Page 27 of Safe Enough

The government liaison man rescued me. He said, “We need to talk about exactly what it is we’re going to do.”

Which surprised me for a moment: Why had I assembled a team before the mission was defined? But he was right: Beyond the fact that we would be going to Iran—and let’s face it, today all of us go to Iran—no details had yet been settled.

The traitor said, “It has to be about nuclear capability.”

One of the women said, “Of course—what else is there, really?”

I noted that she had a charming voice. Warm, and a little intimate. In the back of my mind I wondered if I could use her in a seduction role. Or would that get me in even more trouble, with the powers that be?

The communications man said, “There’s the issue of regional influence. Isn’t that important? But hey, what do I know?”

The government man said, “Their regional influence depends entirely on their nuclear threat.”

I let them talk like that for a spell. I was happy to listen and observe. I saw that the two bruisers at the back were getting bored. They had above-my-pay-grade looks on their faces. One of them asked me, “Can we go? You know the kind of thing we can do. You can give us the details later. Would that be OK?”

I nodded. It was fine with me. One of them looked back from the door with his earlier expression: Don’t get us killed too soon.

The poor bloody infantry. Silently I promised him not to. I liked him. The others were still deep in discussion. They were twisting and turning and addressing this point and that. The way the Eames chair was so low to the ground, it put the government man’s face right next to the right-hand woman’s legs. I envied him. But he wasn’t impressed. He was more interested in filtering everything that was said through the narrow lens of his own concerns. At one point he looked up at me and asked me directly: “How much State Department trouble do you want exactly?”

Which wasn’t as dumb a question as it sounded. It was an eternal truth that very little of substance could be achieved without upsetting the State Department to some degree. And we worked with liaison men for that very reason: They quelled the storm long enough to let us conclude whatever operation was then in play. I thought his question implied an offer: He would do what it took. Which I thought was both generous and brave.

I said, “Look, all of you. Obviously I’ll try to make the whole thing as smooth and trouble-free as possible. But we’re all grown-ups. We know how it goes. I’ll ask for the extra mile if I have to.”

Whereupon the transport coordinator asked a related but more mundane question: “How long are we signing up for?”

“Eighty days,” I said. “Ninety, maximum. But you know how it is. We won’t be in play every day. I want you all to map out a six-month window. I think that’s realistic.”

Which statement quieted things down a little. But in the end they all nodded and agreed. Which, again, I thought was brave. To use another sports metaphor, they knew the rules of the game. An operation that lasted six months, overseas in hostile territory, was certain to produce casualties. I knew that, and they knew that. Some of them wouldn’t be coming home. But none of them flinched.

There was another hour or so of talk, and then another. I felt I got to know them all as well as I needed to. They didn’t leave until well into the morning. I called my editor as soon as they were through the door. She asked me how I was, which question from an editor really means, “What have you got for me?”

I told her I was back on track with something pretty good, and that a six-month deadline should see it through. She asked what it was, and I told her it was something that had come to me while I was stoned. I used the tone of voice I always use with her. It leaves her unsure whether I am kidding or not. So she asked again. I said I had the characters down, and that the plot would evolve as it went along. Iran, basically. As a private joke I couched the whole thing in the kind of language we might see in the trade reviews, if we got any: I said it wouldn’t transcend the genre, but it would be a solid example of its type.

ADDICTED TO SWEETNESS

The man calling himself Socrates said to the man in shackles, “White powder has always made money.”

The shackles were nothing more than regular handcuffs, four pairs, latched separately to the guy’s wrists and ankles, with the empty ends locked into an iron loop set in the floor. As a result, the guy was squatting like a fakir in a pool of liquid, half on his ass and half on his feet, with his knees up and his arms pulled down between them. His head was raised, and his hair was wet and plastered to his skull. He was trying to keep the conversation going, obviously.

He said, “Always?”

“Well, okay, not always,” Socrates said. “Not during the Stone Age, maybe. Or the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. The Middle Ages, I’m not sure, either. But certainly for the last three hundred years.”

The man in the shackles said, “Sugar.”

“Yes,” Socrates said, pleased with the response. He was Brazilian by nationality, but ethnically he had all kinds of blood in him. Mayan, Aztec, Carib, some Spanish, some Portuguese, and a long strain of West African from slaves on the island of Antigua. He said, “In the West Indies, sugarcane was grown on every square inch of available land. There was insatiable demand from Europe. Huge fortunes were made. Hard work, though, for those involved.”

The man in the shackles said, “Slavery.”

“Exactly,” Socrates said. “Hoeing, planting, weeding, and harvesting was backbreaking. Boiling and crystallizing was skilled. But it was all done by slaves.”

The man in the shackles was white and American, so he said, “Sorry.”

Socrates said, “Not your fault. In the West Indies, the owners were British.”

The room the two men were in was the ground-floor living room of a suburban house, unoccupied as of an hour ago. The residents had been told to take a long walk, and Socrates had overseen the iron bolt being screwed into the floor, and then his men had taken a long walk, too, but not before bringing in five gallons of gasoline in a can. The guy in the shackles was soaked in it. The liquid that had plastered his hair to his skull was gasoline, and the pool he was sitting in was gasoline. Less than a gallon so far, but a little goes a long way.

Socrates said, “The plantation owners had one fieldworker for every two acres, plus skilled labor for after the harvest, plus domestic staff. As a result, they were heavily outnumbered, twenty to one at times, and they were mistreating their people very badly, working them too hard in the sun, and abusing them in their houses. Especially the females. They had their way with the pretty ones and worked the ugly ones relentlessly.”

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