Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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taken his place. The door to his study made a sticky little pop when he opened it, like a Band-aid tearing off a wound. When he reached the phone on his desk, it was already ringing. As he picked up the receiver he had a flash of premonition, like a flare going off in some perimeter of his mind.
“Lucius? I thought I might catch you.”
His heart raced as if he’d been awakened in the middle of the night. “Mac? Did you steal my car?” The supposition came out of him unrehearsed, and for an instant he thought it ridiculous, but then he knew he was right. “I have a meeting on Monday in Beijing with . . .”
Gordon MacAllister cleared his throat like a scold.
“But why?” Burling asked, and the unsteady sound of his own voice frightened him. The dark blinds of his study seemed to shutter his solitary life.
“Really,” MacAllister cautioned. The phone he was on crackled, passed through a frequency shadow. “This is hardly a secure line. You’re forgetting yourself.”
The blood rose in Burling’s face. If he could only do that, forget himself.
“Burl? You there?”
“Where else would I be?” he said hoarsely. “You stole my car.”
MacAllister’s laugh, slightly breathy and tapering, filled whatever place he was in. Burling wondered who else was there hearing it. “I thought you’d lost your sense of humor for a moment.”
“That’s not the only thing I’ve lost.” He’d meant the words to sound sarcastic, but they took on more weight as his throat closed around them. Pathetic. “At least I hope it’s somewhere safe. You know I’ve had that car since 1973.”
“And it’s like poor Yorick’s horse, Burl, a guide to us all.” A car honked in the background, and Burling thought he heard the same sound outside. “Of course we’ll keep it somewhere safe. It’ll have a damn sight more security than that basement at State.”
Burling parted the blinds, but outside it was morning as usual: orderly traffic, calm sky. In the circle before the Chinese Embassy a tattered demonstration of Asian students and American hippies that seemed to have been there for years urged commuters to honk in denunciation of something the Chinese had done. While Burling was watching them, a motorcade pulled into the circle and the demonstrators ran to surround it. In the middle car he recognized Huang, a reformed academic from Beijing. Huang seemed to have an awful lot of security for a low-level cultural officer. Once you’d been condemned as a heretic, Burling thought, they could summon you any time they chose.
“I’ll meet you halfway, at the Mill,” MacAllister said.
“I think that’s hardly meeting me halfway.”
“I was speaking literally.”
“So was I: it’s right around the corner from Langley.”
“Give me an hour, okay?”
Burling was a man who liked to take a minute to gather his arguments, but MacAllister had hung up the phone before he could speak.
the mill was a squarish stone building huddled under spreading oaks, just off the route by which Dolley Madison had fled the burning city in 1812. Burling directed the cabbie off the divided highway and into the dusty gravel lot, where MacAllister’s Agency Suburban rested against a screen of forsythia in bloom. Through the half-open window of the taxi, Burling could hear the weary groaning and splashing of the wheel as it sluggishly ladled water from the sluiceway and dumped it into the pond, around which waddled mallards and large, vicious swans.
“Come on over here in the shit,” MacAllister called, looking up at the sound of the taxi door slamming.
Burling left his suitcase by the wheel of the Suburban and parted the bushes with his hand. The hogs grunted and hoofed in their sty, their pungency lurking beneath the sweet scent of flowers. As Burling picked his way deliberately through the guano, MacAllister shifted his seersucker over his forearm and a big smile spread like a shield across his face. It wasn’t a trustworthy smile, but Burling found himself warming at the sight of it. He looks like John the damn Baptist, he thought, about to bathe me in blood.
“If you wanted to play on my guilt,” Burling said, drawing closer, “you certainly picked the right place.” An unintended bitterness crept into his voice. “I used to bring my family out here every Sunday after church. Luke and Betsy liked to visit the animals.”
“I didn’t know that,” MacAllister said. “Whole set-up seems like a big, stinking agricultural deduction to me, right in the middle of McLean.”
They shook hands firmly, and his signet ring pinched Burling’s palm.
“You’ll be glad to know they’re tearing it down. It’s a shame,” he added. “Tract mansions for Internet millionaires.”
MacAllister frowned. When his plane had gone down in the African jungle, burning jet fuel had flared up the side of his neck, melting the bottom of his earlobe and leaving a hot red patch where it lapped at his jawline and cheek. It complicated his expression, so that Burling couldn’t tell if it were pity, contempt, or remorse. In a way it was not unlike a birthmark, or a mark of initiation: whatever mixture of leaves the natives had slathered on his burns had saved his life, although the specialists at Walter Reed had never figured out what had made up the salve.
“How are you, Burl?”
“You tell me. I gather I’m being called down this morning.”
MacAllister took a step forward and past him like a feint, a rhetorical gesture Burling remembered very well from the Agency.
“If they’re tapping you for director,” Burling said, “you’d better not be seen with me.”
“There’s a whole lot worse to be seen with these days,” MacAllister said, bending over to flick the birdshit off his bucks. “I just needed to ask a favor, that’s all.”
“You didn’t have to steal my car to do that.”
MacAllister shuffled a toe in the white-gray muck and followed a duck on the pond with his eyes. The scorched folds of his neck seemed to call for reassurance. “Give me your opinion: What do you think about our progress in the War on Terror?”
Burling felt the wind go out of him. Just last night, in his filial call to his son, Luke had asked this very question. The years between them and the trouble with Amelia had not been easy on their relationship, but it had sounded to Burling as if his son actually valued his opinion. He looked across the lot and remembered Luke reaching through the split-rail fence to touch the pig’s whiskered snout. When the animal tilted its nose, the little boy shrieked with glee. “I think what you want me to think, isn’t that how this works?”
“Lucius.” Mac draped a comradely arm around his shoulders, where it hung with a dull, stiff weight like a rod. “I wouldn’t do you like that.” He gave Burling a squeeze and let go.
Burling took a deep breath and felt the tears scurry back behind his eyes. MacAllister took off his bifocals, squinted into the lenses, then let them hang from a bright, braided string around his neck. “You look like you’ve been spending some time on your boat,” Burling said.
“Not enough. Let’s walk.”
The swans fled before his bucks, hissing and flapping their wings. The two men crossed the sluice on a rickety bridge, and the ground began to rise beneath their feet. MacAllister’s limp grew more pronounced.
“Do you remember a Chinese student at Princeton I asked you to talk to, those months when you were home between Kabul and Islamabad?”
“How could I not?” Burling said. He and the young man had walked beside the canal outside Princeton on a gray November day, the air viscous with oncoming winter, sun remote behind the trees. People were cleaning up leaves in the yards of the big Victorian houses on Harrison Street, reminding him sharply of a fantasy he had cherished as an undergraduate walking