Acts of War

THREE

Paul Hood sat sipping black coffee in the den of his comfortable suburban home. He'd opened the ivory-colored drapes, had cracked the sliding glass door an inch, and was looking across the backyard. Hood had traveled the world and was intimately familiar with many parts of it. But there was nothing that thrilled him as much as the dirty-white picket fence that marked his small part of it.

The grass was glistening-green, and a warm breeze carried the smell of roses from his wife's tiny garden. Eastern bluebirds and yellow warblers were lively with song, and squirrels were acting like furry little Strikers as they moved, stopped, reconnoitered, then moved again. The rustic tranquility was broken now and then by what the jazz-loving Hood called the morning door jam: the slap of a screen door, the groan of a garage door, or the slam of a car door.

To Hood's right was a dark oak bookcase filled with Sharon's well-used volumes on gardening and cooking. The shelves were also hacked with the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries Harleigh and Alexander didn't consult anymore since all that material was on CDROM. Then there was a small corner section for Hood's own favorite novels. Ben-Hur. From Here to Eternity. The War of the Worlds. Tender Is the Night. Works by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Old Lone Ranger novels by Fran Striker that Hood had read as a kid and went back to every now and then. To Hood's left were shelves filled with mementoes of his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles. Plaques, mugs, keys to other cities, and photographs with domestic and foreign dignitaries.

The coffee and fresh air were equally invigorating. His lightly starched shirt was comfortable. And his new shoes felt rich, even though they weren't. He remembered when his father couldn't afford to buy him new shoes. It was thirty-five years ago, when Paul was nine and President Kennedy had been assassinated. His father, Frank "Battleship" Hood, a Navy man during the Second World War, had quit one accounting job to take another. The Hoods had sold their house and were about to move from Long Island to Los Angeles when the new firm put a sudden freeze on hiring. The firm was very, very sorry but they didn't know what was going to happen to the company, to the economy, to the country. His father didn't work for thirteen months after that, and they had to move into a small apartment. An apartment small enough so he could hear his mother consoling his father when he cried at night.

Now here he was. Relatively affluent and the director of Op-Center. In less than a year, Hood and his core team had turned the agency, formally known as the National Crisis Management Center, from a liaison office between the CIA, the White House, and the other big boys to a crisis-management team in its own right. Hood had an often fractious relationship with some of his closest people, most notably Deputy Director Mike Rodgers, Intelligence Officer Bob Herbert, and Political and Economics Officer Martha Mackall. But he welcomed the differences of opinion. Besides, if he couldn't manage personality clashes in his office, he couldn't handle political and military clashes thousands of miles away. The desk-side skirmishes kept him alert and in shape for the bigger, more important battles.

Hood drank his coffee slowly. Virtually every morning he sat comfortably alone on this sofa. He surveyed his life and invited contentment to lap him like an island. But it rarely did. Not on all sides, anyway. There was a hole, much larger in the month since he'd returned from Germany. A void which had been filled unexpectedly with passion. Passion for his one-time love Nancy, whom he'd met in Hamburg after twenty years. Passion that burned on the beach of his little island and disturbed his rest at night and fought for attention during the day.

But it was passion that he had not and could not act upon. Not unless he wanted to destroy the people for whom this home and this life were contentment. The children to whom he was a constant and reliable source of strength and emotional security. The wife who respected and trusted him and said she loved him. Well, she probably did. She probably loved him in the same buddy-sisterly-shared-goals way that he loved her. Which wasn't bad, even though it wasn't what he felt for Nancy.

Hood drained his mug, regretting that the last mouthful never tasted as glorious as the first. Not in coffee, not in life. He rose, put the mug in the dishwasher, grabbed his trench coat from the closet, and walked into the balmy morning.

Hood drove southeast through Washington, D.C., to Op-Center's headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base. He negotiated traffic that was already thick with trucks, Mercedes, and fleets of overnight courier vans rushing to make morning deliveries. He wondered how many people were thinking like he was, how many were cursing the traffic, and how many were just enjoying the drive, the morning, and some upbeat music.

He plugged in a tape of Spanish gypsy music, a love he'd acquired from his Cuban-born grandfather. The car filled with Romany lyrics whose words he didn't understand but whose passion he did. And as the music washed over him, Hood tried once again to fill the gaps in his contentment.