by Jan Fedarcyk
“His name isn’t Tom,” Kay informed him. “And I know more about him than you do.”
“Whatever his name, he was to serve as closer, after I made the initial pitch.”
Kay nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve made the pitch,” she said. “Now make the call.”
55
TOM WAS nervous. Tom was often nervous, in truth. It was one of the things he had learned from Pyotr, from before, even, from his first rounds of training in that dim age before he had left Russia; what would be paranoia in a normal person, what would get you locked up in a padded room, well-meaning medical health professionals prescribing high doses of antipsychotics, was perfectly reasonable to a spy—was, indeed, entirely necessary. In the intelligence Agent’s toolbox, a thousand times more useful than a pistol, was a roll of antacid tabs, one of which he was chewing while waiting for the phone call, chalky powder reduced to nothing on his tongue.
Although in point of fact he had a pistol also, a little holdout piece, five shots in a metal casing, held tight against his ribs in the little pocket. As a rule he did not go about armed, for the same reason that he did not walk around wearing a hard hat: the dim possibility of its being needed weighed less than the hassle of carrying it. But, waking up that morning, there had been something that had whispered to him that it might be required, some cautious instinct that he knew better than to ignore.
Tom sat in a chain coffee shop just across from Luis’s apartment, watching yuppies roll in and out, the bourgeois tide ebbing and flowing, the cup of tea beside him long grown cold. He did not jump when the phone vibrated in his pocket, but he answered it very quickly.
“All is well?”
“Yes,” Luis’s voice said from the other end of the line. “You should come on up.”
He had sounded terrible, Tom thought, exiting the coffee shop and crossing the street, but that was entirely appropriate. The doorman smiled at Tom as he entered Luis’s apartment building, and Tom reminded himself, belatedly, to smile back. Easy amiability, friendly but not noticeable. It seemed to take a long time for the elevator to arrive, even longer for it to deposit him at his destination, some twenty stories above the street. He knocked twice on the door, heard a response from inside telling him to enter. A woman’s voice, Kay’s voice. He felt his heart in his chest, twisted the knob and stepped smoothly inside.
All seemed well at first glance. They were sitting across from each other at the small kitchen table off the main entrance. They both looked miserable, exhausted, uncertain. Tom would have been concerned if he had found them otherwise.
“Good morning, Kay,” he said, taking an unoffered seat smoothly between the two of them. “My name is Tom.”
“Is it?” Kay asked quietly.
“For our purposes,” Tom said, still smiling. “Your uncle has made clear the situation for you, then?”
“As best as he was able,” Kay said, even-faced, giving away nothing. “Perhaps you’d like to run through it as well.”
Tom shrugged, undid the buttons of his coat. “It is one of the upsides of dealing with a fellow professional that we can normally skip the preliminaries.”
“Indulge me,” Kay said. “I’m quite a catch: Don’t you think I deserve the full press?”
A creeping sense of uncertainty, but Tom stepped on it, broke its neck like he would a scurrying mouse. Complete composure, as Pyotr had taught him; no hint of worry. “Absolutely you do. Absolutely. To summarize, then: your brother is ten thousand dollars in debt to some acquaintances of mine, unfriendly people, people you would be better off not knowing, never having met, people whom you would very much not want to owe money. He, moreover, owes this money as part of an illicit drug transaction. In short, your brother’s life hangs by a string. I could snip it, quite literally, allowing my associates free rein to resolve Christopher’s debt in any way they feel. Or, if I was feeling gentle—or perhaps cruel—I could drop a hint of his activities to any number of different law enforcement agencies along with a note suggesting that perhaps they investigate how it is that Christopher walked out of lockup last fall, if perhaps his beloved sister has not been using her influence unduly. That was how he got himself out of that little bit of trouble, wasn’t it? You slipping a finger on the scales?”
Kay smiled but didn’t answer.
“But of course, it doesn’t need to be like that. We don’t need to be enemies. This is not a trap laid for you; at least, it does not need to be, Kay, truly, it does not. We are very good at this, we have long practice. You would pass us what information came your way—nothing so terrible, nothing which would harm any member of your organization. You’ve been doing this long enough to understand that it’s a game more than anything else. The stakes are not so high as any of us like to pretend. The United States of America will muddle on as it has this last half century, and if our people are occasionally further ahead than your superiors would like, it hardly presages the apocalypse.”
“And who are your people, exactly?”
“Are we not beyond that point? Surely you can guess.”
“I’m a little bit slow,” Kay said. “That should be obvious to you: Luis has been playing me for twenty years, and I never picked up on it.”
Beside him, Luis flinched. Tom smiled a bit at his discomfort. “Let us just say that your payment, which will be ample, will come in rubles.”
“And who is in charge of this operation? Who would I be reporting to?”
“For the moment, you would be answering to me.”
“And when the moment ends? Tomorrow, and the day after?”
“These are not questions requiring an immediate answer,” Tom said, smiling sternly, like a grade school teacher bringing his class to heel. “For that matter, you are not really in a position to be asking questions. I can appreciate this must be an . . . uncomfortable situation for you, Kay, but it is where we find ourselves. You will come work for us or you will see your life destroyed. There is no third choice.”
For a woman who had just discovered that her surrogate father was a Russian spy, that her brother’s life was in serious danger, that everything she had worked and struggled towards was about to be torn away, Kay seemed distinctly unperturbed. And again now, despite the chalky-white antacid still heavy in the corners of his mouth, Tom could feel the rising tide in his stomach: not paranoia but a clear, oncoming sense of doom.
“This is a very interesting offer, Tom,” Kay said, leaning forward in her chair. “Let me counter with my own: Come work for us.”
“I have to say, Kay, in all the time I’ve been . . . familiarizing myself with your background, personal habits, behavior, you never struck me as the sort given to frivolous jokes.”
“Your initial impressions were accurate. My sense of humor is, sad to say, underdeveloped. I’m a much better investigator than I am a comedian. I’ve been following you for two weeks,” Kay said. “Well, my associates. You were lying a moment ago, lying twice over, and so perhaps inadvertently telling the truth. This is not a trap you are laying for me. It is the end of one pitched towards you.”
Tom shot a quick look over to Luis, sallow as a starveling, unable to look at either of them, and he remembered that gray sedan he had seen more often than he ought, and he knew that Kay was not lying. How strange, after all these years, to finally taste what he had distributed so much of! The numbing sense of horror, the sudden discovery that the structure you were standing atop was built upon sand, that it was collapsing even at that very moment, a rumbling from far beneath, feet shaking and unsteady . . .
“You’re bluffing,” he said, the classic refrain, one he had heard countless times, and being on the other end it sounded no less foolish, no less childlike and juvenile.
“The whole thing became clear enough once I started looking at it from the other end. The surveillance, the elaborate plotting—it didn’t make sense: Christopher didn’t ha
ve anything worth that sort of trouble. The only thing Christopher had is a perhaps too-loyal sister, one who might, potentially, be convinced by that loyalty to betray another. I spent a day or two watching you watching him, trying to run your plates, coming up with false names and dead ends. By then I was sure enough to call in the Bureau. The last two weeks you’ve been running around frantically, thinking yourself one step ahead, and you didn’t even know what game you were playing. You’re in the net, Tom: you’re already caught. I understand you might need a moment to accept the reality of the situation. Feel free to take it.”
“You knew about this?” Tom asked, directing the question towards Luis.
But his onetime contact and current betrayer did not look at him or at Kay, indeed had not spoken since Tom had come through the door.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” Kay said, and for the first time Tom could hear a hint of victory in her voice. “We don’t need to be enemies. You would pass us what information comes your way—nothing so terrible, nothing which would harm any member of your organization.” His own words thrown back at him, sharp as the edge of a razor. “I have my own friends waiting to speak to you; they won’t be more than a moment.”
And, as if standing on a hill and overlooking a desolate and miserable countryside beneath, Tom could see his future laid out before him. His overseers denying all knowledge of his existence, no diplomatic immunity for poor Tom, twenty years an Illegal, and that meant prison. Tom did not suppose there was a way to pin Sadler’s murder on him, but even so, he would be spending the rest of his life in a very small room, seeing the sun once a day in the company of a few hundred other hardened felons. Or turn traitor, and Tom knew well what sort of a life that was, what sort of misery that foretold, the constant worry and the strain, the endless and ongoing deceit, hypocrisy rising to your throat till it choked you.
Tom lost himself for a moment in a miserable future, and then there was the cold feel of metal in the palm of his hand and Tom realized that he was holding his gun, holding his gun and looking at the object of his long chase, the prey who had become the hunter. The sun was very bright coming in through the very clean windows; it seemed brighter than it had been when he was walking here, bright to the point of blinding.
“Do not do anything foolish,” Kay said sternly, still just as cold as ice water. “You’re a professional: there is no chance of shooting your way out of this, and you hardly need another murder charge added to your sheet.”
And something about Kay’s damnable reserve, that steadiness that she had displayed these long months he had been following her, pushed him further over the edge. Tom raised his gun, even in that last moment unsure if he would use it, and if so where, whether the muzzle might not be pointed at the underside of his own chin rather than the chest of the woman who sat in front of him, seeming calm, seeming altogether unfazed by the threat against her life.
He had forgotten about Luis, the old man relegated to the sidelines, his part played out; and so when Tom suddenly felt an arm reach around his, the gun pulled downward, he reacted with shock if not fright. The pistol jerked in his hand: it was not deliberate, not really, only the stress of the movement and his index finger reacting involuntarily, and then a sliding wetness running down his shirt and his pants, a strange, not unhappy look on Luis’s face, and then the body striking the ground.
Kay moved quickly, up and off the chair, rolling sideways and drawing her weapon as she had been trained to do from reflex years ago at Quantico. Neatly done but pointless, because before she could aim or fire her own weapon, it was over. Tom did not hear the very clean windows breaking, the pane of glass shattering from the incoming bullet and then entering his head, oblivion brought so quickly that he was not even aware of dying.
Two bodies on the kitchen floor then, blood leaking onto her aunt’s floor. Kay lowered her weapon and moved to her uncle as swiftly as she was able. “Don’t talk,” she said, pressing her hand against the wound in his side, trying unsuccessfully to stanch the blood, her voice rising and fearful. “Don’t talk. Just lie back: help is coming. Help will be here in a moment.”
A show of strength that she would not have credited him with, and he pushed her away from his wound, the river of red coming faster. And after a long moment’s consideration, Kay let her hand fall to her side, her uncle’s lifeblood soaking into her dark pants and the bottom of her blouse.
“Sorry,” Luis said, red spilling onto the floor and the light leaving his eyes. “Sorry.”
His blue eyes staring up at her, fever-bright and then dimming and then entirely dark.
The rest of the team had been waiting next door, and they were not slow in entering, not at all slow but still much too late. When they came in, Kay had her uncle’s head in her lap. Her eyes were mournful but her mouth was stern.
56
ON A sunny day in late summer, they put Luis into the ground. Justyna wore a black dress and did not cry. Kay and Christopher stood just slightly behind her, and she did not turn back to look at them during the length of the service. The sermon was flat, given by a clergyman who had never met the deceased. It mentioned his state service, his taking in of Kay and Christopher after the tragic deaths of their parents. The family and friends whom he left behind, bettered by his existence, lamenting his absence, hoping for some future reunion. Kay found herself agreeing with more of it than she would have anticipated. When it was over, they lowered the coffin slowly into its hole, and Kay threw a handful of dirt onto the box, and moved aside for the rest of the mourners to do the same.
Christopher was red-eyed but sober, fingers wearing away at the twenty-four-hour chip he had earned earlier that week at his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. If Kay had had more energy, she would have been worried about him, even more than usual. He had quit his job as a bartender, moved into a halfway house. There would be no legal repercussions for his brief foray into serious distribution of narcotics, the slate wiped clean by his assistance in bringing to heel a dangerous foreign Illegal, and the man who had come near to ruining his life.
He gave Kay a weak smile when he saw she was watching him, raised two fingers in greeting and then lost himself in the crowd.
And there was a crowd, a throng, a pack, a thick swarm of mourners, old associates and business acquaintances, friends from the building and the neighborhood and the city, and Justyna’s own people, bridge-and-tunnel folk mostly, down from their expensive exurbs. If you had been watching over it from a distance, you would have supposed the man’s life a happy one, Kay thought. And perhaps it had been, although thinking of him in those last moments, the weight of guilt on his face, Kay was not sure she would have agreed.
“Ms. Malloy?” a voice asked.
“Agent Malloy,” Kay answered before she had turned to see him, a dark-eyed man in a neat suit.
“Forgive me. Of course,” he said, sweeping his hat off his head in an old-fashioned but not unbecoming gesture of apology. “I just wanted to express my condolences for your loss.” He had the faintest trace of a foreign accent, like that of someone who had lived in exile for so long as to have forgotten their native tongue. “Your uncle was a man of . . . great depths.”
“Thank you,” Kay said flatly. It was the tenth or the fiftieth or the hundredth such conversation she had had that day, the butt end of a wave of compliments towards the man who had raised and perhaps loved her and whom she had never really known. Kay snapped herself back into the moment: there would be time enough for consideration, sleepless nights, recriminations if need be. For now there was etiquette, as much defense as obligation, rote words allowing for conversation to continue without conscious thought. “How did you know my uncle, exactly?”
The man’s teeth were gray and uneven, but his smile seemed sincere and made up for it. “We were old acquaintances,” he said. “Back in Europe, many years ago.”
Not for the first time, not at all for the first time,
it occurred to Kay how much more there had been to her uncle than she had ever known. “He was a man of many parts,” Kay said.
“All of us are—vices and virtues intertwined, inexorably, unknowable even to ourselves.” The man bowed and swept his hat back upon his head. “I hope the Almighty judges him kindly.”
It was only as Kay watched him walk off that she realized she had never learned his name.
There were other concerns that day. Kay had been expecting the funeral to be busy with friends of Luis and her aunt, but she had been surprised to see the Black Bear team show in full strength, dark-suited, looking serious and sad. Jeffries she had half expected, but not Wilson or Marshall or the rest. And Kay had never been the easiest colleague, she could see that now. But they were polite and more so, they were the only people present who knew the entire truth of the situation besides Christopher and Kay. Andrew had sent his condolences, a long e-mail and a short phone call relaying his sympathy, although events in D.C. had kept him from attending in person. Which was just as well, so far as Kay was concerned. There was too much to think about right now to be adding the gray area that was their relationship to the mix.
Jeffries appeared, as she often did, unexpectedly, standing beside Kay’s shoulder—a few inches below it, in fact, gray eyes waiting for Kay to notice her.
“Ma’am.”
“Kay,” she said, extending her hand. It was, to the best of her memory, the first time Jeffries had ever used her first name. “Condolences on your loss.”
“Thank you,” Kay said. “And thanks for coming.”
“This was neatly done,” Jeffries said after a long moment. “Even if the ending wasn’t quite what we had hoped for.”
“Not quite,” Kay agreed.
“My instincts about people are rarely wrong.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
