Orson Card: Empire

That was gratifying, even if it was only a guess. “But what is the assignment?”

“I assume you already asked around the office.”

“Nobody knows. Nobody cares.’ ”

“That’s because he doesn’t report to anyone they know.”

“Who does he report to?”

“Well, clearly he doesn’t report to me or you.”

“Mrs. Malich, I’m drowning here. Throw me something that floats.”

She laughed. “Come out to the house. I’m a cooky-baking wife and it’s summer vacation. Chocolate chips or snickerdoodles?”

“Ma’am, anything you offer will be gratefully received.”

It was more of a house than Cole would have expected on a major’s salary, though still hardly a mansion. There were four bikes on the front lawn, two of them tiny with training wheels, which suggested that the kids were home from some sort of expedition.

“No, I only have little John Paul here,” she said, indicating the three-year-old who was studiously drawing something with crayons at the kitchen table. There were, as promised, chocolate chip cookies on a cooling rack.

“I just thought, with the bikes on the lawn… ”

“The kids have been told to put their bikes away. Often enough that we refuse to remind them again. They know that any bike that is stolen from the front yard will not be replaced by us. So there they sit. Reuben will mow around them before he’ll move them an inch.”

“So he does come home often enough to mow the lawn.”

She looked at him like he was crazy. “Reuben is home every night, except when he’s traveling, and he’s never gone for more than a few days. It’s really been quite nice since he got this Pentagon assignment. It’s a far cry from the days when he’d be gone sometimes a year at a time, with only a few messages.”

“That must have been hard.”

“I take it you don’t have a wife,” said Mrs. Malich. “Or you’d already know all about it.”

“I’m Special Ops, like your husband,” he said. “Not much time for dating, and I couldn’t imagine asking a woman I actually cared about to marry somebody who might be killed at any time.”

“Yes, that’s a hard thing. But husbands die of other things, not just bullets. It’s a risk everybody takes when they marry—that the other person might die. Much higher risk that they’ll cheat on you or leave you. So I chose to marry a man who will never cheat on me and never leave me. Yes, he might be killed at any time, but my odds of keeping him are still far higher than the national average. And now that he’s working at the Pentagon, he’s far less likely to come home covered with a flag. Instead he brings home whatever groceries I ask him to bring.”

“So you call him during the day.”

“Of course.”

“But the secretary said—”

“I only call DeeNee when he has his cellphone off.”

“Doesn’t she have his cellphone number?”

“Of course she does. And he checks in with her frequently.”

“But she said—she claims not to know anything about what your husband does.”

Mrs. Malich laughed. “She’s hazing you, Captain Coleman.”

“Please just call me Cole. Or Captain Cole, if you have to.”

“DeeNee is a superb secretary. My husband trusts her implicitly. In part because she not only never tells anybody anything, she manages to not tell them in such a way as to make them think she doesn’t know.”

“She’s very good at that.”

“But you, I take it, are not pretending when you say that my husband has not been in to the office in three days.”

He nodded.

“That worries me.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s because he’s busy on something—”

“Captain Cole, I know he’s busy on something. I know from the way he tells me almost nothing. Normally he gives me enough information that I won’t worry. Like when he worked on counterter-rorism in the District for a few months. He didn’t tell me anything at all about it, specifically, but he did let me know that he was supposed to imagine ways that terrorists might go after key targets in DC, and I gathered that he was not just looking at high-profile psychological targets like monuments and such, but also at infrastructure targets and political targets.”

Cole felt a surge of relief. So his new boss did do something that mattered.

“But you don’t know which ones.”

“I have a brain. I assumed he looked at bridges and other choke points for transportation. And opportunities to attempt assassinations. That sort of thing.”

“I thought the Secret Service worked on protecting the President and Vice President.”

“And there are plenty of people working on protecting Congress and the Supreme Court and other key personnel. You have to understand, I’m only guessing here, but I know my husband and I know what he’s good at. I’m sure his assignment wasn’t to protect the President, it was to figure out how to kill him despite the protections that are in place. Just as his assignment was probably to figure out ways a terrorist might bring Washington to its knees without having a nuke or poison gas.”

“And he completed that assignment.”

“From his sudden air of relief and cheerfulness back in February, yes, I believe he did.”

“And now?”

“And now he doesn’t even go to the office, but doesn’t tell me that he hasn’t gone to the office, but he’s still coming home every night at the regular time, and he has a haunted air about him, so whatever he’s doing, he hates it.”

Cole finally realized what was happening here. “You didn’t invite me to the house just to chat.”

“No, Captain Cole,” she said. “I’m worried about my husband.”

“But I can’t help you. I’ve never even met him.”

“But you will,” she said. “And when you do, you’ll form your own conclusions about what he’s involved with.”

“I can’t tell you anything that’s classified.”

“You can tell me whether I should worry, and how much.”

“About his safety? Here in Washington?”

“No,” she said. “I deal with my fears for his safety in my own way. That’s not what worries me right now.”

“It’s that haunted look?”

“My husband is a patriot. And a born officer. He is not troubled by the things he does to defend his country. He has killed people, even though he’s a gentle man by nature, and yet he does not wake up screaming in the night from combat flashbacks, and he doesn’t lash out at the children, and he shows no sign of traumatic stress disorder. I know what he looks like when he’s worried about his own safety, or when he’s intense about fulfilling an assignment, or when he’s annoyed at the stupidity of superior officers. I know what those things do to him, how it shows up in his behavior at home.”

“And this is new.”

“Captain Cole, what I want to know is why my husband feels guilty.”

Cole didn’t know what to say, except the obvious. “Why do husbands ever feel guilty?”

“That’s why I haven’t confided these worries of mine to anyone. Because people will assume that I’m assuming he’s having an affair. But I know for a fact that this is impossible. He feels guilty. He’s torn up inside about something. But it’s something to do with work, not with me, not his family, not his religion. Something about his present assignment is making him very unhappy.”

“Maybe he’s not doing as well at it as he thinks he should.”

She waved that thought away. “Reuben would talk about that with me. We share self-doubts with each other, even if he can’t go into the specifics. No, Captain Cole, he is being asked, as part of his work, to do something he fears may be wrong.”