Mark Costello - Big If

No movement was simple, but jogging was especially complex. Gretchen would have outlawed jogging altogether as an unacceptable security environment (the dawdling perimeter, the cover of the trees, the problem of thru-traffic, the exposure in 360 of a slowly moving man), but Fundeberg wouldn’t hear of it. The point of jogging, Fundeberg believed, was to beam the people images of a vital, active man, fit for every challenge. This was important anywhere, and more so in New Hampshire, where the VP was losing droves of undecided voters to the senator, a younger man with fresh ideas and much better hair.

Gretchen tried to compromise — let’s jog in a stadium, I can lock it down — but Fundeberg demanded neighborhood backdrops, typical and scenic, and would not consider tracks of any sort. Tracks are laned and banked, he said, a theater of speed. People think Olympics. Our guy, with his pudding-muscled, fiftyish physique, would look pathetic gasping on a track, a disappointed loser reliving high school glory, hearing nonexistent cheers. No, they needed neighborhoods, Fundeberg believed, houses, hedges, and parked cars, a line of picket fences, bikes on the sidewalks, hopscotch chalked out on the driveways. A man jogging past this scene looked disciplined yet friendly, at peace with his surroundings, open to the day. Gretchen hated running through a neighborhood. Cars meant car bombs to the Service, people in their houses couldn’t be evicted, garages and backyards, all those dormer windows — an uncoverable layout. Some nut could be sitting in his living room, eating cereal, oiling his carbine, letting the entourage draw near.

Because the jog was especially complex, Gretchen was up early, making the arrangements. By half past six, she was showered, dressed, and eating breakfast with Elias in the hotel’s coffee shop. Elias had the traffic plan for the jog route. They reviewed it one more time, then Boone Saxon came in and ordered scrambled eggs, and Elias left to prep the route. Boone and Gretchen went over the day’s schedule, the jog, a drop-in photo op at a McDonald’s on the turnpike, a big speech at a rally, then a motorcade to Manchester for seven more events, a brutal campaign day. Rain had been predicted, but it wasn’t raining yet.

“Be snowing by the time we get to Manchester,” said Boone, shaking hot sauce on his eggs.

Gretchen knew a few things about Boone, and one of these was that he liked hot sauce on his eggs, though not on any other food she had ever seen him eat. She had watched him eat a lot of meals over her year as chief-of-detail. Boone briefed her over breakfast on the road and it was usually a scene like this, Gretchen buzzing from the coffee, limited by diet to a toasted bagel (dry), Boone across the table, shoveling his eggs, and talking with professional dispassion about car bombs, right-to-lifers, released mental patients who were former Marine snipers, and whether it would snow in Manchester that day. His voice was comforting, a drone.

Another thing she knew about Boone Saxon was that he had led the search for Lloyd Felker after Hinman. She had learned this in the course of her long talk with the Director on the quad in Beltsville, and it had surprised her at the time. Boone was based at Beltsville, where Felker had spent his prime. Boone, hunting Felker, was hunting a friend. If the job had bothered Boone, he didn’t show it, and it probably didn’t bother him. It was duty, number one. It was logic, number two: Felker on the loose was a giant liability, as Felker himself would have been the first to understand. Knowledge of the Dome was a weakness of the Dome if turned against it. Which meant that Felker, as the father of the Dome, had been consumed by his own creation. Gretchen was still looking for a lesson in the mess, the rise, glory, and destruction of Lloyd Felker, senior analyst in Plans. She wanted to ask Boone — maybe he would know. Boone knew Felker’s story too, or part of it, and the parts he knew he knew better than she did. He was there the day they found Felker at the first-aid station. Boone could tell her how he had looked and talked that day. Was he really nuts? Or had he simply shed a skin of contradictions in the river? Would Boone know the difference? Gretchen doubted it.

In fairness, Boone only knew the official story: how Felker wrote the Dome and how, in his twilight, he had tried to make it stronger by un writing it, by writing murder plots to give the planners something real to plan against; how the Service shut him down; how Felker, seeking freedom from the thing he had created, did something risky and quite foolish, it now seemed, which was to go out in the field and join the Dome as deputy lead agent. He saw what Beltsville never saw — that there are no theories in the field, no zones of pure control, there is only waiting, boredom, preparation, and the crowds are always out there, a seascape of potential threats, waves in all directions, cresting and receding and re-forming somewhere else.

The official story, though not inaccurate, missed the other side of every agent’s life, your marriage or your lovers, your kids and lawn and dog. For Gretchen, this meant her son, asleep at that hour (she looked at her watch). For Felker it meant — what? All the years he worked in Beltsville, commuting from his farm, building a grand structure on his Certainties, he went home again each night to a mirror-set of certainties: this is my house, this is my chair, this is my wife, Jasper is my son. Gretchen thought the real unraveling of Felker had begun not when he started stalking/protecting Miss Nguyen, nor before that when he left the Dome in Hinman, nor before that with his murder plots in Beltsville. She thought the crackup started on the night Lydia told him that his son was not his son. How did Lloyd, then a planner of unquestioned orthodoxy, process this new data? Several options were available. One: denounce his wife and leave her, the macho option — but what about Jasper? Two: forgive, forget, move on — you’d have to be Jesus to do that. Three: accept, acknowledge, roger-copy, keep the family whole, outwardly forgive, but, inside, brood and wonder — if my life has been based on lies, if nothing that I thought I knew has turned out to be true, if uncertainty is queen, what does this imply about the Dome? Gretchen thought the breakdown started there, Felker asking the first, forbidden question and following the answers where they led him. They led him to dead ends, reversal and inversion, Felker guarding Nguyen, scaring her with “safety,” a fine and final paradox.

Boone droned on, summarizing threats. Gretchen listened, or tried to. She was thinking, that’s the story, fine, but what’s the lesson? Maybe that’s not the question — maybe it was lame to expect a lesson. So, what is the question? There can’t be no lesson and no question, right?

Tashmo and Elias drove the chosen length of river road twicein each direction with a Portsmouth traffic captain, watching the odometer, measuring a mile. The mile ran from a rotary, down a hill, around the bend, around another bend, past nine quiet side streets, and up a gentle grade to a four-light intersection. There were houses on one side, woods on the other, sloping to the river’s edge.

Coming back the second time, Elias stopped the car. He spread a city map on the dashboard and told the captain to close the rotary to all traffic for a distance of a quarter mile and the four-light intersection southbound only. The side streets would have to be secured in both directions for at least five blocks.

“Five blocks?” said the captain. “How are these folks supposed to get to work?”

“Four blocks ought to do it,” said Tashmo from the backseat.

“What about the woods?” Elias asked. “They worth sweeping, do you think?”