The Seventh Floor, page 5
She unceremoniously clanked her bat bag on the dugout bench. Theo, the Cold Warriors’ first baseman, wrinkled his nose at her beery smell and said: “You bring me one?”
“No drinking at the ballpark, Theo. You know that.”
“Right.” He bent over to tie a cleat. “Just before and after.”
She’d gone home for a shower and a few drinks before driving to the field. Sitting out wasn’t really an option. Ten years earlier they’d jerry-rigged a park and a pickup league at the base in Shkin, Afghanistan. The initial catalyst had not been Procter or her Bratva—or even CIA—but two Marines who had played Single-A ball before enlisting. CIA participation had begun as something of a joke: Theo, for example, went one-for-forty-nine that season, and Procter wasn’t much better. Her batting eye had become glaucomic since playing the game as a child. But over time, and certainly now, in the Langley intramural league, the games had become a pyre for the sacrifice of stress and grudges, of all the petty slights and useless, energy-vacuuming bullshit that defined life at CIA Headquarters.
Throughout the years it had been unspoken, though collectively and firmly agreed, that the absent were best honored if the rest of them just kept on playing. In Shkin they’d regularly thrown first pitches shortly after the conclusion of rocket barrages against the Base. One of the Marine teams took the field for a Friday night game after losing their second baseman in a Taliban ambush on that Tuesday. Sam had been the Cold Warriors’ third baseman, and they had played the season opener five days after his disappearance.
Tonight, as her friends filed into the dugout, not one asked her how she was, or why she had shown up for a baseball game mere hours after concluding, in disastrous fashion, a twenty-four-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency. That would come later, over drinks at the Vienna Inn. First they had business with the Counterterrorism Center Predators.
Procter trotted out to center. The night air was bathwater on her skin; the glow of the lights was the sky torn open to heaven; the evening breeze carried the scent of popcorn and clean dirt and cut grass. She chewed a wad of gum like a maniac. She had a good buzz rolling. There was no past, no future. She was playing baseball with her friends.
Gus, the Cold Warriors’ starting pitcher and the most natural athlete among them, could hurl in the low seventies and had in his quiver a reasonable, if inconsistent, curve. In an intramural league, he was nearly unhittable. The Preds’ pitcher—a lanky young analyst who worked on jihadi financing networks—had also brought his stuff. By the sixth inning—league rules stipulated seven innings, no bonus play—the Cold Warriors’ catcher, a reports officer, was complaining of groin pain. “I’ll catch,” Procter said. “I’ve logged a good deal of flight time on my knees.” She winked at Gus, who laughed. “You won’t be catching me,” he said. “My arm is gassed.” That left Mac to pitch the seventh.
Procter spent the bottom of the sixth in the dugout, sitting by Mac on the bench, working on a bag of sunflower seeds in a glorious and companionable silence. The third baseman, an analyst who had taken Sam’s spot, sidled up and for a few moments sat quietly, though Procter could sense that he had words for her, and that she did not want to hear them. Gus grounded out to short. Two down. She spat. Oh crap, she thought. He is going to say something.
“Artemis,” he said.
She looked up with a frown.
“I wanted to say that I heard. And I’m sorry.” His voice was weak, like he was speaking into a running vacuum.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“It’s bullshit,” the third baseman went on. “What happened.”
“Save it,” Mac scolded. “We’re playing baseball.” He kept his gaze fixed on the game, mouth churning through seeds.
Theo, as usual, struck out. This time looking. Three down. Procter began donning the catcher’s gear. Theo traded bat and helmet for his glove and the plain red proletarian cap of the Cold Warriors. “Goddammit,” he muttered, “I suck.” Theo did suck, a feature of his life more than a bug, extending well beyond the confines of the baseball diamond to his marriages and drinking habits. Off the field, Procter was all too happy to remind him of these failings, but in the dugout she just slapped his ass as she strolled by on her way to the plate.
Mac’s inning was shaky. A targeting officer called Tobin, the Preds’ catcher, came to the plate with two down and runners on second and third. After a ball outside, Procter hustled to the mound for a word.
“He’s too comfortable in the box,” she said. “Taking an ownership stance. Soundtrack’s gotta be chin music, Macintosh. You keep missing outside, he’s going to poke out his bat and dribble something down the line past Theo and we’re fucked.” She slapped Mac’s ass, too, and trotted back to the plate. Next pitch came in high and tight, nearly skinning Tobin’s elbows when he lurched back and out of the box.
“Holy shit,” he said, glaring at Procter. “Tell Mac to ease up. It’s just a game.”
“No wonder you got passed up for your 14,” she said, smacking her glove and easing into her crouch. “You’re an idiot, Tobin.”
She signaled for a fastball in. This time Tobin swung and missed and his exaggerated (intentional! the bastard) backswing clocked her in the helmet, rocketed off her mask, and sent her plug of gum into the dirt. “Lord almighty,” she said, and spat.
“Oops,” said Tobin, “sorry. And you’ve already had one spanking today. My bad.”
She picked up the mask, shouldering past him on her way out to the mound. “He’s still crowding the plate,” Procter said. “He’s been warned and now we’ve got to deliver. And first base, well, first base is open, Mac.”
“Ribs?” Mac whispered into his glove.
“If you can manage.”
She slapped Mac’s ass with her mitt and took up behind home. Tobin’s elbows were luxuriously draped over the plate, taunting them, an affront not only to her and her friends personally but to all pitchers and catchers everywhere, for all time. She punched her mitt, rearranged the mask. “Scoot the fuck off the plate,” she said. “You own the box, not the plate. You are an infringer, Tobin. You are line-stepping. And you have been warned.”
“Why are you here, running your damn mouth, after what happened today?” Tobin said, unmoved, check-swinging as he waited for the delivery. “You should be out somewhere, drunk.”
To his credit Mac put some sauce on it; the fastball scored a direct hit on Tobin’s left kidney and he bent like a hinge at the waist and dropped the bat with a grunt that made Procter grin. He just stood there in the box, hands on his knees. Procter picked the ball from the dirt and threw it back to Mac. “Take your base, Tobin. Move along.” She slapped his ass, too. “Go on.”
It spoke volumes about the spirit of the league that the Cold Warriors had thought nothing of beaning a coworker, that both benches were beginning to spill onto the field, and that Tobin was quite obviously keen to rush the mound and fight a fellow officer who was, in fact, his superior. Procter took a measure of pride in this. Because if you couldn’t lather yourself into a murderous rage over a game of baseball, then what were you, really?
Tobin righted himself, and charged the mound. And the cords of her rage—drawn frighteningly tight since Sam’s disappearance, the hopscotch of workplace humiliations, and, at last, today’s firing—twanged inside her and she was on Tobin’s heels, sprinting to protect Mac, who had his fists up, bobbing, waiting.
Procter overtook Tobin before he got to Mac, jumping onto his back to ride him into the dust of the mound. She figured she had about two seconds before the teams collided in the infield and they pulled her off. The only sound was the ringing noise in her skull. Mashed into the dirt, her nose excavated smells of dust and leather and blood. She climbed on Tobin, wrestled his hands from his face, and punched him square in the nose.
After the brawl, the game sputtered to a maddening conclusion: a scoreless tie. No one apologized or tried to smooth things over—which Procter did appreciate—the umps abandoned them, and the two teams melted back to their dugouts to pack up. “Feels like a ten-drink night,” Theo said, zipping up his bag with a flourish, holding an undershirt against the skin of his clawed-up cheek.
They went to the Vienna Inn, the four of them, and for the first round, in their usual booth, spoke only of the game and the fight. Well into the second, Mac at last nudged her to tell the full story of her meeting with Gosford and Debs. She spared no detail, up to and including the impromptu cleanup session in the Seventh Floor restroom and her ignominious final trot out the door. She finished her beer, on to the third—tonight Mac was buying—and Gus, god bless him, he always said this like his teetotaling wasn’t assumed: Gus said he would drive tonight. “Have as many as you like.”
“We gonna fit in your Corolla, Gus?” Mac asked. “Last time you had the twins’ sweaty lacrosse stuff in there. Bit tight. Bit smelly.”
“I’ve got the minivan this time,” Gus said. “We’ll have enough room to lay Artemis in the back.”
Procter raised her drink, removing a few inches with a long thirsty pull. She set down the glass, trading it for her ice pack, which she returned to her red-raw left ear.
“I thought Tobin was going to yank that off,” Gus said, flicking his own.
“You got there just in time,” Procter told Gus. “Turns out it’s tricky to remove an ear while somebody’s smacking you with a batting helmet.”
“What do you figure was in the muffin?” Theo asked. “Ipecac, or what?”
“Probably. Never turned down a chocolate muffin in my life,” Procter said. “Debs knows this. Mac, your nose is bleeding again.”
“Oh shit,” he said, and cradled it in the rag he’d set aside on the table.
“We knew about the yogurt,” Theo said, rotating his ice pack from the cheek that had been clawed to the one that had been punched.
“It’s just brutal,” Mac said through the bloody rag. “And the symmetry? Unreal. Deborah Sweet holds a grudge. Bad case officer, exceptional grudge-holder. Credit where credit’s due.”
Procter looked around at her friends. She had tried to convince herself she might repeat her familiar work pattern, well worn over a quarter century at CIA: Survive, lie low, somehow return to the field. There was a finality here that she could not get her arms around. All your life you’re CIA, then you’re not. Something is dead, she thought. Yesterday it was dying, and now it’s dead.
Even as these thoughts cartwheeled through her mind, Procter did appreciate that her old friends did not offer useless, sugary condolences, nor ask her that most vile of questions: How are you feeling?
Instead, they swapped stories from the brawl, the Farm, Shkin, the decades of life they’d shared together. They laughed about Theo’s second wife and the legendary destruction of his prized fish tanks; about the glorious prank with the filthy pictures that they’d all pulled together at the Farm, when they were undaunted and young. They laughed about Debs and the yogurt and mulled again the baggage she’d so clearly carried all these years, to pull a stunt like today’s fiasco on a subordinate and a former friend.
Soon Procter was quite drunk. Gus and Theo, on the other side of the booth, were laughing, having drifted into their own discussion, the snippets of which, to Procter’s ear, struck her as fabulously raunchy. One of Theo’s signature stories, she presumed, heard it a dozen times: his wild night at the Kabul Station Talibar, for her money the most debauched place she’d ever set foot in, and that included a club near Lakeland, called Physt.
But Mac, next to her, seemed contemplative, lost in thought. She leaned in close. “Do you think,” she said, “that the place really is rotten? That Petra’s right and we’ve got a problem?”
“It’s possible,” Mac said. “It’s also possible the Russians made a mistake in Singapore, I just don’t know.”
“Timing’s certainly odd,” Procter said. “Fiasco happens once Gosford and his people are installed, after they’ve been read in and gotten all the intro briefings. How many Goslings did he bring inside with him?”
Mac thought about that. “Maybe ten, fifteen newbies to the Seventh Floor. At least half of them couldn’t pass a polygraph if they’d had to apply.”
“Long list of suspects,” she said, and let it drop.
He turned to stare at her dead-on. “Look, Artemis, it goes without saying we will do whatever we can to bring Sam back,” he said. “I won’t say another word about this mess, but I want you to hear that from me.”
His words were conjured from the depths of rusted layers of trust and shame, guilt and powerlessness. If they’d asked her how she felt—and, again, they were too close for such callous treatment—she would not have known what to say. But, without saying anything, Mac had known what she needed to hear. She tipped back her drink. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for saying that.”
Mac tilted his head toward her, and they looked across the table for invitation to Theo’s story, because theirs had run to its end. Gus was in tears of laughter, Theo now arriving at the punch line: the case officer had come to, chained to a fountain, short seventy-five grand in operational funds.
When Gus had stopped laughing, Procter raised her glass to her friends. There was everything to say, so there was nothing, and in a solemn and wordless clink of their glasses, they toasted the end.
“It’s not how I thought it would go,” Theo said, “for any of us. I pictured speeches, gratitude, a sense of conquest. Of having run the race and finished well.”
“You’re drunk,” Mac said.
“Well, so what?” Theo said. “Am I wrong, too?”
“Mostly you’re drunk,” Gus said. “You’re always mostly drunk, Theo.”
“I’m just saying,” Theo continued, “that I saw a different ending, you know? A better ending. For all of us, I mean.”
Down went the last of Procter’s drink, glass clattering on the table. “Me, too,” she said. “I mean, a scoreless tie? Hell’s that about? I pictured us winning.”
8
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
Procter was mowing her lawn, a little drunk, when the package arrived. A Thursday afternoon, two weeks after the canning: she’d met Mac for a beer at the Vienna Inn, made it two, then shuffled home for another over yard work in the broiling heat. After mowing, she edged, weed-whacked, and then blew the cuttings into the flower beds, bare and rocky save for a plastic hummingbird with spinning wings, left behind by the previous owners.
Parking the mower alongside her new RAV4 in the garage, she collected the mail from the box and the package from the porch. She dumped it across the mail pile, which, by this point in her skid, was consuming most of her kitchen countertop. Not that the loss of the countertop mattered: the real estate required for meal prep was on a slide as well. She nuked a Party Pizza, placed the whole thing on a sturdy paper plate, popped open another beer, and shambled into the living room. She’d sunk into the recliner before she realized that the remote was on top of the television, plumb out of reach. She ate in a silent stupor, her mind powering down until her phone chirped in her pocket.
“Cummings,” she said, “thanks for the ring back.”
“I listened to your message, Arty,” he said. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“All of it. You want a job? What the hell?”
“Might need a spot.”
“You in the States?”
“Yeah.”
“When’ll you come down for a visit?”
“Not sure. Maybe soon.”
“You done being a spy?”
“Not a spy.”
“Right. Whatever. You retiring?”
“Something like that.” She was bent over the trash can. In went the Party Pizza box, the plate, and the two beer cans, forming a fresh geologic layer atop last night’s: a plate, four cans of Coors, and another Party Pizza box.
“Something like they finally fired your ass?” Cummings said.
“You’re getting warmer. Look, if I give you a few weeks’ notice can I have a job?”
“At the park?”
“Where the fuck else? You own any other businesses? If so, I’m all ears.”
Cummings was making a weird noise, a cross between a wheeze and a chuckle. “Fine, fine. Sure. We’ll find something.”
After the call she stood alone in her kitchen. She’d bought the house from another CIA officer after she’d been pushed out of the field to land in the Penalty Box—two years of riding a desk at Langley under adult supervision. She’d served her sentence, but many of the moving boxes from back then were still unpacked, standing in as tables and footstools in her living room. In those first months her motive had been nothing but sheer sloth, but in the intervening years she’d arrived at the firm conviction that unpacking would signal defeat, an acknowledgment that she belonged in the Penalty Box. There was no furniture in the first-floor sitting room, which she crossed on her way upstairs. The second bedroom held a weight rack and a collection of dumbbells, bands, and free weights that had probably been manufactured during the Nixon administration. The equipment had been her primary contribution to the home’s décor.
She turned the volume on her EDM playlist up far as it would go. The menu: thrusters, push-ups, bench presses, sit-ups, band work, cleans, snatches, dead lifts. There was no structure to it. Suffering was the only goal. Around the middle of the workout there was some suggestive business with the bands that got pretty close to snapping off her legs. By the dead lifts she couldn’t hear her own thoughts, and the pressure building inside her stomach from the pizza and beer was becoming so volcanic that she had to take a short breather.
After a shower, Procter slumped back into the recliner, this time flipping between QVC and a baseball game. On her return trip to the kitchen, from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the package on the countertop. The shipping label made her frown. The package had been through customs. She bent down for a look.
Return address: Helsinki. “Well, well, well. What the shit,” she said.
