He had been with the family for four years, joining their detail when Rachel was five. It had been three years since the kidnapping, three years since David and Maggie felt the cold chill of discovery—an empty crib, an open window—in the middle black of night. Gil slept in what old-world architects would have called the maid’s quarters—a monk’s cell behind the laundry room in the city, and a larger room facing the driveway on the Vineyard estate. Depending on the current threat level—ascertained from email analysis, as well as conversations with foreign and domestic analysts, both private and in the government, based on the melange of extremist threats and the controversial nature of current ALC network programs—Gil’s support team grew and shrank, numbering at one point after the 2006 Iraq surge a dozen men with Tasers and automatic weapons. But, baseline, there were always three. A trinity of eyes watching, calculating, coiled, and ready to act.
Their travel was planned in the home office, always in consultation with the on-site team. Commercial flights were no longer optimal, nor was public transportation, although Gil indulged David’s desire to ride the subway to the office a few times a month, but never in any kind of pattern, a day chosen at random, and on those days they first sent a decoy in the town car, exiting the building dressed in David’s clothes, head down, hurried out by his team and stuffed into the backseat.
On the subway, Gil stood far enough from David to let him feel like a man of the people, but close enough to intervene if outside agents chose to strike. He stood with his thumb resting on the hilt of a curved folding blade, hidden on his belt. A blade so sharp it could cut paper and was rumored to be poisoned with the venom of the molten brown recluse. There was a small semiautomatic pistol tucked somewhere undetectable, one David had seen his body man pull once without seeming to move. A homeless man charged them screaming outside the Time Warner building, holding some kind of pipe, and David took a fast step back, looking to his aide. One minute Gil’s hand was empty. The next he held a snub-nosed Glock, which he produced from the ether like a magician revealing a dull and scarred coin.
Gil liked the rocking of the subway, the corner shriek of metal on metal. He had a deep-marrow certainty that his life would not end underground. It was an instinct he had learned to trust. Not that he feared death. There were so many people he had lost, so many familiar faces now waiting for him on the other side—if there was another side, and not just tar-black silence. But even that didn’t sound bad, an end to the Sisyphean immensity of life. At least the eternal question would be answered, once and for all.
The Torah, it should be noted, makes no clear reference to the afterlife whatsoever.
As he did every morning, Gil rose before dawn. It was the fourth Sunday in August, the family’s last on the Vineyard. They had been invited to Camp David for the Labor Day weekend, and Gil had spent much of yesterday coordinating security with the Secret Service. He spoke four languages, Hebrew, English, Arabic, and German, joking that it was important for a Jew to know the language of his enemies, so he could tell when they were plotting against him.
This joke, of course, was lost on most listeners. It was the look on his face when he told it, like a mourner at a funeral.
The first thing Gil did after he rose was change his status to active. He did it instantly, the moment his eyes opened. At most, he slept four hours a night, waiting an hour or two after the family went to sleep, and rising an hour or two before they woke. He liked that quiet time when the lights were out, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the mechanical hum of the appliances, the trigger click of the HVAC as it engaged to cool or heat the house. He was a master of immobility, having sat still—the legend went—for five days straight on a Gaza roof, deep inside enemy territory, his Barrett M82 balanced on metal legs, waiting for a high-value target to emerge from an apartment complex, the threat of discovery by Palestinian forces a constant.