The Detachment

military convoy, after which, the absence of traffic would be more spooky still.
    I asked Treven the same security questions I had put to Dox, but got no additional insights. If he was hiding something, he was hiding it well. He told me a little about himself. Cut his teeth in Mogadishu. Climbed the ops ladder from Airborne to SF to ISA. A very competent man, no doubt, both from the resume and from what I’d seen at the hotel. But I didn’t feel the kind of connection with him that I’d started to feel with Larison. In Larison, I sensed turmoil, but also purpose. In Treven, what I sensed felt more like…confusion. And compensation. For what, I didn’t know.
    We were listening to a country music station when, just as a day before, the deejay’s typically smooth and soothing voice cut in high-pitched and earnest after a song.
    “Following on yesterday’s attack on the White House,” he said, “we have another horrifying report. A suicide bombing in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Reports of a truck driven into the building, and a partial structural collapse. I know you can’t see it, this is radio, but I’m watching the video now and I have to tell you, my God, my God, it’s unspeakable. It’s like the twin towers again…Folks, I’m sorry to tell you, but yesterday was not a one-off. These have got to be coordinated. Let’s pray the government is doing something to protect us.”
    “Holy fucking shit,” Treven said, and that was all, there was nothing else to say. We drove grimly on, listening for more, dreading that we’d hear it.
    Outside of Memphis, we did. Two more suicide bombings: one at a Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco; the other at a church in Lubbock, Texas. More mass casualties. Lurid descriptions of victims, the burned and buried and blinded. Reporters interviewing dazed survivors, hysterical people trying to find their family members, wailing parents clutching the mangled bodies of their daughters and sons.
    “Country’s going to go mad from this,” Treven said grimly.
    I nodded. “That’s exactly the idea. If nine-eleven, plus a little anthrax afterward, could make the country mad, imagine what you could get away with if you could increase that kind of fear. And sustain it.”
    We drove on. The radio was nothing but special reports now. The attacks had driven everything else off the air. When the shows got tired of recycling the same news, they took to interviewing people in the streets. It was hardly a random sampling, and maybe there were some hardcore pacifists out there who were getting overlooked, or who were afraid to speak up, but the impression I was left with after hours of nonstop radio was that the country was in the grip of atavistic rage. There were calls to intern male Muslims, to close the borders, to nuke Mecca and Medina.
    “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