A gang of seagulls screeched overhead and dived into the water just forty yards away as I ran toward the front of the house.
The sea was choppy; there was a wind picking up that made the yachts in the bay bob agitatedly at their moorings, and their rigging sound like the rattle of a hundred cages.
As soon as I was through the heavy wooden front door I was hit by the overbearing heat. Her mother kept the temperature at a solid ninety degrees, day and night.
George called out from the rear, “In the kitchen.”
My Timberlands clunked on the dark hardwood floor of the hallway and I passed the loudly ticking grandfather clock.
George was sitting, straight-backed, at the old pine rectangular table. A dozen or so photographs of boats were stuck to a corkboard behind him, and he was looking down at a picture frame in his hands. Little lace doilies and smelly candles sat on every scrap of surface.
“You know what they say about New Englanders and the cold, Nick?”
I shook my head.
“When the temperature hits zero all the people in Miami die. But New Englanders, they just close the windows. Trust my ex-wife to be different.”
If he was extending a hand of friendship, I wasn’t shaking.
Just like in the old picture of years ago, square-jawed and muscular, George was still looking like something off a recruitment poster. The only difference now was that his short-cropped hair was graying. His face was cold and unyielding. This setting of New England family domesticity didn’t suit him at all.
“What the hell are you doing here, George? We were supposed to meet downtown on Wednesday, remember?”
“Our plans have changed, Nick. We’re not talking about a vacation booking.”
He pursed his lips and picked up a framed photograph from the Welsh dresser. I could see it was of the three of them. Carrie must have been about ten years old in her blue-checked schoolgirl summer dress. He was in his medal-and badge-festooned military uniform, holding a certificate, with his wife standing proudly beside him. I’d told Carrie when I first saw it that they looked the perfect family. She’d laughed. “Then hellooo…meet the camera that lied.”
“You could have sent somebody. You didn’t have to come in person. You know I wanted to keep her out of this.”
He didn’t answer as I looked down at him. He was a man who had never let power and success go to his clothes. He was dressed in his civilian uniform, a brown corduroy sports jacket with brown suede elbow patches, white button-down-collar shirt, and a brown tie. There had been one addition since September 11: he now had a Stars and Stripes badge pinned to his right lapel. But, these days, who didn’t?
At last he looked up. “She didn’t even give you time to dry your hair.” There was just a hint of a smile as he thought of his daughter fucking me off, as he placed the frame carefully on the tabletop. “I’ve done you a favor, son. She needed to find out sometime. And I happen to think she deserved to know.” He bent down and picked up a leather folder from beside his feet. “Maybe this will help. Compliments of the U.S. government.”
He went and poured himself some coffee from the pot while I sat opposite his chair at the table and unzipped the folder. “It’s not as if it’s a bad thing you have done, you have nothing to be ashamed of.” He turned around and gestured toward the mug in his hand. I accepted with a grudging nod. Carrie’s mother would go ape if the wood got marked, so I took two pineapple-motif coasters from the pile in the center of the table as George continued, now with his back to me. “This isn’t a war of choice like Vietnam or Kosovo. This is a war of necessity. It’s in our yard now, Nick. Carrie should be proud of you.”
I glanced into the folder and saw my passport, driver’s license, and other documents. “This could have waited, George.”
“What you did for us out there, it had to be done, Nick. This is not the time to be showing the world we’re nice guys. This outreach thing that’s going on, every schoolkid gets a Muslim pen pal, that kind of thing, it makes no sense. This isn’t a time to hug, this is a time to be feared.”
I flipped through the passport and there was something wrong, big-time wrong. These weren’t Nick Stone’s documents; they belonged to someone called Nick Scott, who had the same face as me. I looked up sharply. George was still pouring creamer. “I didn’t want a new name, I wanted my own back.”
He came and sat down with the two mugs of coffee, passing one across the table then waving my last words aside. He kept the other in his huge left hand, his veteran’s onyx signet ring glinting on his ring finger. He took a tentative sip; too hot — the mug went on the coaster. “Do you know over six hundred people died in floods over in Algeria two days ago? You were lucky to get in-country before the storms.”
I cupped my hands around the mug and felt the heat. “I heard something.”
“You know why? Because the drains had been blocked to stop terrorists planting bombs under the streets and killing people. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know where this was headed, but I wasn’t feeling good about it. I just wanted to get out of here and go and find Carrie.
“Know what my job is nowadays, Nick? To make sure we don’t have to block our drains. You’ve helped me do that, and the first thing I want to say today is thank you.”
This was really starting to worry me. I picked up the dull-looking brew with not enough cream, and took a sip.
“For years, we’ve been fighting this war with our hands tied. Now people are looking for scapegoats because America doesn’t feel safe anymore. America says, ‘The government should have known, the CIA should have known, the military should have known. Thirty billion of our tax dollars spent on intelligence, why didn’t anyone know?’” He paused to lift his mug. “Well, here’s the news. On nine-eleven America had the exact level of protection that it was willing to pay for. We’ve been telling government for years that we need more money to fight this thing. We told them this would eventually happen but Congress wouldn’t give us cash. Doesn’t anyone watch C-Span anymore to see what their own government is doing? Maybe they’re just too busy watching Jerry Springer. What do you think?”
I shrugged, not really understanding what he was going on about, not that it mattered. I just got the feeling the place we were going to wasn’t one where I wanted to be.
“Did any of the complainers see the intelligence chiefs talking about the new terrorism? We kept telling Congress, live on TV, there wasn’t enough money to build intelligence networks in the areas where these scum are operating — and that they needed to untie our hands so we could deal with this situation. We’ve told them for years that this is a clear and present danger within America’s borders that needs to be taken on and defeated but, hey, guess what? Congress just said no, looking at ways of saving a nickel.”
He took a long, slow breath of frustration before continuing. “So why didn’t America demand more protection from their Congressmen? Because they were watching one of their two hundred other channels and didn’t catch the news. Didn’t catch Congress telling us we didn’t need more capability. Telling us we were just looking for something to replace the Cold War. Know why Congress did that? Because they think that’s what the people think, and they don’t want to upset them, because they don’t want to lose their vote. Now everything is different. Now we have all the nails we need to shut the stable door, but the horse has already bolted.
“Goddamn it, Nick, why didn’t things change after the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole? Seventeen American sailors came home in body bags — why didn’t that open their eyes? And what about the bombing of the air force base in Saudi Arabia? Or the embassy staff in Africa? Or our soldiers mutilated and dragged through the streets of Somalia? Why wasn’t anybody letting us do anything then?