Fidelity

by Jan Fedarcyk

  “We’ll take it,” Torres said, “we’ll take it. Who you going to be working for up in the big city?”

  “Susan Jeffries, in counterintelligence.”

  Torres laughed. “You’re working for Frowny?” He shook his head as if Kay had just told him she was planning on jumping off something high onto something hard. Then he beckoned the barman for two shots of Jameson. “Good luck.”

  “ ‘Frowny’?”

  “You never read John le Carré? What the hell kind of spy are you, Kay? Frowny, like Smiley from the old novels.”

  “I did read John le Carré,” Kay said, “although none of you apparently did with any clarity, because the joke with Smiley was of course that he never smiled. And besides, his name was George Smiley, it wasn’t a nickname.”

  “Oh,” Torres said, shrugging. “I guess we’re not as clever in the FBI as they are at MI6.”

  “A bunch of loose-tongued intellectuals, the lot of them.”

  “God bless America,” Torres said.

  Two shots of Jameson disappeared down two gullets.

  “So it’s counterintelligence work for you, then? Going to make sure the Russians don’t invade North Dakota? I saw that in a movie once.”

  “That sounds like a stupid movie.”

  “It was, but I think they remade it.”

  “Sounds like the kind of thing they would do.”

  Torres laughed. “You’re all right in my book, Ivy,” Torres said. From Torres it represented a ringing endorsement. “Not everyone has what it takes to do this job, but I think you do. If you can keep your head down and manage not to piss anyone off.”

  “God willing,” Kay said happily, calling for the check.

  PART 2

  Nothing is more common on earth than to deceive and be deceived.

  —JOHANN GOTTFRIED SEUME

  10

  GROUP CHIEF Mike Anthony cupped his hands in the basin, filled them half with water, dumped it and brought his damp fingers up against his hairless scalp. Balding since his twenty-third birthday, homely long before that. Anthony looked at the reflection in the mirror with the sort of unflinching honesty that he had always prized as the foremost asset of the intelligence professional: the ability to see reality as it is, rather than as one might wish it to be. How many otherwise excellent case officers, women of sharp mind, men of firm character, had come to ruin because of this simple inability to identify and adhere to the hard, unpleasant, sharp-edged facts of existence? Insisting all was well when this was clearly not the case, maintaining absolute certainty in their sense of direction even as it led them off a cliff? A truth was a truth was a truth, however unpalatable one found it.

  He dried his fingers on a paper towel, threw it into the bin and fixed his tie. No, never a handsome man, not the one you first noticed on walking into a bar, but then again Anthony’s was not a trade that prized good looks particularly. Indeed, his sheer unobtrusiveness had proved a virtue on more than one occasion. Once, many years earlier, before he had become firmly ensconced in the bosom of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when his cover had been blown on some or other ploy in some or other country, the local security services had put out an all-points bulletin for a “bald man in a suit,” a sobriquet that Anthony still looked back on with some pride. Was this not the ultimate compliment for a CIA Case Officer? Faceless and unnoticeable, pulling strings without anyone ever being the wiser?

  The ideal, though—like most ideals—was rarely reached. Anthony looked at himself one last time in the mirror, studying the laugh lines around his eyes, deeply etched as a delineation of his character, although he could not have been accused of any excess of jocularity. Not so many more years at this, he told himself, a promise often repeated that would someday need to be followed through on. But not yet. He grabbed his briefcase and went to start the meeting he had been dreading for the better part of a month.

  The Associate Deputy Director of Operations was ten years older than Anthony, bumping close up against retirement and doing everything he could to hide it. His hair was the jet-black of a twenty-year-old, but if you were perceptive—and Mike Anthony was very perceptive—you could make out some gray amongst the roots. He wore a suit that was expensive, old-fashioned, out of style but still handsome. He sat at the boss end of a big wooden desk, and he had an unlit cigar in his mouth. Anthony wondered, as he did whenever he had to meet with the ADDO, if it was the same cigar or if he had a box of them in some drawer of the giant bureau, a dozen Churchills well chewed.

  “Mike,” he said, gregarious and expansive as ever. “Have a seat, let’s talk through this thing.”

  “Director,” Anthony said, nodding and accepting the seat.

  The meeting was an informal formality. Informal because the ADDO liked it that way: loose ties and first names. A formality because they had only the one option set before them, and no conversation could get around that fact.

  “Sounds like we got a little bit of a mess out there old Moscow way.”

  “I think that’s exactly what we have, sir,” Anthony answered.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Which Anthony did then: a retread of what was in the report, all things that the ADDO already knew. Unhappy to do what needed doing, the ADDO would require an hour of cajoling, of pushing and prodding, although in the end he would follow the only course available to them. Resentfully, with some annoyance at the man doing the shoving.

  The ADDO did not particularly like Anthony and had made that clear over the years in any number of ways big and small. Anthony had never been quite sure why—some long-forgotten insult, or a simple clash of styles, perhaps. He did his best not to hold the ADDO’s antipathy against him. The two things that a lifetime working as a spy had taught Anthony—there were many things but the two main things—were an eye for human weakness, and sympathy towards it. People were not black or white, not good or evil, not one thing or another. They were many things; they were vices and virtues overlapping, sometimes so close that it was difficult to see where one left off and the other began. The ADDO had been a great man once—never an easy man, perhaps never a friendly one, but by the standards of their trade he had been a giant. Coming up through the ranks, Anthony had been weaned on the stories of the ADDO’s victories, snatched from the cold hands of his grim-eyed Soviet counterparts.

  Time passes. More and more the ADDO seemed out of sync with the development of the intelligence community, which, after the failures of 9/11, had increasingly stressed coordination and the shared communication of information through the various government agencies tasked with defending the country.

  “I don’t like it,” he said, after Anthony finished running through what had happened to Dmitri—what had happened and what Anthony wanted to do about it.

  “I’m not thrilled about it, either.”

  “You’re sure there’s no other way? Maybe Dmitri got foolish, started whispering secrets in public places after a few shots of vodka.”

  Anthony shrugged. Another thing that a full career as a spy had taught him: you could never be entirely sure what a person might do under any given circumstances. “It seems to me unlikely. Dmitri was, if nothing else, a professional. I can’t imagine he’d be so sloppy. And all three of them?” Anthony shook his head. “We’ve got a mole.”

  The ADDO let loose a string of profanity that would have been noteworthy for its length and eloquence if Anthony hadn’t heard so many variations of it before. “And there’s no way we can handle this in-house?”

  “If I thought that was a legitimate option, I’d have taken it.” The CIA mandate was to gather and analyze intelligence on foreign entities. Legally it was not allowed to operate within the United States proper. That was exclusively within the purview of the FBI, responsible for counterintelligence gathering inside the nation. In practice, of course, the CIA had not always been known to play entirely ac
cording to the strictest rules of conduct, but neither was it set up to coordinate the sort of manhunt that was the FBI’s core mission.

  “Damn feds,” the ADDO said, which by his standards was actually not even particularly profane.

  “They’re professionals,” Anthony said. “They’ve got the resources to handle it, and the personnel. I’m not crazy about having Agency business spread any wider than it needs to be, but under the circumstances I don’t see an alternative.” Of course the ADDO knew all of these things—knew that the situation, for legal as well as practical reasons, required coordination with the FBI. But some people needed to be talked into things they had already decided on, and the ADDO was one of these people.

  “And who were you thinking would be best equipped to help us sweep up this mess?”

  Anthony made like he was thinking this over, although it was all for show. “Jeffries would be an ideal choice.”

  “Frowny?” the ADDO said, like it was the first time anyone had made the joke. Finished being pleased with himself, he mulled it over for a moment. “I guess there isn’t anyone better suited.”

  There was not, which was why Anthony had suggested her. “She’s earned her reputation for competence,” though “genius” would really more accurately describe the common wisdom relating to Jeffries. “And she’s not the loose-lips sort, either.”

  The ADDO snorted. “No, she certainly isn’t.” He thought it over for a while, or made like he was thinking it over. “If we’ve got to do it, we’ve got to do it,” the ADDO said finally, in the sort of tone that suggested he held Anthony responsible for the situation. “But I want one of ours up in New York coordinating the effort. Let’s just make sure that our . . . associates don’t take this as an opportunity to go on a witch hunt through the Agency.”

  “Who were you thinking?”

  “Andrew did good work in Kiev.”

  “He did,” Anthony agreed. “It’s a different sort of skill set, however.”

  “I think he’s got the chops to handle it. Besides, it’s time he learned something about cooperating with our sister agency. It’s not all adventures in foreign lands. Internal politics is as important as external.”

  Which was as good as an order—and would have become one if Anthony had pressed, and so of course he didn’t. Another thing he had learned as a spy was not to push a rock uphill if you could possibly avoid it. “I’ll put him on it,” Anthony said.

  “Good.” The tip of the ADDO’s cigar dipped as he nodded his head. “And tell him to keep a close eye on the suits. The last thing we need is strangers going through our dirty laundry.”

  Lord knew there was enough of it to find, Anthony thought, nodding and excusing himself out of the office.

  11

  IT DID not take long for Kay to understand how Susan Jeffries had acquired her nickname. She was a dowdy, bespectacled woman of forty-five or fifty, but she was the sort of person who, Kay suspected, had looked forty-five at twenty, had given the impression of late middle age while still in adolescence. She had beady little eyes that were made too large by her out-of-fashion glasses; she had a quivering little contralto; she had not bothered to dye her hair in a long time. If you had passed her on the street, you would have thought her to be that breed of librarian who leaves the back stacks only to yell at rambunctious children, who sees every book under her care as a treasure on par with the Mona Lisa, who secretly dislikes it when people check them out and read them, getting their grubby little fingerprints on the covers, bending back the spines.

  Well—there was no point in looking like a spy if you actually were one, and Kay suspected that Jeffries’s charmless ubiquity had served her successfully in the long years she’d spent working counterintelligence operations. Suspected but didn’t know, because—for all the rumors that flew around about her new boss—there was very little hard information to be found, even for those members of the squad who had worked with her for years and years.

  Kay was a half hour early her first day, as she wanted to make a good impression, wanted also to make sure she didn’t accidentally get lost en route; but Jeffries was there all the same, working quietly at the desk in her office. Kay got the sense that one needed to wake up awfully early in the morning to get the jump on Assistant Special Agent in Charge Susan Jeffries.

  She called Kay into her office a few minutes later, introduced herself in a brisk but not unpleasant fashion, asked a few ­questions—how Kay was handling the transition, where her new apartment was—then promptly got down to brass tacks. “So they had you on gangs down in Baltimore?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I think you’ll find that your new slate of duties will require a rather different mind-set. You’re going to spend your time doing a lot of what you might think is mundane work, reading FISA take and CI reports and doing surveillance.” FISA was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prescribed procedures for electronic surveillance of foreign powers engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. What was gathered from all of this was called “take.” “It can be slow work, but it’s the FBI’s second-highest priority after terrorism, and we take it very seriously.”

  It was clear that Jeffries was not big on melodrama. “Yes, ma’am,” Kay said again.

  “If you have any questions about your new role, feel free to take them up with me.”

  “Absolutely,” Kay said.

  Jeffries handed Kay a list of manuals on counterintelligence that she suggested Kay familiarize herself with. Kay scanned the list quickly: Venona: Soviet Espionage and American Response, 1939–1957 by Robert Louis Benson, Soviet Espionage by David J. Dallin and four more titles that sounded like heavy, ponderous, difficult tomes. Kay had anticipated a somewhat lengthier introduction to her new position, but she could also recognize a dismissal when she heard one. She thanked Jeffries and went quietly back to her desk.

  The rest of the squad had arrived by the time Kay had finished her meeting. The FBI was not the sort of work environment where one slunk in in mid-morning hoping the boss wouldn’t notice, and anyway it seemed clear that Jeffries noticed everything. Introductions were brief and not overwhelmingly enthusiastic as there was little common ground between working criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Kay knew it would take time to learn the new vernacular let alone be accepted by her new squad. That was fine: She’d done it in Baltimore, hadn’t she? She’d do it again in New York.

  Kay spent the better part of the morning engaged in the usual administrative tasks one gets embroiled in whenever one enters a new office. There was a grim efficiency to the squad that contrasted somewhat with what she was used to—less freewheeling, more formal. Part of that, probably, was the nature of the work itself. As Jeffries had intimated, counterintelligence was about as far from gang work as you could get. But part of it, Kay assumed, was Jeffries herself. An office begins to take on the characteristics of the person who runs it, and Jeffries was the epitome of the counterintelligence professional: cool and competent if not particularly gregarious. Midway through the morning Kay found herself missing Torres’s attempts at humor, the easy back-and-forth she had acquired with much of the Baltimore Field Office.

  Five o’clock rolled around and the rest of the squad began to fade out slowly, although Kay remained where she was—indeed, found that her work moved more quickly with the rest of the cubicles empty, computers shut down and silent, with just her in the bullpen—although of course Jeffries hadn’t left but remained in her office as she had throughout the day. Admittedly, it was possible that the ASAC was playing FarmVille or updating her Facebook status, but somehow Kay did not really believe it.

  When Kay finally left, she crossed paths with the janitorial staff, and the light in Jeffries’s office was still on. Late enough already, she was made later still by the elaborate security procedures—­understandable, given the nature of the
work, but still not an ideal addition to what had already been a very long day. In the plus column, she had missed rush hour, and she was able to get a seat on the R train up to Fourteenth Street. The L, unfortunately, was busy and crowded and smelled strongly of unwashed flesh, and by the time Kay had made it back to Greenpoint she was in a mood not so shy of foul.

  But stepping up out of the subway, she felt better. Early summer, and New York was a place to be—was the place, with handsome couples walking down the street, arm in arm; a thousand different restaurants, every cuisine and culture imaginable; a multitude of loud, laughing bars. Uncle Luis and Aunt Justyna had offered to let her stay in the spare room in their Upper West Side apartment—just for a little while, until she got her feet down—but Kay wanted none of it. She had seen enough of her old friends and classmates give in to that mid-twenties malaise that saw them move back in with the ’rents. And she had fallen in love with this part of the city almost as soon as she had seen it. It reminded her a bit of Baltimore: the unaffected locals brushing past overcute hipsters, old-fashioned Polish bakeries abutting fifteen-dollar-a-drink cocktail bars . . .

  Kay hadn’t yet eaten a real meal that day: she had been too antsy for breakfast, too focused once work had started, and she was feeling it now. With nothing to cook at home, she dropped into a little falafel spot, laid a few dollars down on the table, devoured the sandwich they brought her. Afterward she thought about going somewhere for a beer, but a quick check of the clock revealed that morning was not so far away—not so far away at all—and she found herself back in her apartment.

  It was small, and the paint was faded and the brick was crumbling, and it had one window that looked directly into a window across the way, close enough that she could identify the spices on her neighbor’s rack, cardamom and ginger and saffron. But at least it was hers; after two years alone in Baltimore there was no way Kay could have brought herself to live with a roommate.