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actually."
    It was easy to picture him as a short, bespectacled physics teacher, one whose utter lack of physical assurance would prompt such curial devotion to the rubrics of the actual. Rules as a barrier to hide behind.
    "I am not concerned with actual responsibility, Mr. Jones. Not at this point. I am concerned with the whereabouts of my son."
    Again his silence was a declaration, but of what?
    "Mr. Jones?"
    "Yes?"
    "I am asking for your help here. I expected my son home at six o'clock this evening—1800 hours, if you prefer. He did not come. He did not call. My son would never not come home without calling me."
    "Your son is a high school senior, Mr. Montgomery. They do these things."
    "What things?"
    "Not come. Not call."
    "I get the distinct impression you are not telling me something."
    "No, sir. That's not it."
    "What is it, then?"
    Again his silence.
    "Mr. Jones."
    "Maybe you'd better talk to someone else. I'd like to help you, Mr. Montgomery, but I'm not—"
    I forced myself to wait. Now my mind went to the sound of a bulkhead slamming. I heard it through the bones of my feet, a sound from well below decks. A sensation from sixteen years before, just after our bucket, the
Stephen Case,
took a hit well below the waterline. As exec on the bridge, my job was to keep the glasses at my face, scanning for the telltale trails of more torpedoes, but what I was most aware of were the bulkhead hatches banging shut below against the inrushing sea, as now I worked to seal off the flood of feeling this strange bastard had opened in me. And then
bang!
A gunshot.
    "Not what?" I asked.
    "Supposed to."
    "You're not supposed to? Let me understand. You are not supposed to discuss what you know of a student's whereabouts with the student's father?"
    "That is right."
    "Look, Jones, I can be over there in an hour. Do I have to come over there so that you can explain to me what is going on?"
    "You'd better talk to General Healy."
    "What?"
    "General Healy. That's all I am going to say. I've said too much already."
    "Who is General Healy?"
    "National security, Mr. Montgomery. They said it is a matter of national security." Jones's inflection as he uttered that phrase was its exclamation point.
    By now, at the dawn of the century's last decade, as I am writing this, the words "national security" seem to have been reduced to weightless souvenirs from another time, like small bits of the Berlin Wall that hawkers have been selling around the world. In the era of the amiable and feckless Mikhail Gorbachev, it is impossible to use the phrase with anything like the punch it carried when Joseph Stalin had emerged in the American nightmare as Adolf Hitler with the bomb, or when Nikita Khrushchev then arrived as a kind of Mussolini, only madder. "National security" had, in fact, been brought into the lexicon by a man named James Forrestal, whom my father knew well from their time together at Princeton. Forrestal was famous as the first American secretary of defense in the late 1940s, although he had been secretary of the Navy during the war, near the top of my own chain of command when I was in uniform. Before that, he had been head of Dillon, Read, a Wall Street investment firm. But Forrestal's own fate—he jumped from a sixteenth-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949—reveals "national security" as code for a state of mind that is anything but secure. I believed in it as much as anyone at the time, but now see how it was always invoked, whether by the greatest statesmen of the era or by bureaucratic nobodies like Jones, for the same ends, which were to silence, to hide, and to intimidate.
    Apparently, my silence could intimidate, too. Jones's voice shook as he added, "They said it was their responsibility to deal with you and Sergeant Carson, not mine."
    "Who is Sergeant Carson?"
    "I've said too much already. Talk to the general. He's handling the whole thing. He's the one who told me."
    "General Healy?"
    "Major General