Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  We’re so used to expressing fake emotions over fake dinner conversations about days spent at fake art fairs that the realness of it startles me.

  “Beautiful,” I say.

  “Strong.” He nods.

  “Wonder when it beat for the first time,” I muse, watching the Shanghai streets blur by, ducks and chickens strung across alleyways and families balancing on motor scooters. “Crazy it was just a bunch of matter hanging out in my body, and then it got made into a heart. And then that heart started beating. It’s pretty incredible, right? That we made life?”

  Soon, we learn that our baby is a girl. “Wonder woman,” Dean says. I’m relieved, especially given how hard it was to find out, securing a special dispensation to ask our child’s gender. In a country where many parents are still permitted only one child, boys are prized for their future earning potential, and the Chinese government is trying to prevent families from aborting their female babies by keeping fetal gender a state-mandated secret until birth. It’s a security issue for them. Twentysomething men now outnumber women so dramatically, Beijing has opened a new class of visas for single Southeast Asian women. Married men are less likely to protest in Tiananmen Square, or so the logic goes.

  We start to incorporate baby shops into our surveillance detection routes, oohing and aahing over soft pink blankets and stuffed furry animals while watching the door for Chinese intelligence officers trailing us to see if we’re operational. Dean’s home more often now. He’s cut down on his ops schedule to be sure he’ll be around when the baby comes. The waiting makes him antsy. He fills the lane house with a kind of energetic turbulence, thrashing against the stillness with CrossFit workouts and video games. But between the simulated battles of the Xbox and the actual violence of his sleep, he finds peace in the blurry crystal ball of the ultrasound pictures.

  “Do you think she has my nose?” he asks, holding the flimsy printout up to the light. I run facial recognition software between Dean’s photo and the grainy scan.

  “Twenty-four percent match!” I announce, laughing.

  “Hey, that’s enough, right?” It’s a reference to how low the threshold is for the United States to render a suspect to a black site or Guantánamo. This is the first time I’ve heard Dean acknowledge the injustice of some renditions. I crawl across the daybed.

  “I love you,” I tell him, not for show.

  The last time we’re in Washington before my due date, I suggest that we update our E&E plan. Every CIA operative has one—an “escape and evasion plan” covering how to get out of the country if everything goes to hell. The current plan we have on file involves an extremely long swim, along with some overnights under piles of leaves and a few other stretches that don’t seem especially practical with an infant in tow. “We’ll have to think about that,” comes the reply. “Never had anyone deliver a baby while under nonofficial cover.”

  When I see my mother, she suggests: “Maybe you should have her in the States.”

  “Mom, millions of babies are born in China,” I counter. “That’s where my art business is.”

  Not for the first time and not for the last, my mother’s words would soon ring in my ears.

  * * *

  —

  I go into labor in Shanghai on the first of September 2008—Labor Day, as it turns out, fresh after the end of the Chinese Olympics, with homemade fireworks still bursting outside the hospital windows, bright reds and oranges against the billowing blackness of smoke. My mom and sisters are there. The previous day, my mother came over and rode a bicycle in circles around our living room floor while Dean cooked dinner. I had never loved her more. This impossibly beautiful human, whose body pulled me together from nothing and whose spirit electrified me with everything. I went to bed, as early contractions took hold, conscious of one single prayer: “Lord, let me be my mother.”

  A few hours into labor, the nurses suggest Pitocin and the baby’s heartbeat begins to race. Immediately the medical team switches from Mandarin, which I somewhat understand, to Shanghainese, which I don’t. I resist the temptation to ask them to translate, knowing it will slow them down, and the medical training I have is only field triage—tying of tourniquets and removal of shrapnel. They rush me to an operating theater, give me an epidural, and pull our daughter, purple and milky, from an incision in my stomach. Dean captures it, National Geographic photographer that he is. And the hardest twelve hours of my life begin. Gazing at my crumpled daughter tucked into an acrylic container beside my bed, I’m still paralyzed from the neck down—I can’t hold her, can’t move a single finger, though I try with the might I imagine it would take to lift a car. They tell me it’s a side effect of a hastily executed emergency epidural. They say I should regain feeling in the next forty-eight hours. I’ve never heard of that happening. Flooded with drugs and hormones, I don’t believe them.

  In my woozy mind’s eye, I see images of Alexander Litvinenko, dying in his hospital bed after Russian intelligence dosed him with radioactive poison. I run through possibilities, a covert operative lying helpless in a hostile country. Has Beijing gotten to the nurses? Or Moscow? Or Tehran? Is it safe to sleep? Will I wake? Will I hold my daughter? Or is this it for me now? Am I a paraplegic, forever frozen out of the real life I barely got to taste?

  I fall asleep and wake up in the same room in my dream. “I can’t hold her,” I say, “my arms don’t work.” “Don’t worry,” I hear my own voice reply, “we have so many arms. Look, there’s another pair of our arms there.” In the dream, I’m watching a nurse arrive and scoop my daughter into her arms. And suddenly I am my daughter, looking up into this nurse’s eyes. And I am also the nurse, looking down at this face, not one hour old. And I’m looking at myself, nurse to baby, baby to nurse, and thinking how smart the person is who invented the mirror or how else would life see itself, and I remember the thing Kallistos Ware said, the Greek Orthodox priest from my college at Oxford, with the robes and the beard and the big, heavy cross—“In the end, Amaryllis, it’s as Saint Augustine said: the entire universe is just Christ, loving himself.” And then it goes dark.

  The next day, before I even open my eyes, I try to move my fingers. They brush against my palm, creaky but obedient. I am flooded with relief and, for the first time, scoop my daughter into my arms.

  * * *

  —

  We name her Zoë Victoria, meaning “Life triumphs.” It’s the simplest devotion I can think of, testimony to the resilience of life, of love, of light against death and fear and darkness.

  My mother and sisters leave and Dean, Zoë, and I return to the Shanghai lane house. We playact at being a normal family for the cameras and the microphones and quiet old Ayi, who reports back to Beijing. Only nobody has briefed Zoë on the mission, and she doesn’t play her role right, doesn’t do the things in the books on the day that she’s meant to. And deep inside my stoic, silent exterior, I begin to panic, begin to crawl in my skin the way my mom had with Ben before his particular brand of genius emerged. Eye contact, the book says, that’s the first experience you’ll share. But we don’t. Not at all. And the harder I try, the more diligently my daughter avoids locking windows and granting me access to her soul.

  It’s a new feeling, this Hydra in my gut. Counterterrorism, no problem. Counterproliferation, piece of cake. But this tiny infant creature’s distant gaze leaves me pale and panicked. I jump to conclusions. I stop eating. I pore over Internet forums and self-diagnose, make bargains with God, until finally, uninvited, Dean takes my hand. He says, quite simply, “Babies are unpredictable—let’s let her lead.” It is simple and strong, like a stone obelisk I can see through the fog, and I let the fear go a little and hold on to Zoë instead.

  Slowly I ramp back up to my normal pace of operations, flying overseas with Zoë wrapped against my body, while I work to prevent imminent attacks. Never to war zones, but meeting arms dealers turned sources in any co
untry carries risks and I work with a new, almost obsessive care. I run foreign surveillance detection routes with her strapped to my chest. Take notes after secret car meetings with her snoring gently under my chin, tuck papers into concealment devices stuffed with her diapers to relay back to HQS via my covert communications device in the darkness of home. Each time, I weigh the danger of wherever I’m going against the danger of leaving my infant daughter without me in a hostile country, where the housekeeper works for the security service. There’s the ever-present temptation to choose neither, to throw in the towel and head for the safety of retirement and home, but with each new threat, there are the conjured faces of those children—just as innocent as mine—whose lives hang in the balance. Babies in their strollers in the parks of New York City and London, Bangkok and Istanbul.

  Between operations, I sit with her at the Buddhist temple in Shanghai, watching the old women feed the koi fish offerings. Here is a fragment of me, living outside my body. A fragment of me I can’t compel to pretend to be normal, pretend to be anything. A fragment of me independent and new enough to refuse to play some game of make-believe.

  “I get it,” I tell her. “You’re not the theoretical baby in the book, who makes eye contact on day one. You’re Zoë, who makes eye contact when she believes there’s something real to see. You’re a raw human spirit in a tiny, brand-new spaceship, searching for the soul that is your mom. And so far, your sensors haven’t found her. I don’t blame you, you know. I’m not sure where she is, either.”

  I make sure nobody can hear us, and then I talk to her about being afraid. I talk to her about wanting to be known. I talk to her about the night in the hotel bathroom and my dream the night she was born. I tell her all kinds of things I’ve never said aloud, or even inside my own head. And she looks out at the middle distance mostly, when she’s not snoring or guzzling my milk.

  Then one day, sitting at the temple, I lose my train of thought, completely absorbed in following a koi as he nibbles the pellet offerings bobbing on the water. I’m smiling, without meaning to, and instead of returning to my confessions, I say, absentmindedly, “We probably look really weird to that fish, huh, Zoë?” And when I look down, her eyes find mine and she smiles.

  For a moment, I forget to worry about who I am and who I am pretending to be. And I see through the eyes of a fish. By accident, really. And in that moment, my daughter’s sensors find me, her real mom, fear and anxiety stripped away, childlike and joyful, seeing the fish-eye view of things, just as easily as can be.

  I start laughing. And she starts laughing. Her huge green-brown eyes looking steadily back into mine. And I’m flooded by a sudden, forceful wellspring of connection, like I’m experiencing eternity. And the old woman who sweeps the grounds starts laughing too, with stained, ancient teeth. “Welcome out of head,” she says. I look at her quizzically. “Beautiful day,” she adds and grins, gesturing to the sky.

  And so it is that I learn that Zoë sees me when I forget myself, that I’m real only when I’m not aware of being anything at all, which simultaneously makes sense and no sense whatsoever. Guess that’s what I get for hanging out beneath a giant smiling Buddha. “Joke’s on us,” I say to Zoë, as we get up to walk home.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve never underestimated the danger of living undercover in a hostile country. I’ve spent the days of my career in a hyperfocused present, knowing in my quiet subconscious, when I hear about this upcoming election or that movie due out in the spring, that I might not be around to see how it turns out. There’s no drama in this. It’s simply been my reality, in the way we all understand that we might not live to see humans walk on Mars. My time frame has just been a little shorter. The reality of the work.

  But my daughter’s hand closes tightly around my finger when I hold her now, and life seems harder to part with than it used to. As I walk the Shanghai streets, I watch the street sellers who spy on us with a swelling dread, equal and opposite to the swelling love with which I watch her. I feel the magnitude of what could be taken from us and how painful it would be to endure.

  As the weather warms, I start working outside in our walled garden, where I’m less aware of the cameras and Zoë can watch the birds beside me. Still, Ayi hovers about us like a mist, so we are never quite free of Beijing.

  One morning, I eat breakfast while making some notes at the garden table. Ayi sweeps the ground close enough to sneak glances at my scrawl. The notes are fabricated, intended to reinforce my cover as an art dealer. I scribble fictions, and she hovers behind me to consume them. Zoë bats at a mobile, suspended over her bouncy chair.

  “Preparing for the India Art Fair,” I say. Ayi nods, stony-faced. Zoë turns away.

  We’ve done this dance a hundred times. I lie. Ayi lets me. But something about Zoë’s response makes me set down my pen. I turn my face up to Ayi’s. She’s blank and hard.

  Without knowing I’m going to say it until I hear my own words in the air, I ask her, “Do you ever get scared?”

  She startles, as if she’s walked through a cobweb. Then she nods.

  “Yeah, me too,” I say. Zoë turns toward us and gives the mobile a pat. “I’m scared I won’t be a good mom.”

  Ayi sits down. She hasn’t done that before.

  “I’m scared I’m not beautiful to my husband anymore,” she says.

  We talk for a minute longer, enthralled by each other’s realness. Then a gap in the conversation lasts a beat too long for comfort and we fall back into our respective suits of armor. She stands up, hard again. But as she picks up the broom, she says, “If you need privacy, the second-floor bathroom is quiet.”

  We’ve suspected for a while that the second-floor bathroom isn’t wired for surveillance. That doesn’t surprise me. It’s the gruff confirmation that knocks the breath out of me, volunteered from haunting, hostile Ayi. She nods one more time, as if to confirm her capacity for independent decisions, and shuffles inside. I turn to Zoë, with eyes that say, “Well, would ya look at that!” It’s probably my imagination, but Zoë’s delighted smile seems to say, “I told you so.”

  Like a tiny, wrinkled Yoda, Zoë teaches me to use that Force, turning her little eyes away when I start projecting my cover story, lighting up when I drop the act. Like any clumsy Jedi apprentice, I struggle to control it at first. Can’t access the raw humanness on demand, can’t steer it when I do. Half the time, I’m not sure I want to. I’m undercover in a hard-target country, after all. Not the best time for radical honesty. But oddly, the more I practice, the more I find that letting my guard down and climbing inside the realness of other people makes me feel more secure, not less.

  It happens next during a tense meal with Dean at a restaurant in Shanghai. I’ve heard via my covcom that Jakab has information about a planned attack in Karachi. His buyers in the al Qa’ida affiliates there may want to try their hand at a dirty bomb—an explosive device laced with fissile uranium to coat everything it doesn’t destroy with radiation. Dirty bombs are more a tool of mass disruption than mass destruction. They don’t trigger an actual nuclear reaction, so they’re unlikely to add more than a few hundred to the casualty count. But they still make the vicinity of the attack uninhabitable for years, possibly decades. And any use of uranium would cause a worldwide panic. For a terror group perpetually in search of headlines, that makes it a gateway drug. Next stop: a suitcase nuke or a full-on ten-kiloton weapon in the streets of New York. We know they’ve already been inquiring. It’s the path we work day and night to stop al Qa’ida from treading. And from Jakab’s note, it sounds like they’re about to take the first step.

  The problem is, I can’t take the baby to Pakistan. It’s been classified as a war zone for the purposes of family-deployment guidelines. But the timeline is too short and the potential cost too high to try stopping the attack long-distance. I’ve got to be on the ground. It will be my first time away
from Zoë since she was born.

  Dean and I sit in a restaurant in Shanghai and discuss it in clumsy layers of code, a parallel universe where artists are terrorists and paintings are weapons.

  “It’s a tough market there,” he says, and I nod. “You’re never going to convince these guys to stop collecting. Just switch out the Munch with a Matisse and hope they don’t notice.” He means Edvard Munch, the painter of The Scream, that hellish, flat depiction of a nightmare sunset, etched around the hollow face of our most ghoulish selves. Human annihilation, drawn in oil on cardboard. I know he means a nuclear weapon. And the bucolic calm of Matisse is a nuclear attack avoided. He’s suggesting that we switch out the uranium with an inert blob of clay.

  “They’ll notice when they hang it,” I say.

  “So fuck ’em,” he answers, ripping a piece of bread in two.

  “Our guy isn’t the only art broker in the world. If they think he screwed them, they’ll just go find a Munch somewhere else.” And kill Jakab in the process, I add with my eyes. Dean looks like that wouldn’t be the worst thing.

  “Brokers who sell stolen paintings aren’t your friends,” he says, and I grimace. It’s not the best idea to talk about theft, even in the coded context of art. Beijing is just as liable to arrest foreigners for business fraud as they are for espionage. I glance around us, but all seems quiet.

  “Maybe not, but he’s our partner. We need to protect him.” We fall silent as the waiter brings our crepes. He is French and bulbous-nosed, as though he has enjoyed a few too many bottles of Bordeaux in his time. He arranges our plates in front of us with a flourish, then returns to the kitchen.

  “I can use a different artist to introduce me to the buyers,” I continue. “He’ll tell them I’m from the museum. Just play it straight and leave Jakab out of it.” The museum is what we call the U.S. government. The other artist I have in mind is a terror cell go-between we’ve worked with in the past—a courier the al Qa’ida affiliates trust to broker conversations on Pakistani soil.