Chapter 3
“No, seriously, how come you don’t sleep?”
Black trees rushed by in the wet darkness. They were approaching a place called Basingstoke, which sounded like the name for
a fearless vampire hunter.
“I never have,” Colin said. “I do my best work after everyone else is asleep. I can check on the Nikkei index, write my most
important emails, then hit the treadmill. I usually only sleep from about one to five a.m., out like a light. Donna says I
don’t move, don’t snore. It’s like I’m petrified.”
Arthur nodded in the dark. “I read somewhere that sociopaths also suffer from insomnia.”
“Well, and I take Adderall, mixed with an MAOI and the very occasional microdose of DMT. That keeps me perky.”
“I understood at least half a dozen words in that sentence. Are you and Donna together now?”
“Not in any old-fashioned sense. Not in the sense you probably mean. I think you’re aware I’m polyamorous. You know, Homo sapiens are literally the only ape that shows an inclination toward monogamy. I view the institution of marriage a bit like . . .
well, like medieval French. There’s a reason it went away.”
“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining I could only be born once,” Arthur told him.
Colin frowned. “You’re quoting someone.”
“Chesterton.”
“Ah,” Colin said. “And I thought it sounded like John Belushi. Tell me, do you ever get your dick wet? It’s fine to be married, but you aren’t, except maybe
in your imagination.”
“You, of all people, Colin, should know not to underestimate the imagination. What’s King Sorrow, if not a weaponized act of the imagination? He’s a bad dream with teeth. For a few years, I wondered if we’d ever wake up from him.”
Colin lifted an eyebrow. “So you think there’s a way to be rid of him?”
“I’m glad we’re doing this a week after Easter. King Sorrow wouldn’t admit it—he doesn’t care to admit weakness—but it tires
him to pull himself through into our reality. After his Easter feast he slithers back into the Long Dark and sleeps for a
few months. If we’re going to move against him, this is the best time. He isn’t watching. And yes, I may have found a way.
By the way, how did Easter go this year? I didn’t see anything on the news or in the papers.”
“You wouldn’t, would you? We blasted a few dozen soldiers for AQI out of the slums of Ramadi. There wasn’t much coverage.
The Department of Defense keeps a tight lid. You know AQI? Al-Qaeda in Iraq?”
“Oh? Al-Qaeda is in Iraq now? That’s new. Because they weren’t when we invaded.”
Colin smiled indulgently. They had reached the outskirts of an old tension. The shock and awe campaign of April 2003 that
had obliterated Baghdad—sheets of fire raining from the sky, temples caving in, vehicles blown off the roads, and civilians
buried in rubble—had mostly been King Sorrow. It had been Arthur’s turn to choose, and he had attended to Colin, read his
research, listened when he warned that if Saddam Hussein survived the spring, he might have a nuclear weapon by fall. Colin
had the intel to prove it. Only it turned out the intel was a pile of lies. By some accounts six thousand people had died
in a week, and although King Sorrow could not have been personally responsible for more than 20 percent of the fatalities,
Arthur had felt the weight of them all.
After the last day of Hilary in Oxford—that was what they called their spring term, because they were too ancient and erudite to call it second fucking semester like any other college—Arthur had collected some things in a sturdy mountaineer’s backpack, caught a train to Scotland, and disappeared.
Really disappeared, beyond even Colin’s formidable powers to track and trace.
Colin had feared Arthur had decided to join Donovan in the Long Dark, but in the end he had come back, reemerging with his beard thicker than ever.
He’d missed Trinity but returned in time to teach the Michaelmas term.
“Where’d you go?” Colin had asked.
“I found a ruined abbey,” Arthur had replied, “and stayed to pray. After a while some of the monks joined me.”
“There were monks living in the ruin?”
“These monks weren’t living at all,” Arthur said, and offered no more. Colin didn’t doubt that Arthur had spent weeks praying
with ghosts only he could see. Colin had, himself, acquired something very close to telepathy, because when you could see
everyone’s texts and emails, and read their search history, you could know everything relevant about them. But Arthur had
a search engine of his own—a head full of fairy tales and the Surrealist’s Glass that showed him the secret truth of things.
It fascinated Colin, the way Arthur seemed to live in a separate, heightened reality, full of Jungian symbolism and metaphors
made real.
“What about getting Osama?” Arthur asked now. “We’ve got a dragon. Why haven’t we used it? He’s the one person in the entire
world I’m sure actually deserves to meet King Sorrow.”
“I’m more interested in stopping the next Osama, not in punishing an insane old man who lives in a state of terror, always fearing this is the day someone from Seal
Team Six will send him back to Allah. He’s the one trapped in the tower now, with the fire at his back. No way out, no hope
for him. He can jump if he wants, if he has the courage, which he doesn’t. Or he can wait for the fire to reach him at last.
And it will.”
“So did you kill the next Osama in Iraq this Easter? Or did you give birth to him by burning his family alive?”
Arthur’s doubts and challenges didn’t distress Colin but didn’t terribly interest him either.
They had been having the same conversation for fifteen years, when Colin thought it had been all talked out in fifteen minutes.
He wasn’t even terribly upset that, in the end, Saddam had been too incompetent and lazy to build a weapons program that could threaten the Western world.
It was enough that he might’ve and was crushed entirely, his country smashed, everyone who supported him slaughtered or humiliated. Game theory suggested
it was helpful to send the message that the United States might overreact at any time, obliterate a nation just because it
could. Other countries would have to fear what America might do on a whim; they would learn it was a mistake to pull a dragon’s
tail.
“I don’t know if Iraq will produce the next Osama in twenty years. But I do know some of our soldiers will live because many of theirs didn’t. That’s the simple arithmetic of a war, and I like to see the equations come out in our favor. The First Armored are
going into Ramadi in a month—you didn’t hear that from me—and King Sorrow just made sure a bunch of our boys will come back
out.”
“You know a lot about what’s going on. They keep you close, the intelligence people, don’t they?”
“I prefer to think that I keep them close.”
They had come to an arrangement after North Carolina. The week after Colin brought Donna home to The Briars, he reached out
to Paul Follett . . . the man Donna referred to, even now, as Mr. Francis. In late May, Paul and Colin had gone for a walk
together on Boston Common and hammered out their agreement. The national security apparatus would keep its distance and they’d
make sure other interested parties, public and private, kept theirs. They had to; their cooperation was no longer optional.
Colin had emails, PowerPoints, reports, and images that would make Abu Ghraib look like Disney World. He had a record of every
nasty snatch-torture-and-kill Thermopylae had done while on the payroll of the federal government, and he assured Follett
that it was all on a dead man’s switch. It would be released if Colin went missing for even thirty-six hours.
But Follett didn’t walk away with nothing.
Colin would be supplied with a monthly intelligence report and recommendations, which he could distribute to the rest of the Get-Even Gang; Paul made sure that Colin received the Pentagon’s “Shopping List” every fall, the names of the men they most wanted to put in cold storage.
It was a thoughtful gesture . . . although Colin’s firm was already in the business of handling most of the government’s web services, and his own information was broader and deeper than anything Paul could offer him.
In the end, Follett had even offered Colin and company a “consultancy fee.” Colin had turned it down, couldn’t say yes, not
unless he wanted to wake up some morning, his crotch throbbing and wet, and Donna holding his scrotum in one hand and a pair
of garden shears in the other.
“They killed her brother,” Arthur said. “I don’t understand why Donna would accept your having an agreement with them at all.”
“Everyone who killed her brother is dead, and they were all in the employ of a now-defunct private security company. Only
Paul Follett, the NSA man, walked away from Cherokee Island, and Donna seems to think he’s half the reason she walked away
herself. Also: we’ve been able to demand our share of concessions. Key appointments. Key firings. That kind of thing. I can’t
tell you how good it’s been for her to exert control, to know they’re afraid of her instead of the other way around. John
McCain is going to run in 2008, but I’ll tell you what—I’m pretty sure I can fix it so Donna can pick his VP for him. I was
thinking that would be a cute birthday present.”
“Not if we wipe out King Sorrow. Then we won’t have anything left to trade.”
“But we’ll also be free,” Colin said. “And I know we all want that.”