Epilogue

HE ASKED HIM THE SAME QUESTION IN PERSON a week later from his hospital bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he’d been sent to recuperate and mainly to rest. He was taking medications to get the swelling down in the disk in his neck that was on the verge of rupturing. Phil LeDoux had, in fact, pulled rank on DeLuca for the first time in his life and ordered his friend to rest. For now, anyway, DeLuca felt like he could stand down. Of the twenty-four e-mail addresses, twenty had reported back, leading to the very quiet and highly secret arrests of more than two hundred terrorists. Of the remaining three addresses, two jihadis had turned themselves in, reporting that they’d lost their nerve and hadn’t had the heart to activate the virus that had been sent them, meaning it was still live, at which point the bottles they turned over, still sealed, were handled very carefully indeed. The last terrorist was never found, simply missing from her apartment, but the bottle of “olive oil” was recovered, unopened, and neutralized.

Walter and his wife had driven down, to see their friend David. Sami would have come, too, but at the last minute he got a call from a group of Harvard professors who wanted to take one last trip while the bluefish were still running. DeLuca was tempted to tell Sami what he’d seen a week earlier, watching the arrest scene via the thermal-imaging feed, an image of Sami’s boat and then, slowly circling it, a large school of fish, following one alpha fish twice the size of the others. A tech specialist with a degree in marine biology who was watching identified it as a school of migratory bluefin tuna. It was the thirty-thousand-dollar fish Sami had seen, and it looked like it was following him. DeLuca decided to keep that information to himself. It would only make Sami crazier than he already was.

He debriefed Walter Ford as best he could, filling in the details while Martha watched the television. By the second day, Jaburi had been too ill to rise from the berth in his cabin. Scottie said somebody at IMINT guessed, looking at the thermal images, that Jaburi’s fever spiked at around 106 degrees. There’d been talk of sending over SEAL divers in Jack Brown dry-suits or boarding the ship with gowned-up NBC technicians to decontaminate and salvage the boat, but then the let’s-just-blow-it-up-and-go-home argument won out, once all the risks were factored in. Seventy-two hours after the first shot had been fired, an eight-inch gun from the Livingston put Mahmoud Jaburi out of his considerable misery, obliterating the vessel with a thermobaric shell that created an instantaneous sixteen-hundred-degree plasma. Jaburi was no more. His ship was no more. Alf Wajeh was no more, just as Mohammed Al-Tariq was no more.

“So I’m still confused,” Walter said. “If you didn’t know Al-Tariq was alive until after you talked to Ali Hadid, how could he have known to put a reward on your head?”

“I don’t know that he did,” DeLuca said. “There’s a lot of guys over there putting rewards on people’s heads. Half of ’em are just plain assholes. The insurgency’s not the half of it. Hopefully, the Iraqi cops we’ve been training will get it under control when they take over after we leave.”

“David,” Martha interrupted. “Excuse me, but I think you might know this man talking to Geraldo Rivera. I think he was in your unit. Wasn’t that your unit?”

DeLuca looked up at the TV on the wall. He saw a familiar face, the words, “Lt. Col. Stanley Reicken, U.S. Army, 419th Counterintelligence Batt., Ret.” at the bottom of the screen. He’d known they were going to ask him to resign, but the demotion was a pleasant surprise. He turned the sound up.

“Actually, Geraldo, I think they’re wrong,” Reicken was saying. “I was there. We are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It’s a slow process, but we’re winning it. I personally supervised the installation of an electrical generator at a hospital in the town of Ad-Dujayl, and let me tell you . . .”

DeLuca turned the sound down again.

“To quote the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, ‘Some people with no brains do an awful lot of talking.’”

“Do you think that’s true, David?” Martha asked. “Are we really winning the hearts and minds?”

DeLuca could have given her a more complete answer, but then he recalled Phillip LeDoux’s orders—he was supposed to rest, and not upset himself.

“No, Martha, I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

“So Bonnie’s coming down tonight?” Walter asked, changing the subject. DeLuca nodded. “How’re you with that?”

“She’s called off the lawyers,” DeLuca said. “They tell me the VA has a free marriage counseling program specifically for these sorts of things.”

“Well that’s good, then,” Walter said. “Of course, you’re not going to just rely on the VA program to save your marriage.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Okay, then,” Walter said. “Martha, we should go.”

“Can we bring you anything before we go home?” Martha wanted to know, eyeing the card sitting on the windowsill next to him.

“I’m good, Martha,” he said. “Thanks anyway. Thanks for the flowers, too.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” Walter Ford said, reaching into the shopping bag he’d been carrying. “I almost forgot. This is from Gillian. I know she was saving this for you.” Ford handed DeLuca the fifty-year-old bottle of McCallums that she’d locked in her safe. “When you get back, we thought we’d have a little service for her.”

“I’ll save this for then,” DeLuca said.

After they left, he reread the card on the windowsill. It was from Evelyn, handwritten. It said,

Dear David,

I couldn’t believe it when they told me you’d gone home. I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, but then, that’s been more the rule than the exception for me, these last few years, with people I care about. And the people I don’t, I can’t seem to get rid of. I hope they take good care of you—I know it’s not like you, but do try to listen to the doctors and do what they tell you.

Now I must say, I believe you were quite a naughty boy, telling me about your “friend” who died in the “bombing” of “counterintelligence headquarters.” But it has since been explained to me, and I understand. Your secrets are safe with me (all of them) so let’s not not speak any more of it. They say the first casualty of war is the truth, and I’m afraid I may have inflicted my share of wounds to it myself (friendly fire, but that’s hardly an excuse)—that’s what happens in war, isn’t it? That’s just what happens.

It seems rather imperative, then, that I tell you, so that you know, that there are other truths I never fudge, and things I said to you that I meant completely and will always stand behind. There were things that happened that might not have happened, under other circumstances, but that doesn’t make them any less true or meaningful in hindsight. You should know, I keep the friends I make and I protect my friends fiercely. And I consider you much more than a friend, David. I can’t talk of love, though, can I? Too risky, isn’t it? Too dangerous, and I know danger doesn’t have much of an effect on you, but I’m going to let it go anyway.

So you be well, and perhaps we shall see each other again. We’ll always have Sanandaj. We’ll always have Balad. And we’ll never pass this way again, they say, so there it is.

Be good.

Evelyn

P.S. I suspect you’ll want to destroy this note. Go ahead—I won’t mind.

 

She was right, of course. She was right about everything.

He tossed it into the wastebasket.

For an hour, he watched television. There were reports of a car bombing in Fallujah, an IED killing two soldiers at an intersection in Ar Ramadi, a mortar round that killed three Iraqi civilians in Samarra, and on and on it went. He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Phillip LeDoux stood in the doorway.

“Got a minute?” LeDoux said.

“Phillip,” DeLuca said, smiling. “When did they let you out of the asylum?”

“I had to come in yesterday for meetings at the Pentagon,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t call first but they told me you had visitors.”

“Walter and his wife,” DeLuca said.

“I’m sorry I missed them,” LeDoux said. “Anyway, Dave, there are some other people in the hall who want to see you. I said I’d come in first to see how you were feeling. You up for more visitors?”

“Sure,” DeLuca said, wondering who LeDoux could have brought by.

“Listen—there’s something I wanted to say before they come in,” LeDoux said. “You’re going to be reading about this in the papers in the next couple months. You remember your friend Doc?”

“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Chaptered out on a sanity thing.”

“Right on the details but wrong on the conclusion,” LeDoux said. “Apparently he’d gone up the chain of command about some things he said he’d seen going on in the prison at Baquba. Interrogators doing things to prisoners. When nothing happened, he went off the reservation with the media. As I’m just now coming to understand it, some people were trying to have him declared insane to discredit him, but it’s going to come out that everything he said was true. I’m having the whole thing investigated, including the coverup, but a lot of people are going to look really bad. I just wanted you to know. It doesn’t really concern you, but I know Doc was a friend of yours.”

“I appreciate it,” DeLuca said. “He never said anything to us about prison abuse.”

“I also wanted to tell you that the people in the hall are good people. I’ll personally vouch for all of them. I may not always agree with all of them, but I wanted you to know my thoughts about them.”

“If you’ll stand by them, that’s good enough for me,” DeLuca said.

“Let’s let ’em in, then,” General LeDoux said. “By the way, I’d like you to meet Kathryn while you’re in town, but we’ll talk about that later.”

First to enter was DeLuca’s brother-in-law, Tom, who smiled and shook his hand. Tommy was followed by five men and a woman, who formed a semicircle at the foot of his bed.

“Sergeant David DeLuca, 419th Counterintelligence Battalion,” General LeDoux said by way of introduction, “my old and good friend, I’d like you to meet, from your left, John Maitland, commander of INSCOM, Colonel Jose Canales, DIA Pentagon liaison, Warren Benjamin, deputy director of Homeland Security, Ross Schlessinger, deputy director of the CIA, Carla White, White House’s National Security adviser, and Senator Danforth Sykes, from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“Senator,” DeLuca said, trying to sit up. “Tommy. Everyone. You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up, but I don’t have any pants on.”

Tommy laughed, but the others seemed rather serious.

“It’s good to see your spirits are up,” Tom said. “How’s your neck?”

“Not that bad, really,” DeLuca said. “I gather you’re not all here to inquire about my health.”

“We’re all hoping you get better,” LeDoux said. “I’ve debriefed the committee as thoroughly as I could, but they wanted to meet you in person. We’ve got a little business to do here. Colonel Canales?”

“Sir,” the colonel said. He looked way too young to be a full bird colonel, a clean-shaven Latino in his late thirties, DeLuca guessed. “Sergeant, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Believe me, I’ve heard a lot about you. I think the general asked me to start because I’m going to be the good-news/bad-news guy here. So which do you want first?”

“Whichever you’d prefer, Colonel,” DeLuca said.

“I’d prefer to keep the bad news to myself, but unfortunately, I can’t. Here’s the good news,” he said, reaching into the briefcase he was carrying and extracting six hard-shell clam cases, which he opened one at a time. “This is the Purple Heart. You were probably expecting that. This is the Bronze Star, with an attachment for valor. This is the Silver Star, also with an attachment for valor. In addition, you’ve earned a Soldier’s Medal, a Legion of Merit, and an Army Commendation Medal. We’re giving these to you because we wanted you to know, up front, that we recognize the work you’ve done and appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made. Your work in the Sunni Triangle was truly remarkable, and we wanted you to know that we know that.”

DeLuca looked at the medals, then at LeDoux, wondering what the trick was.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I think we had a lot of luck on our side.”

“Well,” Colonel Canales said, “judging by your record, either you’re the luckiest man in the world, or your intelligence and skills have more to do with your achievements than luck. We don’t give medals for luck.”

“Okay,” DeLuca said. “What’s the bad news?”

Canales folded the clamshell cases and placed them back into his briefcase.

“The bad news is that these are yours, but we can’t give them to you. Yet. We’re going to have to hold them in abeyance.”

“It’s all top secret, Dave,” LeDoux said. “TS/SCI until further notice. You can’t talk about what you did. Ever.”

“The president is also aware of your service,” said Carla White, a woman of perhaps forty. “He asked me personally to tell you how much he appreciates it, but unfortunately, it’s been determined that everything about Mohammed Al-Tariq and Alf Wajeh is too sensitive and impingent upon national security to allow for dissemination of any kind. We’re just too vulnerable, and if we expose our vulnerabilities, we’re inviting attack. We can’t do it. We’d like to invite you to the White House and throw you a state dinner, but unfortunately, the best we can do is to thank you privately.”

“That’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I’ve already had dinner.”

“We do expect you’ll receive the recognition you’re due in the fullness of time,” Ross Schlessinger, the CIA deputy director, said. “We just can’t tell you when that might be. We keep a book at the CIA of the names of men who’ve done things we can never talk about, but we think it’s important for them to know that we know.”

“I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” DeLuca said. “There’s obviously more though, right? You wouldn’t all be here like this if all you wanted to do was pat me on the back and then tell me to shut up, I’m guessing.”

“There’s a bit more,” Warren Benjamin said. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the papers, but you’re probably aware that ever since 9/11, we’ve been looking at intelligence and trying to figure out where we fucked up. And how not to fuck up again. So you’re going to be hearing, in the next few months, or years, stories about all kinds of ways we fucked up, and some of them are going to be exaggerated or off base, but some of them are going to be true. The two ways that concern us most here are that there wasn’t enough coordination between the various agencies, and there was too much reliance on electronic intel at the expense of human intelligence. Plain and simple, we need more boots on the ground—assisted by all the technology we can bring to bear, but boots on the ground.”

“By the way,” Schlessinger said, “if I may interrupt, speaking of intra-agency rivalries, I gather your people have told you about my man Timmons, the case officer who was running Mahmoud Jaburi. Timmons has been reassigned.”

“It’s a new world,” Benjamin continued. “We don’t really need guys sneaking around Moscow in black trench coats anymore. We need to adjust to the new map. It’s not China or Russia anymore. It’s Nigeria, and North Korea, and Uzbekistan and Kashmir and Sudan and Bali, and all the little countries and groups and organizations on the fringe of globalization who figure if they can’t have a piece of the pie, they’re going to take a shit in the pie so nobody else can eat it. Excuse the turd-pie analogy, but I think it fits.”

“You’ve obviously never eaten an MRE,” DeLuca said. “Turd pie is one of the better offerings.”

“INSCOM is putting together a new agency,” John Maitland, the INSCOM commander, said. “A special-access program, on a black budget. We’re looking for people with exactly your skill sets to go into Africa and North Korea and wherever we need you to go and work the human intelligence so that we can find the new bad guys before they get organized. We’re the new global police, whether we like it or not, and we’re going to need global policemen like you to walk the beat for us. And to go undercover when you need to. So that’s why we’re here. We want to offer you a job.”

“A job?” DeLuca said.

“Doing exactly what you were doing in Iraq, but with a wider agenda,” Canales said. “Running small-scale missions and special ops crews and coordinating larger operations when need be. Hearts and minds. The things you already do well.”

“Who would I be working for?”

“You’re looking at us,” LeDoux said. “Colonel Canales is your hands-on contact, under me, and I report to the committee. You’d have an unlimited budget, full hands-off authority, and all the toys you could possibly dream of. You’d be CI: Team Red. Red as in hot spot. You always said this would be a great job if the army would just let you do it right, so that’s what we have in mind.”

“My wife wants me to quit,” DeLuca said. “We were talking about opening a bar.”

LeDoux looked at Maitland, who nodded. Schlessinger nodded as well.

“We’ll build you a bar,” LeDoux said. “We really want to give you whatever you want, Dave.”

“Can I keep my team?”

“We have a saying in Congress,” Senator Danforth Sykes said. “‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if it breaks, blame the other party for not fixing it.’ We want you to keep your team. I talked to Dan about you. You couldn’t come with any higher recommendations, and I trust my son’s opinion.”

Dan had been transferred from Balad to the Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany, where the doctors had worked to repair his damaged kidney.

“How’s Danny boy doing?” DeLuca asked.

“He’s better,” the senator said. “I have to say, on a personal note, I was upset when he said he wanted to stay in CI, but we’ve had a good talk about it and I’ve accepted his decision. It’s been a bit remarkable, to his mother and me, how much he seems to have matured in the last year. What you’ll be doing is important, Sergeant. I dare say vital. And my son believes you’d be the best person to head the team.”

“You must be glad you found the WMD you’ve been looking for,” DeLuca said. Maitland, Schlessinger, White, and Sykes all exchanged glances.

“We’re not going to release that, at the present time,” Carla White said.

DeLuca wanted to say, “Then before the next election, perhaps?” but he held his tongue. Maybe he was just being cynical. It was none of his business—these were not the games he had any interest in playing.

“We’re also prepared to give you a field promotion, here and now, with commensurate pay scale,” Canales said. “You can take your pick. Sergeant first class, warrant officer, lieutenant if you want to join the officers’ corps.”

“No thanks,” DeLuca said. “I’ll take warrant officer.”

“Well,” Colonel Canales said, “General LeDoux predicted you were going to say that.”

“And I want my team paid at least as much as the private contractors get paid.”

“Not a problem,” Canales said.

“Can you give us an answer now?” Maitland said. “Or would you like twenty-four hours?”

“I’m going to have to talk to my wife,” DeLuca said.

“Of course,” Carla White said. “We understand. The president has been saying he wants to recognize the sacrifices made by the families of our service members by building them a monument. He thinks we have enough monuments to soldiers and not one to stand for what their families have suffered and experienced. We’ve actually been looking at places on the Mall in Washington to do something.”

“Well,” DeLuca said. “That sounds a lot like political bullshit to me, frankly. I think the families would be more grateful if you fix the VA system.”

He saw LeDoux try to stifle a smirk.

“We’re going to do that, too,” White said.

“My guy at USAMRIID says you probably stopped somewhere between two and three hundred million deaths,” Maitland said. “Just so you know.”

“But why keep score?” DeLuca said. “I’ll think about it. That’s all I can tell you.”

He knew, about five minutes after they left the room, that he was going to take the job. He didn’t feel forced. Somebody else could do it if he didn’t. He knew that. He was going to take the job, simply because right now, there was no better way for him to live, no other way that he could make the same level of contribution to the country that had given him a home, and a dream. Corny as it sounded, this was truly how he could be all that he could be. He thought about it for another hour, but he kept coming up to the same conclusion.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to say it, but he knew approximately what he was going to say when his wife arrived, dropping her suitcase inside the door to his room.

She looked at him for a long time, tears welling up in her eyes.

“We have to talk,” he said to Bonnie.

“That’s my line,” she said. “We’ll talk, but right now, would you mind holding me? Because I really need you to.”

“I might be a little rusty at it,” he said.

“We’ll start slow,” she said.

“Good idea,” he said.

She lay down beside him and rested her head on his chest.