“Now, now—”
“They think information comes in suppositories and should go up their ass for safekeeping.”
Kasser grinned and then got serious again. “There was also somebody from State at my meeting, plus two guys from the Joint Chiefs. They’d rather work with the Bureau.”
“They’ve got nothing to do with it!”
“They say they have. They’re saying what everybody on the TV is saying — Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, whatever. There’s already pressure to carry out a punitive strike.”
“Without an investigation?”
“Osama bin Laden. They’ve got a contingency plan.”
“This only happened a few hours ago!”
“It isn’t just this one — there’s a whole string of stuff. They want to use this one as motivation to make a punitive strike.”
“They call for a punitive strike before there’s proof, and they’re wrong, this country looks like shit! What’d they do the last time — they blew up a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan! We’re not goddamn Nazi Germany!”
“The Agency and the Bureau say they can have the proof in seventy-two hours.”
Dukas banged his fist on the arm of his chair. “This is a Navy ship; we’re a Navy investigating unit; we do our own work. CIA and FBI stay out.”
Kasser looked at his hands again. “Tell me why I should send you.”
“Because— Because I don’t belong in the office doing routine.”
Kasser nodded. “And because you got shot and you want to prove to yourself that you’re okay.”
Dukas shrugged.
“You refused counseling, Mike.”
“So would you have. What do I need counseling for?”
“Post-trauma.”
“Bullshit.”
“Statistics show—”
“I’m not a statistic! I want a job!”
Kasser swung around to look out his window at the tops of trees, blowing now in a warm wind. He sighed. “Okay, you got the case for now — for as long as I can fight off the Bureau and the Agency. What’s your plan?”
Dukas, suddenly sweating, ran through it: team, schedule, forensics, support. “I can be there tomorrow,” he ended.
Kasser nodded, but he was frowning as if the most important thing hadn’t been said. “CIA will have somebody on-site before you get there — they’ve got a station there, can’t be helped. The Bureau, too — they’re international now. We can insist that you’re in charge for a while. But if you find something that doesn’t go along with what they want to find, you’re going to have a hell of a time.” He pointed a finger. “You go, and go as fast as you can. You hit the ground running. I’m not going to be stampeded, Mike, but I think we can hold the line for only a few days. Maybe a week. Okay?”
Dukas jerked his head. “Okay.”
He held out his hand. “Go.”
Dukas went.
For Rose Siciliano Craik, the television sets were like needles some malign power had left to jab her with. She’d manage to forget her husband and the idea that he might be dead, and then she’d pass a TV and would see some part of the Kilindini footage, and he’d be back at the front of her mind.
She had dropped the kids off and spoken with their teachers, and she had come to NASA and spent her obligatory time with a woman in security. The idea that somebody who had blown up a ship in Africa would also reach into a day-care center in Houston seemed absurd. Dukas had said they had to “take precautions.” Whatever that meant. Arm all the six-year-olds? String razor wire around day care?
“I’ve got a weapon in my car,” Rose told the security officer. “NCIS recommendation.”
“Not on the base, I hope!”
“It’s locked.”
“That’s against the rules, very much against the rules, Commander.” Rose thought that was a peculiar view for a security officer to take, but she was only beginning to glimpse the culture around her. It was more about rules and conforming and looking good than she had suspected. Or, a traitorous voice whispered in her mind, than she liked.
The security officer said that Rose was safe on the base and there was no reason for a gun. Rose volleyed back with an offer to check her handgun in and out every day at the gate. She would be a good little astronaut, but off base she wanted the gun. The security officer frowned and said that unfortunately she had no control over what Rose did off the base, but she advised against carrying weapons.
“I’m not carrying it.”
“Semantics.”
The security woman got on to Rose’s boss, Colonel Brasher, and made an afternoon appointment to meet with somebody whose title was Director of Personnel Education; Rose had already learned a lot about the educating that went into the making of an astronaut, so she concluded that “education” in this case probably meant something else. Like fitting in or getting along.
“Fine,” she said with a bright smile. She could feel the phoniness of the smile, like something she’d glued on. She hated that smile.
She was in the gym when they pulled her out for an “urgent” phone call. She thought at once of her kids — a kidnapper? an attacker? — and then of Alan, and then of her mother.
It was Rafe Rafehausen, calling from the Jefferson.
“Nothing yet, Rose, but I wanted you to know we’re trying. We can’t get a secure channel.”
“Thanks, Rafe. Any idea how he is?”
“I figure no news is good news. He’s tough, Rose.”
They were all tough. That was what they got paid for. Life was tough; they were tough. Rafe had a paraplegic wife who was pregnant; she was tough, too. She thought of her mother, who was not tough, who was a whiner, who couldn’t see beyond the end of her own comfort.
“Keep me informed, will you, Rafe?”
“The minute I know anything.”
Walking back to the gym, she decided she’d get a book on Alzheimer’s. Not for her mother’s sake, but for her father’s, because he was the one who was going to have to be tough.
For the old silversmith whom Alan had visited that morning, who was not really old but was an “old man,” an mzee, because he owned his own shop and had three sons, the hospitals were hell. He had always stayed away from doctors, cured himself with traditional remedies, avoided the clinics where Western medicine and modernity were doled out together, and now he was in a hospital and it was, as he had known it would be, hell.
This was his third hospital today. He had let his second son lead him through the streets from hospital to hospital, allowing himself to be pushed into doorways, pulled down behind a barricade, urged into a trot to escape the trucks and the soldiers. They had walked or run everywhere; there were no taxis, no cycle-jitneys, no matatus. Chaos. He wanted to go inside his house and shut the great wooden door and wait until it was over.
Instead, he was in hell. Hell had green walls, scuffed and nicked and stained, marked today with new blood in smears and spatters. Hell had a slippery floor where there was hardly room to place his small feet because human bodies had been put down everywhere. Mostly men’s bodies, young men, but some women, some children. Bleeding. Bandaged, some of them, with cloth torn from garments and now sodden.