The Seventh Floor, page 19
“What was the name,” Petra said, so loudly a few of the dogs popped up their heads, “of the goddamn political regime Gosford installed?”
“Reversion.”
“Reversion.” She cackled. “Those tools. Reversion in Gosford’s paradise meant dat pokkenwijf Deborah Sweet had her mitts in every cookie jar. Gosford wanted that turkey-necked bitch running things like James Jesus Angleton in his glory. She came to my office one day, not long after you got the ax, and asked after my report on REMORA. His intel was going into reports left and right and dat nare pokkenwijf was joining the briefings with Gosford on the backs of that reporting; REMORA’s punching her tickets to the Oval. She told me that the Seventh Floor and the Russia House Front Office had complaints about my assessment, that now was not the time to question an asset taking serious risks. And she said, of all things, why was I even yammering about the safe house expense? I’d sent a few emails on that, you see, nothing in cables, and—”
Procter cut her off. “Safe house expense?”
“Oh, it was stupid, Artemis. There is a farmhouse. Provence, beautiful spot outside Lacoste. Chosen because REMORA could travel there when he visited his wife’s family in Barcelona. She’s half-Catalan. And the place, as you can imagine, was terribly expensive. Finance threw a fit about it, said why don’t we just go through one of the cutouts to rent properties on Airbnb or whatever the hell? Why are we retaining this place? And the answer was always the same: REMORA is one of our top-producing assets, we need a place that is comfortable, that does not change, that is there, always, if he can travel and needs to talk to us. You ever hear of us sitting on a property like that for a single asset?”
“No,” Procter said. “No, I have not. What’d you say back to Debs and the boys, hon, you don’t mind me asking? About the anomalies?”
“Simple things. REMORA is Deputy in the Fifth? Have him bring us a list of every operation Moscow is running in Europe right now. Have him bring us the names of every SVR case officer working the American target in Europe—whatever he can find. And dat pokkenwijf said I was kicking up shit. Deborah Sweet was a washout case officer with an unremarkable and undistinguished record who by dint of proximity to Gosford returned to CIA to run the Directorate of Operations. I mean, holy crow, Artemis, she knew zilch, zilch about what we were up to when she walked into Langley for the second time. She needed to find treasure to prove her worth, and REMORA’s intel was gold. He’d been tested. He was delivering. Why was I raking shit all over the place, that’s what they said, Artemis. Told me to hush up. And I zippered up my cheesepipe like a good girl.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Oh, who knows? All of them, probably. They had their reasons; I was throwing cold water on their case, making Theo’s life difficult. Shade on Mac’s golden goose. Gus felt that I’d iced a few of the Moscow cases with lousy assessments when he’d been Chief out there, and you damn well know how black his mood was when he came home in the spring. Bad juju, all around. No one likes Derms.”
Procter raised her glass with a sick smile.
“In any case,” Petra continued, “your Bratva and dat pokkenwijf got their mutual wish, though I don’t believe they shared motivation. I got knocked off the assessment. They gave it to a more pliant lad, a baby-faced kid with furless balls. Don’t remember his name.”
“And it was Debs who pushed you out, in the end?”
“Who else? Course, that giraffe wouldn’t let me go in peace. The way they pushed me out, I can’t even get contract work.” Her eyes were bright with anger. “Now, Artemis,” Petra said. “Your cereal is mush. And if we talk about this too much longer, I’m going to get so angry that I might kill you just to calm my nerves. Time for you to scram.”
The woman accompanied her to the car. Procter gripped the door handle, Petra her shoulder. Her eyes were a shade wild. The dogs were yapping again, feeling Petra’s energy—there wasn’t a squirrel in sight.
Petra spoke to the ground. “If they’ve been running a high-level penetration and we’ve lost only a few sources so far, you’ve got to wonder what the game is, don’t you? If Zhomov is playing a different one entirely.”
Petra punctuated the sentence by crushing a pinecone beneath her shoe. “I thought I’d be celebrated when I retired. You probably did, too. Gave the place our all, didn’t we? Then we got turned out. Not a salute. Not a thank-you. They said they would mail me the Blue Bag with the flag and the medallion and their fucking certificate, and you know what? Never came. Lost in the mail, I’m sure. Lord knows I wasn’t looking for a ticker tape parade, but how about some gratitude? A little payout for all the sweat equity. Didn’t seem like too much to ask. By the end, after dat pokkenwijf and I had said our piece and my head was snuggled under the guillotine, I realized I was done helping that building. If there is a mole digging around in there, I said to myself, Petra, well, you let those ingrates find it. You’ve done your time. Whole place is just a bunch of limp-dicked managers and woke kids now. Anyone actually spying around here? I thought about that in my last few weeks, dinking around in the cafeteria, not even visiting the vault anymore. Seventh Floor didn’t want me there, your Bratva didn’t want me there. I would watch the youths walking around, all the contractors and all the managers. What a useless flesh pile Langley had become. They sent a Seventh Floor flunkie, some HR doofus, to speak at my retirement ceremony, and the bastard got my name wrong. Called me Patty. And do you know what I said, Artemis? Opkankeren. I said fuck ’em. You might consider that, too. After all you’ve done. But if you decide not to say that, you should be careful, Artemis. So very careful. You stick your hand down this mole hole, something’s going to bite back. Sink its little buck teeth in real nice and deep. You watch yourself. Listen to Petra on this.”
Then the woman’s grip on Procter’s shoulder loosened and she was walking away, dogs plodding at her heels over the carpet of pine needles toward the house.
PART III
FREE RADICALS
27
DALLAS / PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO
Around the neighborhood, on long walks or when they played with him in the front yard, Peter and Irene Venable’s French bulldog was known as Joseph. Only in their home was he called by his proper name: Stalin. The house was a one-story adobe with a terra-cotta roof fronted by massive palms, snuggled in Dallas’s leafy eastern flank, a neighborhood where the deadening flatness of North Texas warps into low rolling hills. They’d purchased the property a few years earlier, after they’d graduated from the University of Texas and moved up from Austin. Peter, slogging through a Zoom call, stared sleepily out the window into the trees. This year the heat had raked its nails across the autumn chalkboard; mid-October, and the mercury would scratch ninety today. He sipped coffee from his home office and daydreamed about snow.
After having contributed nothing during the call, Peter closed out of Zoom, answered three emails from colleagues at Southwest Airlines, where he worked in financial planning and analysis, and opened his personal email. The usual—news, a note from a neighbor planning a poker night, a reminder for the dog’s Bordetella shot. What the Venables’ unconventional friends would call a lapse in tradecraft had occurred the first time Irene schlepped the dog to the vet: she’d provided his real name, earning, in her telling, not even a sidelong glance or arched eyebrow from the staff, who, like all Americans, were doubtless woefully ignorant of the basic facts of the world, doubly so when the subject was Russian history. The email, which made him smile, announced that Joseph Stalin’s appointment was scheduled for the following Tuesday, and included a reminder that, due to a recent spate of biting incidents, Joseph Stalin should be leashed throughout.
He stopped smiling when he saw the subject line of an email that arrived just when he closed out the vet’s note.
Subj: Hi from Uncle Stephen
Shit, Peter muttered. Shit. His fingers were frozen to the keyboard.
He opened the note. In an instant he felt that his body had cartwheeled onto a high bookshelf, where he now watched himself sit at the desk.
Hello Peter, I’m sorry it has been such a long while since I wrote to you, but I thought I would tell you about the gardening your aunt and me have been engaged with this past summertime. Golly, such flowers, so many herbs and vegetables and maximum shrubs. It is incredible, we are so so happy. I have included a snapshot your auntie tooken. Tell her how you think, maybe, you and lovely Irene. Mayhaps a visit soon, so you might see the blossoms living in advance of the autumnal fall.
With utmost sincerity, your most favorite uncle Stephen
God, he thought, who wrote that crap? He remembered the simple codes: one before shrubs, one after blossoms. Maximum living.
“Irene, come here,” he called to her makeshift desk at the dining room table. Irene ran the social media handles for a rideshare start-up; all morning she’d been posting pictures of local restaurateurs zipping around Dallas in the vehicles.
“One sec, babe, I’m finishing a post.”
“Well, when you do, bring the computer.”
“Peter? What? Shut up.”
The Spaniard had supplied the ASUS laptop two months after Oklahoma, the memories of which still made Peter’s legs feel like water.
Irene logged in to Instagram and navigated to the handle @maximumliving. There were pictures of jewelry, videos of models hawking outfits, shots of exotic vacation destinations and appetizing meals. Rote influencer fare, doubtless trawled and scraped from other accounts, but Irene cooed that it did boast twenty-one thousand followers and the posts seemed to generate a reasonable level of engagement. Irene had insisted on as much with the Spaniard. Red handbags, he knew, they were looking for red handbags. In mounting frustration, Irene scrolled through a few weeks’ worth of posts, then returned to the most recent, and, sure enough, the fourth image in the set boasted a red Hermès bag slung over the shoulder of a waifish blonde. Irene downloaded the image onto the laptop and then dragged it into a folder labeled flowerhappy.exe. Then she punched in a strange twenty-seven key password, written in segments across several pages of a notebook. The picture, dropped into the flowerhappy.exe program on the main computer, was now sent to another program hidden on the hard drive. Irene clicked. Ten percent, twenty, fifty, eighty. Then the computer’s hourglass showed up, and she wondered if something was wrong. “Peter? Did you touch something?”
“What? Of course not.”
Irene mashed the trackpad with a steady, menacing gaze that seemed to declare her intent to punch it through the desk.
Suddenly: one hundred. Text replaced the hourglass: steganography for the digital age, the art of hiding a message in a picture.
A location, a date, the body language. A note, supposedly from “the highest levels,” that their friends were counting on them.
“Peter, like, oh my god,” Irene said.
Peter imagined the enfolding winter, the ramparts engulfed in snow; in his mind he reviewed an endless expanse of green-brown rolling hills, took the loam of the black earth into his nostrils. A valve opened to his soul.
Two days later, and Stalin was packed away to the kennel; they’d held their mail and asked the neighbors to collect the Amazon deliveries. A weekend getaway in Puerto Vallarta to help Irene destress, he told his team. Both had plenty of leave. Indeed, neither company had a formal vacation policy. Work from anywhere! Peter’s job at the airline meant the couple flew standby for free. They spent four hours sitting in the Love Field concourse waiting for open seats, three hours on the flight itself, and a few more in the car. By late afternoon they were careening into another round of margarita stress reduction therapy at the resort’s deserted beachfront bar, struggling to maintain even a modestly stilted conversation. Irene wore a black bikini and a Texas Rangers ball cap. Peter wore blue trunks and a matching Rangers cap, as the decoded message had instructed.
The burst of gymnastic lovemaking to consecrate their room and the IV drip of alcohol they were wheeling through the day—ding of the button once they’d hit cruising altitude and screwdrivers please, yes, a double would be great—had done little to blunt the edge. He did not know precisely what they wanted from him and Irene, but after Oklahoma he fretted, and in any case he knew for certain that his first sight of the Spaniard would turn up the volume on that memory, and it would be impossible to tune out.
Peter first heard his voice roll down the walkway snaking from the pool to the beach—and fought the instinct to turn his head. The Spanish, bits and pieces of which Peter understood, was silky and assured. He made idle chitchat with an American mounting a lousy, if valiant, effort at the language. Peter sensed the Spaniard taking the scene in, watching, assessing. After a few moments he wound down the conversation with the faceless American and soon Peter heard only his folksy whistle and the smack of his sandals across the planked walkway.
The Spaniard took the seat next to Irene. He wore his usual pleasant smile and slacks and a white linen shirt. The Spaniard, Peter had come to realize, had a way of saying the right things in the right order to arrive, by some form of conversational magic, just where he wanted to be. And he was a gentle guide, willing to zigzag through a discussion not precisely on his chosen path, from baseball to the weather, tequila to the vagaries of the Dallas real estate market.
Like most men, the Spaniard enjoyed the sight of Irene in a swimsuit. But, quite unlike the other resortgoers, the Spaniard made no attempt to mask his interest. He looked her over without shame. For some reason Peter did not find this threatening, as if perhaps the Spaniard were sufficiently professional to appreciate a half-naked, athletic, twenty-eight-year-old body without telegraphing the temptation to screw it. That the Spaniard was at least two decades their senior, that he was working on a second chin without credit of a first, and that Irene had once pronounced him “gross” did not hurt Peter’s case: Let him look.
For an hour they drank and made small talk, the Spaniard, Peter could feel, easing them into things. Once he seemed satisfied that it would not appear overly direct or abrupt, the Spaniard suggested they join him for a drink in his villa. His tequila was quite rare, he said, and he had a veranda tickling the beach. For a half mile they shuffled through the trucked-in sand, along the lapping turquoise water, and finally up a meandering boardwalk to the front of a villa the Spaniard claimed was his.
They gathered around the dining room table. The Spaniard looked at them for a few uncomfortable moments, the first of their kind since he’d arrived at the bar: he was constantly pinching his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, tapping the dark wood, and running his fingers over the aquatic engravings running along the table’s lip. “We have a big job for you,” he said at last.
He slid a black thumb drive and a folded piece of paper to Peter, who opened it.
“This paper has traveled all the way from Moscow,” the Spaniard said. “So that you understand the importance of this task. The responsibility we are placing on your shoulders.”
He noticed now that Irene had fastened her hand on Peter’s knee, squeezing as if she might juice it.
“What do you want us to do?”
The Spaniard laughed, snatched back the paper, and ate it.
Late that night, back in their room, Peter and Irene soaked in a hot bath, rose petals floating lazily across the surface like pink steamboats. They’d not traded a word since leaving the Spaniard’s villa. Each time Peter shut his eyes and slid deeper into the bath, he piled up memories: the rich smell of apples floating over Aunt Lidia and Uncle Alexei’s dacha outside Nizhny, that summer so long ago, of the orchards and green hills and the whine of insects; then stronger, searing memories of the spectral Masha, daughter of the neighbors, visionary-eyed girl of seventeen who throughout that summer was stapled to his hip and with whom he would log a decade of bedroom experience in three months’ time; and at last he was with Irene in a Russian field hospital outside Rostov on Don, the latest stamp in their passports was from Finland, and they were speaking to a soldier who had lost his legs and a good deal of an arm in a Ukrainian artillery bombardment. “There is a letter from that young man on the thumb drive,” the Spaniard had said. “Read it when you get home.” The memories dredged from the abyss of Peter’s soul an even more dizzying mess: alienation, anger, envy, powerlessness. And, despite his brainpan’s emotional clog—to say nothing of the warm water—his thoughts of Masha had made him very hard.
Peter opened his eyes. “We can say no,” he blurted out. He eyed the suitcase the Spaniard had left behind. “Throw that thing in the ocean along with the thumb drive, bury it, like, in the jungle, leave it here for the housekeepers.”
Irene laughed. “Babe, we’ve seen the names. We can’t do that. And come on: Is that really what you want?”
“No,” he said, quickly, to avoid a fight. “It’s not.” But was he certain? No, he was not.
She slithered across the tub, spreading herself across him to kiss his lips and his neck. She tasted like salt and booze. His fingers slid down the furrow of her spine. His ear went into her mouth for a moment, and he felt her tongue. Then she withdrew ever so slightly and whispered: “This is our chance. They have given us a chance, Peter, and I, like, I think we should take it.”
“Why us?” he asked, perhaps more to himself than to her. “They have professionals, for god’s sake.”
As the plane descended into Dallas–Fort Worth, Peter was thinking of the customs form: Was he carrying more than $10,000 in cash? There were no paper forms on US-Mexico routes anymore, the flight attendant said, and for some reason that put him at ease. As if his transgressions might still be deniable—future sins considered but not yet committed.
As they crawled through the sweaty line of sun-scorched tourists and screaming children, he thought his heart was going to explode. Irene applied lip balm constantly. He watched the tube disappear and reappear into her pocket, her hands gripping it savagely, as if it might save her, or she might use it to stab an overly inquisitive customs officer.
