Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Easier to put journalists out of work than to find something to replace us with.”

“Drives me crazy. I don’t have to tell you what morale is like in the bomber and silo crews. We don’t trust technology quite enough to replace them with machines. We may yet reach that point, but in the meantime those postings are career suicide. You get the worst and the least bright, safeguarding our most terrible weapons and bored out of their minds. Cheating on their exams, breaking rules, flunking urine tests. Or not flunking them.”

“In Albuquerque?”

“If you’re thinking crystal meth, think again. These are career officers. Don’t even write down the name Richard Keneally, but remember it. The Man Who Can — apparently there’s at least one on every base. I hope you don’t mind that I’m summarizing many pages of a report that has a unique typographical signature, rather than letting you read it?”

“You have a plane to catch.”

“The drugs are almost all prescription stuff. Adderall, OxyContin. Drugs to help you pass the time while your classmates from the academy are flying actual missions or eating Lockheed’s shrimp. You know my feelings about the nation’s drug laws. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about officer drugs, not grunt drugs. But still, whatever the legal inequities, they’re a no-no in the armed services. They’ll still light up a tox screen. Which, if you’re the Man Who Can, is the real ceiling on the growth of your business. What to do about that?”

Leila shook her head.

“Have the friendly friends who supply you with the drugs quietly take over the lab that tests the urine.”

“Really,” Leila said.

“I wish I could show you the report,” the senator said. “Because it gets better, which is to say worse. Who are the friendly friends? I hate the word cartel , it’s completely wrong. We should call them DHLes Especiales or FedExes Extralegales , because that’s what they are. If you’re manufacturing fake cancer drugs in Wuhan and you need to get a container of your product to the American consumer, who are you going to call? DHL Especial. Same thing for weapons, designer knockoffs, underage prostitutes, and, obviously, drugs of all kinds. One call serves all. The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth. Their business is delivering the goods, and their offices aren’t far south of the border. And our Man Who Can, Richard Keneally, whose name you’re remembering but not writing down, was doing business with them for several years, right under the noses of sundry inspectors general, and it only came to light because a training-replica B61 turned up where it shouldn’t have.”

“Did the real weapon leave the base?”

“Fortunately no. The story is extremely sad and disturbing but also funny in a way. DHL Especial may or may not have had a buyer for the weapon — we’ll never know. But before Richard Keneally could even try to get the ‘replica,’ which is to say the real weapon — before he could get it off the base, he tripped on a parking stop and fell on a bottle of tequila he was carrying. The broken glass severed an artery, he nearly bled out, and he was stuck in a hospital for a week. That’s the part that’s a little bit funny. The part that isn’t is that Keneally apparently couldn’t deliver the warhead as scheduled, and he had no way of letting the Especiales know why he hadn’t. His two sisters had both disappeared, one in Knoxville, one in Mississippi, around the time the warhead swap occurred. Apparently they were kidnapped as security for the deal. They both ended up dead behind a car dealership in Knoxville, with single gunshots to the back of the head. One of the sisters had three children. The only bright spot is that the children weren’t harmed.”

Leila was writing as fast as she could. “Good God,” she said.

“It’s terrible. But to me it’s as much a story about the utter failure of the war on drugs, about trusting in technology instead of taking care of people, as it is about our nuclear arsenal.”

“I see that,” Leila said, still writing.

“It was all going to come out even if you hadn’t come here with your questions. The WaPo ’s already on the demotion and reassignment of the officers Keneally sold to. They know about the drug dealing. Only a matter of time before someone leaks the rest.”

“You’ve talked to the Post ?”

The senator shook his head. “Still being punished by this office for something unrelated.”

“Why did Keneally do it?”

“The speculation is partly money, partly fear for his life.”

“Are you saying he’s not in custody?”

“You’ll have to ask someone else.”

“That sounds like a no.”

“Draw your own conclusions. And let me reiterate that none of this goes on your site until you have independent confirmation.”

“We don’t like single-source stories. We’re old-fashioned that way.”

“This is known to us. It’s one reason you and I are sitting here. Or have been.” The senator stood up. “I actually do have a plane to catch.”

“How was Keneally going to get the weapon off the base?”

“That’s it, Leila. You already have more than you need to get the rest of it.”

He was right about that. One of the best stories of her career was in the bag. The rest would be routine triangulate-and-bluff—“I’m just confirming that I have my facts right”—while she endured the sick-making anxiety that the Post or someone else, someone less scrupulous about multiple-sourcing, would scoop her.

Leaving the Dirksen, she thought about canceling her trip home to Denver, but the work she had to do now, to confirm the senator’s story, could only be done with in-person meetings, and on a mild and sunny spring weekend nobody she needed to see would be staying in D.C. Better to spend the weekend in Denver, writing and lining up interviews, and fly back on Sunday night.

Or so she rationalized it. The unfortunate, unflattering fact was that she didn’t want to leave Tom and Pip alone together for a weekend. She’d already been feeling resentfully beleaguered by how much she had to do — too many stories, a caregiver crisis at Charles’s house, the usual email and social-media onslaught (the former Mrs. Cody Flayner was writing to her daily, sending recipes and pictures of her kids) — and the new urgency of the Albuquerque story only added to her workload. The story was demanding and she its single parent. Even going home, she wouldn’t have much time for Tom or Pip. Their unscheduled freedom on the weekend seemed sybaritic in comparison. She knew it was important to resist jealousy and resentment and self-pity, but she was having a hard time of it.

On the Metro, her hand shook so much that it was hard to fill out the scribbles in her notebook, hard to tap out texts to Tom and Pip. By the time she boarded her Denver flight, her anxiety about being scooped was nearly disabling. There wasn’t enough room between seats for her to work without being observed by the businessman next to her, and her mind was too jumpy to concentrate on tech-industry taxes, and so she bought a split of wine and stared uselessly at the crawl of the jet icon across the route map on the seat-back screen. She bought a second split and applied it to her anxiety.

She had no rational case against Pip as a houseguest. The girl had yet to leave an unwashed dish or spoon in the sink, a light burning in an empty room. She’d even offered to do Tom and Leila’s laundry for them. They’d recoiled at the thought of her handling their underwear, but she explained that she’d never lived in a house with a functioning washer and dryer (“Total luxury”) and so they let her do the sheets and towels. She had little of the unearned entitlement for which kids of her generation were laughed at, but she didn’t apologize for being in the house or thank them too profusely for letting her be there. During the week, at least on the nights when Leila was home, she prepared her own separate dinner, retreated to her room, and didn’t show herself again. Come Friday night, though, she plunked herself down on a stool in the kitchen, let Tom shake her one of his perfect Manhattans, chopped garlic for Leila, and opened up with funny tales of squatter life in Oakland.