She knew he was using her as an ad hoc stringer—a conduit for information the US government wanted to float, but she couldn’t imagine who it was he wanted her to tell. The world was ending and this very bright, disconcertingly attractive man of the inaccessible type that used to give her a terse “no comment” on the way to a waiting limousine from a meeting in the Tank or the White House didn’t seem to realize it.
Now he said, his even-featured, supremely American face composed and his eyes delving into hers so that she sat back in her chair with crossed arms: “It could be worse, you know. Cheer up.”
“How? How could it be worse?” He flustered her: she was sure he could see right into her soul, knew that, in the midst of Armageddon, all she wanted was to go to bed with him; that, as life as she’d known it was ending, all she could think of was getting laid by some career diplomat who undoubtedly had a wife who routinely spent fifty thousand a year on clothes but never looked dressed up, and who paid for it all with stock dividends from the portfolio she’d brought to their marriage.
“Somebody could have won,” he replied, saw the shock on her face and reached out to enfold her hand, squeeze it quickly, then break contact: all very professional and earnest. “Does that sound subversive? It’s not. It’s practicaclass="underline" both sides realized the unworkability of continuing hostilities, admitted their mistake—there’ll be no retributive strikes, no incursions of ground—”
“Practical?” Chris couldn’t believe her ears. “Mistake? Continuing hostilities? What’s to con tinue?” She fingered the little red-film badge he’d given her; not to worry, he’d said, until and if it clouds up: in her purse she had a pocket-sized Geiger counter—just a precaution this early, he’d told her; the local jet stream would carry the radiation downstream at a speed of one hundred miles per hour at forty thousand feet initially, but ground-level winds carried fallout at normal windspeed and that was an average of fifteen miles per hour—they had days to prepare, he’d smiled.
Beck sat back and loosened his rep tie. He had made the dinner while she watched—Salade Nicoise—telling her cheerily that she’d better eat all the greens she could before they became suspect; his manner now was similar and he seemed genuinely hurt that she was questioning his unassailable truths.
“Chris.” He sat forward and there was something of the priest in him now, the zealot of unshakable faith. “You’ve got to stop feeling sorry for yourself if you want to survive.”
She imagined saying, I don’t—just fuck me and I’ll die happy, but she wasn’t that brave. In the five hours Chris Patrick had sat waiting for Beck in the inner offices of the consulate, she’d learned a lot: she was, after all, a trained observer. She’d learned that the consular staff had all been issued protective clothing and breathing apparatus, as well as Geiger counters and badges, but that they’d decided that wearing them would terrify a populace who must do without, so they were waiting for some sort of last-minute alert; she’d learned that their best advice to American citizens was to depart for southern hemisphere destinations if possible; if not, to collect as much food and drinking water as they could and plan to stay indoors for at least a month, wear protective clothing (hoods, hats, raincoats, high boots), carry paper masks when they went out, and seal their windows with duct tape.
“I told you,” she said, hoping checked hysteria would pass for an imitation of his unflappable calm, “the nicest thing you can do for me—besides this wonderful dinner, of course—is lend me your gun.”
Now Beck’s eyes narrowed with an almost paternal outrage; black pupils seemed to swallow the smoky irises around them: “You’re fixated. What makes you think I have a gun?”
“Well, you’re a spook, aren’t you?” she said defensively.
“Try sleeping pills, if you must—it’s cleaner.” He put down his fork and it clattered against the faience plate. “But if you’re that intent on throwing your life away and you’re not afraid of dying, I can offer you an alternative.”
He was like a snake, striking; then he sat back and waited for her to respond.
“What do you mean? What kind of alternative—something for God and Country, I bet.” She’d kept her temper in check through all his obscene references to second strike capability and subsequent incursions; she hadn’t said a word, though she’d turned over the cassette in her little recorder on the table between them when the tape ran out. Now her horror got the best of her: “Do you think it matters that there won’t be Soviet shock troops in Langley by morning? Do you think it helps that only the northeast seaboard, Silicon Valley and the northwest as far as Utah have been confirmed as your stinking… your fucking filthy radioactive red zones? It’s over, can’t you see that? God knows you seem intelligent—can’t you get it through that handsome head of yours that this is the—”
“I told you to stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said quietly, and yet it was as if he’d slapped her across the face.
He stood up and went to the balcony’s edge; the high-rise compound might have been in any of a number of cities she’d visited but somehow, she knew, Marc Beck would only have been here. He leaned with both hands on the hip-high concrete wall, then faced her again, his back to it: “Answer me,” he said like an army officer to a soldier facing court-martial, and she realized he had her little tape recorder in one hand, the cassette in the other, and was methodically pulling the tape from its spindles.
“I don’t understand the question—Christ, I don’t even remember the question.”
She stood up uncertainly and her napkin fell from her lap. He was angry and she didn’t want him to be angry with her; the terror of his displeasure was more immediate than the terror of lingering death by radiation poisoning, and not only because she remembered what he had done to the panicked tourist in the consulate.
“Come here, Chris.”
She did and he was holding yards of unwound recording tape over the balcony’s edge, where it fluttered like ticker tape. Her neck was hot and she was so close to him she could have reached out and grabbed the loose tape as he dropped it and it wafted downward. She didn’t and it disappeared into the dusk.
He probed her with his stare: “I could use you. If you’re angry enough, when you understand enough, if you’re willing to die for something rather than as a victim of something.”
She’d thought this before, now she said it: “You want me to be your stringer. You are a spook.”
He shrugged: he didn’t like her choice of words but that was a minor irritation and he was willing to bear with her—she was ignorant; he was patient.
He didn’t say anything, so she went on: “But why? What’s the use? No, I’m sorry; I do remember: don’t feel sorry for myself. But my bureau’s in a mess; there’s no use in propagandizing, whether it’s gray, black, or even white propaganda you’ve got in mind—”
“There’s still an international edition of your paper; I’ve checked it out,” he interrupted. “We want to set the record straight, for starters. We want to protect our people overseas in more substantial ways than having the Israeli government declare American money to be as good as shekels and make it a crime not to take our paper or our plastic.” He faced her now, something like fervor glittering in his eyes so that he seemed like a priest again: “I keep telling you this isn’t the end of the world and you keep refusing to register the input.”
“You got that right, buddy,” she muttered. And that stopped him, so she said, “Again, my apologies for not acting like a trooper. Please go on. You know all us girl reporters fantasize regularly about working for the CIA—”