“You do speak English!” he said with a smile.
“A little,” she replied without looking up as she found her place in the book.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said sitting up, energized.
“Because you would have started talking to me and I wouldn’t have been able to read my book, which I have been looking forward to for a long time.” She returned to her book.
“How did you know I’d start talking to you?”
“Because you’re an American, and Americans always talk to strangers.”
“How’d you know I was an American?” he wondered.
She shook her head slowly, amazed. “Your haircut, your jacket, your shoes, your cord… what do you call them — corduroy pants. Your questions, and you’ve been staring at me since I came into this compartment.”
Vialli grimaced. “Sorry…”
She started reading again.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Vialli said. He checked his watch. The trip was only thirty minutes, and they had left Naples fifteen minutes before. He tried to concentrate on the countryside as the rails clacked rhythmically beneath him. He could see Mt. Vesuvius in the distance, the now-dormant volcano that had buried Pompeii centuries ago. You could see it from Naples for that matter, or from thirty miles out at sea, or from a hundred miles if the weather was clear and you were flying high enough. He couldn’t stand it. “Where are you from?”
She placed a bookmark in her book and laid it on her lap. “The American conversation,” she said. “Where are you from, what do you do, where did you go to school. Right?”
He looked at her directly, and she noticed his intense brown eyes under his dark brown hair. “Doesn’t hurt to be friendly,” he said.
She relaxed slightly. “No, it won’t hurt. I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and shrugged her shoulders. “I live in a town in northern Italy called Trento. It’s just south of Austria.”
“Must be nice.”
“It is very pretty, and very old. A wonderful town.”
“What do you do?”
“See?”
“Come on,” he said.
“I am a schoolteacher, at least by training. I don’t teach right now. I’m waiting for an opening.”
He nodded and looked out the window again, trying not to show that he was really focusing on her reflection in the glass.
“What do you do?” she asked suddenly.
He looked at her with surprise. “I’m in the Navy.”
“The American Navy?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you on a ship?”
He nodded. “More or less. I’m a pilot — I fly off a carrier.”
“Of course,” she said. “You’re on that big carrier in the bay.”
He smiled and nodded. “That’s me. The George Washington. Largest class of warship ever built. Nimitz class.”
“Is it really?”
“Nothing else is even close. Some of the battleships were almost as heavy, but nothing nearly as big in every dimension.”
“What do you fly?”
“Do you know airplanes?”
“Not really.”
“Fighters. F-14s. Tomcats. You know, two tails, wings that move back and forth…”
“I think I’ve seen them. I think we have them too.”
Vialli shook his head. “No, only the U.S. and, unfortunately, Iran.”
“What do we have that looks like that?”
“We who? Italy?”
She looked puzzled, then understood. “Yes. Italy.”
“Nothing really. Just Fiats and those sorts of things. Gnats. Bugsmashers. Noisemakers. Nothing serious.”
“Well, you shouldn’t belittle it…”
“I didn’t mean to. I’m sure Italy’s Air Force is truly formidable,” he said. He tried to get her to look at him, which she was reluctant to do. “Do you mind if I ask you your name?”
She hesitated before she answered. “Irit.”
“What?” he said, leaning forward, as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Irit.”
“That’s an odd name. Is it Italian?”
“What’s your name?”
“Tony Vialli.”
“That’s an odd name. Is it American?”
“Very funny. No such thing as an American name,” he said, “except maybe Sitting Bull,” he added. “No, my name is Italian, and my family, some time ago, I think my grandparents’ parents, came over to the States. I’ve heard they were from Genoa, but I’m not really sure.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Vialli.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Where are you going?”
She looked amused. “This train only goes to Pompeii.”
He nodded, trying to imply he knew that. “But are you going to see the tourist trap, where all the dead people are, or what?”
“Yes, I’m going to see where the dead people are. What else would I be doing there?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. I figured there may be a town there too.”
“Not really.”
“So you’re playing tourist today?”
“Yes I am.”
“You want to come with us? With Sean and me? We can go to Pompeii together and see the dead people,” he said. He suddenly realized he hadn’t even asked Woods. “If that’s okay with you?” he said to Sean. “We’ll all go together.”
Woods stared at him, amazed.
She studied Vialli carefully. “I don’t really know you.” She leaned back against the seat as the train rounded a curve. She considered. “Why not.”
3
“As of right now each of you is a member of a special task force to track the attack on the Gaza border, and identify the group responsible. This one has the Director’s attention.” Joe Kinkaid, Director of Counter-Terrorism at the CIA, had them hanging on every word. This was the kind of assignment they all longed for. It could launch a career. Kinkaid’s unit had two hundred members. It was their job to identify and track all terrorist threats worldwide that might threaten American interests. He was overworked but he loved his job. He was one of the few people in Greater Washington who went home every night knowing he was making the world better for his children. In his mid-fifties, he was out of shape and didn’t care. What he cared about was that his mind was working at full speed, which it always was.
Kinkaid pressed the space bar on the laptop computer sitting on the lectern and the screen in the front of the room lit up with the first slide of his presentation. The screen was blue with decorative red in the lower-right corner. In large white letters the slide said: gaza task force.
“This task force is classified Top Secret. I expect it will go code word in the not too distant future. No one outside this room has a need to know about us or what we’re doing unless I say so. You know the drill.” He touched the space bar again, and the next slide came up. It was in outline form and provided him with the bullet points he wanted to be sure to make. “The Gaza attack occurred after dawn, about eight in the morning, local time. Stranded truck, turned around, doors burst open. Big firefight.”
The next slide showed a photograph of the checkpoint. There were several bodies on the road near one side, and a burning APC across the fence on the Israeli side. The high-quality color photo had words on the bottom: secret, noforn, wnintel. Classified secret, not to be released to foreign intelligence or military, and a warning notice, that intelligence sources or methods were involved in the acquisition of the photo that made it more sensitive than the usual secret photo.
“Note what we all know, and what we’ve all heard on CNN, that both Palestinian guards and Israeli guards were killed. This is different. I can’t think of any time someone has taken on the Israelis and the Palestinians at the same time.”