Purity (35 page)

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.

“So you could have heard this from any number of people,” he said when she'd written down the names. “The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard. That's where the whole country is right now.”

“Easier to put journalists out of work than to find something to replace us with.”

“Drives me crazy. I don't have to tell you what morale is like in the bomber and silo crews. We don't trust technology quite enough to replace them with machines. We may yet reach that point, but in the meantime those postings are career suicide. You get the worst and the least bright, safeguarding our most terrible weapons and bored out of their minds. Cheating on their exams, breaking rules, flunking urine tests. Or not flunking them.”

“In Albuquerque?”

“If you're thinking crystal meth, think again. These are career officers. Don't even write down the name Richard Keneally, but remember it. The Man Who Can—apparently there's at least one on every base. I hope you don't mind that I'm summarizing many pages of a report that has a unique typographical signature, rather than letting you read it?”

“You have a plane to catch.”

“The drugs are almost all prescription stuff. Adderall, OxyContin. Drugs to help you pass the time while your classmates from the academy are flying actual missions or eating Lockheed's shrimp. You know my feelings about the nation's drug laws. Suffice it to say, we're talking about officer drugs, not grunt drugs. But still, whatever the legal inequities, they're a no-no in the armed services. They'll still light up a tox screen. Which, if you're the Man Who Can, is the real ceiling on the growth of your business. What to do about that?”

Leila shook her head.

“Have the friendly friends who supply you with the drugs quietly take over the lab that tests the urine.”

“Really,” Leila said.

“I wish I could show you the report,” the senator said. “Because it gets better, which is to say worse. Who are the friendly friends? I hate the word
cartel
, it's completely wrong. We should call them
DHLes Especiales
or
FedExes Extralegales
, because that's what they are. If you're manufacturing fake cancer drugs in Wuhan and you need to get a container of your product to the American consumer, who are you going to call? DHL Especial. Same thing for weapons, designer knockoffs, underage prostitutes, and, obviously, drugs of all kinds. One call serves all. The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth. Their business is delivering the goods, and their offices aren't far south of the border. And our Man Who Can, Richard Keneally, whose name you're remembering but not writing down, was doing business with them for several years, right under the noses of sundry inspectors general, and it only came to light because a training-replica B61 turned up where it shouldn't have.”

“Did the real weapon leave the base?”

“Fortunately no. The story is extremely sad and disturbing but also funny in a way. DHL Especial may or may not have had a buyer for the weapon—we'll never know. But before Richard Keneally could even try to get the ‘replica,' which is to say the real weapon—before he could get it off the base, he tripped on a parking stop and fell on a bottle of tequila he was carrying. The broken glass severed an artery, he nearly bled out, and he was stuck in a hospital for a week. That's the part that's a little bit funny. The part that isn't is that Keneally apparently couldn't deliver the warhead as scheduled, and he had no way of letting the Especiales know why he hadn't. His two sisters had both disappeared, one in Knoxville, one in Mississippi, around the time the warhead swap occurred. Apparently they were kidnapped as security for the deal. They both ended up dead behind a car dealership in Knoxville, with single gunshots to the back of the head. One of the sisters had three children. The only bright spot is that the children weren't harmed.”

Leila was writing as fast as she could. “Good God,” she said.

“It's terrible. But to me it's as much a story about the utter failure of the war on drugs, about trusting in technology instead of taking care of people, as it is about our nuclear arsenal.”

“I see that,” Leila said, still writing.

“It was all going to come out even if you hadn't come here with your questions. The
WaPo
's already on the demotion and reassignment of the officers Keneally sold to. They know about the drug dealing. Only a matter of time before someone leaks the rest.”

“You've talked to the
Post
?”

The senator shook his head. “Still being punished by this office for something unrelated.”

“Why did Keneally do it?”

“The speculation is partly money, partly fear for his life.”

“Are you saying he's not in custody?”

“You'll have to ask someone else.”

“That sounds like a no.”

“Draw your own conclusions. And let me reiterate that none of this goes on your site until you have independent confirmation.”

“We don't like single-source stories. We're old-fashioned that way.”

“This is known to us. It's one reason you and I are sitting here. Or have been.” The senator stood up. “I actually do have a plane to catch.”

“How was Keneally going to get the weapon off the base?”

“That's it, Leila. You already have more than you need to get the rest of it.”

He was right about that. One of the best stories of her career was in the bag. The rest would be routine triangulate-and-bluff—“I'm just confirming that I have my facts right”—while she endured the sick-making anxiety that the
Post
or someone else, someone less scrupulous about multiple-sourcing, would scoop her.

Leaving the Dirksen, she thought about canceling her trip home to Denver, but the work she had to do now, to confirm the senator's story, could only be done with in-person meetings, and on a mild and sunny spring weekend nobody she needed to see would be staying in D.C. Better to spend the weekend in Denver, writing and lining up interviews, and fly back on Sunday night.

Or so she rationalized it. The unfortunate, unflattering fact was that she didn't want to leave Tom and Pip alone together for a weekend. She'd already been feeling resentfully beleaguered by how much she had to do—too many stories, a caregiver crisis at Charles's house, the usual email and social-media onslaught (the former Mrs. Cody Flayner was writing to her daily, sending recipes and pictures of her kids)—and the new urgency of the Albuquerque story only added to her workload. The story was demanding and she its single parent. Even going home, she wouldn't have much time for Tom or Pip. Their unscheduled freedom on the weekend seemed sybaritic in comparison. She knew it was important to resist jealousy and resentment and self-pity, but she was having a hard time of it.

On the Metro, her hand shook so much that it was hard to fill out the scribbles in her notebook, hard to tap out texts to Tom and Pip. By the time she boarded her Denver flight, her anxiety about being scooped was nearly disabling. There wasn't enough room between seats for her to work without being observed by the businessman next to her, and her mind was too jumpy to concentrate on tech-industry taxes, and so she bought a split of wine and stared uselessly at the crawl of the jet icon across the route map on the seat-back screen. She bought a second split and applied it to her anxiety.

She had no rational case against Pip as a houseguest. The girl had yet to leave an unwashed dish or spoon in the sink, a light burning in an empty room. She'd even offered to do Tom and Leila's laundry for them. They'd recoiled at the thought of her handling their underwear, but she explained that she'd never lived in a house with a functioning washer and dryer (“Total luxury”) and so they let her do the sheets and towels. She had little of the unearned entitlement for which kids of her generation were laughed at, but she didn't apologize for being in the house or thank them too profusely for letting her be there. During the week, at least on the nights when Leila was home, she prepared her own separate dinner, retreated to her room, and didn't show herself again. Come Friday night, though, she plunked herself down on a stool in the kitchen, let Tom shake her one of his perfect Manhattans, chopped garlic for Leila, and opened up with funny tales of squatter life in Oakland.

Leila ought to have been pleased with the arrangement. But she had reason to believe that, on the nights she worked late or had to be at Charles's, Pip wasn't staying in her room all evening. Twice already in a month, Leila had learned of important news—the unofficial approval of a $7.5 million grant to DI from the Pew Foundation, the selection of an unfriendly judge for a First Amendment case that DI was co-defending—not directly from Tom but from Tom by way of Pip. Having herself once been the beneficiary of an older man's experience, Leila knew how nice it felt to be specially apprised of things, and how unaware the girl was of what a privilege it was, how unaware that people might resent her for it. Leila wondered if the guilt she'd come to feel about what she'd done to Charles's first wife wasn't guilt at all but anger; anger at the younger Leila who'd been granted entrée to the literary world because she was attractive to Charles; an older woman's feminist anger at her younger self. She felt some of this anger as she watched Pip absorbing Tom's wisdom and basking in the pleasure he took in her young company.

This wasn't just theoretical. Twice already in a month, Tom had pounced on Leila in Charles-like ways. Once while she was standing at the bathroom mirror, removing her makeup, and he'd come up behind her with his cock already escaping from his pajamas, and again just a few nights later, when she'd turned out her reading light and felt his hand on her collarbone, which he liked, and on her neck, which he liked even more. This had been Tom's way only in the beginning. Other understandings had long since superseded that one, and very minimal paranoia was required to connect the sudden change in Tom to the radiating presence, two doors down the hallway, of a full-chested, creamy-skinned, regularly menstruating twenty-four-year-old. If Leila had lived alone with Pip, she might have been happy to see the girl making herself at home, going braless under her sweatshirt after showering, digging her bare feet between sofa cushions while she lay and worked with the tablet device DI had issued her, the shampoo fragrance of her damp hair filling the room. But with Tom in the mix, the spillage of Pip around the house made Leila feel merely old.

The girl was doing nothing wrong, just being herself, but Leila could feel herself turning against her, envying her time alone with Tom, envying that she, not Leila, was getting to enjoy him. She believed that both he and Pip liked her too much to betray her, but it didn't matter. Scarcely more than minimal paranoia was needed to imagine that Pip's physical resemblance to Tom's ex-wife had reawakened something in him, was curing him of his post-traumatic aversion to Anabel's type, making it possible for him to again be attracted to it, and that this type was more truly his type, and that his preference for Leila's type had been, all along, a reaction against the awfulness of his marriage: that Pip was the perfect avatar of young Anabel, his fundamental type without any Anabel baggage. When he'd asked Leila if she would mind his taking Pip to
One Night in Miami
, since Leila was going to be in Washington, she'd felt pinioned by her circumstances. How could she object to Tom going out with Pip when she herself spent so much time at Charles's? Still gave the man hand jobs from time to time! She was stuck with an embittered wheelchair dude and could buy herself free time only at the cost of sleeping fewer hours, while Pip, who had no other friends, and Tom, who left the office promptly at seven every night, had plenty of free time and could hardly be faulted for spending it with each other.

Her resentment would have been more demonstrably irrational if she hadn't persisted in feeling secondary in Tom's inner life. Guilt wasn't the only reason she'd stayed married to Charles. She'd never quite got over her suspicion that, however much Tom loved her for her own sake, it mattered to him that she hadn't been young when he met her; that Anabel couldn't fault him for being with her. Just as Anabel couldn't fault him for operating an impeccably worthy news service with the money her father had left him. These moral considerations were still operative in him, and so her commitment to Charles continued to be strategic, a way of ensuring that she, too, like Tom, had someone else. But she was ruing it now.

The girl seemed largely unaware of her jealousy. Midway through her second Manhattan, the night before Leila had left for Washington, Pip had gone so far as to declare that Tom and Leila gave her hope for humanity.

“Say more,” Tom had said. “I think I can speak for Leila in saying we'd both like to offer hope to humanity.”

“Well, the work you do, obviously,” Pip said, “and the way you go about it. But all I've ever seen of couples is bad things. Either it's lies and misunderstanding and abusiveness, or it's this stifling, I don't know,
niceness
.”

“Leila can be stiflingly nice.”

“I know. You're making fun of me. But it's like, with the really close couples I know, there's no room for anybody else. It's all about their wonderfulness as a couple. There's kind of an old-sock smell to them, a this-morning's-pancakes smell. I'm trying to say it's nice for me to see it doesn't have to be that way.”