The red light above the little porthole goes off. He is off the air. He abruptly shrinks in size; now his words will be heard by only the handful of TV technicians and loyal staffers around him, here in this cramped media facility sunk a hundred bombproof feet beneath Pennsylvania Avenue. Other Cabinet-level officials get marble-and-limestone federal buildings so long that each has its own horizon, whereas he must function huddling in a small windowless office in the basement of the White House. With a Herculean sigh of weariness, the Secretary turns from the camera. He is a large man, with a slab of muscle across his back that gives the tailors of his dark-blue suits extra trouble. In his massive head his mouth looks truculently small. His haircut, on that same head, also looks small, like a hat belonging to someone else but jammed on anyway. His Pennsylvania accent is not a broad, syllable-swallowing growl like Lee Iacocca's or a piercing honk like Arnold Palmer's; of a generation younger than they, he speaks a neutral, media-friendly English, which only in its tense solemnity and certain vowel shadings betrays its source in a Commonwealth renowned for seriousness, for earnest effort and stoic submission, for Quakers and coal miners, for Amish farmers and God-fearing Presbyterian steel magnates.
"Whajja think?" he asks an assistant, a slender pink-eyed fellow-Pennsylvanian, sixty-four but virginal, Hermione Fogel.
Hermione's transparent skin and fluttering, embarrassed demeanor express an instinctive underling's yearning for personal invisibility. In the spirit of cumbersome fun with which the Secretary expressed his affection and trust, he brought her with him from Harrisburg and gave her an informal title: Undersecretary for Women's Purses. The problem was real enough: women's purses were sinkholes of confusion and sedimented treasure in whose depths any number of compact terrorist-weapons-retractable box-cutters, exploding sarin pellets, lipstick-shaped stun guns- could be secreted. It was Hermione who had helped develop the search protocols for this crucial area of darkness, including the simple wooden stick with which security guards at entrances could probe the depths and not give offense with the rummaging touch of their naked hands.
The majority of security personnel were recruited from the minorities, and many women, especially older women, recoiled from the intrusion of black or brown fingers into their purses. The dozing giant of American racism, lulled by decades of official liberal singsong, stirred anew as African-Americans and Hispanics, who (it was often complained) "can't even speak English properly," acquired die authority to frisk, to question, to delay, to grant or deny admission and the permission to fly. In a land of multiplying security gates, the gatekeepers multiply also. To the well-paid professionals who travelled the airways and frequented the newly fortified government buildings, it appears that a dusky underclass has been given tyrannical power. Comfortable lives that even a decade ago moved fluidly through circuits of privilege and assumed access now encounter sticking-points at what seem every step, while maddeningly deliberate guards ponder driver's licenses and boarding passes. Where once a confident manner, a correct suit and tie, and a business card measuring two by three and a half inches had opened doors, tiie switch is no longer tripped, the door remains closed. How can die fluid, hydraulically responsive workings of capitalism, let alone the commerce of intellectual exchange and the social life of extended families, function through such obdurate thicknesses of precaution? The enemy has achieved his goal: business and recreation in the West are gummed up, exorbitantly so.
"I thought it went very well, as usual," Hermione Fogel responds, to a question the Secretary has all but forgotten. He is preoccupied: the clashing claims of privacy and security, convenience and safety, are his daily diet, and yet his compensation in terms of public admiration is nearly nil and in terms of financial compensation distinctly modest, with children approaching the age of college education and a wife who must keep up her end in tiie endless social rounds of Republican Washington. Except for a black, single woman, a polyglot academic and accomplished pianist in charge of long-range global strategy, the Secretary's colleagues in the administration were born rich and have made additional fortunes in the private sector during their eight-year holiday from public service under Clinton. In those fat years the Secretary had been grinding his way upward through low-paying government posts in the Keystone State. Now all the Clintonians, including the Clintons themselves, are getting pig-rich with their tell-all memoirs, while the Secretary, loyal and stolid, is wedded to tight-mouthed secrecy, now and ever after.
Not that he knows anything his Arabists don't tell him; the world they monitor, of electronic chatter crackling with poetic euphemism and pathetic braggadocio, is as alien and repellent to the Secretary as any underworld of sleepless geeks, even those of Caucasian blood and Christian upbringing. When the heaven splits asunder in the east and reddens like a rose or stained leather-the insertion into this clause from the Koran the non-Koranic "in the east" may or may not, coupled with various rambling and extravagant "confessions" of captured operatives, justify the elevation of the level of police and military watchfulness accorded certain Eastern financial institutions of the spectacular, skyscraping sort attractive to the enemy's superstitious mentality. The enemy is obsessed with holy sites, and as convinced as the old Communist archenemies had been that capitalism has a headquarters, a head that may be cut off, leaving flocks of the faithful to be gratefully herded into an ascetic and dogmatic tyranny.
The enemy cannot believe that democracy and consumerism are fevers in the blood of Everyman, an outgrowth of each individual's instinctive optimism and desire for freedom. Even for a stout churchgoer like the Secretary, a will-of-God fatalism and a heavy bet on the next world have been left behind in the Dark Ages. Those who still hold to the bet have one thing going for them: they are eager to die. The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well: that was another verse that kept coming up in the Internet chatter.
"I'll be knocked for this," the Secretary gloomily confides to his so-called undersecretary. "If nothing happens, I'm a scaremonger. If it does, I'm a lazy leech on the public payroll who allowed the death of thousands."
"No one would say such things," Hermione reassures him, her sallow spinster skin reddening with sympathetic feeling. "Everyone, even the Democrats, knows you are doing an impossible job that nevertheless must be done, for the sake of our national survival."
"That about says it, I guess," the object of her admiration admits, his mouth pinched even smaller by a conscious wry-ness. The elevator smoothly returns them, with two armed security guards (one male, one female) and a trio of gray-suited staffers, to the level of the White House basement. Outside, church bells are ringing in sunshine blended of Virginia and Maryland rays. The Secretary muses aloud, "Those people out there… Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us? What's to hate?"
"They hate the light," Hermione tells him loyally. "Like cockroaches. Like bats. The light shone in darkness," she quotes, knowing that Pennsylvania piety is a way to his heart, "and the darkness comprehended it not."