The Profession by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online Page A

comes in with no greeting or salutation:
    Y R U cpking M/Cole?
    My reply:
    Fine, thank you. How are you?
    A.D.:
    Cut the shit, Gent. What’s up?
    I try to block A.D.’s visual linkup so she can’t grab any cues from the environment, but she catches just enough airport audio to get a glimmer before I toggle the camera icon off. “Where are you? Amman? Is that Gate 6?”
    She’s good, A.D. This is serious though. Revealing the tiniest clue will be enough for her to unspool an entire story; in ten minutes she’ll know more about my assignment than I do and the saga will be all over the air, the Web, and the blogosphere.
    My problem with A.D. is I have a weakness. I’m still in love with her. A.D. can get to me and she knows it. She starts asking how I am. Am I okay? She’s been worrying about me, she says. What makes it worse is she means it.
    Some women get to you with their bodies. A.D. does it with her voice. I can’t describe it. It’s not throaty or come-fuck-me seductive; if anything it’s the opposite: cerebral and news-y. It has that rhythm to it. A.D. is quick. Nothing gets past her. She has a relentless curiosity that’s childlike—and oddly arousing. I hear that voice and I have to hang on.
    She makes me set up the holo where I can see her. That’s another problem. Her face. I have a weakness for that, too. “You can’t write anything about this, A.D.”
    “What’ll you do, kill me?”
    “Yes.”
    A.D. has been a finalist twice for Pulitzers. Along with Ariel Caplan of Agence France-Presse (who is A.D.’s best friend), she is one of the half-dozen most celebrated female journalists in the world, though you’d never know it to hear her talk. A.D. is tortured and insecure. That’s one of the things that first attracted me to her. For years when I was with her, I tried to save her—to take away her self-torment, or at least ease the pain it caused her. Finally I realized that she didn’t want to lose it. She needed it. It was the engine of her artist’s soul.
    I never knew a writer before I met A.D. Any time you have a writer, you have self-torture. Why? Because every one of them wants to be Shakespeare. And every American wants to write the Great American Novel. I don’t care how many awards they get for journalism or movie-writing, they all want to be Hemingway. The women more than anybody. A.D. has four novels she’s working on. I know them all by heart. She hasn’t finished one. She’s always going off to war. You can’t help her. When I’d suggest that maybe journalism was her true calling, she’d cut me off for a month. I look at her now on the little, shimmering hologram. I hate that sick feeling in my heart but there it is.
    “So,” she says, “are you gonna get yourself waxed this time?”
    “If I do, honey, you’ll get the exclusive.”
    This is an old joke between us. A.D. asks if she’s still in my will.
    “Always, baby.”
    “How much do I get?”
    I recite my line: “You’ll never have to turn tricks again.”
    A.D. is half Greek, half South African. She speaks with a Johannesburg accent. On the occupation line of her passport, it says “war correspondent.” A.D. is ambitious. She likes to quote Elvis:
    Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine
.
    I first met A.D. in East Africa in the late teens. We got married in Mombasa, at the Hotel Serena Beach, with Chutes as my best man and Rob Salter—then a ILT with Force Recon—pouring the pineapple daiquiris. A.D. and I had a bayview suite for two nights that she got us comped for through Trump/CNN; the rate was $1,450 per. I was in the Marine Corps then (technically still married to my second wife, but who’s counting?), a twenty-nine-year-old O-2 serving under Gen. James Salter.
    I used to run into A.D. on flights. In Africa, to get anywhere, youhave to travel by plane. Even if you’re serving-military, you catch hops with whoever’s going near where you’ve got to go; otherwise you wait around forever. A.D. was a