The Detachment - Barry Eisler [80]
“I’d feel the same way,” Treven said. “If I didn’t know what was really going on.”
“Doesn’t matter who’s behind it. Either the response is tactically sound, or it’s not.”
“I’m not talking about tactics. I’m talking about how I’d feel.”
“I get it. And that’s the beauty of what they’re doing. Think about it. Four attacks so far. The White House—a key symbol of the nation. The biggest mall in the country—a key symbol of consumer shopping and the economy. A church—to make people feel their religion is under attack. And an attack on sports—the country’s secular religion. Everything the culture identifies with and holds sacred, and distributed all over the land. There’s only one thing missing so far to make the country lose what’s left of its reason, and give in entirely to the kind of feelings you’re talking about.”
“What?” Treven said.
“A school. One, maybe more.”
He glanced over at me. “Christ.”
“Yeah. My guess is, if they can’t get what they want based on what they’ve done so far, they’ll ratchet it up. Schools would do it. Think Beslan. Or that camp in Norway.”
“You think they’d go that far?”
“You see any indications otherwise?”
We drove on to the hysterical cadences of the incessant recycled news stories. I watched the country going past, green hills and forests and terraced farmland, towns with names like McCrory and Bald Knob and Judsonia. The sky was an absurd, bright blue. The road was gray in the shimmering heat and looked like it might stretch on forever.
Most of the airtime was filled with speculation. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Iran. Libya. The Muslim Brotherhood. Sleeper cells in America, and how many more there could be. Why they hated us, why they loved death more than life. The topography outside the windows was indifferent and unaltered, but I felt the country we were driving through had changed irrevocably since we’d begun this journey, a time that itself already felt improbable, distant, surreal. I imagined the four of us in the truck as some sort of germ, silently delivered into America’s arterial system, hunted by rogue T cells even as the unseen body politic around us convulsed in fever and delirium.
I hated that we’d been part of the horror we listened to over the radio. But what could we do, except try to protect ourselves?
Periodically, we stopped for bathroom breaks and provisions. There was panic buying everywhere: duct tape, plastic, canned food, bottled water. Iodine tablets were impossible to find, and apparently there was a thriving black market for Mexican knockoff Cipro, the anthrax treatment. We saw Wal-Marts being emptied of water purification and camping supplies. Gun sales had gone through the roof, and ammunition was sold out.
We kept driving in shifts: two in the front to make sure no one fell asleep at the wheel; two in the cargo area getting some rest, at least theoretically; our only breaks at highway rest stops, where we parked far from other vehicles so that whichever two of us were riding in back could get in and out without being noticed.
I was dozing in the back with Treven when I was awakened by the feel of the truck coming to a stop. There was no light leaking into the cargo area. It must have been night.
There were three knocks on the door outside—the all-clear signal we’d been using to prevent misunderstandings. I had already accessed the Supergrade, and kept it in my hand anyway.
The door opened, and I saw Larison and Dox. It was twilight outside, not yet dark. I could hear crickets in the grass, but, other than that, the evening was silent. The