get inside Henry’s mind. She thought that if she could just see the world as he saw it, even for one night, she would truly know the man she loved. “What did it look like?”
“Don’t do this, Jill.”
“Every detail.”
Henry sat back. He spoke in a tone similar to the one he had used to record his observations after the boy’s death. He described a child that had been literally eaten alive. His body was swollen, filled with bloody abscesses and black patches of gangrene. The medical team had excised chunks of tissue and amputated one leg, but there was never much hope of saving him. A dozen family members were in the waiting room. Grandparents, siblings, cousins, and the hollow-eyed parents. Henry had spoken to them. He asked about how the boy had become infected—apparently, through a dog bite—and the family members told him stories about how special Salvador was, how great the loss was to the world. They could see that Henry was also desolate, and they tried to console him, as they did the children, by affirming again and again that Salvador was in heaven now, he was an angel, a star among the constellations.
By the time Henry finished telling about his afternoon, Jill was weeping so copiously that one of the waitress nuns came over to see if there was something she could do to help. “Do you want me to call a doctor?” the nun had asked, and through her tears Jill had laughed.
That night, she truly began to understand Henry.
* * *
—
JILL HAD TO TELL the children something about where Henry was. She took them to Rosario’s, a neighborhood Mexican restaurant in Little Five Points. Helen immediately jumped to the worst scenario. “Dad’s sick,” she said.
“No, no, he’s fine,” said Jill. “They had to isolate him for a week just to be sure, but he’s totally fine. You know your dad, he never gets sick.” This wasn’t true, Henry’s immune system was nothing to brag about, but Jill used it as a defense against her own concerns. “But he’s got to go to Saudi Arabia because he’s afraid the disease might spread.”
“Why does Dad have to go?” Teddy demanded.
“Teddy, I have asked myself that question a million times,” Jill said. “I wish there were someone else who could do what your dad does, but he has a special talent, I guess. Think of him like a policeman. There are times when people have to be protected from danger, and that’s what your father does, he protects us from disease. He protects all of us.”
Helen didn’t say anything, but at that moment she decided she was going to be a doctor too.
9
Comet Ping Pong
Among Tildy Nichinsky’s complaints was that there is no safe spot to talk in Washington, and yet people were leaking classified information all over the place. How did they get away with it? And where? There was the famous bar in the basement of the Hay-Adams, cheekily called Off the Record, where so many illicit conversations took place. The dining room of the Mandarin. A park bench on the Tidal Basin. When she considered them, they all seemed so clichéd.
Even from her high perch at Homeland Security, Tildy still could not see the intelligence community in its entirety. No one could. It was not just the sixteen official agencies that make up the IC, all of them formally and ineffectually overseen by yet another sprawling bureaucracy, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was also the spinoffs, the private contractors, which were spread all over the city and the suburbs, some along the toll road to Dulles airport or in imposing glassy buildings in McLean, where the ex-CIA or Pentagon brass went to collect their golden rewards. Super-secret outposts were hidden in plain sight, such as in a strip mall in Crystal City, or on a forested hilltop in northern Virginia, called Liberty Crossing, where the National Counterterrorism Center resided. Spyworld. Every day they poured out reports that buried the IC in excess information, so little of it useful or actionable. Fear was the growth hormone that had transformed America into a security state following 9/11. Now it was sustained by inertia and greed, and Washington was the capital of all that.
Yes, she had given much thought to where to meet in this spy-infested city. She was well aware of the administration’s lynch mob, out to get anyone who spoke to the press. Tildy had once felt that way herself. It