by Jan Fedarcyk
Kay brushed her teeth and changed into her nightclothes. She had planned on reading awhile before going to bed, a text on cognitive psychology; Kay liked to keep abreast of current developments as best as her time allowed, which wasn’t very much. Or perhaps she would do a few chapters in her Russian language textbook: since Kay had found out months ago that she would be transferred to Russian counterintelligence, she’d gone back to try to improve her speaking ability, her tongue having grown slack with disuse. Then of course there was the homework that Jeffries had assigned her; she’d need to start on that as soon as possible.
But the instant Kay felt the bed against her back, she knew she was too exhausted to get any more work done. She set her book down beside the two pictures that rested on her night table. The first was a photo of her parents taken a few years before their deaths, staring into the camera and smiling, looking happy and wholesome. The second was from outside the gym in Quantico, a tree that Kay had run past hundreds of times during her time there. Nailed into the wood were boards reading HURT, AGONY, PAIN, LOVE-IT and, beneath them, FAMILY, PRIDE, ATTITUDE, RESPECT, LOYALTY. Kay stared at both photos for a few moments, then hit the light and passed swiftly into slumber.
12
JUSTYNA DĄBROWSKA Alvaro-Nuñez was one of those woman who seemed, infuriatingly for the rest of the world, destined to spend the entirety of her time above the ground beautiful. When Kay was a child Justyna was a staggeringly attractive forty; when Kay was an adolescent she was a stylish and handsome fifty; and now that Kay was a woman, Justyna was a dignified sixty. Perhaps in the dim years before her birth Justyna had experienced some period of awkwardness when she was gawky and big-boned, but Kay could not imagine it. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, the slightest Eastern European tremolo when she spoke, just enough to give her an air of mystery. Her sense of fashion had always been unerringly keen, and her birthday presents were inevitably the best thing in Kay’s wardrobe.
Today Justyna was in a smiling sundress from one of the downtown boutiques that Kay liked to walk past but could never really imagine buying anything from, shoes smart and sensible, her earrings stylish but not overdone. The gloves were the only off touch: they were too thick for a warm day in June, not quite seamless with the rest of the costume. Beneath them, Kay knew, although virtually no one else alive did, were seven fingers, three on the left and four on the right, a souvenir of a week spent beneath the less-than-tender ministrations of the government back in Poland, now almost forty years in the past. Justyna had never spoken of it, retaining that ineffable sense of class that seemed to have died off with Grace Kelly, allowing her to remain just above the world’s unpleasantness, never quite getting stained by it. What Kay had gleaned of Justyna’s years before she came to America she had gotten from Luis, and he had been very nearly as closemouthed, referring simply to some “political unpleasantness” and leaving the matter at that. It was not until after the death of her parents that Kay learned more about the half-century-long nightmare that was the Soviet Union, the humiliations and outright brutalities inflicted by the secret police upon members of a recalcitrant intelligentsia. What exactly Justyna had done to draw their attention, and how she had managed to escape, was a mystery to this day, and one that Kay knew better than to attempt to plumb.
This was not at all on Kay’s mind when they met for brunch at a very cute place on the Upper West Side that Kay would not normally visit.
“Kay, darling,” Justyna said, leaning in for an air-kiss, which Kay, for all her practice, had never quite learned to manage as adroitly. “Sit down and tell me everything!”
It was the Saturday afternoon of Kay’s first weekend since starting work in counterintelligence, and since she had spent the morning reviewing one of the texts Jeffries had recommended to her, it was also essentially the first time in six days that Kay was not actively working. She had to make a conscious effort to enjoy the moment, the sunny weather and her aunt’s good humor. “Everything would take a while,” she said.
It had been Justyna who had kept them together, Kay knew, kept them together that long first summer after her parents had both died. Luis was all but broken by it, wandering about the house, staring out the windows aimlessly, drinking probably more than he should. Christopher had just begun that stage of adolescence when nothing anyone tells you makes any sense at all, when you don’t need an excuse for rebellion. Kay, three years younger, still a child, had been sad and scared and lonely and desperately confused.
It had been Justyna’s quiet strength that had stopped them from collapsing completely. Christopher had determined—for reasons that to this day remained unclear to Kay, probably in large part because they remained unclear to Christopher as well—that he and Luis would be enemies; that nothing their surrogate father could do would gain favor in his eyes. But even Christopher’s impressive sense of youthful rebellion, one that he had sustained far beyond adolescence, could not extend towards disliking Justyna. Perhaps somewhere in the world there was a person capable of such meanness, but Kay had trouble imagining who it was.
“How is the new position?” Justyna asked.
“Tiring,” Kay replied. “Like the old one.”
“I don’t remember anyone forcing you into it.”
“I’m not complaining,” Kay said, and indeed she wasn’t. “It’s interesting. It’s very different than what I was doing in Baltimore. There’s a ton to learn,” and even as she said it Kay could find her mind shifting back to the text on counterintelligence she had been reading earlier that morning. She would get back to it this afternoon, and of course there remained the two chapters of Russian she had assigned herself to finish that night before she went to bed. “Asking Directions in a Museum” was the title of tonight’s first lesson, although Kay wasn’t exactly sure how often that sort of dialogue would come up in her counterintelligence work.
She shook herself back into the moment. “Anyway, I’m still feeling things out. They haven’t given me much to do yet.”
“I’m sure that will change,” Justyna said. “Have you spoken to your brother lately?”
“Not since he came to visit me in Baltimore. He’s been dodging my calls since. You?”
“He sends me notes, sometimes. Postcards from little spots in the city that I’ve never heard of.”
“Nothing more than that?”
“Your brother is . . . a free spirit,” Justyna said lamely.
That was one way to put it. A slow moment of unhappiness, but Justyna turned the page quickly. She had a rare talent for seeing the happy side of anything. “You know, Kay, we’re all so proud of you. Christopher too. We know what it took to get where you are, how few applicants are accepted into the FBI, how many wash out of Quantico. And you seem to have done so well in Baltimore, even the New York newspapers ran articles about your . . . about what . . . about the shooting.”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” Kay said abruptly. She did not regret what had happened to Williams on that long winter afternoon months earlier. It was part of the job, part of the mission, and Williams had forced her hand. But she didn’t like talking about it, especially not with anyone from outside the Bureau, a civilian, even if that civilian was family. It sounded too much like bragging to Kay, however casually she discussed it; and there was something in her mind irredeemably foul about crowing over the death, however unavoidable, of a fellow human being.
“Of course, of course,” Justyna said, graceful as ever. “I’m just trying to let you know: we’re proud of you. Paul and Anne, if they were here, they’d be twice as proud.”
Paul and Anne Malloy had met during their residencies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, two young ideologues meeting and bonding over shared passions. They married just before graduation and dedicated the better part of their careers to trying to bring the benefits of modern medicine to remote and impoverished parts of the third world, fighting leishmaniasis in the Congo, tuberculosis i
n India.
And then they had been killed. A robbery gone wrong in Colombia late one summer. Kay thought about it frequently but almost never discussed it. Not with her friends or acquaintances, not even very much with Luis and Justyna. If Christopher had ever been around, perhaps she might have discussed it with him, but given his habits and lifestyle this was rarely an option. It bothered Kay some—actually it bothered her quite a bit—that she could not remember much of her mother or father, or more accurately that all she could remember were the bits and bobs that a child could piece together: that they were kind, that they had loved her, that she missed them.
“You know, after their death was the first time I ever had any experience with anyone from the FBI. Coming from where I did, one did not have a very high opinion of state security.” This was as close as Aunt Justyna would ever get to directly discussing having been arrested, jailed and tortured. “But they were very professional—friendly, even. I’d never have thought at the time that my little Kay would end up in their ranks.”
Kay hadn’t really been paying attention to the last few sentences, lost as she was in memories of her parents and her early childhood. It took a few seconds for her to seize on her aunt’s comment. “FBI? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember? Well, you were very young at the time. And I suppose there was a lot else going on. We had a visit from the FBI a few days after . . .” your parents’ death was how that sentence ended, although Justyna had let it trail off. “Anyway, they wanted to ask us a few questions.”
This was the first Kay had heard of this, and it didn’t make any sense. “Why would the FBI have gotten involved?”
Justyna shrugged. “They said it was standard practice, a U.S. citizen dying abroad in such circumstances.”
Except that it wasn’t standard practice at all, as Kay well knew. “What did they ask about?” she asked, taking a sip from her drink to feign indifference.
“It was twenty years ago, dear, and to be honest I had other things on my mind.” Justyna thought for a moment. “They said they wanted background information on your father. They had a few questions about his new job, though I didn’t know much about that and couldn’t really help them. They talked to your uncle awhile also, though not for very long.”
If the FBI in the mid-nineties in any way resembled the Bureau that she was currently dedicating her life to, they would not have had the manpower to run about investigating every unfortunate accident that befell an American in a foreign country. There was something strange here, something off, and for a long moment Kay found herself worrying at it like a loose tooth.
“Kay? Kay dear? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Auntie,” Kay said, returning to the conversation but filing the information neatly away for later. “Shall we have another mimosa?”
13
AFTER A few weeks in the New York Office, Kay had started to fall into the grind. Some days she almost felt like being an FBI Agent didn’t seem all that different from working in any other high-pressure office, except that this high-pressure office was inside a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, where access was controlled by a keypad and cell phones were prohibited to preclude electronic eavesdropping. Which admittedly was probably not something that the bankers and public relations flacks and Wall Street wolves who occupied the other buildings in Midtown had to deal with.
To the general public there were few things more exciting than counterintelligence work. A firm century of misinformation, of legend, of Rudyard Kipling stories and Ian Fleming novels, had inculcated an almost comprehensive misconception of what the job actually entailed. Within the Bureau itself, however, counterintelligence was far from a plum assignment—indeed, quite the opposite. Gone was any hope of street work, gone was the thrill of the arrest, gone was the joy of wrapping up a case, of taking a legitimate villain off the streets. A counterintelligence operation could last years—decades, even—and involve endless hours sifting through paperwork and engaging in other subtle and obscure maneuvering.
It was a life for which Kay was not overly prepared. Perhaps more than any other law enforcement agency in the world, the Bureau’s mission was extraordinarily varied. With fifty-six field offices in every state of the Union and more than sixty legal attaché offices scattered throughout the rest of the world, responsible for a portfolio of tasks ranging from counterintelligence to counterterrorism to white-collar crime to public corruption, the Academy could only equip an Agent with the essential skills that would be required of them upon being assigned to a field office: a background in the legal system, self-defense and firearms training; information on the Bureau itself and on law enforcement generally. Much of what was required of any given Agent would be determined by whatever their placement was: Kay had known little about the drug subculture of Baltimore before being sent there, but after two years she had left with no small level of expertise. No doubt if she had been placed in some other office, in some other part of the country or the world, she would have developed a different skill set, one tailored to the needs of that assignment.
But still, Kay felt certain, there could be few positions within the Bureau as taxing as counterintelligence. An Agent might be focused on a specific country, in which case they needed to become familiar not only with the current political and clandestine service structure of the nation in question but also its history, culture and language if possible.
It was a far cry from what Kay had been doing in Baltimore, her nose to the concrete most days, cleaning up the streets one savage at a time. “The needs of the Bureau come first,” she would remind herself when the days started to drag long. “You didn’t get into this job for the thrill of it” was another one she liked to use. “It beats mining coal” was her final card to play, although some afternoons, looking through reports or decade-old State Department I-94 forms, she began to wonder if this was actually true or if she wouldn’t be better off trading in her service weapon and badge for a hard hat and a pickax.
But most of the time Kay felt like she was settling into the New York Office well enough. Being the newbie on the squad always carried with it a certain amount of rising, but at least they had dropped the Ivy bit. Here in the New York Office she was far from the only Agent who’d attended an elite college. The Bureau prided itself on evolving to deal with the threats of the moment, and in the twenty-first century that meant the need for foreign languages, computer programming, and special skill sets mandated going after the best-educated and most driven young men and women. The Baltimore Field Office had been “old-school,” with hard-bitten field Agents who knew the streets and the people on them, and for gang work there was nobody better. But it was clear that counterintelligence required a different sort of mentality. After two years swilling Natty Boh with Torres and the rest of the office, it was something of a culture shock for Kay.
The other Agents in the squad were sympathetic. Sitting in the break room early one afternoon, working their way through deli sandwiches and diet soda, the chatter drifted to her background in Baltimore.
“Bit of a comedown from putting murderers into the ground, huh, Malloy?” Marshall asked. Marshall was a short African American whose career had been confined to the New York Office. Despite that, he was comfortable with the work and the city, smiling often, and free of the “sharp elbows” that so often characterized hardened New Yorkers. Kay had come to like him almost as soon as she met him, a feeling he seemed to inspire in most of the people he came in contact with.
“Put who where?” Wilson asked. Wilson was tall and thin, serious and, to Kay’s mind, at least, a bit standoffish. In the time since she had transferred to New York, this was practically their first conversation that wasn’t directly work related. He was also reputed to be very good at all of the elaborate stages of cultivating an asset, and had worked hand in glove with Jeffries over the years to help build the reputation for excellence t
hat her squad enjoyed.
“You didn’t hear?” Marshall paused to wipe a bit of ranch dressing off his chin, and to build anticipation. “Agent Malloy here is a straight gunslinger. Tracked down the biggest drug kingpin in Baltimore, challenged him to a duel at high noon, shot him down in the street like a dog.”
“High noon, huh?” Wilson repeated drily. “Man, things really are different in Baltimore.”
“Very little of that is true,” Kay said flatly. She didn’t like discussing the Williams shooting and would have been happier if it weren’t public knowledge, although of course that was impossible. The FBI was like any other tightly knit organization, and the gossip flew pretty quickly, especially gossip as good as hers. There might not be an Agent on the East Coast who hadn’t heard the story of her going at it with Williams; certainly she had figured it was common knowledge amongst her new squad. Being one of those rare few involved in a firefight had clearly given Kay a certain amount of status within the organization, but it wasn’t one she relished. If it were up to her, that horrible afternoon with Williams would be the last time she ever had to draw her service weapon off the range, and she didn’t quite appreciate the flippant way in which it was being discussed.
“You and Jeffries should start a club,” Marshall said sardonically.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know? Back before they put her behind a desk, Jeffries was a stone-cold brick Agent,” Marshall said, meaning an investigator who preferred not to enter into management. “Spent most of her time working the Iron Curtain countries.”
“Lot of stories seem to be circulating about our Jeffries,” Kay said.
“All of them true,” Wilson responded. “She can drink three pots of coffee without peeing.”
“She doesn’t need to pee,” Marshall corrected. “She has absolute control over all her biological functions. Haven’t you ever noticed that she never sweats?”
