Painkiller

49

Peter M. Gates had his morning routine nailed. As DDCI, he was one of six officials who received a preview of the daily intelligence briefing, which would in turn be shown to the president. The preview version went out to its limited-distribution roster via encrypted fax at four-thirty each morning. By 4:37, Gates would pull the fax off the machine in his study, set it on the kitchen table, pour himself some coffee-already brewed with the aid of a timer-then read the report while he drank two cups from his favorite mug. He then made any necessary calls, reviewed a trio of daily newspapers, hit the treadmill, shaved before a sink of water so hot it steamed up his bathroom mirror, and concluded with a cool shower. Choose a suit for the day, fill another favorite-his burnished metal travel mug-with a third cup of coffee, and he was on his way by seven sharp. Most days, Gates came out his door thinking he’d got a two-hour jump on the bad guys.

This particular morning, however-the same morning Cooper and Laramie were busy getting high off Popeye’s secondhand ganja fumes-Gates didn’t feel so hot about the two-hour jump.

It was on this morning that Gates’s fax machine failed to ring. The coffee timer delivered his brew on schedule, but as he drank his two cups, the taste of the coffee seemed slightly bitter. He read the Times and Post, rode the tread-mill, shaved, showered, dressed, filled his travel mug with his third dose of java, then, at the door leading from his kitchen to the garage, Gates stood, unmoving, until, slowly, he lowered his head almost to where his chin pressed against his chest.

He stood that way for a long time; while doing so, Gates found it odd that his thoughts turned to a place with no apparent relevance to the conversation he’d had in Lou Ebbers’s office the day before.

The DCI had fired him unceremoniously. No one else had been present, and there was no call for a letter of resignation; Gates was simply dismissed. Let go like a middle-management drone, as though he were a man who had never held in his grasp history’s greatest and broadest-reaching spy shop.

As though, Gates observed at the time, he were a common corporate loser.

Still, his head bowed as he stood before the garage door, Gates found that he thought not of Lou Ebbers, or of his firing, or even of his mistakes-but of marriage. His wife was not home this morning; she was almost never home in the morning. He assumed that this morning was no different from other mornings; that she was sleeping in the bed of whatever man she’d fucked the night before. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. He might have seen her a week ago, but he couldn’t be sure.

What occurred to Gates, standing there in the kitchen, was that he now had nothing. Previously it had not been an issue, taking the big house that came with his wife’s money, taking all the shit she shoveled at him along with it. It hadn’t been an issue, because Gates had his work. It was all he cared about; it was all he did. Now it had become the only issue: he was a married man bereft of marriage. A human being utterly without home.

He tried for a moment to determine whether he should affix the blame to Cooper, Laramie, or possibly even his own mistakes for doing himself in, but in the end, he found it didn’t matter. A flash of brilliance surged through his skull, and Gates realized he did possess something after all. There was, he decided, one last action he could undertake to secure his rightful place in the annals of Washington diplomacy and intrigue.

He took a moment to think through the logistics.

The media would have to get hold of the story; this meant local law enforcement would need to arrive on the scene before Lou Ebbers and his crew got their grubby hands on matters. If Ebbers found out before the local police did, Gates knew that he didn’t have a prayer of getting the story into a single newspaper.

The details now properly arranged in his head, Gates placed a call to the local 911 operator. To the woman who took the call, he said, “Christ, there’s been a shooting!” He provided the address where he claimed to have heard the shots fired-his own-and hung up while the operator was asking for further clarification. He then retreated to his study, opened the drawer where he kept his Walther P99, exited through the kitchen to his garage, got situated in the driver’s seat of the Lexus he rarely drove, and, inexperienced as he was with the device, somehow managed to put a bullet through his right temple.