The Seventh Floor, page 20
Finally they were at the front of the line. The customs official called them forward and wordlessly scanned their passports.
He and Irene collected their cases from the carousel and wheeled them past two Customs and Border Protection officers milling by the doors. They strolled through the line for returning U.S. citizens with nothing to declare. The air was oily and metallic and he wondered if this was what it felt like to be alive.
That evening Peter and Irene were examining the contents of the Spaniard’s suitcase, spread open on the floor of their walk-in closet. Irene had already worked open the concealment device with the combination of pressure points and dials the Spaniard had demonstrated not long after he swallowed the paper.
Irene plucked a stack of bills from a pouch and handed it to Peter to count.
“Twenty-five thousand,” he muttered.
Irene sniffed. “Excuse me?”
“I said twenty-five. We make this in a month. This is . . . this is chump change. We deserve respect. This does not feel like respect. What is this?”
What was unspoken, and yet so very real that Peter could feel it rattling in his heart, was that money had little or nothing to do with it.
“We do this,” Irene said. “We prove ourselves. Then we ask for more.”
That night Peter and Irene sat in the encroaching dark on green Adirondack chairs, sharing a joint and drinking hard kombucha. Stalin was snuggled on Irene’s lap. She’d pulled out her phone and was admiring a few of the rideshare’s Instagram posts. “Twice as many likes as last week,” she said. “More than double the number of comments.” She set down her phone, took a hit of the joint, and handed it to Peter, who was gazing dreamily up at the rising moon.
“Is it a kamikaze mission?” Irene asked, exhaling the smoke. Stalin gave a contented rumble as she dug fingers into his hips.
A head appeared above the back fence. A wave.
“Hi, Venables,” came the voice. “How was Mexico?”
“The best,” Peter called back. “You guys doing well, Doug?”
“Business is good,” Doug said. “So I can’t complain.” Peter hated when he did that. Talked about business being good. The man was a heart surgeon. “Headed to Breck next week for another break, though. Figured, why the hell not?” He sniffed at the sky and shot Irene a wry look; Doug liked to look at Irene.
“Now, Irene. Young Peter.” Fuck you Doug, he thought. “You guys smoking weed?”
“Indeed we are,” Irene said. She accepted the joint from Peter and cast a cloud into the air. “This stuff is real sticky, you want a hit?”
Doug laughed. “I’ll pass. Hey, mind picking up the mail? Through Thursday.”
“All good,” said Irene, punctuating her thumbs-up with a stoner smile.
“Cool, thanks, guys. Next time we’ll watch Joseph, save you the kennel trouble.”
“Deal,” Peter said.
“Thanks, Venables, take it easy,” Doug said, and disappeared.
Peter took the joint. “Do you want it to be a suicide mission?”
She lay back in the chair and closed her eyes and rubbed Stalin’s haunches. “Maybe we see? Maybe we find out together?”
28
LANGLEY / CLARENDON
Since procter had left town, information had been running in the wrong direction: Sam was giving it all, with none coming in return, an exceptionally uncomfortable position for any CIA officer. To start, they’d told him the psych and medical reevaluation was routine. A pulse check after the trauma of Moscow. Gus had previewed that it would include a few more “discussions” with Security and the CI debriefers. “Maybe two, three of those,” Gus had said, outlining the entire process with a nonchalance that put Sam at ease. He found the reboot odd and inconvenient, but what could he do?
The Security debriefings, spread over two weeks, had been particularly strange. In place of the usual coldness bordering on hostility, the interviewers were, without exception, disinterested, disengaged, bored. At first Sam had taken heart, interpreting this as a signal that the review was in fact a formality, a box-checking exercise to tick and tie any concerns after his captivity, so everyone could just move on.
The calendar invite read “OMS Re-evaluation—Decision and Outbrief” and had been sent by Gus the night before with the Moscow X HR rep cc’d. Sam was half right, then. The process had indeed been a formality. The outcome, though? Well, as Sam walked into Gus’s office to a curt nod from the HR rep, he saw that he’d had the outcome ass backwards.
A decade earlier: Sam Joseph’s first trip in front of a CIA review board.
It had come on the heels of falling in love with his Syrian asset, the kind of pleasurable mistake now rich with layers of joy, regret, nostalgic lust, and self-loathing. In other words: the type of sin you’d gladly commit again. He should have been fired for it, and even now—even knowing the entire story—he marveled that he had not been.
At first he’d gotten the tale in drips. Though she would play a starring role, the Chief, of course, had never said a word about any of it. In fact, for a while after Syria he didn’t see her, and she didn’t really try to see him. He’d wondered if he should take it personally, but he’d grown to understand the Chief’s bizarre weather patterns. Procter, he decided, didn’t bear him any ill will. Like everyone else, she’d merely forgotten him.
But during an otherwise innocuous happy hour during the dark early months of that Langley internment, the scars of Syria still fresh on his mind and body, a drunken colleague who also happened to be a Farm classmate pulled him aside and slurred out that his old Chief, Artemis Procter, had come calling during the review board process, had taken him out for a lunch, in fact. “And the thing was,” the guy said, “I didn’t know her at all. Never talked to the woman, and, lo and behold, I come in one day to find a note from her inviting me to lunch.”
“Why’d she do that?” Sam had yelled over the din of the bar.
“She had some excuse, I don’t even remember what it was, because after about five minutes she only wanted to talk about you. Sickening, yes?”
“About what?”
“What?” The music had grown louder.
“What did she ask about?”
“Oh. Sappy bullshit. What you were like at the Farm, my impressions of your general character, your honor and good judgment and shit. I said the right things. Lied for you.” Big smile, tip of his drink, sloshing over the sides.
“Why did Procter do that?”
The guy didn’t answer. Instead, he said that he knew of another Farm classmate who’d received a similar invite for a chat. The Chief had of course been interviewed during the review board process: she’d offered something akin to sworn testimony regarding the cataclysmic events that had marked the last days of his Syrian tour, when he’d wound up in an interrogation room with his asset, who was also his lover, and both had nearly died. He’d returned to Langley not a hero, not a goat, but something far more ambiguous and thus potentially dangerous: a highly capable and wrecked case officer who’d performed heroically and also grievously violated the moral code of the tribe. His old mentor Ed Bradley, then running the Near East Division, had put it simply: The board will weigh the heroism and distinction against your obvious fuckup, and render judgment accordingly. When Sam had asked for odds, Ed said it was better than Vegas. It was a coin flip.
Two months after the review board had flipped the coin and decided he might stay, and one week after he’d learned of Procter’s mysterious lunches, Sam drove out to Bradley’s farmhouse for beers and a few questions about the Chief’s interventions.
“Where is she now?” Sam asked. “She’s gone missing. Least to me.”
“She’s in Florida for a month or so,” Ed said. “Family time.”
“Chief has a family?”
“I am told,” Ed said, with a tone of forced restraint, “that she has family members in Florida, a cousin or something. I don’t honestly know what the hell she’s doing down there.”
Sam opened another beer. “I heard she was doing the rounds with a few of my Farm classmates, asking about me.”
“It’s normal,” Bradley said, “for the board to consider the officer’s character in its judgment. Your track record of honor and integrity.”
“Is it normal for the subject’s former Chief to be the one doing the diligence?”
Bradley looked at him dead-on. “Of course not.”
“Well, what’s she up to? She won’t even return my calls.”
“She’s not normal Sam, you know that.”
“I do. I do know that.”
“Let’s drop it. What’s done is done.”
“Where are they going to send her next?”
“Well, with the flak the board shot through her, I don’t know. She’s not riding a desk yet, but they might put her on ice for a while.”
This, from Bradley’s lips, was the first Sam had heard of the Chief taking any heat for his decisions in Syria.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they shoveled some shit on her, Sam. To be honest, she shoveled it on herself.”
“Ed, come on, man. Just tell me.”
Bradley did not want to talk—Sam had wondered if the board had shoveled some shit his way for the whole thing, too—but he did offer a few clarifying bits. One, that Artemis Procter had, in effect, assumed responsibility for every operational call in those last Syrian days, that she vouched fully and comprehensively for his character—Bradley said Procter had assembled a dossier of approximately twenty testimonials from Sam’s colleagues to make this point—and she testified that Sam had come clean about his relationship with the Syrian on his own. He had told the truth, that most precious and essential ethic in a world where, outside the walls of Langley, they were paid to lie and steal. “Why’d she do all of that?” Sam asked.
“I told you. She’s not normal.”
After three more beers Bradley admitted that she’d lost her next Chief slot. Procter was in Florida licking her wounds, probably on a colossal bender.
It sunk in later, and in pieces: on the drive home from the farmhouse; in his apartment, lying awake; in the endorphin high of the comedown from his evening run; staring through the cable traffic the next morning. The Chief could have walked away, fence-sat, or heaped the blame on him, washing her hands of the ordeal. Instead she ducked into the ring and started swinging.
Two days later, working off a motel address and room number that Bradley had reluctantly provided, Sam was on a flight to Orlando. In those days she did not have the trailer and had taken up at an Econo Lodge outside Kissimmee. She hadn’t been answering her cell phone because it was turned off. She’d apparently gone so far as to call her provider and suspend service for the month. He saw her RAV4 in the parking lot. He walked up to Room 202 and knocked.
“Bad timing, Magda,” he heard the Chief growl through the door, along with the slide of the bolt. “I forgot the DO NOT DISTURB”—door swung open—“and anyway, when . . . Oh.”
“Hey, Chief.”
“I thought you were housekeeping.”
“Got that.”
“Well, you missed the exit for Disney.”
He stole a glance into the room: four feet dangled off the bed’s end. A bag of Fritos was scattered across the floor. The smell leaking through the doorway was damp clothes and skunked beer. The Chief met his eyes and then swiveled back to the room to see what was attracting his attention. He thought he caught a flicker of surprise, as if she hadn’t quite figured what she might find. “What time is it?” came the pained voice of a man from the bed. “Ugghh . . . shut up,” came a girl’s.
He poked his head through the door. “Seems like it could be more fun here than at Disney.”
“Well, the room is occupado,” Procter said, and, sliding into sandals, added: “You’re driving and paying and going to do most of the talking, Jaggers. Take me to Harmon’s.”
There is a certain panache to the CIA officer out in the field, but the return stateside can be a bit like the bell tolling midnight on Cinderella, the officer transforming into a pumpkin of humdrum middle-class mediocrity. Artemis Aphrodite Procter, however, was never one for mediocrity. Instead, she had chosen to slide a few rungs lower, into unbridled tropical squalor.
Her sartorial choices in Damascus had been strange—fabrics mismatched to seasons, colors to everything else—but now they veered even further afield: biker shorts, white tank top (no bra), Birkenstocks, Indians hat flocked by grease stains. On the drive to Harmon’s she did not ask why’d he come. She seemed to assume no preamble was necessary, no How are things with you? small talk to catch up. As was her way, she launched into bantering as if he’d been with her in Florida for weeks: a series of complaints about and praises for the maids at the motel; a run of curses for her cousin, who owned a gator park or something, she was not particularly specific about him, nor her laundry list of grievances.
Harmon’s was a bar that also boasted a breakfast buffet stuffed with customers fast-tracking diabetes. The staff all smiled and addressed her by name, and Procter approached the buffet with the certainty of someone getting down to business in their own kitchen. The Chief assembled for herself an overflowing plate—she did not waste a moment debating her selections—and joined him in a quiet booth, where Sam was sipping black coffee and picking at his far more sensible meal: scrambled eggs, sausage links, two pieces of toast.
She shingled four pieces of bacon across a waffle. Atop the bacon went two chicken strips, which she slathered in syrup and a creamy sauce that she sniffed thoughtfully before deciding it passed muster. Four more strips of bacon were draped over top, then a second waffle to complete the masterpiece. Procter took a sip of coffee, then searched around the plate, the table, the booth seat. “Damn thing must’ve rolled off,” she muttered. “One sec.” She went to the buffet, where she collected a single strawberry to sit atop the waffle. She picked up her silverware, sighed, and, still staring at her plate, said: “You didn’t quit, did you?”
“No.”
“Phew,” she said, “Fucking phew,” before cutting into the waffle to take her first bites, saying she was hungrier these days, lots of time in the gym and I can’t seem to get enough calories. “Glad you didn’t quit, though. Would’ve royally pissed me off. What brings you down old Florida way? This a social visit?”
“You haven’t been answering my calls.”
“Sometimes I don’t answer calls.”
“Why?”
“I’m in a different zone now, Jaggers, and I don’t multitask so good. We’re talking now, aren’t we? What’s up?”
“I spoke with Bradley. And a few old Farm classmates. Heard about how you went to bat for me during the board process. I didn’t know. Wanted to say thanks.”
“Well, you’re welcome,” she said, though she was laser-focused on hacking through a piece of chicken. “But you could’ve said that in a voice mail.”
“Felt like something to say in person.”
With her fingers she plucked the felled strawberry from her plate and plopped it into her mouth, treating him to a shrug that said: Whatever, man.
“I heard that you lost the Chief slot—”
“Oh good grief, not this shit,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“No. I want to talk about this. I heard you lost the slot in Amman because of me. And I’m—”
“Wrong, all wrong,” she said, making a wet noise and picking up her silverware with gusto. “Erroneous! Err—”
“Goddammit,” he said. “Shut up for one second. I wanted to say that I am sorry about that. I wanted you to hear that from me.”
She was now spearing soggy hunks of chicken and waffle with a manic energy. “Fine, fine, fucking fine. We can do this, Jaggers. You flew down to Florida for the party and I’ll deliver, seeing as you’re getting all contemplative in your golden years.” Monstrous forkful of chicken and waffle, several seconds of chewing. “My tour was deferred”—a term she would use with strict consistency in the days to follow—“because of me. Not you. Me. Not always about you, Jaggers, how many times do I have to say it? This was about me. And truth is it’s really fucking simple. Seems nowadays Headquarters likes to launder the easy shit into three-dimensional chess or a lubed-up Rubik’s Cube or whatever, but sometimes the simple shit is just that: simple. You are a good case officer who fucked up, and this place allows one fuckup, long as you come clean. Which you did. To me.” One entire strip of bacon inserted into her mouth, folding over itself like a fleshy piece of chewing gum, and a long pause until she’d gotten it down. “Now, that all being what it is, our friendly spy Service and its doughy overlords sometimes prefer to shove the blame for a disaster on a single intrepid soul before showing them the door. Heap the village’s goddamn—” A coughing fit, halted only by the arrival of a waiter with the largest glass of orange juice Sam had ever seen. “Bless you, Sandra, god bless. She’s a doll, Jaggers. One of the good ones. Where was I? Ah yes: sins. Sometimes Langley sees fit to heap all the sins onto one goat and slit its throat. I’ve seen the movie, lord knows I’ve seen it, and yes, it would’ve been easier to pile on and let that happen to you, because you fucked up, well and truly. But you know what? I was Chief out there”—she’d shut one eye to refocus on the knifework—“and I was responsible. Responsible for your sorry ass and your sorry-ass decisions. Also, I’ve been in star-crossed love before and know what that’s like, doomed and beautiful all at once. I get it. There is such a thing as honor, among thieves and also friends.”
Speech done, her plate ransacked, she said she had to use the ladies’ room, and disappeared for what felt like ten minutes.
“Who were you in love with?” Sam asked, after she’d returned.
