Terrorist

The red light above the little porthole goes off. He is off the air. He abruptly shrinks in size; now his words will be heard by only the handful of TV technicians and loyal staffers around him, here in this cramped media facility sunk a hundred bombproof feet beneath Pe

"Whajja think?" he asks an assistant, a slender pink-eyed fellow-Pe

Hermione's transparent skin and fluttering, embarrassed demeanor express an instinctive underling's yearning for personal invisibility. In the spirit of cumbersome fun with which the Secretary expressed his affection and trust, he brought her with him from Harrisburg and gave her an informal title: Undersecretary for Women's Purses. The problem was real enough: women's purses were sinkholes of confusion and sedimented treasure in whose depths any number of compact terrorist-weapons-retractable box-cutters, exploding sarin pellets, lipstick-shaped stun guns- could be secreted. It was Hermione who had helped develop the search protocols for this crucial area of darkness, including the simple wooden stick with which security guards at entrances could probe the depths and not give offense with the rummaging touch of their naked hands.

The majority of security perso

"I thought it went very well, as usual," Hermione Fogel responds, to a question the Secretary has all but forgotten. He is preoccupied: the clashing claims of privacy and security, convenience and safety, are his daily diet, and yet his compensation in terms of public admiration is nearly nil and in terms of financial compensation distinctly modest, with children approaching the age of college education and a wife who must keep up her end in tiie endless social rounds of Republican Washington. Except for a black, single woman, a polyglot academic and accomplished pianist in charge of long-range global strategy, the Secretary's colleagues in the administration were born rich and have made additional fortunes in the private sector during their eight-year holiday from public service under Clinton. In those fat years the Secretary had been grinding his way upward through low-paying government posts in the Keystone State. Now all the Clintonians, including the Clintons themselves, are getting pig-rich with their tell-all memoirs, while the Secretary, loyal and stolid, is wedded to tight-mouthed secrecy, now and ever after.

Not that he knows anything his Arabists don't tell him; the world they monitor, of electronic chatter crackling with poetic euphemism and pathetic braggadocio, is as alien and repellent to the Secretary as any underworld of sleepless geeks, even those of Caucasian blood and Christian upbringing. When the heaven splits asunder in the east and reddens like a rose or stained leather-the insertion into this clause from the Koran the non-Koranic "in the east" may or may not, coupled with various rambling and extravagant "confessions" of captured operatives, justify the elevation of the level of police and military watchfulness accorded certain Eastern financial institutions of the spectacular, skyscraping sort attractive to the enemy's superstitious mentality. The enemy is obsessed with holy sites, and as convinced as the old Communist archenemies had been that capitalism has a headquarters, a head that may be cut off, leaving flocks of the faithful to be gratefully herded into an ascetic and dogmatic tyra

The enemy ca

"I'll be knocked for this," the Secretary gloomily confides to his so-called undersecretary. "If nothing happens, I'm a scaremonger. If it does, I'm a lazy leech on the public payroll who allowed the death of thousands."

"No one would say such things," Hermione reassures him, her sallow spinster skin reddening with sympathetic feeling. "Everyone, even the Democrats, knows you are doing an impossible job that nevertheless must be done, for the sake of our national survival."

"That about says it, I guess," the object of her admiration admits, his mouth pinched even smaller by a conscious wry-ness. The elevator smoothly returns them, with two armed security guards (one male, one female) and a trio of gray-suited staffers, to the level of the White House basement. Outside, church bells are ringing in sunshine blended of Virginia and Maryland rays. The Secretary muses aloud, "Those people out there… Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us? What's to hate?"

"They hate the light," Hermione tells him loyally. "Like cockroaches. Like bats. The light shone in darkness," she quotes, knowing that Pe