Hale stepped back, looked over the room and plastered a satisfied look on his face. He left and took the elevator down to the main lobby. He walked outside, where limos were arriving, under heavy security. He eased into the crowd that was gathered on the other side of the concrete barriers, some waving flags, some applauding.

He noted the protesters too, scruffy young people, aging hippies and activist professors and their spouses, he assessed. They carried placards and were chanting things that Hale couldn’t hear. The gist, though, was displeasure at U.S. foreign policy.

Hang around, he told them silently.

Sometimes you get what you ask for.

Chapter 38

Entering the sixth-floor conference room with seventeen other soldiers from all branches of the armed services, United States Army Sergeant Lucy Richter gave a brief smile to her husband. A wink too to her family—her parents and her aunt—who were sitting across the room.

The acknowledgment was perhaps a little abrupt, a little distant. But she was not here as Bob’s wife or as a daughter or niece. She was here as a decorated soldier, in the company of her superior officers and her fellow men and women at arms.

The soldiers had assembled downstairs in the building, while their families and friends had come to the conference room. Waiting for their grand entrance, Lucy had chatted with a young man, an air force corpsman from Texas who’d come back to the States for medical treatment (one of those fucking rocket-propelled grenades had ricocheted off his chest pack before exploding several yards away). He was eager to get back home, he’d said.

“Home?” she’d asked. “I thought we were reenlisting.”

He’d blinked. “I am. I mean my unit. That is home.”

Standing uneasily in front of her chair, she glanced at the reporters. The way they looked around them, searching hungrily for story opportunities like snipers seeking targets, made her nervous. Then she put them out of her mind and gazed at the pictures that had been mounted for the ceremony. Patriotic images. She was moved by the sight of the American flag, the photo of the Trade Center towers, the military banners and emblems, the officers with their decorations and rows of breast bars, revealing how long and where they’d served.

And all the while the debate raged. Thinking back to what Kathryn Dance had said, she asked herself: And what’s the truth for me?

Go back to the land of bitter fog?

Or stay here?

Yes, no?

The side doors opened and in walked two quick-eyed men—Secret Service—followed by a half dozen men and women in suits or uniforms with senior staff insignias and ribbons and medals covering their chests. Lucy recognized a few of the bigwigs from Washington and New York City, though she was more stirred by the presence of the brass from the Pentagon, since they’d come up through the world that she’d made a part of her life.