Inside Outt

anyway.
    Well, he was one of those rough men. And he wasn’t going to change that, not for Sarah, not for anyone. And fuck anyone who had a problem with it.

CHAPTER 12
A Massive Deductible
    U lrich could no longer see the K Street traffic below him. It was dark outside, and his windows were now effectively mirrors. It was too late to make any more phone calls, and he was too agitated to get any work done anyway, but still he lingered. His two sons were in college and his home life had long since settled into a sexless kiss hello, followed by a perfunctory recitation of the minutiae of the day, followed by the sounds of the television in the next room, followed by sleep. He and his wife had become strangers, bound mostly by past and progeny, acquaintances who continued to share the same space merely out of habit, the result of some long-ago momentum that itself was slowly dying, as, he supposed, were they.
    Not that it had been so terribly different even before the boys had left for school. He was the vice president’s special assistant back when the vice president had been the secretary of defense, and after that he’d served as the Defense Department’s general counsel. Cynthia had put her foot down about the hours after Timmy, their second, had been born, and Ulrich had joined a law firm to placate her. The money was better but the work was boring, and he’d missed being on the inside. So returning as the new vice president’s chief of staff when his old boss was tapped as the president’s understudy was impossible to resist. Cynthia had put up a few pro forma arguments, but she knew not to fight the battle she couldn’t win.
    So for eight years he’d arrived at his sons’ basketball games in the last quarter, if at all, and the family had maintained the fiction that dad was mostly home for dinner by moving the meal hour to eight, then to nine… and even then, more often than not, he’d had to call with an apology and another useless promise that everyone knew he’d break next time, too. Mostly by the time he’d get home in the evening the boys had been asleep, and often he was gone again the next morning by the time they woke. Weekends he tried to be around. But with two active war theaters and so many initiatives to keep the country safe… it was all-consuming. How would he have explained it to his family if there had been another attack on his watch? They told him they understood and he hoped it was true. And Cynthia, whatever resentments she might once have harbored over his absences, seemed to have long since let them go. He was grateful to her for that. But none of it changed the fact that his children had grown up and left the house, and he’d barely been around to see any of it. And nothing would ever bring that time back for him, or give him a chance to relive what he’d missed. Nothing.
    He tried to let it go. Ruminating about the past, happily or otherwise, wasn’t a luxury he could afford just now. It was the future he needed to worry about. He tried running worst-case scenarios in his mind. Ordinarily, this kind of exercise would calm him. This time, though, the scenarios were exceptionally horrific. If Clements screwed the pooch on the tapes, and if Ulrich’s backup failed, too, he was going to be left with not much more than the gobbledygook Condi Rice had been caught stammering in response to those little Stanford shits. What was it again?
The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture… and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the Agency. That they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department’s clearance… so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
People laughed at her at the time. But what else could she say? She had to say something.
    Yeah, it was feeble enough when Rice said it. In Ulrich’s case, it wouldn’t work at all. Because his name—his
signature
, for God’s sake—was all over the authorizations.
    He heard the chime of incoming email and checked the message. Damn, this was good. Daniel Larison, former JSOC operator. The name sounded familiar… one of the people they’d suspected when the tapes first went missing? But hadn’t that guy been dead? He’d look into it, figure out the discrepancy. He