your Shorts? Doug? Rug Rats?”

“If it’s Ren and Stimpy, forget it,” Jared said. “I hate Ren and Stimpy.”

Colin gulped air and emitted a loud burp, and then Jared did the same, and both of them cracked up laughing again.

After dinner, Sarah went upstairs to kiss Jared good night. He was lying in bed, holding Huckleberry, the teddy bear, reading the biography of Satchel Paige. He rarely cuddled with his teddy bear anymore; he considered that kid’s stuff.

“Is that a kid’s version?” Sarah asked.

“Grown-up version.” He returned to reading. After a moment, he looked up and asked peevishly, “Yes?”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Your Excellency,” Sarah said in mock-dudgeon. “I just came up to say good night.”

“Oh. Good night.” He turned his head to one side to receive a kiss.

Sarah complied. “Didn’t you read this already?”

Jared stared at her blankly for a long time, and then said: “Yes, so?”

“Everything okay with you?”

“Yes,” he said, and turned back to the book.

“Because you’d tell me if everything weren’t okay, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” Not looking up.

“It’s this weekend, isn’t it?” Sarah asked, suddenly realizing. Saturday was two days away, which meant he spent the day with his father.

Jared kept reading as if he hadn’t heard her.

“You’re worried about Saturday,” she persisted.

He looked up. “No,” he said, his mouth curling in sarcasm. “I’m not ‘worried’ about Saturday.”

“But you’re not looking forward to it.”

He hesitated. “No,” he said in a small voice.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he said, still more softly.

“Do you not want Daddy to come this weekend? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, you know.”

“I know. I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s just that…” His voice trailed off. “Why does he act the way he does?”

“Because that’s the way he is.” That meant nothing, it was unhelpful, and they both knew it. “We all have our blind spots, and Daddy-”

“Yeah, I know. That’s the way he is.” He returned to the book and added: “But I hate it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the business of counterterrorism is deciding what to ignore and what to pursue. You are faced with a vast quantity of intelligence, but most of it is simply noise, static: pillow talk, intercepted telegrams, rumors. Ninety-nine percent of it is useless.