The Year of the Locust, page 7
I laughed. “Then we should get the Intelligence Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor.” I looked at her in the soft lamplight and was serious for a moment. “I want to thank you,” I said.
“Why?” she replied.
“For persevering, for making the effort. Most people would have given up long ago.”
“You’re right,” she said. “What was I thinking?”
The look on her face, the smile in her eyes, made me think of the first time we met—it was a Friday night in New York, a bar in Soho, a hip place full of sharp-elbowed people where everybody was talking and nobody was listening. Quite by chance, I came in alone, looking for a restroom, and she was in the process of being stood up by a blind date. She was sitting at a table near the kitchen door, tall and well-dressed, and I noticed her immediately across the crowded room.
She was in her midtwenties then, her long hair—highlighted with blond streaks earlier in the day for the date who would never show—was pulled back off her face, giving her a natural look. She appeared athletic in an outdoors sort of way but I can’t tell you if she was beautiful. All I can say is with high cheekbones, a sensual mouth, and eyes full of life, she was to me.
“Remember that first night in Soho?” she asked. “What about the guy near the stairway?”
He was handsome, surrounded by a throng of people. Going by what the waiter had told Rebecca, he ran a fitness app and had, like, five million followers.
“Remember what you said after you walked over and introduced yourself and I told you who he was? You said being famous on social media was like being rich in Monopoly.” She laughed at the memory and looked at me. “You had me at that. I was thinking, Maybe I’ve found a real person at last. And in here of all places.”
She trailed her fingers across my cheek. “If I’m honest,” she said, “I liked the look of you when I first saw that you had noticed me. There was something separate, self-contained, about you. I had the feeling somebody could be safe with you.
“There were other things that attracted me—and still do. There’s your straight nose and the sharp line to your jaw—it seems to say you can be decisive and unyielding.”
Her index finger reached my forehead and circled my eyes. “And then there’s your eyes—they’re deep set, so it makes it look like you’re watching, always watching. It’s scary—as if you know more than you’ll ever say. Perfect for someone who works at Langley, I guess. Even today I find it hard sometimes to tell whether they are gray or green.”
She kissed my eyelids gently. “They’re your best feature, you know—best by a mile. Don’t forget that,” she said. “They almost make you look intelligent.”
CHAPTER 22
I felt the GreenEnergy jet swing onto the runway and heard the engines escalate to a roar: sunset was over and night had almost fallen.
The reflection of my face faded until all that remained, staring back at me, were the eyes that Rebecca had once spoken so fondly of; but they were neither gray nor green tonight, they were at the golden end of brown. To a lot of Westerners, all Arabs have dark hair and brown eyes, but I have seen plenty of blue eyes on missions that have taken me from Western Sahara all the way to Pakistan. Nevertheless, I was entering an isolated corner of the world where my life would depend on blending in, and their original color would have brought me the one thing I didn’t need: unwanted attention.
In years past, contact lenses would have been the agency’s only option, but over time everyone from Russian border guards to Islamic fundamentalists had learned that all they had to do was throw sand in the face of a suspect and wait. Once the grit worked its way between the lens and the pupil, the pain became unbearable and the man or woman, no matter how good their cover story, had to take out their lenses.
Spurred on by a case in Colombia—in which the leader of a drug cartel, having realized an agent was wearing lenses to change his appearance, gouged out the man’s eyes and dumped him, alive and screaming, outside the US embassy—the CIA’s advanced technology division had pioneered a colored film that was surgically attached to the iris. Impervious to grit and only visible with the help of specialized equipment, it meant an agent could have whatever eye color they needed. In my case it was a golden brown.
I turned and my eyes disappeared from the glass—night had finally crushed the day—and for a moment, in the darkness, on the brink of yet another mission, I thought about how Rebecca would have woken up five days earlier and only then realized I had left again.
The separations had always been difficult for her, rendered even more complicated by the fact that at the outset of our relationship she had no idea what she was getting into. When we met in New York she asked what I did for work and I told her that I was an oil industry analyst on my way to an international conference in Tromsø, Norway.
I really was flying to Norway, the conference was genuine, and I was certainly registered as a delegate, but that was where the truth ran out. I was setting out on a solo mission that would take me into Russia, and those elements were all part of my “legend”—the elaborate cover story I was using.
Six months later, when it was clear that things were serious between us, I told her I wasn’t an analyst and I had nothing to do with any energy business: I worked for the CIA. She stared at me, shocked, taking a long time to process it.
“And what do you do there?” she asked finally. “Kill people?”
“I can’t tell you,” I replied.
She kept staring at me, shock turning to disbelief: not only had I completely misled her, but now I wouldn’t even explain what my job was.
“It’s not me,” I said. “It’s the agency, the policy—I’m allowed to disclose that I work there but nothing more. Nobody can go beyond that.” Still she didn’t say anything—confused, the foundations of her new life shaken. “I know it’s hard,” I said. “But that’s the rule. If you want, I can show you an excerpt—”
She shook her head. “Maybe it is policy but I don’t believe everyone follows it. There must be plenty of people in the intelligence world who know exactly what their partner does.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “There could be a lot of intelligence agents who share information with lovers or spouses, but I’m sure most of them work aboveground.”
“And you work underground, is that it?” she said, seizing on it.
I realized I’d already said too much—if I hadn’t crossed the line, I was perilously close to it. As a Denied Access Area spy, everything was hidden; there was no latitude, there couldn’t be. “Strike that,” I replied, more harshly than I had intended. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
She looked at me, taken aback—I think my uncompromising tone told her I had gone to the edge of something very serious. As a result, entirely by chance, I had convinced her that any more information about my work wasn’t within my gift. So we sat in silence, together but miles apart, Rebecca looking at her clenched hands…
At the time we were the only occupants of the lounge at a small hotel in Maine—at Rebecca’s suggestion we had driven up to look at the fall foliage—and the only sound as the seconds passed was the crackling of the fire. I could tell from her face she was trying to work out whether to go forward or walk away, caught between her heart and her head. “I’d always had this dream,” she said quietly. “To drive up the coast and see the autumn leaves… with someone… someone I was ready to give my heart to.”
I stared at her—now I understood why she had been so keen for us to make the trip. I couldn’t speak for a moment. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.
She shook her head and tried to smile. “Dreams can be pretty stupid, I guess.”
“The opposite,” I replied. “If you want to live it, first you have to dream it.”
Her voice almost cracked. “Well, I certainly dreamed it; I just don’t know if I want to live it.” She paused until she had her emotions under control. “How about you—always your dream to work for the CIA?” She smiled. “Or were they the only people that’d have you?”
“Probably,” I responded, smiling back. “No, I was a junior officer in the navy. Submarines. The agency came later. I had skills—languages—that proved valuable and that’s what they needed.”
She stared at me in surprise; she had no idea I had a natural ability in that regard. “What languages?” she demanded. I looked at her with regret—if she knew the languages, she would know the countries where I specialized.
“Sorry,” she said, realizing. “The rules again?”
I nodded; a log collapsed in the fire, sending up a shower of sparks; and the silence grew again between us. I don’t think either of us knew how to proceed—or retreat. “What would you say to a drink?” she said finally.
Our eyes met and I saw hers soften. In silence she twined her fingers with mine, squeezed them, and I started to think we might be through the worst of it.
I ordered a bottle of wine and—thankfully—we kept talking, haltingly at first but then with greater ease. Spies are taught early it’s more important to listen than to speak, and I was happy for her to take the lead, telling me about the trauma two years earlier when her grandmother, the only family she had ever known, had died. I learned volumes about her in those few hours and it gave her enough time to adjust to a new reality. As far as my work was concerned, she only ever raised the issue one more time.
That was months later, and as I was no more forthcoming then than I had been before, she seemed to realize that no amount of asking would ever change the outcome. And there things would have stayed…
CHAPTER 23
Except secrets are hard to keep—ask any spy—and there are probably few places more difficult than in a home you share with a lover.
A crumpled railway ticket from a faraway place, late-night phone calls from numbers that never answered, flights on private planes with no tracking data, and then the night sweats and injuries—a knife wound stitched in the field, a broken bone or muscles that had been torn apart—and it must have been obvious to Rebecca I didn’t lead the life of an intelligence analyst. Underground, whatever that meant, was obviously a dangerous place.
A few months after our conversation in Maine we began living together, moving onto a leafy street in Maryland where the ranch-style houses were set back from the road and you had to go out of your way to see a neighbor. It was perfect for someone like me. One Friday afternoon, with the boxes barely unpacked, I came home early from Langley, uncharacteristically parked in the driveway, and instead of entering from the back porch I came through the front door. As I walked down the corridor I could hear Rebecca in the kitchen and I was about to greet her as I stepped into the room.
She had her back to me preparing a meal. Sunlight was streaming through the large window, casting a golden light on her hair, and I paused, just looking at her. She took a step along the bench and the sun struck the white dress she was wearing, rendering it almost transparent, revealing her slim body. I was thinking of all the times I had lain in bed and held her close, through all my secret fears and a host of dark memories, when she turned and saw me.
Alarm leapt across her face. “You startled me,” she said.
The loving greeting that had been in my throat died. Her eyes were red rimmed and she’d been crying. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head, indicating it was nothing, but a week earlier I had returned from a trip to Syria: the type of mission that people in my section sometimes described as “bring your own noose.” It turned out as badly as most of us had feared, but I counted myself lucky to have crossed the border into Lebanon with nothing more than a slashed calf and a round from a machine pistol in my shoulder.
The leg had been stitched and the bullet removed at the American Hospital in Beirut, but both wounds were still bandaged when I got home, and I knew from Rebecca’s behavior—stolen glances and sleepless nights—that the injuries had been occupying her thoughts.
“No—tell me,” I said as we stood in the kitchen.
“I’ve barely asked about your work, not since the day when you told me,” she said. “And I haven’t said anything about your injuries this week, I just asked if you were okay,” she continued. “But it’s been hard, very hard—”
“I know, I’m sure it has,” I said.
“No, you don’t know,” she continued harshly. “You made a mistake.” I looked at her, perplexed—no idea what she meant. “You went for a checkup on Monday,” she explained. “And you brought the X-rays of your shoulder home. Unfortunately, you left them on the backseat of the car—so I looked.”
I didn’t respond. I took a deep breath—some intelligence agent, I thought—and a moment later our eyes met. “You should have destroyed them,” she said.
She was right. My only excuse was that my shoulder had been hurting like hell and I had been desperate to get inside and take the painkillers they had given me. Now I knew exactly where this was going. Despite her straitened circumstances but with the constant encouragement of her grandmother, Rebecca had always been a good student, and when she was fourteen—more on a whim than anything else—she had entered an essay competition asking students to describe the value of studying other cultures. For a young woman living in a double-wide trailer in Appalachia, the question must have seemed irrelevant at best, but Rebecca did her research, applied her growing intelligence, and won first prize.
It was to spend a year, all expenses paid, as an exchange student in Japan, and it changed everything. She loved the culture, developed a working knowledge of Japanese, and—in one of those accidents of fate—was hosted in a house where both parents worked as doctors. As a result, most weekends, she accompanied them on their rounds at the University of Tokyo Hospital—one of the best hospitals in the world—and those visits inspired her to return home with a clear idea of the career she wanted to pursue.
She worked two jobs through high school, entered college, gained admission to medical school, and, with the help of several lifetimes’ worth of student loans, was now in her last year of residency as an ER physician at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.
Apart from anything else, it meant that she knew how to read an X-ray, and I watched as she walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 24
She returned a minute later from the garage, carrying the large envelope; took the film out; and held it up to the sunlight.
“In my professional opinion,” she said, turning to look at me and holding my gaze, “there’s only one thing that causes this sort of damage. Unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of it—our ER treats more gunshot trauma than any hospital in DC. It was a bullet, right?”
I nodded—yes, a bullet. She indicated the entry point on the X-ray and traced its path. “An inch to the left, a little lower, you were dead,” she said. Her voice had become even quieter as she tried to keep the emotion out of it but for a moment her eyes welled up.
“I know it was close,” I replied. “The surgeon who took it out told me.”
She suppressed her feelings and shook her head in despair. “Okay, I’m not going to ask you to give away any secrets,” she said coolly. “I just want you to tell me—how will I know?”
“Know what?”
“That I don’t have to keep waiting anymore, that you won’t be coming home? That you’ve been…” Her voice trailed away.
I finished it for her. “That I’ve been lost?” I guess neither of us wanted to say “killed.”
She nodded. “Yeah, lost,” she repeated. “That’s a good word.”
“They have your details, Rebecca—they’ll tell you,” I replied. “I made sure of it a while ago.”
“Thanks for that,” she said ironically. “But how? Is it a phone call, a message to visit some office? Am I taken to Langley?” There was real anger in her voice now. “There’s no way this should be a secret—I just want to know what to expect.”
No, that’s not true, I thought. You want to know what to be frightened of; you want to know what the monster looks like. I glanced out the window: night was almost upon us, and what did it matter if it was supposed to be secret? She was correct, she did have a right to know; the organization I worked for at least owed her that.
“A car will come,” I said at last. “It will be deliberately ordinary, a four-door—one of those vehicles that are meant to be anonymous but scream ‘government’ from every panel. It won’t be traveling slowly. The occupants will know exactly the house they are looking for,” I continued. “They will have called the hospital to make sure that you weren’t working and would have done a drive-by earlier to check that you were at home.”
She sagged, shocked by the surveillance, the quiet, efficient organization of it.
“A man, probably in his forties, will get out of the car and knock on the door,” I said. “He’ll show you an agency photo ID to assure you it’s official. The ID will be genuine but the name will be fake—that’s standard. If you’re sensible, you’ll ask him in,” I continued, keeping it as matter-of-fact as possible. “You probably won’t want to go through this at the door. He’ll say he’s very sorry but your partner, while traveling overseas on government business, was killed in a car wreck, the crash of a charter flight, or something like that.”
“It won’t be true, though,” Rebecca said.
“He might have a news clip, a video from German TV, whatever they’ve been able to create or repurpose from other footage. It will look very real, but no—it won’t be true.”
“And that’s okay, is it?” she asked, her tone clearly indicating it wasn’t.
I shrugged. “It’s not evil. The agency can’t disclose anything about an intelligence operation in case it risks the mission or someone else’s life; on the other hand, they have to account for the loss of a person’s partner. What else can they do?”
