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President Obama's nighthawks: Top officials charged with guarding the nation's safety

With two wars, multiple crises abroad and growing terrorism activity at home, the nation's top security officials do not sleep in peace.

"This old fax keeps jamming," Janet Napolitano says, sticking her hand into the secure fax. Crumpled paper. "Oh, Lord."

The secretary for homeland security can't go to bed until she reviews a secret fax. She asks an aide to have it re-sent. She puts up water for black tea.

"This time of night is the fourth act," says Napolitano, an opera fan. She rode home an hour ago in a motorcade accompanied by flashing lights and Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte." "There is the normal workday -- Act 1 -- with all the hearings on the Hill, banquets and news shows. But the real drama is behind the scenes, at very odd hours."

Recently Homeland Security has been trying to intensify efforts against home-grown extremism, pushing Napolitano's own home life to the extreme. Although Napolitano lives by herself, tonight her apartment all but sings with characters and action. A Secret Service agent hulks outside. The kitchen answering machine bleats messages from her chief of staff. Rand Beers, the counterterrorism coordinator, rings her bedside phone as she's stepping toward her gray slippers.

"No suspects or targets?" Napolitano asks Beers. "We'll talk to the undersecretary for intelligence about that."

She hangs up. Nighttime calls about terrorism investigations are "not unusual in the weird, sick world I inhabit." At 2 a.m., she has been called about adjusting outbound rules at airports to catch a fleeing suspect and about emergency communications with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On a trip to Asia, a senior Napolitano staffer set her BlackBerry alarm to ring every hour, all night, so the staffer could check e-mail alerts.

To fall asleep, "to calm down my brain," Napolitano reads on the couch. "A lot of times I'm reading, and I'll wake up and the book is on my face." She lifts the 1,184-page "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years." "I don't want to read this one before bed. If it falls on my face, I'll break my nose."

A shriek pierces the air -- the tea kettle boiling: "Let me get that, before the Secret Service comes in." The secure fax whirrs -- the secret memo: "Ah, bueno. Here it is. It's hot."

Napolitano reads the hot document. Drinks her hot tea.

12:01 a.m.

Eric Holder's kitchen

"Iced tea for me!" Eric Holder says. He jokingly cracks the door of his liquor cabinet. If Napolitano's nights are operatic, the attorney general's are notably calm.


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