“Hey, Dad,” she said with false cheeriness. She walked over and kissed his thinning hair, making sure to not wrinkle her nose at the old-man smell.
He looked past her into the corridor. “What are you doing here?”
It was the same time she usually came by. Either he’d forgotten, or he was being passive-aggressive.
“I snuck out of work a little early. I wanted to say hi.”
“Where’s Dash?”
She didn’t bring Dash anymore; it was too upsetting to him when her father didn’t recognize him.
“He’s at school, Dad.”
“Pretty late in the day for school.”
“You know Dash. Baseball practice. I’ll bring him next time, okay?”
By next time, she reminded herself, her father would forget having asked, so her promise would cause no hurt. She wondered when her own visits would become superfluous. Her father wasn’t that far gone yet, but the doctors had warned her it was mostly a matter of time. Sometimes he talked about her mother as though she were still alive — was she back from the store yet? — that kind of thing. But on the other hand, they’d had a happy marriage. Maybe it was a blessing, the way his wife had crept back from the realm of his memory and into his waking life.
There was a moment of awkward silence. She searched for a way to break it.
“It’s sunny out, Dad, you want me to open the curtains?”
“I like the dark.”
“You don’t feel like bingo today, with any of your friends?”
“They’re not my friends.”
And so on. She stayed only twenty minutes, pausing to kiss him again when she left. That smell was getting worse, wasn’t it? Like the other symptoms. She promised him she’d be back soon, maybe even tomorrow, knowing the promise would be broken, this time not even rationalizing that it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t remember.
She stopped at the adjacent Safeway and picked up some fried chicken for dinner and ice cream for dessert. Digne often cooked for them, but Safeway fried chicken was Dash’s favorite, and sometimes Evie just liked to surprise him with it. Especially when she’d just come from visiting her father and needed something to make herself happy. She reminded herself the ice cream was for Dash, not for her. And to peel the skin off the chicken. She exercised regularly and was pleased with the results, but no one exercised that much.
She pulled into her apartment lot and cut the engine, her Prius at home among the Ford Fusions, Honda Accords, and Suburu Outbacks. Practical cars for practical people. People who couldn’t afford to be otherwise. And suddenly she was fighting back tears.
How had it come to this? The drift and the divorce. Her mother, eaten alive by melanoma that had spread to the lymph nodes. Her father, still recognizing her and appreciating her visits, but slowly sliding into darkness and dementia. And no one else. No one to fall back on if anything really bad ever happened. She looked around at all the empty cars. Did the people who drove them feel as scared and isolated as she did? Did they wonder how they had arrived here, what they were doing, why they bothered, who would miss them if they were gone?
She thought of Dash, the auburn hair he got from his father, the freckles he got from her, the gap-toothed grin for which she couldn’t afford braces, not right now. Dash would miss her. Wasn’t he waiting for her right now, in their little apartment? She loved the way he always instantly dropped whatever he was doing when she got home and ran over to give her a hug, the way Digne would nod in recognition at the bond they shared. And how he wasn’t embarrassed to hug her even in front of his friends. How could she ever feel sorry for herself, with a son like that?
She smiled and went inside to see him.
CHAPTER
8
The video was posted on YouTube at seven in the morning Washington time — perfectly timed for morning coverage on the major news websites and hysterical follow-on commentary on the evening shows. Hamilton kneeling, dressed in an orange jumpsuit similar to the ones made infamous as the official uniform of prisoners at Guantanamo, his wrists bound behind him, an undifferentiated desert landscape all around. Beside him, a masked jihadist holding a long Bedouin dagger, explaining with calm confidence that soon the man would be beheaded as a lesson to America.
Anders called Remar into his office the moment the video went live. He knew the White House would be on the line any minute and they didn’t have much time.
“What the hell is this?” he said, standing behind his desk and gesturing at the monitor. “They were supposed to kill him on camera, not just threaten it.”
Remar came around, moving crisply in his blue army service uniform, and nodded. “I know. I just saw it.”
“So what happened?”
Remar moved respectfully back to the other side of the desk. “I’m guessing they decided to squeeze some extra propaganda value out of the exercise. Milk it a little while longer before collecting their reward.”
“How much longer?”
Remar looked at him. He didn’t have to answer. They were both thinking the same thing: Long enough for US Spec Ops to mount some sort of rescue operation?
Anders looked at the image on his monitor again. “This isn’t good.”
“You want me to contact Ergenekon? Suggest a completion bonus if the work is finished in the next twenty-four hours?”
Anders moved out from behind his desk and started pacing. “You could, but it’s as likely they’ll smell blood in the water as it is they’d go for the money. Or maybe they don’t care about the money at all at this point. We don’t even know if whoever is holding Hamilton is really ISIS affiliated. More likely, Ergenekon gave him to some wannabe group willing to spend a little more cash, and the game for them is notoriety. Right now, ISIS is the brand to beat, so these idiots are probably going to milk their new captive for a good long time. They can only kill him once. But they can display him again and again and again.”
Remar moved to the door and paused, as though ready to leave the moment Anders ordered him into action. “The more they display him, the more intel it’s going to produce.”
“Correct. And the more likely the president will order a rescue operation.”
“We could obstruct it. JSOC would need our SIGINT to carry out a rescue.”
Anders stopped pacing, realizing Remar was missing a crucial change in the way the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command ordinarily had to rely on NSA’s Signals Intelligence.
“You’re not seeing it,” he said, holding up his hands in a stop gesture. “Any rescue will be carried out from Turkey. Which would have ideally positioned us — if we had a live SUSLA there. But Perkins just died in a car accident, remember?”
There was a long pause. Remar said, “Jesus.”
“Jesus has nothing to do with it. Without someone on the ground for liaison, JSOC will have a pretext to use their own operators and their own intel. We won’t have a chance to muddy the waters.”
“Okay, but this is all assuming the president even orders a rescue.”
Anders laughed. “His ratings are down. If he could pull off the rescue of an American journalist from an evil jihadist group, it would be a political wet dream. The longer Hamilton is alive and suffering on YouTube, the more the president’s opponents will try to flank him by screeching he’s not being tough enough. Hell, Senator McQueen’s going to be ecstatic over this. The president could order the nuclear destruction of Russia, and McQueen would still be trying to make him out to be some kind of eunuch.”