State of Siege

TWO

When he’d ended his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles, Paul Hood decided that cleaning out one’s desk was a misnomer. What you were really doing was mourning, just like at a funeral. You were remembering the good and the sad, the bittersweet and the rewards, the accomplishments and the unfinished business, the love and sometimes the hate.

The hate, he thought, his hazel eyes narrowing. He was full of it now, though he wasn’t sure at whom or what or why.

Hate wasn’t the reason he’d resigned as the first director of Op-Center, the U.S. government’s elite crisis management team. He’d done that to spend more time with his wife, his daughter, and his son. To keep his family intact. But he was full of it just the same.

At Sharon? he wondered suddenly, half-ashamed. Are you mad at your wife for making you choose?

He tried to sort through that as he cleaned out his desk, dropping declassified memories into a cardboard box — the classified files and even personal letters therein had to stay. He couldn’t believe he’d only been here two and one-half years. That wasn’t a long time compared to many jobs. But he’d worked cockpit-close with the people here and he was going to miss them. There was also what his intelligence chief Bob Herbert once described as “a pornographic excitement” in the work. Lives, sometimes millions of them, were affected by the wise or instinctive or occasionally desperate decisions he and his team had made here. It was like Herbert had said. Hood never felt like a god making those decisions. He felt like an animal. Every sense hair-trigger alert, nervous energy at a high boil.

He was going to miss those feelings, too.

He opened a small plastic box that held a paper clip General Sergei Orlov had given him. Orlov was the head of the Russian op-center, a facility code-named Mirror Image. Op-Center had helped Mirror Image prevent renegade Russian officers and politicians from throwing Eastern Europe into war. The paper clip had a fiber-thin microphone inside. It had been used by Colonel Leonid Rossky to spy on potential rivals of Minister of the Interior Nikolai Dogin, one of the organizers of the war effort.

Hood put the plastic box in the cardboard carton and looked at a small, black piece of twisted metal. The shard was stiff and light, the ends bubbled and charred. It was part of the skin of a North Korean Nodong missile. It had melted when Op-Center’s military unit, Striker, destroyed the weapon before it could be launched at Japan. Hood’s second-in-command, General Mike Rodgers, had brought the fragment back for him.

My second-in-command, Hood thought. Technically, Hood would be on vacation for two weeks before his resignation took effect. Mike would be acting director until then. Hood hoped the president would give Mike the job full time after that. It would be a terrible blow to Mike if he didn’t.

Hood picked up the Nodong fragment. It was like holding a piece of his life. Japan was spared an attack, one to two million lives saved. Several lives lost. This memento and others like it were passive, but the memories they triggered were anything but.

He put the fragment back in the carton. The hum of air coming from the overhead vents seemed unusually loud. Or maybe the office was just unusually silent? The night crew was on, and the phone wasn’t ringing. Footsteps weren’t coming to or from his door.

Hood quickly went through the other memories tucked in the top drawer of his desk.

There were postcards from the kids when they vacationed at Grandma’s — not like this last time, when his wife took them there while she decided whether or not to leave him. There were books he’d read on airplanes with notes scribbled in the margins, things he had to remember to do when he got where he was going or when he returned. And there was a brass key from the hotel in Hamburg, Germany, where he bumped into Nancy Jo Bosworth, a woman he’d loved and planned to marry. Nancy had walked out of his life over twenty years before without an explanation.

Hood held the brass key in his palm. He resisted the urge to slip it into his pocket, feel like he was back at the hotel, just for a moment. Instead, Hood placed the key in the box. Returning to the girl, even in memory, who’d walked out of his life, wasn’t going to help save his family.

Hood shut the top drawer. He’d told Sharon that he would take her on one big last-night-of-having-an-expense-account dinner, and there was no excuse to miss it. He’d already said his last good-byes to the office workers, and the senior staff had thrown him a surprise party that afternoon — even though it wasn’t much of a surprise. When intelligence chief Bob Herbert had E-mailed everyone the time and date, he’d forgotten to remove Hood’s E-mail address from his list. Paul had pretended to be surprised when he walked into the conference room. He was just glad that Herbert didn’t make mistakes like that as a rule.

Hood opened the bottom drawer. He took out his personal address book, the crossword puzzle CD-ROM he’d never gotten to use, and the scrapbook of daughter Harleigh’s violin recitals. He’d missed too damn many of those. The four of them would be going to New York at the end of the week so Harleigh could perform with other young Washington virtuosi at a function for United Nations ambassadors. Ironically, they were celebrating a major peace initiative in Spain, where Op-Center had been involved in helping to prevent a civil war. Unfortunately, the public — parents included — were not invited. Hood would have been curious to see how the new secretary-general, Mala Chatterjee, handled her first public affair. She had been chosen after Secretary-General Massimo Marcello Manni had suffered a fatal heart attack. Though the young woman wasn’t as experienced as other candidates, she was committed to the struggle for human rights through peaceful means. Influential nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan — which saw her strong stand as a means to tweak China — helped her get the appointment.

Hood left the government phone directory, a monthly terminology bulletin — the latest names of nations and their leaders — and a thick book of military acronyms. Unlike Herbert and General Rodgers, Hood had never served in the military. He’d always felt self-conscious about never having risked his life in the service, especially when he had to send Striker into the field. But, as Op-Center’s FBI liaison Darrell McCaskey once pointed out, “That’s why we call this a team. Everyone brings different skills to the table.”

Hood paused when he came to a stack of photos in the bottom of the drawer. He removed the rubber band and looked through them. Among the pictures of barbecues and photo-ops with world leaders were snapshots of Striker’s Private Bass Moore, of Striker commander Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Squires, and of Op-Center’s political and economic liaison Martha Mackall. Private Moore died in North Korea, Lieutenant Colonel Squires lost his life on a mission in Russia, and Martha had been assassinated just a few days before on the streets of Madrid, Spain. Hood replaced the rubber band and put the stack of pictures in the carton.

He closed the last drawer. He picked up his well-worn City of Los Angeles mousepad and Camp David coffee mug and placed them in the box. As he did, he noticed someone standing to his left, just outside the open office door.

“Need any help?”

Hood smiled lightly. He ran a hand through his wavy black hair. “No, but you can come in. What are you doing here so late?”

“Checking the Far Eastern newspaper headlines for tomorrow,” she said. “We’ve got some disinformation out there.”

“About?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You don’t work here anymore.”

“Touché,” he replied, smiling.

Ann Farris smiled back as she walked slowly into the office. The Washington Times once described her as one of the twenty-five most eligible young divorcées in the nation’s capital. Nearly six years later, she still was. Op-Center’s five-foot-seven-inch-tall press liaison was wearing a tight black skirt and white blouse. Her dark rust eyes were large and warm, and they softened the anger Hood was feeling.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to bother you,” the tall, slender woman said.

“But here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“And it’s not a bother,” he added.

Ann stopped beside the desk and looked down at him. Her long, brown hair fell along her face and over the front of her shoulders. Looking at her eyes and smile, Hood was reminded of all the times during the past two and a half years that she’d encouraged him, helped him, made no secret that she cared for him.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, “but I also didn’t want to say good-bye at a party.”

“I understand. I’m glad you’re here.”

Ann sat on the edge of the desk. “What are you going to do, Paul? Do you think you’ll stay in D.C.?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about going back to the financial world,” he said. “I’ve arranged to see a few people after we get back from New York. If that doesn’t work out, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll settle in some small rural town and open an accounting practice. Taxes, money market, a Range Rover, and raking leaves. It wouldn’t be a bad life.”

“I know. I lived it.”

“And you don’t think I can.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What are you going to do when the children are gone? My own son’s scratching on teenagerhood and I’m already thinking about what I’ll do when he leaves for college.”

“What will you do?” Hood asked.

“Unless some wonderful, middle-aged guy with black hair and hazel eyes carries me off to Antigua or Tonga?” she asked.

“Yes,” Hood said, flushing. “If that doesn’t happen.”

“I’ll probably buy a house somewhere in the middle of one of those islands and write. Real fiction. Not the stuff I give the Washington Press Corps every day. There are some stories I want to tell.”

The former political reporter and one-time press secretary to Connecticut Senator Bob Kaufmann did indeed have stories to tell. Tales of spin-doctoring, affairs, and back-stabbing in the corridors of power.

Hood sighed. He looked at his depersonalized desk. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve got some personal things to work on.”

“With your wife, you mean.”

“With Sharon,” he said softly. “If I succeed, then the future will take care of itself.”

Hood had made a point of saying his wife’s name because it made her seem more real, more present. He did that because Ann was pushing more than usual. This would be her last chance to talk to him here, where the memories of a long, close professional relationship, of triumph and mourning, and of sexual tension were suddenly very vivid.

“Can I ask you something?” Ann said.

“Sure.”

Her eyes lowered. So did her voice. “How long will you give it?”

“How long?” Hood said under his breath. He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ann. I really don’t.” He looked at her for a long moment. “Now let me ask you something.”

“Sure,” she said. “Anything.” Her eyes were even softer than before. He didn’t understand why he was doing this to himself.

“Why me?” he asked.

She seemed surprised. “Why do I care about you?”

“Is that what this is? Care?”

“No,” she admitted quietly.

“Then tell me why,” he pressed.

“It isn’t obvious?”

“No,” he said. “Governor Vegas. Senator Kaufmann. The president of the United States. You’ve been close to some of the most dynamic men in the nation. I’m not like them. I ran from the arena, Ann.”

“No. You left it,” she said. “There’s a difference. You left because you were tired of the smears, of the political correctness, of having to watch every word. Honesty is very appealing, Paul. So is intelligence. So is keeping cool when all those charismatic politicians and generals and foreign leaders are running around swinging their sabres.”

“Steady Paul Hood,” he said.

“What’s wrong with that?” Ann asked.

“I don’t know,” Hood said. He stood and picked up the carton. “What I do know is that something’s wrong somewhere in my life, and I need to find out what it is.”

Ann also rose. “Well, if you need any help looking for it, I’m available. If you want to talk, have coffee, dinner — just call.”

“I will,” Hood smiled. “And thanks for stopping by.”>

“Sure,” she said.

He motioned with the carton for Ann to go first. She left the office briskly, without looking back. If there was sadness or temptation in her eyes, Hood was spared both.

He shut the office door behind him. It closed gently but with a solid, final click.

As he walked past the cubicles to the elevator, Hood accepted good wishes from the night team. He rarely saw them, since Bill Abram and Curt Hardaway ran things after seven. There were so many young faces. So many go-getters. Steady Paul Hood was definitely feeling like an antique.

Hopefully, the trip to New York would give him time to think, time to try and fix his relationship with Sharon. He reached the elevator, stepped in, and took a last look at the complex that had taken so much of his time and spirit — but had also given him those adrenaline jolts. There was no point lying to himself: He was going to miss it. All of it.

As the door shut, Hood found himself getting angry again. Whether he was angry at what he was leaving or what he was going to, he just didn’t know. Op-Center psychologist Liz Gordon once told him that confusion was a term we’d invented to describe an order of things that was not yet understood.

He hoped so. He truly did.