8.19.2004
ACE
It was an hour or so before dawn, and I was drowning in the Atlantic.
None of us had had enough sleep to be doing this. Miranda was practically standing on top of my head, and I kept breathing seawater and listening for a chopper that was taking way too long to show up.
We were all hypothermic, except Miranda, who I finally seized by the arms and shoved underwater, hard. She came up sputtering, too surprised to struggle anymore. "Knock it off or I'll dunk you again," I told her. I could be talking to the first lady, I thought. Or the President's daughter, who was seventeen and about Miranda's height and build.
She subsided, and threading my arms under hers, I pulled her back against my chest and treaded water for both of us.
"I'm cold," she said. She didn't have to act. She was genuinely scared, and freezing. We could all rationalize it was a drill, but it didn't change the vertiginous roll and pitch of the icy water, the whistling snap of the wind at the surface, or the fact that it had been almost an hour since they'd thrown us in and left us behind.
"We'll do everything we can to get you out of here," Edie said. "Coast Guard's on the way."
She wouldn't make promises: you don't give false hope. It's tempting to say something like 'you'll be all right,' or 'everything will be OK.' But sometimes that simply isn't true.
It's what everyone, every client or protectee thinks they're paying for. Assurance. Total safety.
Some kind of guarantee.
There is no guarantee, especially when you start to operate on that false sense of security, and then you let your guard down.
Miranda stayed tense and frightened in my arms.
Fear can kill, but more often keeps you alive. In this kind of work it's paradoxical, but true.
Six hours later, I was in a tuxedo, trying to keep overview on my section of two hundred people at a party. Swaying on my feet I was so tired, and reasonably sure they were going to throw us a curve ball sometime soon.
Oskar was entertaining us by telling us dirty jokes in Cantonese and then insisting Edie translate them. They were all completely unintelligible in either language, and we were punchy enough to find it all hilarious. The usual game of listening, contributing, reacting without ever registering it to onlookers, without ever cracking a smile.
When we had at last gotten Miranda into a basket and lifted out of there, she'd been disoriented and close to unconscious. We found out from one of the medics she was an administrator for the local agency motor pool.
"The scary thing," said Edie as we all sat wrapped in blankets and hot packs and trying to drink thin coffee with shaking hands, "is that she probably volunteered."
"Yeah," rumbled Buller, eyes closed and leaned against the chopper's bulkhead. "She was probably hoping some handsome agent would rescue her and carry her off into the sunset."
"Sunrise," I said. "Too bad you're not a better swimmer." Then my teeth were chattering, which was a welcome sign that I was warming up, but it made it too hard to say anything else.
At eleven twenty-two a gunman came through the eastern window, crashing through the glass and opening fire.
I knew it was all staged, that all the blood and screaming was an elaborate sham for our benefit, but adrenaline kicked in and I was alert and the fatigue was gone and a repertoire of responses were at my disposal, and that was a good thing.
Because when I leapt for Hagemeier, who was covering the north door and had his back turned, it was a live round that found my arm and not his head.
BUTTE
Zephyr is high strung. Zephyr is a bitch, Zephyr is crazy, she's blind and everyone says it doesn't matter, she's still one of the best snipers out there; I'd been around her maybe twenty minutes and I wanted to kill her already.
Cunt. I know it's not a nice word to use about ladies, but that's what I was thinking.
You could tell she didn't trust any of us to do our jobs, except Rico. She could train and drill us in that desert sweatbox for three weeks or six years and it wouldn't make any difference. It didn't matter that she recruited us herself. It didn't matter that my percentages averaged out better than hers, even though there was six level ranks between us.
She was one of those types who's pretty sure she's the only one who can do anything right.
Within twenty minutes I hated her. In an hour I was pretty sure she and Rico were fucking on a regular basis. Within a day I realized whatever job they'd just come off of had gone seriously, seriously wrong.
