A deep voice blitzed the receiver. “Mia Tucker.”
“This is she.” She waited for the caller to identify himself. Nothing came. “With whom am I speaking?”
“My name’s Roger Tran.” The man coughed into the phone and continued. “I’m with General Collins’s exploratory team.”
“I see.” She waited and again nothing came. “As I told the general, I’d like to help out, as I can.”
“We’re hoping to talk specifics. You wouldn’t be free today.”
Mia thought about the IPO risk assessment that was due. “I could do the early afternoon,” she said.
After hanging up the phone, Mia began restructuring her day. Something else tugged at her, though. The landline number. It was unlisted, she was sure of it. And it hadn’t been on the business card she’d given the general. She was sure of that, too.
She heard Jesse’s voice in her head. “Agency spooks, though.”
* * *
They met in an isolated tower made of black glass at the nub of West Street. The tower housed a global investment firm notorious for hostile takeovers that Mia’s bank, among others, still blamed for bringing about the overregulatory Finance Reform Act (since overturned). Mia’s grandfather had once called the firm “the Barbarians at the Gate” (first to other city power brokers, eventually on the record with the Wall Street Journal), so it was unsurprising that Mia had never before set foot in the building. A large, abstract interpretation of a morning sky greeted her in the lobby. Above the painting hung portraits of men and women in military uniforms, their young, lean faces a collage that spelled out V-A-L-U-E-S.
As part of its image rehabilitation, the global investment firm had hired thousands of combat veterans and opened a Warfighters Institute dedicated to medical research. Mia’s prosthetics came from a design that originated there, something that even impressed her grandfather, however begrudgingly.
An assistant escorted Mia through security to a trim, narrow office on the sixth floor. “Mr. Tran will be with you in a moment,” the assistant said. She was alone but couldn’t shake the sense of being watched. The office’s lone window didn’t open to the outside but instead overlooked the inner atrium of the building. Mia peered into the bowels of the old enemy and found people in business clothes hustling to meetings with manila folders and laptops. She turned her attention to Tran’s desk, still feeling that unknown watcher upon her.
Three photographs faced outward. In the first, a man in a navy suit and tie knotted in a power Windsor stood with a blank-faced woman with their hands on three smiling children, in front of a new suburban house with a green lawn. He had neat black hair and a craggy face, something that became even more pronounced in comparison to the next photograph: a skinny Vietnamese soldier cradling a long rifle in one hand and a helmet with no strap in the other. The same man with the same sense of self, Mia decided, separated by thirty years and a life. Something between fresh and worn emerged in the third photograph, Tran in military dress blues holding up his certificate of citizenship next to a beaming Lieutenant Colonel Jackie Collins.
About fifteen years back, Mia figured, doing the math in her head. Tran wore the crest of the International Legion on his shoulder and a Purple Heart on his chest. A hard path, the Legion, and a hard life. All for the chance—just the chance—to become a citizen.
“Spill blood for America.” The voice behind Mia was measured and flat, startling her from the photo with the Legion’s motto. “That day happened because of General Collins. I owe much to her.”
Tran took a seat behind his desk, and gestured for Mia to do the same across from him. He wore a similar navy suit as the one in the family photograph and a tie again knotted in a power Windsor. She expected a bit of preliminary small talk but he launched straight into campaign matters.
“All of this is hypothetical. Exploratory,” he began. “Lehman Brothers. We’re looking for an introduction to the chair.”
“I see.”
“Can you provide that?”
Mia didn’t know much about politics, but she knew this wasn’t how things were done in her world. There was a grace to the ask, a decorum. “You don’t have that access?” She raised her palms toward the atrium. “This is a connected place.”
Tran blinked once, hard. “I’m a nobody here, Ms. Tucker. Certainly you’ve gathered that. My title is ‘Strategic Executive Advisor for Military, Privateer, and Warfighter Partnerships.’ Two years in, I still don’t know what that means.”
Mia did admire the candor.
He apologized for his brusqueness, saying General Collins often accused him of “letting my infantry show.” Then he continued in the same manner. What other fund-raising possibilities could Mia think of? He made Mia anxious, and not just because their time together began to feel like an interview more than an initial brainstorm. Tran wanted details while she offered generalities, and sought assurances when she gave prospects. And still she felt like she was being watched, and not just by Tran.
“Where were you on Palm Sunday?” he asked, veering suddenly away from the near future. Something faraway seemed to be rolling behind his eyes, like he was hearing an old song. Mia understood her answer wasn’t the point to his question.
“Driver’s ed,” she said. “First time on a freeway that morning.”
Tran nodded, straightening his back. The old music in his eyes slowed down. “Federal City itself,” he said. “Assigned to the War Department. A dream gig after battalion command in the Legion. Time to reconnect with my family, to decompress. Moved there ten days before the attacks.”
“Oh my God.”
Tran nodded again. “We were home, thankfully. I bring it up because I saw what happened there. After, I mean. All that fear, all that anger—it turned everything in the capital rancid. Now that’s seeped out, spread across the country. If you consider—well, if you consider it in a certain way, Abu Abdallah won.”
Mia didn’t know what to do with that idea. She knew she didn’t like it. She held to the quiet, as she’d learned to do as a Tucker and then as an army officer. It forced others to their intentions.
“General Collins can save this country from itself,” Tran continued. “My job is to ensure she’s granted the shot.”
That was heavy talk for a small-party senatorial run, Mia thought. But that’s why I’m here. To be part of something again that’s grand. To be part of something bigger than myself.
“I hear you,” she finally offered. “I can get it. The Lehman chair. Might only be five minutes, might be a shared taxi ride, but it’ll be something.”
Tran nodded and his lips thinned out into a smile. “All any of us can ask for,” he said. “Opportunity.”
* * *
Mia was walking home as the explosion rumbled through the day, soft as a prayer. Strangers told her where but she knew already, nothing else in the area made sense, so she went there, pushing against the crowd to Vietnam Victory Square, and found saws of black smoke ambling into the sky. They came from where the white spire had been cleaved from its base. The monument now bent into the square, felled over like a giant clutching at its heart.