Ian Slater - Payback

Tom had thought about it. “No, why?”

“Well, in the old black-and-white movie days, Stan Laurel was a thin, dopey-looking screwup and Oliver Hardy was a big, overweight straight man. Laurel was always screwing up, and Olly’d go ballistic. Anyway, point is, the FBI guys asked my mortgage assessor what he’d meant. My mortgage guy explained about the two comedians — earlier generation, right? — but what he didn’t tell them was that the only place he’d mentioned screwup Stan’s line, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s going on?’ was in the rental car he was driving months before. He was too embarrassed to tell the FBI agents he’d been talking to himself while listening to some report about how security experts were worried about some of the Stingers we gave the Afghans years ago possibly turning up in America sometime in the future.” Nick paused again, then asked Tom Prenty, “You ever talk to yourself in the car?”

Tom Prenty hesitated, then shrugged, a little embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“So do I. I talk back at the radio — and the TV, when I’m a passenger — all the time, like when they reran an old documentary made in ’03 about that Dixie Chick telling a Brit audience how ashamed she was to be American during the Iraq War. I’m yelling at the screen and my wife says, ‘They can’t hear you!’ But you know, sometimes you get so pissed…Anyway, my mortgage guy was listening to this talk show and talked back sarcastically at the radio, about the U.S. doing a Laurel and Hardy bit with Stingers in Afghanistan, and he says to himself, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s goin’ on?’ ”

“You’re telling me,” Tom had said, “the rental car was wired ?”

“Yeah, like those cars the cops use to catch car thieves.”

“Bait cars,” said Tom.

“Yeah. That’s it. Bait cars. What I’m afraid of is that the water police bitch is gonna write about me and the flowers in her report. You know, about Eleanor screaming to get the flowers out and her being on the White House staff—”

“You told the water bitch that ?”

“Hey, I’m sorry, but I was so pissed about the hose fine, I was just explaining how it was I had to leave the hose running.”

Tom had put his hand reassuringly on Nick’s shoulder. “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

The banker’s face was creased with concern. “You think they’re winning?”

Tom looked at his neighbor, trying to parse the neighbor’s question. What did he mean by “they’re winning”? The government’s invasion of every American’s privacy? Or did he mean the terrorists were winning the war by turning America into a quasi — police state, a country of spy cameras, hidden recording devices, and informers?

“Tell Eleanor to make a joke of it or something at work,” Nick advised. “You know, how—”

“Otherwise they’ll think she’s nuts,” proffered Tom. “Cracking up. Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s the times, Tom.”

“You sure your mortgage guy only said that about Laurel and Harley—”

“ Hardy. In the rental car. Absolutely. He’s positive.”

“I’ll tell Eleanor.”

He did.

She was recalling the incident now, back home by order of the President. While her postpartum blues hadn’t torpedoed the marriage, they hadn’t helped. Unable to sleep, and feeling an acute need for junk comfort food, she got up, went to the kitchen, sniffed suspiciously at a “best before” date on a lump of cheese, decided to chance it, made herself a decaf tea, and wandered into the flickering blue light of Jennifer’s bedroom; the TV was still on. There was no sound, CNN showing pictures of the National Transportation Safety Board investigators treading painstakingly through reassembled bits and pieces of aircraft from JFK, LAX, and Dallas/Fort Worth.

Eleanor switched off the TV and looked down at Jennifer and Billy Bush, the two of them seemingly grafted together, the room redolent with the same soft, warm smell Jennifer had had as a baby. Had it been eleven years? It was just after the flowers incident that Tom had bought the stuffed “Gotta Have a Gund” pig. She’d taken his advice and made a joke about the flowers incident to several of her female colleagues at the White House. They’d all had a big laugh, several of the women swapping their own postpartum stories, funny now but not when they’d happened. No one thought she was losing it, but it transpired that Tom, who had seemed to be so kind and empathetic at the time, was more annoyed about it than his conversation with their neighbor indicated, and soon his annoyance grew into a sullen anger, exacerbated by Eleanor’s increasing attention to Jennifer, which, Tom charged, was robbing their marriage of any spontaneity. It meant he wasn’t getting enough sex.

She wanted to bend down now and pick Jennifer up, even though Jennifer’s baby days were long gone. Instead, she kissed her daughter, patted Billy Bush — then started in fright as the kitchen phone rang shrilly. She dashed out, for fear the ring would wake Jennifer. It was three in the morning, for crying out loud. It had to be the President. What now? “Hello?” she began in a whisper, pulling the sliding kitchen door closed so she could talk to the President in an ordinary, nonhushed business tone.

“Eleanor, I’m sorry to call at such an ungodly hour.” It was Freeman, calling from SOCOM — Special Operations Command — in Florida after an exhilarating two and a half hours en route from Monterey in an F/A-22 Raptor trainer on “super cruise” high above the western deserts. And yes, Eleanor agreed with Freeman, it was an ungodly hour. Besides, she’d been decompressing, as it were, from the tense teleconference during which Freeman had so tendentiously cautioned the White House that any payback mission would involve the President going ahead without conclusive evidence that the third missile was from a North Korean stockpile, a stockpile that, the CIA’s list of MANPAD MIDs had assured the White House, was in Kosong — just north of the DMZ.

“I wanted to apologize,” began Freeman, “for being a little—”

“Rude!”

“Ah, yes, well, I suppose that’s a fair description, but I don’t like that Air Force whiz kid.”

“Oh, I would never have guessed.”

“It’s a character flaw.”

“Yours or his?” she snapped.

“Mine,” he said sheepishly.

But she knew that in his own brusque way the general had “covered their collective ass” in the Oval Office. As he’d pointed out, should something go awry, the CIA should rightly take some of the fallout. But why was he calling her at 3:00 A.M.? “You having second thoughts?” she asked.

“Hell, no!”

She’d been careful not to mention anything specific on the phone, knowing that even the National Security Advisor’s phone could be tapped — but she knew the general knew she’d meant second thoughts about the in-out “snatch and grab” mission. “Ah,” she said, her tone lighter now, appreciating his apology. “So you’ve been so guilt-ridden by your response to Michael, you couldn’t sleep, is that it?”

She heard a snort of derision from the other end. “I want to call you at fourteen hundred tomorrow. I know how busy you are, so I wanted to reserve a straight-through call, on scrambler, no matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.”

Eleanor shook her head — the man was impossible. An apology, immediately followed by a demand to have her office cleared for a call at 2:00 P.M. tomorrow: “No matter whether you’re in conference or whatever.” The nerve of the man, thought Eleanor. He wasn’t even on the active list, a man who’d been put out to pasture, really, and now this demand to drop whatever she was doing at the White House tomorrow the minute he called. Cradling the cordless between her left cheek and shoulder as she reached over to open the fridge door, she took out a jug of orange juice then turned to reach up and take a glass from the cupboard.