by Jan Fedarcyk
“So she’s a robot?” Kay asked.
“I don’t think so,” Wilson said, “though it’s hard to say for sure. I think it’s more like the way they say Buddhist monks can lower their heart rate through sheer strength of will.”
“So she’s the Dalai Lama?”
“I’m pretty sure the Dalai Lama doesn’t carry a gun,” Wilson observed.
“I’ve never heard of the Dalai Lama carrying a gun,” Marshall agreed.
“What did she do before working counterintelligence against the Russians?”
Marshall shrugged. “Sucked on a pacifier, I suppose. Professionally she’s been doing it since before I came into the Bureau. You know she speaks all those Iron Curtain languages.”
“Which ones? Polish? Czech? Ukrainian? Russian? Hungarian?”
“All of them,” Marshall said, probably joking. “She speaks all of them.”
“No one speaks Hungarian,” Wilson insisted. “Even the Hungarians don’t really speak it; it’s just an elaborate con they’re playing on the rest of us.”
“I’ll make sure to mention that next time I’m in Budapest,” Marshall said. “You know she can still make possible on the gun range.”
“Possible” was the highest score that one could achieve on the FBI gun range, the name itself almost a challenge, as if to say, It’s possible, but you sure as hell won’t be able to do it. Kay, who had been one of the better shots in the Baltimore Field Office, had never gotten close.
“Bullshit. Everyone knows that when they promote you from a brick Agent, they take away your service weapon and replace it with a pen.”
“I came in on my lunch break and watched her put two straight clips into some unfortunate theoretical subject’s septum,” Wilson insisted. “So that cap gun has quite a punch. You know they’ve been trying to send her up the chain for years now, but she keeps rejecting it. Won’t take anything that might take her out of the day-to-day running of counterintelligence. It’s all she lives for,” he said, which Kay thought was a pretty strong statement to be making about someone as reticent about opening up as Jeffries.
“Never been married?” Kay asked. “No significant other?”
Wilson laughed, shook his head. “Sure, she’s got a significant other: Pyotr Andreev, her Russian counterpart. It’s a star-crossed-lover kind of thing, Romeo and Juliet–style. Pulled apart by politics, only able to demonstrate affection through elaborate attempts to entrap and defeat the other.”
If counterintelligence was a game, then success meant knowing your opponent. The FBI kept files on their counterparts throughout the world: personal history, education, professional background, likes and dislikes—anything that might potentially be useful, that might offer some insight into the opposition’s thinking. Pyotr Andreev was another part of counterintelligence lore, an ice-cold ex-Soviet who had done more damage in his long career to the U.S. security apparatus than Hanssen and Ames combined. Unlike some of his colleagues, there was very little on file about him, hearsay and rumor more than anything else, operations he might have been involved in. The only thing that could be said of him with any certainty was that he was as good at his job as anyone on the planet, and he had a strong affection for a particularly noxious brand of cigarettes called Belomorkanal.
“So far as I know,” Marshall said, “she’s never been on a date. Jeffries is about the mission. I mean, we’re all about the mission, but . . .”
“Jeffries is about the mission,” Wilson finished. “Speaking of which,” he said, tossing the end of his sandwich in the trash, “duty calls.”
Kay stayed late that night, as she did most nights, trying to catch up on everything she needed to know in order to be an effective counterintelligence Agent. And when she left—as always—the light in Jeffries’s office was still burning brightly.
14
LUIS PUSHED his pawn forward a spot, leaving his knight unprotected.
Kay pursed her lips and thought for a while.
“Didn’t see that coming, did you?” Luis asked happily. Close to seventy but still spry—handsome, even—silver hair and icy blue eyes, a smile that overflowed its mouth whenever he was with his niece.
“If you’re trying to rattle me, Uncle,” Kay said, “you’re going to have to work a bit harder.”
It was late afternoon on a Sunday. Kay had met her uncle earlier that morning and they had spent several hours walking through lower Manhattan, catching up on old times, ending up in Washington Square Park to enjoy the fading sunshine and get in a few games of chess.
“How is the new job?” Luis asked, putting another packet of sugar into his takeout coffee. He had always had a passion for sugar, as he did for red meat, alcohol, pretty girls, tobacco—really, the entire suite of things from which a person finds himself in a grave before old age, or at least some of the suite. He had given up most of the more egregious vices under the watchful eye of his wife, but he still enjoyed what sins were allowed him.
“It’s all right,” Kay said, trying to keep her mind on the game.
“Are you doing gang work? Like back in Baltimore?”
“Not exactly,” Kay said. She castled, protecting her king, leaving Luis’s knight hanging.
“Counterterrorism, perhaps? Tapping the phones of various Muhammads, listening in on the Friday-evening sermons to make sure they’re within the acceptable bounds of anti-Americanism?”
Kay had long grown used to Luis’s old-fashioned, quasi-radical sympathies, which she assumed to be a product of his having lived through the sixties and that she knew he only half believed anyway. “That’s not really how we think of it,” Kay said.
“It is counterterrorism, then?”
“No,” Kay said, taking the knight.
Luis laughed and moved a rook to threaten her queen. “White-collar crime? Knocking down the next Madoff before he can cheat some poor old woman out of her last billion?”
“Not white-collar crime, thank God.”
“I can only assume that your reticence to answer me is because they’ve taken to giving you the cloak-and-dagger.”
“You know that I can’t tell you, Uncle Luis,” Kay said.
Luis smiled, reached out to take Kay’s knight with a bishop. “You’ll need to learn to lie better if you’re going to work intelligence.”
“The FBI does counterintelligence, Uncle. Just as a point of fact,” Kay said, taking Luis’s knight.
“I’ve never been entirely clear on the distinction between the two.”
Which was understandable. In theory, it was Kay’s job to defend America from infiltration and compromise by the intelligence organs of foreign governments, to act as a shield against potential malfeasance. In practice, doing so required the Bureau to adopt many of the tactics of its enemies: covertly gathering intelligence, actively recruiting informants from foreign governments and rival intelligence agencies. “We’re the good guys,” Kay explained half jokingly.
“I’ll try and keep that in mind,” Luis said.
“I saw Auntie last weekend,” Kay said, shifting the conversation abruptly and without preamble.
“I see her every day.”
“And a lucky man you are.”
“Absolutely.”
“Anyway, she told me something that I didn’t know about Mom and Dad’s . . . about what happened to Mom and Dad.”
“Which was?”
“She said that after their funeral a couple of FBI Agents came by the house, offered their condolences and asked some questions about Dad’s work. Do you remember anything like that?”
Luis pursed his lips, as if hyperfocused on the game. “I suppose, now that you mention it,” he said, holding his hand over one of his pieces, then bringing it swiftly back to his side. Luis had raised her to play what was called “touch-move” chess, tournament-style, meaning that if you put a fi
nger on a piece you had to move it. It had once made her cry uncontrollably in Washington Square Park at the tender age of eleven, but she had to admit that in the long run it had helped sharpen her focus.
“That didn’t seem odd to you?”
“Not really,” Luis grumbled, finally conceding to the inevitable and trading his rook for a bishop. “Maybe you didn’t appreciate this, being so young, but your father had a great deal of status within his field. His death was in the Times, the Post . . . I suppose the FBI were just being thorough.”
Kay had realized that, actually, indeed it was one of the things that, even as a child, she had associated most with her father: that he was, in some way that a ten-year-old girl could express only imperfectly, a good man, an important man, an important man who did good. But neither had he been a State Department Foreign Service Officer, and Kay still could not quite understand why the Bureau would have such an interest in him. Their resources were, God knew, far from unlimited, and for that matter the investigation into his murder in a foreign country would have fallen outside of their purview. “That’s it, then? Just being thorough?” Kay asked, moving a piece.
“Remind me, Kay, which one of us is in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I would think you would be better equipped to determine what interest the FBI had in the death of your parents than I would.”
Which made sense as far as it went, but in fact part of being an Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that you didn’t get to use the powers of your office for petty personal reasons; didn’t get to pull the bank records of disliked neighbors or send out a SWAT team to torment old boyfriends. It was a clear breach of policy for her to be snooping into an old case, and there was no reason Kay could think of that her counterintelligence work would overlap with a twenty-year-old murder investigation.
“And how are your finances?” Luis asked.
“I didn’t get into this business for the money,” Kay said simply. In fact, wealth had never been a particular motivator for Kay—a legacy, she assumed, of her parents, both of whom had given up lucrative opportunities to work in the far less remunerative field of international development. As a federal employee, Kay was paid at a GS-13 rate, far less than some of her friends working in law or finance, but more than enough for her own needs.
“I’ve been . . . doing some thinking,” Luis said, suddenly red-faced. “Perhaps your aunt and I could . . . help you out a bit. Just in these early years. You know we have enough,” he said quickly. “It wouldn’t be any trouble for us. We would be glad to do it, I mean.”
Kay’s hand hovered around her queen. Happy images flooded through her mind of renting an apartment in a part of town near where she worked, of avoiding an hour-long commute, of being able to order takeout without double-checking her bank account. She savored them for a long moment, knowing the entire time that they were only fancy. Aunt Justyna and Uncle Luis had done enough for her as a child—more than enough; indeed, she knew she owed them a debt she could never repay. There was no point in adding to it.
“That’s very kind of you, Uncle Luis,” she said, moving her queen to the back rank. “But I couldn’t possibly accept. Incidentally, it’s mate in three.”
Luis laughed, looked down at the board and began to set up the pieces for another game.
15
HIGHLAND PARK at eleven thirty in the evening would not have been Kay’s first choice to meet a potential recruit. It was secluded enough, in a distant corner of not-quite-gentrified Brooklyn, close to an hour on the subway from Manhattan, nearly as long by cab. Compared to Central Park’s enormity, or even Prospect Park’s greenery, it was not very large, a bare sliver of shrubbery interrupting the city’s concrete edifices. The area surrounding it was middle- and lower-middle-class, a far cry from the slums Kay had grown used to during her time in Baltimore, but equally distant from the tourist-thronged neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.
Not, of course, that anyone had asked her. A bare month with the squad, and so far mostly she had been trusted with nothing more than routine work, most of her daily efforts going towards digesting the immense, the seemingly infinite amount of information required to bring her up to speed as a counterintelligence Agent. Likely she wouldn’t have been tapped for this duty, either, except that one of the other members of the squad had been sick with the stomach flu.
“We need you for something, Kay,” Marshall informed her earlier that afternoon, walking briskly out of Jeffries’s office after a long chat. Marshall had a reputation, like everyone else in Jeffries’s squad, for quiet excellence, for a cool and distinguished competence that did not draw attention to itself. He was also considered, within the office, to be one of the best handlers of assets—next to Jeffries herself, of course, although her position generally kept her out of the nitty-gritty of casework. Kay could see why Marshall was so highly regarded; he was amiable and good-natured but also gave the impression of a person who watched you carefully and closely, and remembered what he had seen.
“Of course,” Kay said, there being nothing else to say. “What for?”
“I’m going to be meeting with a developmental recruit tonight, and we need you to fill in on the surveillance.”
Not much information to go on there, and Kay knew that none would be forthcoming. A recruitment could take place over the course of weeks or months or even years, the process slow and torturous, like reeling in an oversized fish. Sometimes many meetings were required to convince a target of the wisdom of assisting the FBI with their operations. It took a deft hand with the right combination of stick and carrot to cultivate a recruitment in place, or RIP, the standard Bureau term for a double agent.
It also took a team of professionals assisting that deft hand. Kay and Wilson and the rest of the squad that had been assigned to assist Marshall had spent the hours beforehand prepping, in thorough detail, every aspect of the meeting: where in the park the meeting would take place and where the nearest exits were; where the members of the surveillance team would set up; and even the location of the nearest hospital in case something went terribly and unexpectedly wrong. One thing that was not discussed, for reasons of operational security, was the identity of the asset himself. It was not mentioned, and Kay did not ask.
Kay’s part in the matter was a simple one, or seemingly simple. She and Wilson were posted in an unmarked car just outside of the main exit, tasked with keeping their eyes open, making sure that no member of the opposition had cottoned to their operation and was following close behind. Far from riveting, but Kay was enjoying herself all the same. It was the first time since joining the counterintelligence squad that she was out in the field. And for all that she often felt herself a step behind her colleagues, she felt more than confident in her surveillance skills, courtesy of her time in Baltimore.
And perhaps that was what alerted her to them: the long hours spent in grimy surroundings observing Rashid Williams and men like Rashid Williams. It was a warm September evening, still gripped tightly in an Indian summer, but the two boys lounging by the entrance of the park had their hoodies pulled up all the same, obscuring their faces, obscuring everything but two pairs of grim, voracious-seeming eyes. They shared a smoke, passing it back and forth between them warily, staring at the night and the things hidden within it.
“Anything about that seem strange to you?” Kay asked.
Wilson had worked counterintelligence for going on twenty years: a good Agent and a good team member. His attention was occupied on the interior of the park, on Marshall sitting on a wooden bench, patiently waiting for his contact to show up. “How so?”
Kay smiled grimly. “You’ve been working this so long, you can’t smell regular old crime when you get a whiff of it? That’s their second cigarette,” Kay explained, “and if you had two anyway, why bother to share? Unless you want an excuse to stay where you are.” Kay rolled down the window and inhaled deeply of the night air. “That
ain’t just tobacco, either.”
“What are you getting at?” Wilson asked, turning to stare at Kay full on. “I don’t know how they do it in Baltimore, but here in the big leagues we don’t get so worried about a couple of kids smoking a dime bag outside of a public park, leastways not enough to interrupt an ongoing operation.”
“In Baltimore we don’t get out of bed for anything less than a fresh corpse sitting on a half ton of heroin,” she said, “but since we’re already out here I might as well let you know that those two gentlemen”—she pointed at the men, who had just thrown aside their joint—“are about to try and rob that gentleman”—pointing now towards Marshall.
Wilson looked for a long time at the two potential troublemakers, cursed, then leaned into his walkie-talkie. “Touissant, you there?”
Touissant was posted in a copse of trees close to where the meet was to take place. Kay could not see him, of course—the purpose of the dark clothes and the lack of movement—but he was there. “Yup.”
“You clock those two coming in from the east entrance?”
Brief pause. “I do now.”
“Malloy thinks they’re trouble.”
“I think she’s right,” he said, and a spare second later Kay saw him move out from his hiding spot: a big man, the largest in the squad, white teeth smiling but not friendly. After he took a few steps into the park itself, the two potential muggers looked at him, looked at each other, then turned and backtracked the way they had come. Touissant returned to his position, and a few minutes later their target, or so Kay assumed, walked swiftly from the direction of the subway and towards his meeting with Marshall.
“That was sharp, Malloy,” Wilson said, not quite grudgingly.
Kay bit back a smile and returned to inspecting the night. Crisis averted.
16
GENERALLY SPEAKING, Tom had found, it was not a very difficult thing to take apart a person’s life: it was like pulling apart a warm roll at a nice restaurant.
