your hands dirty?
I saw at a stubborn pine sapling that’s near an old stone wall on the property, and think, Because it helps. It keeps your mind occupied, your thoughts busy, so you don’t continually flash back to memories of your presidential term.
The long and fruitless meetings with congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle, talking with them, arguing with them, and sometimes pleading with them, at one point saying, “Damn it, we’re all Americans here—isn’t there anything we can work on to move our country forward?”
And constantly getting the same smug, superior answers. “Don’t blame us, Mr. President. Blame them.”
The late nights in the Oval Office, signing letters of condolence to the families of the best of us, men and women who had died for the idea of America, not the squabbling and revenge-minded nation we have become. And three times running across the names of men I knew and fought with, back when I was younger, fitter, and with the teams.
And other late nights as well, reviewing what was called—in typical innocuous, bureaucratic fashion—the Disposition Matrix database, prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center, but was really known as the “kill list.” Months of work, research, surveillance, and intelligence intercepts resulting in a list of known terrorists who were a clear and present danger to the United States. And there I was, sitting by myself, and like a Roman emperor of old, I put a check mark next to those I decided were going to be killed in the next few days.
The sapling finally comes down.
Mission accomplished.
I look up and see something odd flying in the distance.
I stop, shade my eyes. Since moving here, I’ve gotten used to the different kinds of birds moving in and around Lake Marie, including the loons, whose night calls sound like someone’s being throttled, but I don’t recognize what’s flying over there now.
I watch for a few seconds, and then it disappears behind the far tree line.
And I get back to work, something suddenly bothering me, something I can’t quite figure out.
BASE OF THE HUNTSMEN TRAIL
Mount Rollins, New Hampshire
IN THE FRONT SEAT of a black Cadillac Escalade, the older man rubs at his clean-shaven chin and looks at the video display from the laptop set up on top of the center console. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat, the younger man has a rectangular control system in his hand, with two small joysticks and other switches. He is controlling a drone with a video system, and they’ve just watched the home of former president Matthew Keating disappear from view.
It pleases the older man to see the West’s famed drone technology turned against them. For years he’s done the same thing with their wireless networks and cell phones, triggering devices and creating the bombs that shattered so many bodies and sowed so much terror.
And the Internet—which promised so much when it came out to bind the world as one—ended up turning into a well-used and safe communications network for him and his warriors.
The Cadillac they’re sitting in was stolen this morning from a young couple and their infant in northern Vermont, after the two men abandoned their stolen pickup truck. There’s still a bit of blood spatter and brain matter on the dashboard in front of them. An empty baby’s seat is in the rear, along with a flowered cloth bag stuffed with toys and other childish things.
“Next?” the older man asks.
“We find the girl,” he says. “It shouldn’t take long.”
“Do it,” the older man says, watching with quiet envy and fascination as the younger man manipulates the controls of the complex machine while the drone’s camera-made images appear on the computer screen.
“There. There she is.”
From a bird’s-eye view, he thinks, staring at the screen. A red sedan moves along the narrow paved roads.
He says, “And you are sure that the Americans, that they are not tracking you?”
“Impossible,” the younger man next to him says in confidence. “There are thousands of such drones at play across this country right now. The officials who control the airspace, they have rules about where drones can go, and how high and low they can go, but most people ignore the rules.”
“But their Secret Service—”
“Once President Matthew Keating left office, his daughter was no longer due the Secret Service protection. It’s the law, if you can believe it. Under special circumstances, it can be requested, but no, not with her. The daughter wants to be on her own, going to school, without armed guards near