Gone Tomorrow

‘So why haven’t we seen the story already?’

‘Because they’re way behind the times,’ I said. ‘They’re looking for confirmation. They still seem to have some kind of moralistic scruples over there.’

‘Are they going to get confirmation?’

‘Not from you, presumably. And no one else knows anything for sure. Susan Mark didn’t live long enough to say yea or nay. So the lid is back on. I advised them to forget all about it and head home.’

‘Why are they posing as mother and daughter?’

‘Because it’s a great con,’ I said. ‘It’s appealing. It’s like reality TV. Or those magazines they sell in the supermarket. Clearly they studied our culture.’

‘Why wait so long?’

‘It takes time to build a mature television industry. They probably wasted years on important stuff.’

Sansom nodded vaguely, and said, ‘It’s not true that no one knows anything for sure. You seem to know plenty.’

‘But I’m not going to say anything.’

‘Can I trust you on that?’

‘I served thirteen years. I know all kinds of things. I don’t talk about them.’

‘I’m not happy about how easy it was for them to approach Susan Mark. And I’m not happy we didn’t know about her from the get-go. We never even heard of her before the morning after. This whole thing was like an ambush. We were always behind the curve.’

I was looking at the photographs on the wall behind him. Looking at the tiny figures. Their shapes, their postures, their silhouettes. I said, ‘Really?’

‘We should have been told.’

I said, ‘Have a word with the Pentagon. And with those guys from the Watergate.’

Sansom said, ‘I will.’ Then he went quiet, as if he was rethinking and reassessing, more calmly and at a slower pace than his usual fast field-officer style. The lid is back on. He seemed to examine that proposition for a spell, from all kinds of different angles. Then he shrugged, and got a slightly sheepish look on his face, and he asked, ‘So what do you think of me now?’

‘Is that import ant?’

‘I’m a politician. It’s a reflex inquiry.’

‘I think you should have shot them in the head.’

He paused and said, ‘We had no silenced weapons.’

‘You did. You had just taken one from them.’

‘Rules of engagement.’

‘You should have ignored them. The Red Army didn’t travel with forensics labs. They would have had no idea who shot who.’

‘So what do you think of me?’

‘I think you shouldn’t have handed them over. That was uncalled for. That was going to be the point of the story, as a matter of fact, on Ukrainian TV. The idea was to get the old woman next to you and let her ask you why.’

Sansom shrugged again. ‘I wish she could. Because the truth we didn’t hand them over. We turned them loose instead. It was a calculated risk. A kind of double bluff. They’d lost their rifle. Everyone would have assumed that the mujahideen had taken it. Which was a sorry outcome and a major disgrace. It was clear to me that they were very scared of their officers and their political commissars. So they would have been falling over themselves to tell the truth, that it was Americans, not Afghans. It would have been a kind of exculpation. But their officers and their commissars knew how scared they were of them, so the truth would have sounded like a bullshit story. Like a pathetic excuse. It would have been discounted immediately, as a fantasy. I felt it was safe enough to let them go. The truth would have been out there in plain sight, hut unrecognized.’

I said, ‘So what happened?’

Sansom said, ‘I guess they were more scared than I thought. Too scared to go back at all. I guess they just wandered, until the tribespeople found them. Grigori Hoth was married to a political commissar. He was scared of her. That’s what happened. And that’s what killed him.’

I said nothing.

He said, ‘Not that I expect anyone to believe me.’

I didn’t reply.

He said, ‘You’re right about tension between Russia and the Ukraine. But there’s tension between Russia and ourselves, too. Right now there’s plenty of it. If the Korengal part of the story gets out, things could blow up big. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Except different. At least the Soviets were sane, in their way. This bunch, not so much.’

After that we sat in silence for what felt like a long time, and then Sansom’s desk phone rang. It was his receptionist on the line. I could hear her voice through the earpiece, and through the door. She rattled off a list of things that needed urgent attention. Sansom hung up and said, ‘I have to go. I’ll call a page to see you out.’ He stood up and came around the desk and walked out of the room. Just like an innocent man with nothing to hide. He left me all alone, sitting in my chair, with the door open. Springfield had gone, too. I could see no one in the outer office except the woman at the desk. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. No page showed up.

We were always behind the curve, Sansom had said. I waited a long minute and then started squirming around like I was restless. Then after a plausible interval I got out of my chair. I stumped around with my hands clasped behind my back, like an innocent man with nothing to hide, just waiting around on turf that was not his own. I headed over to the wall behind the desk, like it was a completely random destination. I studied the pictures. I counted faces I knew. My initial total came to twenty-four. Four presidents, nine other politicians, five athletes, two actors, Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Elspeth, and Springfield.

Plus someone else.

I knew a twenty-fifth face.

In all of the celebratory election-night victory pictures, right next to Sansom himself, was a guy smiling just as widely, as if he was basking in the glow of a job well done, as if he was not very modestly claiming his full share of the credit. A strategist. A tactician. A Svengali. A behind-the-scenes political fixer.

Sansom’s chief of staff, presumably.

He was about my age. In all of the pictures he was dusted with confetti or tangled with streamers or knee deep in balloons and he was grinning like an idiot, but his eyes were cold. They had a canny, calculating shrewdness in them.

They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes.

I knew why the cafeteria charade had been staged.

I knew who had been sitting in Sansom’s visitor chair before I had.

We were always behind the curve.

Liar.

I knew Sansom’s chief of staff.

I had seen him before.

I had seen him wearing chinos and a golf shirt, riding the 6 train late at night in New York City.

FORTY

I CHECKED ALL THE CELEBRATION PICTURES, VERY CAREFULLY. The guy from the subway was in all of them. Different angles, different years, different victories, but it was definitely the same guy, literally at Sansom’s right hand. Then a page bustled into the office and two minutes later I was back on the Independence Avenue sidewalk. Fourteen minutes after that I was inside the railroad station, waiting for the next train back to New York. Fifty-eight minutes after that I was on it, sitting comfortably, leaving town, watching the dismal rail yards through the window. Far to my left a gang of men wearing hard hats and orange high-visibility vests was working on a section of track. Their vests glowed through the smog. The fabric must have had tiny beads of reflective glass mixed into the plastic weave. Safety, through chemistry. The vests were more than highly visible. They were attention-getting. They drew the eye. I watched the guys work until they were just tiny orange dots in the distance, and then until they were completely lost to sight, which was more than a mile later. And at that point I had everything I was ever going to get. I knew everything I was ever going to know. But I didn’t know that I knew. Not then.

The train rolled into Penn and I got a late dinner in a place directly across the street from where I had gotten breakfast. Then I walked up to the 14th Precinct on West 35th. The night watch had started. Theresa Lee and her partner Docherty were already in place. The squad room was quiet, like all the air had been sucked out of it. Like there had been bad news. But no one was rushing around. Therefore the bad news had happened somewhere else.