What Came After (17 page)

“I was picturing something with four wheels.”

“Four wheels means four tires and four tires means twice as many opportunities for failure. It’s all about the numbers, son. Trust me. You’ll do fine.”

“I will.”

“That Harley’s tough as nails. The simplest transport in the world.”

“Simple is good. If it breaks down, I can fix it.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Weller looked at the photograph of his daughter. He had half a mind to reach out a finger and touch it to her chin, but he looked up at Bainbridge instead.
“Let’s hope?”
he said, “The way you fellows work, I wouldn’t think hope would figure into it .”

“You’d be right,” he said. “We strategize, we train, and we execute.” Letting himself look at the photograph and then looking away. Just enough to let Weller see him do it. Seeing that it mattered to Weller. “Hope is a weakness,” he said. “Operationally speaking.”

“Operationally,” said Weller. Standing and taking up his ball cap. “So anyway—the Harley. What else were you thinking I’d need?”

Bainbridge tilted his head and stuck out his lip and looked him square in the eye. “Most of what you’ll be needing, sonny, is
you.
And that’s what we’re going to work on, starting first thing tomorrow.”

*

The picture over the bed was of the last chief executive of the old United States. the one that AmeriBank and MobilGo and Family Health Partnership had resurrected from the dead to tear down the federal government once and for all. The born again president. Another miracle of science. In the picture he was on a trout stream at sunrise in some western Eden, craggy mountains in the background and clouds streaming overhead and mist rising from the water into the cold dry air, casting a fly line. His famous reedwork creel hung around his neck, the one that held the heart pump and the battery packs and the dialysis equipment and whatever else it was that kept him alive. Top secret, all of it. A matter of national security.

Weller lay half asleep on the hard bed with the moon outside the window and the lights on in the hallway and Bainbridge moving around in his room next door. The clock on the desk said four something. Recorded music played somewhere, a march with a full military band. Trumpets and trombones and big bass drums, with a piccolo soaring above it all birdlike. He lay in the bed and the light from the doorway fell on the picture and he looked at it upside down for a while, listening to the marching band, until he remembered where he’d heard Bainbridge’s name before. Whom he’d associated it with. The last president himself. General Bainbridge had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs under him. The last man to hold the job, and the first to hold it as a civilian subcontractor.

A shadow passed across the door. Something emerging from it, moving into the room at speed and unfolding itself as it came. Something on the order of a bat but heavier. “Rise and shine, young fellow. Put these on.” Fatigues of his own landing on the bed. Weller pushed them aside and pointed to the photograph before Bainbridge could go on his way. Wanting to seem alert at this hour if nothing else. Wanting to seem ready for anything, which he was, but still. Pointing to the picture and saying, “Friend of yours?”

Bainbridge went soft if he ever went soft. Leaning against the jamb. “You bet your ass he was a friend of mine. A fighting man never had a better ally than that individual right there.” Tilting his head down and raising his eyebrows to indicate.
“Angler,
we called him.”

Weller had his feet on the floor now, and even in the chiaroscuro of the hard hallway light and the blackness of his cell he could see the sentiment written upon the general’s face. A softness. A softness permissible here perhaps because it was home and perhaps because the mingling of light and dark concealed it some but a softness nonetheless. Undeniable. The tough sentiment of an old soldier. “That’s interesting to hear,” Weller said. “I always understood he didn’t like the military all that much.”

“Au contraire.”
Straightening up. “He loved the military. He loved every man in it. What he didn’t care for was how the U. S. government ran the operation. He didn’t trust the government to handle anything that important.”

Weller was up and sliding into the fatigues. The lamp still switched off in the room and Bainbridge still blocking most of what light came in from the hallway. He was having trouble finding the buttons or snaps or whatever they were, trouble even determining
what
they were, at the same time listening to Bainbridge talk and studying the picture of the last president on the wall. That little bit of light finding it and bouncing off and making it gleam like an icon. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “He was Commander In Chief.”

“And he
still
was, even after he’d outsourced the whole business to people who knew what they were doing. He was always in charge. Don’t you forget it. He never did.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t.” Looking at the figure standing hip-deep in the trout steam, braced against the moving water with every bit of his fractionally restored strength. The rising sun like a halo and his ghastly face dark under the shadow of a longbilled cap. Still intent. Still pursuing the old pleasures. Still angling.

*

Bainbridge said they’d eat at the officers’ mess. The jeep was out in the circular drive but they didn’t get in. They ran instead. Five miles or so to the Pentagon with the jeep rolling alongside them in case Weller should falter. A driver behind the wheel who may or may not have been the same driver as before. Old man Bainbridge remarking on this and that the whole way and hardly breaking a sweat. They ran down the hill from the observatory and into Georgetown and then made a little side trip through the old university with its endless red brick barracks. Morning drills under way on broad lawns trimmed crewcut short. They passed by with the general utterly anonymous and they stopped in the middle of the Key Bridge so Weller could catch his breath. Not quite halfway to the Pentagon. Weller doubled over gasping and the driver stopping to offer him a bottle of water and Bainbridge saying what did he tell him last night, eh? About how the most important equipment he’d have would be himself? Saying Weller probably understood now what he’d meant by that. Saying he bet Weller was a fast learner. Weller ashamed of himself and not looking up. Bainbridge shaking his head and helping him into the back seat and getting him arranged with his head down between his knees. Giving the driver orders to go on without him. He’d be right along.

Weller had recovered when Bainbridge arrived. Sitting on a bench in front of the building, cooling his heels and finishing up his bottle of water, watching a small army of men mowing the enormous lawns. They weren’t the automatons he’d seen everywhere else. Just ordinary men with ball caps and sunglasses and overalls not that much different from his own. Each one wearing headphones against the small engine roar. All of them working quickly and carefully.

Bainbridge slowed to a trot when he spied him on the bench and he came up steadily but he didn’t stop. Saying, “Take a look at those boys with the lawnmowers if you want to understand the beauty of the military. It’s the one place left where a man can rise up from humble beginnings.” Still talking as he went past, and Weller having to get up and keep pace if he wanted to hear.

“Every single one of those recruits came in from the outside. Straight from the Zone. They found their way here and they enlisted because they had a dream, and if they keep their noses clean that dream will come true. They’ll be Management. Just like me. Do you know anyplace else where that can happen?”

“No sir, I don’t.”

“Damn straight you don’t. Because there isn’t anyplace. Nobody’s born into Black Rose, son.”

“So I see.”

“A man can still work his way in and work his way up.” Arriving at the main entrance and taking a thick white towel from a soldier waiting there for him and waving Weller through in his wake. “God bless Black Rose,” he said as he took off across the lobby, and the soldier at the door said, “Amen to that, sir.” Coming to attention and saluting for a second time. Apparently just because it pleased him to do it.

*

The Pentagon had seventeen miles of hallway, conference rooms of every size and description, and offices almost literally without number. Target ranges and running ovals and weight rooms. A pair of competition swimming pools in the basement and an obstacle course spread over the open central pentangle in five wedges of ever-increasing impossibility. The motor pool was linked by a secure underground tunnel to the old Ronald Reagan International Airport, where most of the runways were still functional and a glass-walled museum housed the last lumbering twin-rotor Chinook helicopter in the whole world. Better than seventy-five years old but still in working order, its belly full of empty drums stenciled all over with the word NAPALM for verisimilitude. Jellied gasoline. Airborne destroyer of worlds.

“Now then,” said Bainbridge when the tour was over. Standing at ease, stiff as an ironing board. “I’m only here to facilitate. You’re in charge.”

“In charge of what.”

“In charge of preparing yourself. I’ll be with you every step of the way, son, but exactly where we go is up to you.”

Weller said he’d always thought they’d just give him a set of keys and a tent or something and send him on his way. Some road maps and some food and what have you. But that run from the house this morning had opened his eyes a little.

Bainbridge smiled. “Good thinking,” he said. “So take all the time you need. It’s your call. We’re billing the bank a fortune every day you’re on board, plus the bonus when you turn the car in, so I don’t care how long it takes.” Lifting his eyebrows and giving Weller a look. “The longer the better, actually.”

Weller said, “You get a bonus when I deliver?”

“You bet. That was the lesson of Vietnam, and the lesson of Iraq too. You promise to fight, but you don’t promise to win. Not if you’re smart. Winning costs extra, if you can do it at all.”

Weller said he guessed he understood now why Bainbridge took such a personal interest. The general had a lot of duties, but the most pressing of all were financial.

It wasn’t just that, the old man said. Sure, he had something of the mercenary about him. That’s what they were, after all. Mercenaries. But Weller’s case was different. There was the little girl. It just about broke your heart, didn’t it?

Weller nodded.

Bainbridge said he’d seen Weller with that photograph he’d brought. The way he’d looked at it.

Weller smiled.

Plus there was the adventure, he said. One man against the world. Against the unknown. “I’d go down there with you if I could. It’d be just like the old days.”

Weller saw that he meant it. Anyone could have seen that.

“I wouldn’t mind crossing swords with Marlowe again, either.”

“Marlowe. You know him?”

“Knew
him.” Turning away then, heading toward the showers and changing the subject. Saying Weller had a hard decision to make, didn’t he. He’d have to balance preparing for what he kept calling
the mission
against getting back home to that little girl of his. Saying he couldn’t offer any particular counsel on that one. His own children were grown and scattered. Two sons and two daughters and neither of the boys had had the least interest in the organization that had always meant so much to their old man. Which was just as well. As he’d said, you didn’t get born into Black Rose. They’d have had to endure the same hard time as everyone else. He wasn’t sure they’d have withstood it.

*

There were satellite phones with big screens in the communications room. The officer on duty showed him how to work one and located the number and helped him call Penny’s suite at the hospital. The satellite phone there was mounted alongside the door and the camera over it was aimed down at the table as if for some kind of commercial function. A consultation maybe.

Penny looked good. Her mother looked good. The sight of the two of them made him heartsick but he tried not to show it. The weird and troubling miracle of their disembodied presence was harder to endure than the still photograph on his little writing desk, the urge to reach out and touch their images stronger. Penny leapt from her chair at the table and ran toward the phone and got so close that she disappeared from view on his end. First going out of focus and then dropping out of the frame entirely. Her father saying, “Hey, hey, back up a little bit, all right? I can’t see you.” His daughter coming back into focus and walking backwards. Returning slowly to her chair, one step at a time, leading with her little butt. Looking disappointed, but recovering.

He asked her how she was doing and she said fine but why was he wearing that uniform. She didn’t like it. Plus how come his hair was all wet. He smiled to reassure her and said he was staying with some soldiers who were giving him a hand and he’d just gotten out of the shower was how come. He’d just gotten out of the shower and he’d been in a hurry to come talk with her and her mother. Thinking while he was saying it how fine it was that she’d noticed. She’d noticed what he was wearing and that his hair was wet. It seemed like a good development.