Short Century Read Free

New York.”
    â€œJust come home,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have added, but couldn’t stop myself from adding: “Listen, I’ve got great news. We’re about to take out…”
    â€œBig Brother?”
    â€œNot quite. Little Brother. But I’m going to be there to write about it.” A boast, okay. And a fairly stupid thing to say over the phone. Still—couldn’t help myself.
    â€œThat’s amazing,” she said. “That makes me so happy.”
    â€œYou have to get on a plane, Sydney,” I said. We said goodbye and we felt such pride in each other that at that moment I could have died with my life’s mission complete. But death wasn’t kind enough to stop for me right then.
    f
    Within a few hours I was standing in the back of a room, watching a movie.
    What I was actually watching was a monitor, on which was playing, in a manner of speaking, OPERATION TAHOE—so named because we were essentially killing Fredo. The drone’s-eye view: a cluster of small buildings, outside of which milled a handful of women in burqas. Sheila, whose name is not actually Sheila, gripped the joystick and leaned in as the drone barreled on. Dressed in an impressively serious and therefore weirdly arousing suit, Sheila could have pressed the button atop the joystick and turned these three women into curls of dust. The monitor wasn’t very large but I really did feel like I was watching a movie, standing in the back of the theater, in the days when movies were still strange and scary—it was like that famous and probably apocryphal screening wherein audiences ducked from the oncoming train, except that the train was real and we were onboard rather than in the way.
    True we weren’t actually onboard, but the basic principles apply, more or less.
    â€œPoor clitless fucks,” Sheila said.
    The way that Sheila’s red hair settled on her powerful shoulders—along, of course, with everything else about her—made me suspect that she was the woman who tracked and killed Osama bin Laden, the woman on whom several upcoming Hollywood projects were based. She looked too young to be that woman, but it’s wrong to judge a woman based on her looks. The anonymous source for a half-dozen of my most-linked-to articles, she was a woman of the utmost seriousness, and even more importantly, she was a woman. The murderous misogynist Little Brother would only truly be getting what was coming to him if he got it from a woman, and apparently he would. This would have been even better if Sheila were black, or a Muslim, since it was by and large black Muslim women whom we were saving from Little Brother, but such justice as the world offers is never quite perfect.
    We left the women behind and passed over what passed for a highway. For a long time the highway repeated and repeated. Dry, cracked land stretched out as though the world were breaking from the effort of covering itself.
    Finally, a truck came into view. A black arm hung out the window, holding a handgun, or maybe a rifle. A rebel, a soldier: who could tell except for Sheila? I steeled myself for her to bomb the truck, and from the way she stroked the joystick with her thumb, she appeared to steel herself for the same thing. But I looked again at the gun and it was just a cigar. Okay, we were looking at civilians. Civilians whom, over the next several weeks, we would liberate. Maybe the driver harbored a dream of sending his daughter to school to become a doctor, a dream that could become a reality after an American intervention. And maybe one day, twenty or twenty-five years from now, his daughter would be my oncologist, and she would save me, or at least bring me some last light comfort.
    But what was really happening was more impressive than this fantasy. What was really happening was another kind of fantasy. For most intents and purposes I was actually flying over this truck, actually guiding the