by Jan Fedarcyk
“Look, Kay,” Andrew said, setting the plate of eggs down in front of her, then turning back to the stove to get his own. The muscles in his chest stood out in sharp definition against the morning’s light. His smile was handsome and tinged with regret. “There’s something I think we need to talk about.”
The unexpected sincerity was enough to break Kay free of her musings on Sadler, at least for a few minutes. “What?”
“They’re calling me back to D.C.,” he said. “There’s no point in having a CIA liaison for the Black Bear investigation when—”
“When Black Bear is over,” she finished. “I expected as much.” Although knowing it was coming didn’t erase the trickle of disappointment that she felt upon hearing the news. “How long do you have?” she asked with an almost authentic nonchalance.
“A few weeks,” Andrew said, as if he were apologizing. “Write some reports, brief some people . . .” He shrugged.
“What about your place?”
“It’s month-to-month,” he said. “And the furniture is all rented. Come July, it’ll be like I was never here,” he said, with more than a touch of melodrama.
Kay put her hand on his. “Not quite,” she said.
“You know how much I care about you, Kay,” Andrew said. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and with me in the capital and you up here . . .” He sighed. “It’s not like either of us have so much free time anyway. They’ll assign you to something else soon enough, and me also, and in a couple of weeks you won’t even remember you knew me.”
“I think you might be exaggerating the case just a bit,” she said.
“Maybe just a bit,” he admitted.
“But you’re right,” Kay said, biting down on any trace of sadness. “We’re too busy for a long-distance relationship.”
“Maybe they’ll move you down to D.C.,” Andrew said, perhaps only half kidding. “All the success you’ve been having? They’ll be making you Director in no time.”
Kay laughed. “That would be a hell of a jump,” she said. “Besides, going to work in Washington, dealing with those suits all day? Not for me, thanks. I’d go mad if I wasn’t operational.”
It was only later, after Andrew had left, that Kay realized that that last statement hadn’t been hyperbole. She had started the Black Bear investigation unsure if counterintelligence was the right spot for her to work in, and now she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
48
TORRES CALLED her the next Wednesday on her direct line, and beneath his usual friendly jawing there was something of an edge. “I got that thing you wanted,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything for a while.
Which Kay could only take to mean that he didn’t want to discuss it over an open phone. “Thanks,” she said noncommittally.
“I thought maybe I’d drop it off to you when I came into the city this weekend.”
“You? In New York?” A Baltimore native, Torres had left the city only during his first years in the Bureau. He had a little cabin on the eastern shore of Maryland that he went to in the summers, and apart from that traveled little. In particular, he had very little positive to say about the Big Apple, a parochialism common to many of the denizens of the cities bordering New York.
“It’s sort of a . . . package deal; my wife got it. One of those Internet sites. A room and a show, supercheap, that kind of thing.”
“A show?” Kay said, trying to keep the mockery out of her voice and not quite succeeding.
“You married, Ivy?” Torres asked, somewhat irritably.
“I’d have mentioned it to you, probably.”
“In the happy event that you one day wed, you’ll shortly discover that you sometimes have to do things that you don’t want to do to keep your spouse happy.”
“Is it Cats? You can tell me if you’re coming up here to see Cats, Torres. I won’t make fun of you. Much.”
“Do you want the thing or not?” he said testily, and Kay decided she’d better not ride him too much harder after all.
“All right, all right. Saturday evening it is. I’ll make us dinner reservations.”
“See you Saturday,” Torres said.
“See you Saturday.”
• • •
Kay met Torres and his wife, Eileen, at a sushi restaurant she knew in the Village. Torres looked skeptical but soon got into the swing of things, especially after Kay explained that it was perfectly acceptable to eat the rolls with his hands. It was only the second or third time that Kay had met Eileen, but she felt like she knew her better than that, having watched Torres call her from every stakeout and late-night investigation they’d ever been a part of. It was like that anytime two people loved each other long enough, it occurred to Kay. They start to wear into one another, acquire habits and phrases, shared idiosyncrasies. It was like that with Luis and Justyna. Kay supposed it had been like that between her own mother and father, although she couldn’t remember well enough to be sure.
After dinner Eileen excused herself for a cigarette, laughing off Torres’s judgmental scowl. Fried food, alcohol and the job were the only vices for which Torres had any affection: as far as he was concerned smoking tobacco was an abomination, although to Kay’s mind it said something about their relationship that he had never managed to get his wife to stop.
Kay waited until Eileen was outside before speaking. “Are you going to pass over what you have,” Kay asked, “or am I going to have to ask you questions about the musical you just sat through?”
Torres took an unnecessarily long look at his wife, making sure that her attention was taken up with other things, then swiveled his attention around at the restaurant, reached into his satchel and set a manila folder on the table.
Kay looked at it awhile but didn’t touch it. It was a slender thing: there couldn’t be more than a page or two inside. Whatever connection her father had had to the FBI, it apparently had been less than extensive.
“This is it?” Kay asked, knowing the answer but somehow not wanting to touch it.
“Yup.”
“Did getting it . . . cause you any trouble?”
Torres shrugged, half shook his head. “People like me, Ivy. And I’ve been around long enough to earn a few favors here and there. Don’t worry, it won’t come back to bite me. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Me? What do you mean?”
“What are you up to here, Ivy? What exactly do you think you’re going to find in this folder?”
“The truth. Isn’t that our job?”
“My job is to catch criminals. Yours is rather more complicated altogether, but last time I checked, it was as much about keeping secrets as it was unveiling them. Jeffries have any idea about these . . . extracurricular activities of yours?”
Not so long ago, Kay would have blushed at that. Working counterintelligence, however, had sharpened her capacity for obfuscation and dissimulation, and her face was solid and unreadable. “I’ll make sure to inform Jeffries of my situation as soon as it becomes appropriate to do so,” she informed Torres.
“When do you think that would be, exactly?”
Kay shrugged. “That would depend on what I find inside the folder,” she said, running her fingers down the paper as if it were something secret and precious. “Did you look at it?”
“No,” Torres said after a few moments. “And if you feel like taking my advice, you won’t, either. What’s in there won’t change anything for you, Kay. Won’t improve anything, at least.”
“But I’ll know the reason why they died.”
“What good is that going to do you? It won’t bring them back to life. It won’t let you talk to them or hold them, won’t make up for being the only girl in high school without parents. Won’t save your brother or fix the mess he made of his life.” Torres put his hands up as if to defend himself. “I’m not trying t
o be cruel here, Kay, I’m being honest. You need to get some perspective on this whole thing.”
“I haven’t looked at the folder yet. Maybe there’s nothing to it.” Although Kay didn’t really believe that.
“I am your friend,” Torres said, sitting up straight. “And I’m also a sworn Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; have been that since you were still wearing your hair in pigtails. And I take both of those responsibilities very seriously, Kay, very seriously indeed. Remember the FBI’s motto—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity? It was one thing to bend a rule or two—I’ve never been known as a particular stickler for every little bit of protocol the Bureau decides to lay on us—but there’s a difference between bending rules and breaking them. It looks to me like you’ve got it into your head to run your own parallel investigation: just you, all by your lonesome. What if you open up this folder and there is something in there, something secret, something important? Are you going to go to Jeffries with it? Or are you thinking about going off the reservation?”
“I won’t know until I’ve seen it,” she said. “And how about you? You planning on dropping a dime to my new supervisor?”
Torres looked hard at her. “I’d think you know me better than that, after everything.”
Kay looked down at what was left of her drink, felt bitter and foolish, unsure how exactly she wound up midway through a fight with an old friend who had done her a serious favor. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “There’s been a lot of stress at work lately,” she said. “I guess I’m a bit on edge.”
Torres grunted, far from satisfied, but he didn’t push the matter any further. Kay didn’t suppose he’d enjoyed these last moments of unpleasantness any more than she had. “Just be careful, Kay,” Torres said. “You’re playing without a net.”
Kay nodded and finished her coffee, entirely aware of that fact.
49
THE FOLDER was causing trouble all out of proportion to its size. The night before, after she had finished saying good-bye to Torres and his wife, Kay had taken it home, set it on her desk, drunk three cans of microbrewed beer while staring at it warily, then gone to sleep without opening it. She had woken up the next morning with the feeling that it was staring at her; had ignored that feeling, taken a shower, put on her weekend clothes, shoved the file into her satchel and gone to grab some brunch. It had sat beside her as she picked at her omelet, an unpleasant garnish that had ruined the meal. It hung heavy on her shoulder during what should have been a pleasant walk along the waterfront, like a rain cloud blotting out the sun.
And now it sat on the table at the coffee shop she had stepped into, mainly to escape from the summer heat, the air-conditioning on full blast. At the booth next to her a skinny boy wearing Coke-bottle glasses typed away at a MacBook. Most of the rest of the seats at the café were filled with virtually identical members of his species.
If Kay opened it, she was committing herself to a course of action. Torres was right: Kay was an FBI Agent, one closely bound by rule of law. Her badge meant—or should mean—that she followed the rules more closely, not that she was free of them. The mission came first; wasn’t that her credo? This wasn’t the mission, and Kay’s powers of self-delusion were insufficient to convince her otherwise. This was personal, this was about the Malloy family and what had been done to it. As long as she could remember, since the rest of her friends were chatting about the latest boy band and slapping stickers of ponies on their binders, Kay had wanted to belong to something—like her father. She had struggled, toiled, sacrificed. What was she if she wasn’t an FBI Agent?
Reaching over to open the folder, the answer seemed clear. She was the daughter of Paul and Anne Malloy, and that carried with it responsibilities as well. Less obvious than those of the Bureau, perhaps, but no less strict. Inside the plain manila envelope was a single sheet of paper and a few short paragraphs inked onto it. The copy Torres’s friend had made for her was fuzzy, but Kay could still recognize the outdated typewriter font. She forced herself to read it line by line, carefully, making sure not to miss anything. When she was done she read it a second time, then a third. Then she put it back in the folder and put the folder in her satchel.
In the days shortly before his death, Paul had reached out to a contact within the Bureau, trying to set up a meeting with someone in counterintelligence. He claimed to have information regarding a matter of national security but was unwilling to share it except at a face-to-face meeting. A short addendum explained that this meeting had never happened due to the untimely demise of Paul Malloy, killed on a third-world street corner. The timing was suspicious, certainly, but with nothing more to go on, the authorities had been forced to close his file. So far as the FBI had been concerned, the death of Dr. Malloy had brought the matter to an abrupt end.
Years ago, in one of the required classes that Kay had taken at Princeton, she had listened to a lecture on black holes. So unimaginably dense that even light could not escape their pull, they were impossible to identify with a telescope. They could only be recognized by the effect that they had on other objects in their proximity, shifting the flights of asteroids and the paths of planets and the placement of the stars themselves. This idea had fascinated Kay—that some things can only be identified indirectly by the ways in which they distort the existence of what is around them. Kay began to think about that now, about the strange way that this new information was pulling on everything that she knew of her own life and history, of who she was, of the fundamental core of her character.
Her father had not been, so far as she could remember, a paranoid sort. He would not have reached out to the FBI for no reason. He must have known something. Was it something important enough to kill him over? Or had it been something else, something personal?
“Son of a bitch,” Kay said, the expression of rage undirected, or more accurately, directed at whatever as yet unknown entity had murdered her parents, this faceless entity that had turned her into an orphan. The hipster next to her, deep in what he no doubt imagined would become the next great American novel, was about to say something, but then he saw the hard set line of Kay’s mouth and decided against it.
50
THEY HAD a good-bye party for Andrew on the roof of Kay’s apartment on a late afternoon in July. A simple thing, a grill and a few haunches of meat, several coolers full of beer from the liquor store down the street, someone’s iPod on shuffle. Technically it was against the terms of her lease to be grilling on the roof, but with roughly a dozen Agents in attendance, Kay did not think they would have any trouble with the super.
Apart from the Black Bear squad, Andrew had brought some of his own people, mostly neighbors and casual acquaintances that he had picked up in the time he had been stationed in New York. He had a gift for it, Andrew, some ineffable but indisputable quality to make strangers acquaintances and acquaintances friends. It had worked on the Black Bear team, at least, most of whom had come out to eat cheeseburgers and drink a bit and watch the sun set on a Manhattan skyline.
Not Jeffries, of course, although Andrew had been gallant enough to ask her. Their ASAC was good at many things, but frivolity was not one of them.
A bittersweet occasion, but Kay was enjoying it. They hadn’t discussed the future of their relationship after that one day at breakfast a few weeks earlier; had done their best to enjoy what little time was left to them. In truth, with everything that had happened to her lately, the dissolution of her union with Andrew was not foremost in Kay’s mind.
“Shame about Mike Anthony,” Marshall said slyly, standing over the grill, watching Andrew work.
Andrew nodded seriously and flipped three beef patties in rapid succession, the sizzle of fat against heated metal. “No question. Anthony is a master, done more good for this country than anyone without a security clearance will ever know. But he’ll be all right: they’re moving him to Deputy at the National Counterintelligence and Security
Center. It’s real work for a counterintelligence professional.”
“Who do you think will take over his position?”
Andrew bent down and took a long peek at one of the sausages, then righted himself. “Lots of good people down in D.C. Same as it is here: the mission is what matters. The mission is all that matters.”
“But it’ll be you,” Kay said quietly, after Marshall went to grab another beer.
Andrew smiled his even, white smile, gave a shrug that was mostly confirmation. “We’ll have to see. Nothing’s been decided yet. The ADDO is pleased with my work, or seems to be. I’m a bit junior to be given a position of such authority, but . . . it’s not unheard of.”
“Counterespionage Group Chief,” Kay said. “That’s quite a coup.”
He looked up at her abruptly, sharply, but then he laughed and went back to his work. “Hard work and some good fortune, nothing more. Besides, I’m not even sure if I’ll get it.”
Although he seemed pretty confident. Andrew never bragged or boasted, but he carried himself with a quiet and unflappable confidence, as if he were following some clearly marked line through the byways and vicissitudes of day-to-day life. Normally, it was one of the things Kay liked about him.
“You never liked Anthony, did you?” Kay asked.
“Mike Anthony is a very skilled case officer,” Andrew said. “And I have great respect for him. But he and I were never what you’d call close,” he admitted.
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t want to presume.”
“Because he knew you were angling for his job?”
“Everyone was angling for his job,” Andrew said. “Everyone beneath him, at least. I don’t have any sense of shame in admitting that, none at all. Ambition is not, in and of itself, a sin. Yes, I want to rise in the ranks. I want to be important; I want to have a big oak desk and a plaque with my name on it.” Although his broad smile seemed to make a mockery of his words, his eyes were clean and clear and even.
