The Wonder Test

by Michelle Richmond

  “Rory will be ready tomorrow,” I assure him.

  “Great! Prepared for the test, prepared for life, every student counts!” He turns to Rory. “Now go home and get some sleep. We’re counting on you.”

  Our next stop is Laney Park. Empty. We cruise through the golf course, then up to Crocker Lake. I park in front of the closed gate, open the glove compartment, and take out my flashlight. I don’t tell Rory about the young woman who disappeared from South City in 1987 and was found dead beneath a pile of leaves at this very lake.

  The park has changed a lot since my high school days. Beside the gate, a wooden sign says, “Crocker Lake is proudly maintained by the Greenfield Beautification Committee.” A few yards down the path, two wooden benches sit side by side, and a bed of flowers has been planted within stone borders. The well-tended path curves toward the lake. Beyond the path, the vegetation remains wild and dense.

  “Watch out for mountain lions,” I tell Rory.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m not kidding. One of them killed a deer on Robinwood Lane right after we moved in. You’re not in New York City anymore, kiddo.”

  “Caroline?” I call, as we make our way along the two-mile loop.

  Rory joins in. “Caroline?” It’s eerie, the sound of our voices cutting through the silence as twigs snap beneath our feet. By the time we get back to the Jeep, we have a few bug bites but no answers.

  We drive around for another half hour. It’s just past eleven when we finally give up. At home, Rory is jittery. Realizing we never had dinner, I make him a tuna melt, a bowl of strawberries and cream, and a glass of milk. I slide the sandwich across the counter. “Here, omega-3.”

  He eats the sandwich with one hand, typing on his phone with the other. At 11:29, his phone pings with a text.

  “Caroline!” His face lights up with joy and relief as he reads aloud, “I’m fine. Something came up. Talk soon.” His shoulders relax, his face softens, and he is himself again.

  Where have you been? he texts back. Can we talk?

  Ping. Don’t worry, Friend. All is well.

  He sets his phone on the counter, Caroline’s text still visible on the glowing screen.

  “I guess I overreacted,” Rory says. “God, the Rekowskis must think you’re insane.” He takes his dishes to the sink. On his way out of the kitchen, he stops and turns around. “Thank you, though, for helping me stalk my girlfriend.”

  “Anytime.”

  30

  When time travel is finally invented, who will be in the most danger? Provide a plausible timeline and supporting scientific data.

  At traffic circle Monday morning, the A team is out directing cars and greeting students for day one of the Wonder Test: Miss Hartwell, the dainty English teacher with a shock of white hair; Mr. Cartwright, the science teacher who moonlights as the lead singer in a ska band; and Kobayashi. Rory points out Dopey Barrett, the kid who defeated him in the student council elections, standing beside a table covered with blue paper bags. A banner hanging behind the table declares, BLUBERRY: THE PERFECT BRAIN FOOD.

  “What’s that about?” I ask Rory. “And why’d they misspell ‘blueberry’?”

  “It’s the name of his dad’s software start-up. They also own an organic blueberry farm near Clear Lake. They’ve been passing out berries every day as a publicity stunt.”

  Kobayashi stands next to Dopey, waving at parents, greeting students. Rory gets out of the Jeep and scans the crowd, looking for Caroline.

  At 1:25 in the afternoon I arrive at George’s designated spot on the Bay Trail. I sit on the bench, waiting. I’ve been looking forward to the meeting, but now I’m distracted, worried about Caroline, running her text message through my mind: Don’t worry, Friend. All is well. It has been nagging at me. It doesn’t sound like Caroline. Call it instinct, call it statement analysis, call it what you will: one thing I know for certain. Something is off.

  At 1:29, George appears on the path, alone. He sits down beside me. Without a word, he hands me the envelope to count.

  “What, no run today?”

  He points at his right foot and cringes. “Plantar fasciitis is a bitch.”

  I quickly thumb through the stack of fifty-dollar bills. Like me, George pays his sources in fifties whenever possible. I’m the one who turned him on to the idea. Every time you pay a source, regardless of the amount, you create goodwill and generate personal equity. Since most people don’t carry around fifty-dollar bills in their daily life, if you pay them with a stack of fifties, then you get a little bonus bump every time they spend one. Even if it’s just a flash, a quick memory of the moment you paid them, it fosters a positive association with you.

  On the crudest level, some agents measure the strength of a relationship with the equation: “number of contacts” multiplied by “total amount of time on target.” But the equation is too simplified, overlooking myriad subtle methods for strengthening the bond. Since personal contact is limited in a clandestine relationship, the noncontact methods are key. For me, paying in fifty-dollar bills is just one way to spark repeated, safe memories of the relationship, thereby creating additional relationship equity.

  I count $9,950, just under the reporting limit for outbound US passengers. I pull out the receipt, write in the amount and the date, and initial.

  “I told him one forty-five, so we have a few minutes to talk,” George says. “Good news. LeSaffre said we can’t have you working for free. He sent a memo asking personnel to reactivate you part-time.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  My tone must have been harsher than I intended, because George looks slightly hurt. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  I touch his arm. “I am. Thank you. I just feel like I’m not finished here. And Rory seems to like it.”

  “I knew you’d say that. LeSaffre says you can work from here. He said to get him something on the French diplomats.”

  “French diplomats aren’t exactly the big white whale, George.”

  “No, but this fellow Donadieu is still a valuable target, and he has some interesting contacts in Moscow. No pressure. You in?” George has a velvety smooth voice that somehow wills a person to agree with him.

  “Of course I’m in.”

  A figure appears in the distance, walking toward us. Wheeling.

  “Bastard is always early,” George mutters.

  “How’s it going with this guy?”

  “He’s producing a ton.”

  “Good stuff?”

  “Excellent. I’m getting tired of typing. Twenty-three IIRs last week alone. Let me know if you could use a hand on the French diplomat.”

  “As a matter of fact, I need to track him down.”

  George gives me a confused look. “Wait, you’re already working on it?”

  “It’s more of a personal matter. As I mentioned before, Rory is friends with his daughter. Donadieu suddenly dropped off the map, but so did the girl. I don’t know if it’s related.”

  “Sounds like a job for Malia Lind at HQ.”

  Wheeling is a few dozen yards away. “Quick, before he gets here, how’d you decide on the name Wheeling? I don’t know the reference.”

  “Joy Harjo, from In Mad Love and War.” He recites, “I don’t know the ending. / But I know the legacy of maggots is wings.” Wheeling is a few steps away now. “The poem is set in Wheeling, West Virginia,” George says. “It fits him perfectly, don’t you agree?”

  “Too early to tell about the wings.”

  We stand together to greet Wheeling. “Let’s do this, Damien,” I say.

  Wheeling shakes George’s hand and gives me a sweaty hug. Either he likes me or he just likes the money that materializes whenever I’m around. After the exchange, the two of them walk off together.

  Being in this familiar triangle, going through the
familiar motions, is comforting. It reminds me that everything’s still ticking, that this whole world, just below the surface, is still there for me whenever I’m ready to return. I’m not sure I’d know how to do any other job. Every time I see George, I’m back in my element, a fish returned to water.

  I take the long path back to the car, feeling more optimistic, recalibrated. It’s good to reengage with that other person I was, not so long ago—not quite a maggot sprouting wings, but not quite a caterpillar emerging as a butterfly either. In this line of work, we live somewhere in the middle, between two extremes: ugliness and beauty, life and death.

  31

  Provide examples to illustrate the term “diminishing returns” without providing so many examples as to achieve diminishing returns.

  “How did the test go?” I ask when Rory climbs into the front seat, alone.

  “Good, I think. I wrote an essay on modern alienation in Martin in Space.”

  “So why the gloomy face?” I ask, although I’m afraid I already know the answer.

  “I haven’t heard from Caroline since that text last night.”

  “Why don’t we swing by her house again?”

  As we cruise through the wrought iron gate of Caroline’s estate, I have a knot in my gut. Instinctively, I turn down the music on the car stereo, bracing for bad news.

  When I first received word of Fred’s accident, I was in our apartment, washing dishes, taking the morning off after a long night at work. I had turned the music up loud to drown out the thoughts in my head. I’ve always found it difficult to get to sleep after operations, no matter how exhausted I am. Usually, I end up cleaning the house until I’m sufficiently relaxed to go to bed. Most agents have a similar post-op ritual, for two reasons. First, ops like search warrants and arrests create adrenaline spikes, and you need time to come down from them. Second, search warrants have taught me that American homes are dirtier and more cluttered than you would ever imagine. Combing through jumbles of paperwork, rank-smelling shoes, broken toys, used batteries, abandoned projects, and far worse will inspire any agent to get her own house in order.

  That day, Rory was at school and Fred was in a cab, headed downtown for a meeting. My phone rang. I remember the moment with startling clarity, like when you press Pause on a streaming video and instead of pausing, it moves forward slowly, one frame at a time, frozen but not frozen, forward motion interrupted but not entirely stopped. The stereo was playing a Mendoza Line song, “Love on Parole.” As I reached to turn the volume down, preparing to answer the phone, I listened to one more line: “The room readied itself for that transfer of power / When you rode right through in your penultimate hour.”

  I can hear the song so clearly, even now. I can see my hand reaching toward the volume knob, the cell phone buzzing on the kitchen counter. Looking back, I understand how completely unprepared I was for that moment. Since then, every time I hear that song, or when the lyrics unexpectedly flit through my mind, unwelcome but unavoidable, everything comes flooding back: the horror of that moment, the collapse of our world, the avalanche of grief. In behavioral analysis, it’s called a linguistic trigger.

  I’m not sure what will happen in the coming hours or when Rory and I step up to that door. But I feel dread welling up, a certainty that things are going to get worse. I don’t want some Dylan song to be a land mine that triggers Rory’s sadness for the rest of his life.

  At the door, Rory hesitates, as if he too has suddenly been struck by that wall of inexplicable dread. I press the bell. The orchestral chime carries through the house, and we stare anxiously at each other. Rory bounces up and down on the balls of his feet. He rings the bell again, then lifts the knocker and pounds the iron against the heavy oak door.

  We hear footsteps in the foyer. The door opens a crack to reveal Blandine in her pressed navy uniform. I speak with her in a rapid-fire stream of French that belies my story of Berlitz tapes and the West Side Highway.

  Blandine tells me she last saw Caroline yesterday morning before the practice test, but that doesn’t mean Caroline hasn’t been home since then.

  Wouldn’t she have known if Caroline came home? I ask.

  “Cette maison est très grande, et la fille est très calme,” she responds. No matter how big the house or how quiet the girl, it seems unlikely that Caroline could be in the house without Blandine knowing.

  The first consul and his wife and daughter come and go at odd hours, she says. They do not always inform her of their schedules. She is here to maintain the estate, nothing more. A personal assistant tends to other family affairs, but Caroline’s mother fired the assistant three weeks ago and she hasn’t been replaced.

  “Pourquoi?”

  “Elle manque de savoir-vivre.”

  Bad manners? Judging from Blandine, the bar seems low. Either the assistant’s manners were atrocious, or there’s something Blandine isn’t telling me.

  “Peut-être,” she says, “la fille rejoint ses parents lors de leur voyage.”

  “She says Caroline might have joined her parents on their trip,” I tell Rory. “Did she ever mention that she might meet them?”

  “No.” His forehead creases with worry. “If she planned to meet them, she would have told me.”

  “Could they have summoned her?” I ask in French.

  Blandine shrugs. “Je ne sais pas.”

  “Caroline is missing,” I say. “Aren’t you concerned?”

  “Ce n’est pas grave.”

  If a missing teen isn’t serious, I wonder, what qualifies as serious? And what about Caroline’s parents? Don’t they have a right to know she hasn’t shown up? After several minutes of stonewalling, Blandine pulls back her shoulders and declares, “Je travaille pour mon pays. Je ne travaille pas pour cette fille. Maintenant, vous devez aller!”

  And then the door slams in our faces.

  32

  A force F acts at point P on a rigid body, as shown in the figure below, where R is the distance from point O to point P, and θ is the angle at which the force acts. What is the torque exerted on the rigid body about point O?

  Two streets over, beyond the range of the security cameras on Caroline’s estate, I park the Jeep.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “I need to send a quick message.”

  Malia Lind has inhabited the same tiny, windowless office on the fourth floor of headquarters for twenty-three years. Before she was an analyst, she was an intelligence officer in the navy. With an admiral from New Jersey for a father and a forensic pathologist from Brazil for a mother, Malia has service and curiosity in her blood. She is left to her own devices, tasked with researching all of the historical, unsolved espionage cases.

  Malia is brilliant, maybe on the spectrum. She gets obsessed, looking at each case from dozens of angles, searching for the elusive nugget of information that will finally break it open. Usually, this means finding the exact guy who would know an exact piece of information, tracking him down, finding the perfect agent to do the pitch, and creating the extensive, complicated op that might make it all coalesce into a recruitment.

  Malia’s passion for these forgotten cases is infectious. In the past, when she asked me to meet someone, I always said yes. It often meant I had to drop everything and be on a plane to some far-flung location within hours. Each time Malia’s number flashed across my phone screen, I felt a rush of nervous excitement. I knew I’d soon be packing, making excuses to Fred and Rory, to my boss and my coworkers, apologizing to everyone whom I was surely going to disappoint in the coming days.

  The last time Malia called me for one of these last-minute gigs was Iceland. The trip went well, but now, whenever I see a news item or travel ad for Iceland, I think of the hours I wasted in that northern outpost when I should have been at home with Fred, enjoying our time together during what would prove to be his final months. The most difficult part of the equ
ation is this: if I hadn’t gone to Iceland, the calendar might have shifted, time altered in some unknowable way, and he would still be here now. Rory would still have a father.

  Asking for a favor means I have to be willing to return it. At the moment, there’s probably only one thing Malia needs from me: she needs me to go back to Iceland, do another meeting, and finish this thing we started.

  We’re approaching the anniversary of the last meeting, and I’m certain the source has been expecting an email from me. On paper, he’s known as Red Vine. I open the encrypted messaging app Confide and type: I need you to check some “diplomats” for me discreetly. Also, let me know if the interest and money are there for another Red Vine trip.

  Seconds later, her response arrives: Money and interest always there if you’re willing. I’ve been saving part of my budget for you.

  I send Malia what I know about Caroline’s parents: Official surname Donadieu, French first consul and his wife assigned to San Francisco since last year, frequent travel to Vienna and North Africa. Can you find out where they are now?

  On it, she replies.

  Rory cracks his knuckles. “Are you worried?”

  I can’t lie to him. “I’m not not worried,” I admit. I think of Gray Stafford’s cryptic message to me on movie night. I think of the blonde woman telling Caroline not to show up for the test. Of course, there’s also the personal assistant fired by Caroline’s mother three weeks ago, but my gut tells me that has nothing to do with Caroline.

  We drive the streets of Greenfield again, searching. Then, in concentric circles, we widen to Burlingame, San Mateo.

  “Has Blandine ever seemed hostile toward Caroline?” I ask Rory.

  “No, she’s almost invisible. She doesn’t pay any attention to us unless we go into the kitchen. She thinks snacking is a mortal sin.”