I could see how it happened. If Paul had lost another VIP principal under his protection—and brought out nothing but the man’s passport and wedding ring, as he had with the German engineer—his business would have dried up overnight. But even the military officers assigned to quietly investigate the incident agreed that Paul’s unit had shot people without cause. Two kids were seriously wounded. One lost a leg. Complaints were filed, legal action threatened. The Hague was mentioned. A couple of generals wanted Paul tried as an example to all “cowboy contractors.” But because there had been a long series of kidnappings and executions in the wake of the first Fallujah operation, the Pentagon wasn’t feeling too charitable toward the Iraqis just then. Still, Paul’s unit had made a hell of a mess.
Given what was at stake for Paul, I decided to omit the Honda Accord from my public retelling of the night of April 8 in Ramadi. I didn’t lie to myself about what I was doing. Without the Accord incident, it was a different story. It wasn’t reality. But it would become history. With that omission, I edited the truth into something like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and I never forgave myself for it. When Hollywood came calling five months later, I declined to option my book. That was my self-inflicted punishment, meager as it may seem now. I neither wanted nor deserved that money. That said, I did not turn down the Pulitzer Prize I won for the same book, which covered all my time in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. And I have reaped untold benefits from that Pulitzer. Every time I’m introduced on television, they mention it. In every bio in every pamphlet handed out before I give a speech for $20,000 or $30,000, that Pulitzer leads my list of accomplishments. For years I’ve prayed to win another, to wipe the shadow of false pretense from my life. But while I’ve made the list of finalists twice more, I’ve never again won the award.
Paul’s outcome was very different. He wasn’t tried or officially punished for any action he took on the day he and his men shot their way out of the Jamhori Quarter. But he was ordered by Joint Task Force command to leave Iraq, and ShieldCorp had all its government contracts canceled. Worse, Paul was personally barred by both the State Department and the Pentagon from returning to either Afghanistan or Iraq. My book made him a hero to a lot of people, but less than a year after he saved my life, Paul watched his business condemned to oblivion. He returned to Bienville, Mississippi, to work for his father, and within three months, he relapsed into heavy drinking.
Thirteen years later, I would return to Bienville and start sleeping with his wife. It sounds low, I know—perhaps unforgivable to some. But here’s the thing: I loved Jet first. She loved me first. More to the point, I’m not sure Paul ever loved her. He wanted her, sure, but that’s a different thing. I wouldn’t be alive today if Paul had not gone back into that house to save me. And I would probably be dead if he hadn’t shot those people in the Honda Accord. But there’s also this: if I had written the truth about the people in that Accord in my book—while the Pentagon was making up its mind about ShieldCorp’s bloody escape from Jamhori—then Paul might have gone to federal prison for the second incident, and the fame that my book brought him as a fearless warrior would have been forever tainted.
The way I figured it, we were even.
Chapter 17
When I first moved back to Bienville from Washington, I rented an apartment downtown, just a short walk from the Watchman building. I knew I couldn’t live in my parents’ house, and there was nothing to rent in their neighborhood. They’re still in the tract house Adam and I grew up in, a 1950s ranch-style with pleasing touches of midcentury modern, set in a wooded subdivision that was filled with kids when I was growing up but is now inhabited by old people, many widows living alone.
The downtown apartment worked well until Jet and I started sleeping together. After that, it was too risky. I needed a secluded refuge that could give us real privacy while we worked out what the future was going to look like for us. To that end, I bought an old farmhouse on six isolated acres east of town. The place had sat on the market for two years. Only fifteen minutes from downtown, it’s bounded by woods on all sides, and there’s only one entrance by road.
It was 2:50 when I reached home after my raid on Buck’s rental house. Jet had set our rendezvous at three, but because she must evade not only her husband but also anyone else she might run into before meeting me, it’s not uncommon for her to be an hour late. As soon as I walked in, I called Nadine Sullivan and told her I would love to attend the party on the roof of the Aurora, if she would still have me. Nadine replied that she was glad to have the company and was looking forward to it. Then I opened a Heineken and walked out to my back patio, which looks onto four acres of woods.
Lying back on a teak steamer chaise, I checked my email on my iPhone. I felt guilty that I wasn’t rifling through Buck’s files and maps without delay, but given that I hadn’t found any bones at the rental house, I didn’t think the task was urgent. There would be time to go through the stuff after Jet left and before the party. I did watch Denny Allman’s edited drone video, which was a masterpiece featuring superimposed GPS coordinates, and I made a note to pay Denny well for that footage. I wasn’t sure what I could do with it, other than go out to the mill site in the middle of the night and risk being killed to try to unearth evidence that an army of technicians would be unlikely to find. Publishing the video to the Watchman’s website might be an option, but the video on its own proved little. I took another swallow of Heineken and watched the tree line.
The first sign I usually see is Jet walking out of the shadows beneath those trees, sixty yards away. A few times she has driven her car across the grass and right up to the patio, but leaving her car visible beside my house is too dangerous, even with my security gate. Though only Jet and I know the code required to open the gate, a single electrical glitch could allow a mailman or UPS driver to ride up to the house and recognize Jet’s Volvo. When it comes to risk, we’ve pushed the envelope a few times, but in general we’ve worked hard to eliminate any chance of disaster.
That’s the only way we’re going to get what we want.
Most extramarital affairs begin with the understanding that they’re not going anywhere. This pragmatic truth isn’t generally stated, but both parties—even first-timers—usually grasp the unwritten rules of the game. We’re not in this to blow up our families. They may be deluding themselves, of course. One may be acting out of desperation, grabbing for a ripcord to escape a marriage they’ve become convinced is a trap. Another might have fallen truly in love, or at least under the grip of romantic delusion, which becomes the equivalent of a ticking bomb.
Jet and I are different. We’re not playing a game. We wanted each other long before I moved back to Bienville, and not simply to consummate the desire that had gone unfulfilled for so long. The love that bloomed when we were kids had survived a nearly thirty-year separation during which we were alone together only twice. If I were self-indulgent, I might call us star-crossed lovers, but the truth is much simpler:
I was stupid.
The first time I saw Jet alone after I left Bienville for UVA was during her senior year of college. She was finishing a year early at Millsaps, a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, and she’d flown up to Washington to tour Georgetown Law School. Without telling anyone—including me—she made a quick side trip to Charlottesville. We spent the whole day together, and we slept together that night. Only in the morning did she tell me that she’d been seeing Paul on and off since he’d gotten back from Ranger duty in Somalia. This revelation—along with the shaved-to-stubble pubic hair that greeted me when she wriggled out of her pants—told me that much had changed in her life. I felt sure the grooming choice was Paul’s preference, though she denied it.