Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  He’s a foreign national and I’m not cleared to so much as kiss a foreign national, let alone live with one. The only way around this restriction is to get engaged, at which point the review board would be allowed to grant an exception. But Anthony doesn’t know where I work, so explaining this need to get married is tough. I suggest that we tie the knot to qualify him for a longer visa. He laughs. “Getting sentimental, huh, Indy?” he asks. It’s a reference to Indiana Jones, and no, I’m not getting sentimental. In fact, I’m increasingly dreading his arrival. But at each fork in the road, I dread the drama of breaking up just a little bit more. And so he boards a flight to Dulles.

  I go and stand there in the greeters’ spot and wait for him, surrounded by people with balloons. He comes through the door, smelling like two years haven’t passed.

  “How was your flight?” I ask.

  “You cut your hair,” he says, and takes the ends in his fingers.

  Outside, a supersized American flag waves above the cars glinting in the parking lot. He talks as we walk, filling my silence with stories of people we once knew. All I can focus on is what’s about to happen. It’s an insanely unfair thing to do to someone you love.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” he says, and we climb into my Jeep, as though home is where we are going.

  Instead, I drive us to a building in Arlington, where a man dressed as a garage attendant checks my ID.

  “Second floor. Leave your phones in the car,” he says.

  Anthony watches me roll up the window.

  “This is gonna be weird,” I tell him, “but just be yourself and we can go.”

  “Are we auditioning for a reality show?” he jokes. I’d forgotten that he jokes when he’s nervous.

  “Kinda,” I say, and put my phone in the glove box.

  Inside, the wall beside the elevator is lined with names and suite numbers. Dentists and accountants. I’m not sure if they’re real or put there for show. If they’re real, they don’t know what goes on in Suite 201. Anthony takes my hand.

  I wonder, as the sliding doors close and reopen, whether I’m doing this because I want to be with him. Or whether I’m doing it because I don’t want to break up with him. And whether those two things are the same.

  “Remove all jewelry” reads a sign propped up on the waiting room table, amid worn copies of The Economist. There is no receptionist. I notice a camera in the corner, above the clock.

  When the inner door finally opens, the man on the other side reads out a string of digits.

  I nod. It’s my Agency identification number, used to avoid revealing real-world identities anytime we can.

  “This way.” He waves us into a beige hallway with geometric prints and looped nylon carpet. The walls are lined with doors.

  He overtakes us and punches a code into a keypad beside one of the door frames. The door opens to a small office. Against one wall is a desk. Against another is a chair. Around the chair, like a halo, is a tangle of wires. Some connect to dials, others to elastics and hooks and belts. On one side, a padded platform stands ready to support a strapped-in forearm.

  “That’s a lie-detector machine,” Anthony says. “I’ve seen them on Jerry Springer.” He laughs. The man doesn’t. “Is it true,” Anthony asks, “you can beat these things by tightening your sphincter?” He’s really nervous now. The tips of his ears are pink. I want to hug him, but I’m worried that the man will think I’m whispering secret instructions.

  “Just be yourself,” I say again, and the man leads me back out into the hallway, into an adjacent room with a window in its wall. I can see Anthony, in his docksiders and teddy bear socks, sitting in the chair, surrounded by the wires. He’s looking at a potted flower on the desk.

  “Be kind to him,” I say.

  “Just doing my job, ma’am,” the man says back. And then he is in the room again, and I watch him hook the wires across Anthony’s chest.

  He sits on the edge of the desk.

  “Can you tell me what day of the week it is,” he begins.

  “Look, what’s going on,” Anthony asks.

  “I’ll explain in a minute. If you could just answer the question, sir.”

  There’s a long pause.

  “Sunday,” Anthony says.

  “Thank you. And what state are we in?”

  “Virginia, I think.”

  “Thank you. Have you ever lied on your taxes?”

  The man’s voice has no inflections. Anthony’s eyes flick to the mirror. At least he knows I’m here. At least he knows he’s not alone.

  “What is this?” he asks again.

  “Really, sir, it would go so much quicker.”

  “Probably, okay, yes, I’ve probably fudged my taxes at some stage. My British taxes, I might add. But out of confusion, okay? Not malice. I’m not an accountant.”

  He’s doing great. The less professional he seems at this, the better. Flustered is fine. Flaky is fine. Even tax fraud is fine. Just so long as no one thinks he’s a spy.

  The man asks a few more baseline questions in his emotionless drone voice. Then he pulls a long piece of paper out of a printer embedded in the desk and studies the squiggly lines. It’s not clear to me if they actually mean anything or if the whole kit and caboodle is a giant prop in a game of psychological warfare. I’m not sure it’s even clear to the man.

  “Look, am I required to be here?” Anthony asks.

  “No. You can leave at any time. But if you leave, you won’t be able to see your fiancée again.”

  For the first time, a look of genuine fear passes across Anthony’s face, and I know it’s occurring to him I am in danger. The man sees it, too.

  “She’s fine. We just need to be certain you don’t pose her—or us—any threat.”

  Anthony looks unsure whether to laugh or run.

  “Amaryllis is employed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency,” the man explains. “Did you know that?”

  Anthony stares at him, looks to the mirror, turns back to the man, shakes his head.

  “I need a verbal response,” the man says.

  “No,” Anthony answers.

  “I need a complete sentence,” the man says.

  Anthony stares at him a beat longer. “No, I did not know that Amaryllis is employed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.” His tone is hollow, as if his innards have been kicked out. The man marks inflection points on the printer paper with a felt-tipped pen. Then Anthony’s voice again, softer: “But I believe she has a good reason if she is.”

  Suddenly, I am crying.

  “Do you currently or have you ever worked for any intelligence organization?”

  “Do you now or have you ever held any affiliation with a violent resistance movement?”

  On and on the man drones.

  “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  Anthony laughs.

  “You guys know its 2003, right?”

  When the exam is over and the man opens the door, I stand there in the nylon-carpeted hallway, bracing for Anthony’s anger. For a second, his face is blank. Then he cracks a grin.

  “Aw, come on. You didn’t think a little thing like a secret identity would scare me off, did you, Indy?”

  It’s like being accepted by some ancient part of myself. He’s the first person from my old world, my real world, to know my truth. And he loves me anyway. It’s almost enough to make me feel whole. And so I ignore the tugging fractures between what was and what is. I drive him home and unpack his bags.

  * * *

  —

  The Agency wastes no time before it starts breathing down our necks, urging us to make good on our promise. We either get married or risk losing the provisional permit to sleep in the same bed. A city hall wedding would confuse my fa
mily and raise too many questions. After all, getting engaged at twenty-three is really only believable if you come across as a serious romantic. That, and Anthony has always wanted a big cathedral wedding. Given what I’ve put him through, it seems like I owe him that much. So it’s real-deal pomp and circumstance or bust.

  I’m working Baghdad kidnapping cases, matching audio samples from beheading videos with street noise from locations where we think American prisoners might be detained. Planning a wedding is the last thing on my mind. But each week I get an increasingly breathless note from the security office, checking on my marriage status as though it’s a matter of national security. Eventually, I call my mom and set about choosing fabric swatches.

  She probes gently as we pick china patterns and examine reception brochures. Am I sure? Aren’t I a bit young? Couldn’t we give it a little more time? I want to tell her that I’ve already signed my life away. I want to tell her that I’m just trying to do what my country is asking of me. I want to tell her that I don’t feel like I have a choice. Instead I say, “When you know, you know.”

  In the evenings, I forgo drinks with my Agency brothers to play board games with Anthony at our local pub. Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit and Risk. We eat French fries and don’t talk about work. There is a salve to it, like the silence between sets of intense music. Some nights, it even feels like enough.

  We get married in the Washington National Cathedral on a bright April afternoon. The building is echoey and vast, but to me it is the most intimate of hiding places, the scene of my high school daydreams and secret, stolen lunchtimes. In its pews and corners, I read Catcher in the Rye, Crime and Punishment, Siddhartha, Of Mice and Men. In its subterranean chapels, I talked to the universe and to Laura and to God. And so I feel safe here, cradled in the arms of an ancient stony friend, as the first bars of “Ave Maria” begin to play and my sisters glide ahead of me down the vaulted aisle.

  I walk toward the altar, past work friends whose real names I’ll never know. Above me, a piece of moon rock hangs suspended in a stained-glass window. I think of my mother reading me The Little Prince, remember the man in that book, counting all the stars he owns without realizing he owns nothing at all. You don’t own a piece of the universe just because you say so, my mother had explained. Someone should tell that to al Qa’ida in Iraq, I think. And to our generals, too, while they’re at it.

  Anthony watches me walk toward him, a knowing look on his face. I can no more give myself to him than I can spend the money I’ve already paid in taxes. The government has taken more than its tithe. The coffers are bare. But he loves me for making the effort, and I love him for letting me try.

  Afterward, an evening rain sweeps in. We jump out of the car on the way home from the reception and share a smoke under the pitter-patter of rain on our umbrella, sitting side by side in our wedding clothes on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  “Bosses’ll be happy now?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure happy’s in their vocabulary,” I say as the rain falls around us like a curtain. “But I am.”

  And in that moment, it’s true.

  * * *

  —

  The next month, I get assigned to CTC/WMD, the portion of the Counterterrorism Center responsible for keeping nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons out of the hands of terrorists. We don’t focus on state programs like Iran’s or North Korea’s. Our purview is strictly nonstate actors—mostly al Qa’ida and its affiliates, but also the smugglers that supply them.

  Traditional targets, like the officials who run the Iranian or North Korean programs, can be approached by CIA officers posing as State Department diplomats. But our targets—arms dealers and their terrorist clients—are just as unlikely to talk with a State Department employee as with an officer from CIA. To them, we’re all U.S. government lackeys, and they avoid the U.S. government—avoid all governments—like the plague.

  To get near our type of targets, the Agency uses a different approach. Instead of playing diplomats, officers under nonofficial cover, known as NOCs, pose as businesspeople or aid workers—anything that gives them access to the world of their targets, while avoiding the stench of officialdom.

  Not only are the field operatives under nonofficial cover, but their commanding base is as well. It’s too risky for a NOC to report to Langley when they visit D.C. That right turn off Route 123 could burn hundreds of thousands of dollars in elaborate cover if the wrong person should happen to see. And so their operations are run out of nondescript office suites, high up in nondescript office buildings, deep in the sprawl of northern Virginia.

  It’s my first time working in a safe house under commercial cover. It’s my first time working in an office building at all. And I savor the banal normalcy of it. The Ruby Tuesday in the lobby. The chitchat of paralegals blotting their lipstick in the bathroom. They have no idea that in their midst we track missing suitcase nukes and intercept strains of smallpox and anthrax. But they play their role. Their faces flash in my mind every time we add a casualty estimate to a given threat report. They are the humans we are protecting, in all their beautiful, everyday glory.

  Behind the double set of doors on the twenty-second floor, we write dozens of those threat reports. Run nightmarish simulations based on plots we intercept on the terror cell wires. The hardest part is conveying the sheer scale to policy makers in terms they can understand. The population of lower Manhattan, every kid in the U.S. public school system, the entire U.S. water supply.

  One report talks about a martyrdom operation where instead of blowing himself up, the bomber would infect himself with a lethal virus and sit on the New York City subway system, breathing, until he dies. We run the simulation. It takes under two weeks to reach urban breakdown point—the death of 10 percent of the city’s population. One attacker, hundreds of thousands of casualties.

  “Guess that’s why they call it asymmetrical warfare,” I say to my deskmate.

  “What did they call Hiroshima?” he asks.

  10

  I feed on the frenetic pace, justify my growing distance from Anthony by repeating like a mantra the importance of my work. In the echo chamber of my Agency brothers, it’s easy. Sipping burnt coffee before dawn or rail tequila after midnight, we judge ourselves—and one another—by the scale of catastrophe we’re averting. “You know the problem with that?” Anthony asks me one night as we weave our way home from an Irish pub crawl with the crew. “You guys have to keep making up apocalypses so you can keep finding self-worth in preventing them.”

  It’s an uncomfortably simple piece of logic. But I picture the pile of red-bordered cables on my desk and say, “Luckily for us, al Qa’ida’s already made up a couple hundred apocalypses to work through before we’ll have to go making up any of our own.”

  Getting married for administrative reasons at twenty-four turns out not to be the best idea, especially a month before moving into the most elite operational training program on earth. I start the CIA Field Tradecraft course in the fall, learning the basics of elicitation, dead drops, bumps, brush passes, and surveillance detection; afterward, some of us will be chosen to undergo further operational training at the rambling covert base in Virginia known as the Farm.

  My small band of classmates and I run around D.C. at all hours of the day and night, marking signal sites with chalk and identifying the license plates of the cars that trail us, sorting the training surveillants from the real ones, high on the fact that the civilians around us are carrying on with their normal days, oblivious to what is happening right in front of them.

  We’re given our first operational assessment: a bump, which means finding a target of interest in some public place and manufacturing a reason to get them talking. The aim is the much-coveted “second meeting”: an opportunity to continue the conversation somewhere else at some later date; this offers the operative the chance to build a relationship and, w
ith it, access to whatever information the target might hold. I know from my time at CTC how precious that information can be. The location of a detainee, delivered hours before she’s to be beheaded. The name of a seller on his way to provide Soviet-era tactical nukes to a contact in al Qa’ida. The security loophole Hizb’allah plans to exploit to walk catastrophic biological agents out of a scientist’s deep freezer.

  The targets we’re given during training are all characters played by case officers, the real-life, battle-hardened spies we trainees aspire someday to be. Some play the roles out of a sense of duty, passing their skills on to the next generation. Others do it out of exhaustion, craving a plum three-year tour back home. The rest do it by way of penalty box, paying their dues after screwing up—or screwing someone—somewhere out there at the tip of the spear.

  Our instructor drops folders on the tables in front of us, one each, all black. Mine opens with a photo of a middle-aged Gorbachev look-alike, minus the port-wine stain, leaning against the bar in a crowded pub. The write-up is sparse. He’s a Kazakh civil servant, it says. He knows about an imminent attack to be carried out with his government’s blessing. He has objected—privately, of course. He was ignored. The local station believes he might be a viable target. Beyond that, there are only a few words of bio. He went to the Kazakh-American University in Almaty and studied business, with a minor in film. He collects American baseball cards. He has a dog. Tacked onto the end is a surveillance report. His home, the ministry, the home of his lover. Sometimes, on Sundays, he likes to go to Panera Bread. I smile at the awkward allowance for a location near the training center. Guess that’s where I’m headed. My eye scans the rest of the page. He sits in the back, it says. He always orders the pie.