From impact Will Holmes knew all there was to know about what got called “Potomac Pilot.” It was his idea to get the White House involved. Donovan, White House chief of staff, put out conflicting versions, none of them too right. Will had noticed that reporters took anything the White House said. Still, he was curious to see how they wrote it. It amused him to see the stories, well sourced and well written.

Will avoided book learning. He was high-school degree and Ohio son. He had a face like a thumb: drab eyes the color of grotty hair not much different from dingy skin. Now, after years of being high and tight, he could wear his hair so long it needed aerosol. He looked like a failed rocker, sober after touching death, once, twice, more. He’d been part of so much peligro that there was something of rigor, as in mortis, about him. A few operators had Will’s look, and many had his capacity for control. He thought his came from the same place as his eidetic memory, his crypto talent.

The mining of data, analyzing media, digitized logic—he was glad for them. This night’s test run was different, a program with duper avionics that would stop suicide pilots from smashing into buildings. It was a war-boffin special from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The DARPA prototype could, from the ground, control a plane without a pilot knowing it. It was in the beta stage. It was buggy. He’d made the decision to test it—too soon. So, when he got to the crash site, his mind shorted out—to Panama and the rescue mission he’d flubbed. That was, in ′89, his first kill ever. Later, they told him: He’d gotten stinked-up intelligence. He’d taken out the wrong man. Days of griefsick wouldn’t end, so he put the gun to his own teenage head, debating, debating. His CO said, “Gotta kill the captor to rescue the captive.” And if the killed man wasn’t, it turned out, the captor? “You can’t always be right.”

Until this crash, he’d been happy there was no more Pablo, not Pancrace, Kibungo, Mogadishu, or Rome. No corpses his eye could see, none of the sounds thousands dead didn’t make and yet did. Now that he was the Chair, he directed the action: no more making it. He could switch it on and off. Standing beneath this pilot in a tree, he tried to remember why that was better. By morning, some of it came to him. He could control what he heard.

2.   AFTER SOME
ILLIMITABLE SATISFACTION