Chapter 1
Chapter 1
After the steep bank, Vanderpoel felt suspended; turned almost on his side, looking down to the ground. A slight uptick in his pulse signaled his discomfort. It was like the spinning sensation he often felt when coming out of a dream. Something primitive in him questioned the soundness of the calculus humans had worked out to represent the laws of earth and sky. A small over rotation would sheer the wind from their wings; a spark in the fuel tank would turn them to a comet plummeting toward earth, properly strapped to their seats in ranks and columns like an orderly troop of fallen angels. It was not that he was afraid to fly; on the contrary, he considered it one of the more acceptable ways to die, the blame accruing almost entirely to the faults of others. But he believed there were as yet undiscovered flaws hiding not only in the physical matrix of steel, gears, and electrical currents but in the very math, like a worm in a flower waiting for the alignment of chance and human error to reveal its truth in some headline worthy drama. But for now the sky was all sun and blue. As they descended, the floor of clouds became the ceiling for the 2 million or so mostly taxpaying daytime residents of the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia who did not know how close was their beautiful day.
The other case officer, Ted Colburn, was staring out the window, although he was usually the more talkative of the two. Vanderpoel’s impatience with extroverts wasn’t that they were loud or distracting. He could like such people. It was that they could never seem to maintain the level of energy they initially promise. Another intelligence collector, Conor Ward, sat in the row behind. It had been a tight seating chart when they selected their flights. Except for Ted, who looked like he might have been an athlete in some former time, they had good faces for spies, instantly forgettable. Vanderpoel was slightly older than Ted; he was in his early forties but had the lightly used and ageless quality of the never married, no children. They were coming back from training. They’re driving, shooting, and fighting skills needed refining before each assignment. The witch of competition still hung over them. It seemed a concern for Ted who was nominally in charge of the group. The other two were known for being independent. Ted and Vanderpoel had each been to South Asia three times, Ward two. They were not always together but they had gotten to know each other quite well over the course of their sixteen hour days and now they were heading back to Afghanistan. Ted turned to Vanderpoel.
“Hey, Stephen, it’s the Pentagon,” he said, with something between a pat and a punch to Vanderpoel’s shoulder to assure he had his attention. Vanderpoel only gave him an appraising look. People didn’t usually call him by his first name and, by professional training and natural inclination, he wondered what Ted’s motivation was for using it now. People usually called Ted just Ted but he didn’t see any meaning in that. “It has five sides because that was the design of castles from the Renaissance almost up to the twentieth century. If you extend each line to a terminal point, there is no approach that isn’t covered. An attacker would find himself swallowed up in its defenses.” Like many people who worked in their field, Ted was a history buff. Vanderpoel thought such men pictured themselves riding into battle on horseback wearing fancy boots. They regretted the modern world that deprived them of heroism. Ted was such a man for action but he didn’t like people to forget how smart he was and so Vanderpoel had learned to expect these sudden tutorials. He also knew it was important to Ted to establish the pecking order. He made a half hearted comment about the endless maze of hallways within it having the same effect, which Ted ignored. He had already turned back to Ward with the news.
“Hey, Pentagon, port side,” he said, with the same pat/punch. Everybody had to take his shots like a vaccination. Ward had a small man’s horror of being touched. Vanderpoel remembered from training, he wasn’t sure which training - they all tended to run together, that touching someone was a means of establishing rapport or asserting dominance. He was sure Ted had internalized the lesson. Vanderpoel heard Ward say something he didn’t quite catch; he could be soft spoken. From Ted’s fake laugh and reply, “No, those are on the inside,” Vanderpoel thought Ward must have said that from the air the Pentagon looked like a giant orifice.
Vanderpoel wanted to orient himself by looking out the window for the horizon. Behind him was the Washington Monument, blinking its one red eye. Beyond that were the gothic towers of the National Cathedral. Both landmarks were looking wounded in their casts of scaffolding, healing from the shock of a freakish East Coast earthquake a few months before.
Once on the ground they did not wait for each other. At baggage claim, Ted took out his computer and studied the day’s market performance. When he was in Viet Nam Station one of the local hires told him his sister in America once sent him $5,000 and he used it to set up a stock trading account at the nearest internet cafe. In six months he had made his investment back many times over. Ted had never been very interested in finance but having a child quickly changed that. Having advantages of education and citizenship over his Viet Namese friend, he saw no reason why he could not be at least as successful an investor. The market was closed for the day and he had a superstition about checking the market after close but he did not check it all yesterday so he decided to make an exception. He didn’t mind steep drops. These were buying opportunities. But flat was just frustrating and most of his stocks were flat. His eyes drifted over the green print of his winners without thrill anymore. No amount of gain was ever enough, his friend had warned him. His losses seemed to balance out his winners but long term he was creeping forward, so slowly there was little joy or excitement. At first every jump or dive was the same as at the gaming tables of a casino. How was this not gambling? How could so much risk and excitement be legal? But that had worn off over the years to a steady grind. It was a painful education but he was getting smarter.
Ward was outside with the smokers even though he didn’t smoke.
Vanderpoel was milling about with the other travelers waiting for his luggage. Rather than watching the carousel, he was watching them. His enthusiasm for travel had diminished a little over the years, despite the government’s effort to remove every uncertainty from the trip. When landing in a foreign country, he liked to be on his own and, when coming home, he liked to be picked up. He was now disappointed to find that he had no ride. His friend Lisa was supposed to have met him there. He could have called home but he thought it would be futile and he was too angry, anyway.
“My wife is picking me up. Need a ride?” Ted asked. If this was intended to sting it fell on a part of Vanderpoel’s consciousness that was well calloused. He knew Ted’s wife; they had gone to law school together and he would have liked to see her again. But he declined and moved on. Now he faced the question of taking a taxi or the Metro. He disliked cabs and tended to fight with cab drivers. While he was waiting he saw Ted’s wife pick him up. It was somehow inevitable. His daughter went running to him across the endless seeming concourse, getting in peoples’ way but it was no matter. The concourse would have seemed to her designed for people to run on and, for Ted, the entire world was a construct to support the raising of children. It was the source of his great confidence, the arrogance of fatherhood. Ted saw Vanderpoel just as Vanderpoel saw him. Vanderpoel was leaning against one of the pillars almost snakelike, almost sinister, the bachelor arrogance of his own of having nothing to lose. It was both a stricture and a freedom that Ted could no longer comprehend and he knew it would always put them in opposition. Vanderpoel could just make out in the light from the streetlamp Giada in profile, behind the wheel just as her cheek drew tight at the beginning of a coughing spell. “What is this thing I have for sickly women?” he thought.
