he has temporarily exchanged identities with someone other than himself, a completely familiar alter ego who inhabits his body and will be buried in the same tomb with him, along with the details of the top-secret work he does for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which employs him to analyze data beamed down from satellites to create vivid and detailed maps and portraits of events on Earth.
His office is deep in the interior of the building behind cipher doors. It has no windows. At the end of the corridor is a large window with a panoramic view of the city. He pauses there from time to time to remind himself where he is. He can see the domes of the Capitol and the Library of Congress, the Washington Monument. On the hilltop in the distance is the National Cathedral. In the foreground are Haines Point and East Potomac Park, where he often plays golf; Fort McNair, the National War College, and the brand-new Nationals’ baseball stadium. Immediately in front is the Anacos-tia Naval Air Station, where the president’s helicopters are parked in an enormous hangar surrounded by double rows of high-security fencing. The president always travels in convoys of three, a pea hidden in one of the identically marked VH-3D Sikorsky Sea King shells.
It is snowing. A soft white blanket is coming down gently on the city and on the sprawling lawns of the air base. It has coated the three white radar orbs of the Naval Research Laboratory, the wings and fuselage of the F-105 Thunderchief that ornaments the traffic circle just inside the main entrance, Foley’s Folly. Noel enjoys the incongruous quiet of the base. Falling snow makes everything feel ordinary, and life seem simple. Standing at the window, he is reminded of the famous photograph of Kennedy silhouetted against a window in the Oval Office, concentrated power invisibly served by bureaucrats and technicians staring intently at their computer screens—which is exactly what Noel is doing when Geoff Cowper, his first-level supervisor, comes into his office late in the afternoon. Cowper closes the door with conspiratorial gentleness. “It was a school,” he says hoarsely.
“A school?”
“Investigation under way, but basically, we already know everything.” He bounces against the door, holding the knob behind his back with both hands.
“A real school? With kids?”
A shrug.
“How many?”
Another shrug.
“Fuck!”
The light in the office is low. Noel prefers the incandescence of table lamps to high fluorescence overhead. In the corner is a light table for studying transparencies and a bank of high-res monitors. He leaves the light table on as a reminder that his existence is not all flickering fiery orange but may also be aqueous, blue and soothing. He is not without his refinements. Some time ago he taped a few lines from Wordsworth to the wall: Listen! The mighty Being is awake/And doth with his eternal motions make/A sound like thunder. Noel enjoys poetry, especially Wordsworth, who offers consolations and reassurances—fits of joy, the charm of visionary things. And golf. Noel plays whenever he can. On summer evenings, he’ll often stop at East Potomac Park and get in nine holes on his way home.
“We’ve got work to do,” Cowper says, seating himself. He picks up a pencil, drums it on the table. Noel rarely sees him flustered. Cowper is one of the pioneers of drone air reconnaissance and came to the DIAC from the navy after the war in Yugoslavia. He is tanned and ruddy, a broad-chested Californian with a full head of silver hair, ten years older than Noel—though his good looks and easy humor often lead people to mistake him for the junior colleague. He has a thirty-two-foot Beneteau 323 sailboat that he keeps docked in Annapolis. He and his Texan wife, Ann, spend weekends sailing around the Chesapeake Bay. They are outdoorsy enjoyers of life and have no children.
“A little late, isn’t it?” Noel mutters.
“You’re goddamn right it’s late.” Cowper frowns, looks at his watch.
“I mean it’s a little late for excuses.”
“I’m not going argue with you.” Cowper slides from the stool. “We gave the clear to engage. We need to have some answers ready before they’ve thought of the questions.”
Answers before questions? Noel’s impulse is to laugh. Typical Cowper: if not actually on top of things, then satisfied by his instinct to get himself there. The ever-prepared Boy Scout. Noel is not a Boy Scout. He prefers to wear his insignificance as camouflage rather than camouflage his insignificance. A message enters his in-box with an urgent ding. He knows all too well what it contains. It takes surprisingly little time for things to drift down to these lower depths. The bigger the catastrophe, the more leadenly it falls as the larger vertebrates swimming overhead voraciously consume responsibility while spitting out little pebbles of blame.
“We’re not leaving here until it’s done,” Cowper says flatly.
They cue up the gun-tape footage and the audio feed and watch it over and over. Grayscale infrared picture fringed with instrument readouts. In the target hairs, a complex of square structures inside a walled compound, vehicles, and people—little infrared white grubs—moving between them. It’s hard to look at, harder still to look away. A floating aerial camera view, circling steadily, keeping focus, command voices patched in, steady, circling, steady, then flash, white screen shock-wave shudder filtered zoom showing exploded bodies and slow-motion debris falling back to charred earth.
They craft the memo, couched in enough classified material to guard against its being released while leaving the requisite chutes and ladders open for the downward transference of blame. One of the reasons Cowper has survived for so long in the tense red-cell environment is the skill he brings to parsing and compartmentalizing the team’s duties and after-action reports. His deftness in after-action jujitsu is an aspect of his athletic and competitive personality. He enjoys his victories and considers himself, in the office and out, to be a winner. Noel’s pleasure is less gladiatorial. He thinks of it more like the action of bark-stripping porcupines, or of beavers on forests and wetlands: action from below with broad, far-reaching consequences.
After they send the carefully crafted memo into the chute, they linger in the office for a few minutes. The high-res feed runs in a soundless loop on the monitor. There are certain people, and Cowper is one, whose facial furniture gets completely rearranged when they begin to think. Frowns, creases, darkened looks are signs of deepest thought, which, like duty goods, must be declared upon arrival. He pulls his chair up to the edge of Noel’s desk, slides his folded palms between his knees. Their eyes meet for a moment, then simultaneously avert. “Shit happens,” Cowper says.
Noel understands his obligation is to be resigned to the mysterious engines that serve politics and fate. The other day, he overheard someone say, The more that die, the sooner they’re forgotten. What a shock to hear Lenin paraphrased in the DIAC cafeteria. But it’s the truth. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Nobody would openly admit it. In the world of full disclosure, certain things must not be seen, shown, or said. The same decorum that attends the arrival of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Base attends those patriotic TV and newspaper-photo memorials to the fallen soldiers—desperate efforts to deny that the ego vanishes in history.
Snow has been falling all afternoon. He was hoping for a big storm, likes the idea of driving through it with snow swirling all around, sticking to the road, the grass and trees. He takes the South Capitol Street bridge, passes the new ballpark, and gets on the Southwest freeway. The Lincoln Navigator was made for just these conditions. It is late, and because of the snow emergency, the roads are nearly empty. He crosses the Fourteenth Street bridge, gets on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. After Arlington Cemetery, the parkway begins a steady ascent along the Potomac gorge. The river narrows here, and the banks on either side become suddenly darker. Noel is sure he is not alone in imagining, from time
