Ian Slater: Payback

“Those two discarded launchers,” Freeman said. “Have we got their MIDs?” It was obvious she didn’t know what he meant, and so he added, “Manufacturer’s identification numbers. Without them you can’t keep track of inventory in a factory. Do we have them from the launchers?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

In fact, the FBI field forensic lab was already examining the launchers for MID numbers. It had proved helpful in the past — the same launcher used in the near-miss against the Arika Airlines’ Boeing 757–300 of November ’02 had been used in other attacks.

“If we can find out where the launchers came from,” said Freeman, “we could pay it a visit.”

“The President’s already determined to do that, but we’ve had so much stuff coming in, I don’t know whether anyone’s determined the actual source, even if they’ve got those MID serial numbers. My God, Douglas, how are they getting them into this country?” Eleanor asked exasperatedly.

“Through slimeballs like unlicensed arms dealers.”

“I’ll press the agencies for the serial numbers.”

“If I can be of further help…”

“Don’t worry, Douglas. The Pentagon might have exiled you; I haven’t.”

He was at once gratified and humiliated that his only conduit as a “retiree” to the halls of power was not via his reputation, his past reputation, as a gung-ho leader of Special Forces in America’s defense, but only through the goodwill of Eleanor Prenty. A civilian.

“I appreciate what you said,” responded Freeman, then said good-bye, his tone, one of a forgotten champion, noticed by Margaret — who, getting ready for bed, passed by in her robe, beneath which she was wearing a brand-new translucent pink nightgown, of a kind that her mother would have condemned as “blatant.” And Margaret would have agreed, but the awful carnage of today, the sight of the black, smoldering heaps that only seconds before had been hundreds of human beings pulsating with life and hope, had been an epiphany in Margaret’s life, provoking a determination to no longer simply exist, to vegetate in a lonely world of restrained, reined-in spinsterdom, but to cast off her uptight, buttoned-down feelings of guilt about the love she’d felt for her sister’s husband all these years. Catherine was long deceased. Anyway, wouldn’t she have wanted Douglas to be, well, comforted? Margaret felt it was time for her need to be comforted. And today they had broken the ice, through the deep freeze she had built up between them, but she was afraid that now that the ice of her guilt had cracked, she would be — well, she would be humiliated.

She said good night. He was still working at his laptop but gave her a smile. “Good night, Margaret. You’ve been a great help.” After all this time, it was as if he’d kissed her.

“Don’t—,” she began, quickly aborting the phrase “stay up too late” and instead encouraged him. “Don’t forget there’s lots of food — in the icebox.”

He laughed. She smiled, but was nonplused. “What’s so funny?”

“ ‘Icebox.’ It’s — such an old-fashioned term. I like it.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“God bless,” she said, and went to her bedroom. “Icebox,” she said softly. Well, she wasn’t going to be an icebox. She searched in her dresser drawer for a small six-by-one-and-a-half-inch square white box purchased in a moment of fantasy years ago in an out-of-town drugstore. She took the tube of viscous liquid from the box and, removing her robe, admired her figure in the mirror — full breasts, firm tummy and bottom, front and side-on beneath the slinky film of pink silk. “Not bad,” she dared whisper, “for an old-young girl of fifty-five.”

Beneath the covers she squeezed a bead-sized drop of the K-Y lubricant on her right index finger and, careful to replace the tube’s screw-on top so as not to get any on the sheet, she slowly applied it, working it in gently. She couldn’t fit a minnow in there. One of those dreadfully sex-obsessed women’s magazines— Cosmopolitan, if she remembered correctly — at the hairdresser’s had had an article in it about how virgins needed to use one of those “things” to widen the entrance.

It seemed such a lot of bother, but then sometimes alone in bed, or working alone in the garden, alone on her daily walk, she just ached — there was no other word for it — she ached to have a man inside her, hard and gentle and forceful until…until what she’d never known from a man would happen. How so-called modern women would laugh at her, she thought, a woman so traumatized by a fundamentalist upbringing that even satisfying yourself was such a mortal sin that she had always felt guilty — you had to save yourself, wait for marriage. She had waited — fifty-five long, aching years. Dear Lord, wasn’t it time? The awful vision of the dead from the plane crashes was before her, their lives ended, snuffed out like candles. Life itself was so tenuous — you never knew. If Douglas walked through her bedroom door, she’d cast her bedcovers aside and be blatant for once in her life. He could do what he wanted with her. He would be her lover. Her first.

The very thought of the word “lover” made her catch her breath, her eyes closing, then wide-awake in fright. The article in Cosmopolitan said you would need to insert one of those wax things daily for a week or two, or use your fingers with some lubricant, to ensure you were wide enough, because if the skin tore, it would hurt like the devil, as too many honeymoon-nighters had apparently discovered, a terrible way to start a relationship — and worse, put the man right off. Surely her lubricated fingers would serve to—

She tried to relax. Of course he wouldn’t approach her tonight. What was she thinking? They’d just broken the ice. Besides, he’d be too busy trying to help track down the unspeakable creatures who had murdered all those children and other passengers at JFK, at Los Angeles, and down in Dallas/Fort Worth, hundreds of people who’d been alive only hours before. Tomorrow she would go see a doctor — no, not her usual MD, but someone, a young woman doctor perhaps? No, a married middle-aged doctor, who could advise her. Surely there must be a quicker, more modern way to widen herself than one of those things Cosmopolitan talked about. Ugh.

The phone rang and she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It was just after midnight as she picked it up. She heard a man’s voice — an Australian accent. “The products’ MID numbers—” Margaret replaced the phone.

In the living room, the kitchen’s cordless phone beside him by the laptop, Freeman was pressing Aussie Lewis for details. “What’s the problem?”

“Scuttlebutt from my buddies at the Pentagon is that there’s a jurisdictional scrap going on between National Transportation Safety Board investigators and the FBI over who has primary responsibility for detecting serial numbers.”

“For God’s sake!” thundered Freeman. “What are those suits doing? The President’s spent millions with Homeland Security, trying to get those wankers to stop competing against each other and start cooperating. Pride, Aussie, pride cometh before a fall.”

“You got it,” agreed Aussie, thinking of another adage, something about the pot calling the kettle black. Freeman’s legend, like Patton’s, was based on solid and, at times, brilliantly unorthodox tactics, such as the famous Russian tank-oil maneuver in the U.S.-led NATO mission in Siberia. But the legend was also built on an ego and a pride that, like Patton’s, thrived on media-fed public acclaim. What was it General Omar Bradley, Patton’s onetime subordinate, then his superior, had once said about the legendary Patton when his Third Army had broken out of the heavily fortified bocage, the hedgerow country in Normandy, slashing through the Nazi defenses? “Give George a headline and he’s good for another hundred miles.”