by Sam Powers
“They’re putting me out to pasture, aren’t they?” Brennan said. “Walter, I’m thirty-nine years old. I can’t become a house husband at thirty nine. I can’t walk away ... it’s just wrong.”
Lang had mentored Brennan for seven years and his soft spot for the former Navy SEAL was considerable. But he wasn’t going try and soften the blow, or infuse him with false hope. “I’ll keep fighting for you, you know that. But it doesn’t look good, Joe. It’s the timing, that’s all. If we weren’t going into a new election cycle…”
“We’re always in an election cycle in this country,” Brennan snapped. “They run for office permanently when they should be running the country.” Then he regretted the tone. Walter wasn’t the enemy. “I’m sorry, Walter, I didn’t mean to bark at you. You know what I mean.”
“I know. It drives us all crazy, watching a country run on three- and four-year plans instead of looking long-term, just because some narcissistic jerk who managed to raise a few bucks wants a title and a free ride. But that’s not going to change any time soon, and they’re not going to change their minds. You’re a cliché to them, Brennan, a relic of a different era. These are pen pushers, guys who have two-hour country club lunches. They don’t want anyone drawing attention to how little they actually do. It’s got nothing to do with the op, or the purpose, or the public. It never has. It’s about their townhouse in Georgetown and their McFuck You Mansion in Jackson Hole. They have to keep the politicians happy. They don’t give a shit about the public, and they sure don’t give a shit about you. Or what you can offer.”
“That’s…”
“Bureaucracy,” Lang said grimly.
“I was going to say it’s all kinds of bull. But we both knew that, too. I’m going to have to resign, you realize that, right?”
Lang frowned. “I’m not even sure they’d accept it right now. They want you under wraps.”
“They know I can’t talk publicly.”
“It’s not publicly they’re worried about. Besides, think of Carolyn.”
“What about her?”
“If you walk away against their wishes, she’s left working at the agency. She’s on a career track, Joe. She’ll be in executive before long. You really want to ruin that?”
For a second, Brennan wanted to ask Walter whose side he was on -- and who saved who; but he did as taught in leadership training and reframed it dispassionately; he knew Walter was just being bluntly honest.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “She’s worked so hard in the last year. I was pretty bad to be around for the first few months after I was suspended and she hung in there for me.”
“It can’t have been easy for either of you,” Lang said. “Again, you know how sorry…”
Brennan shook his head vehemently. “No, cut that stuff out right now. You’d have done the same for me.”
It was probably true, Lang thought. Probably. He wondered whether he’d have had the courage. It was one thing to work undercover. If you were doing it right, conflict was usually off the table. He’d blown it, and he knew it, and Joe Brennan had paid for it. But would he go into a heavily armed compound for Joe? He wasn’t sure he had the guts.
“What are you doing for the rest of the summer?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Carolyn’s rented a place in the Napa Valley for the next four weeks; then we’re going to play it by ear. She might come back to work at that point.”
“Napa?”
“Wine tours. She figures we can get zonked while the kids go horseback riding, or something.”
“And when you get back?”
He shrugged. “Like you said, it’s probably not up to me.”
“You could always work freelance. They’ve never cared much what work agents did in their own time, as long as it didn’t lead back anywhere and isn’t intelligence related. And there’s a lot of work out there for a good contractor. There’s no shame in security consulting, for example.”
Brennan gave an affirmative but he kept what he was really thinking to himself. Walter had a guilty enough conscience already. “Sure. Did you manage to figure out the press leak?”
“No. But I’ve got a few ideas.”
“NSA?”
“Possibly. More likely one of ours. There are a lot of different interests on this one trying to massage it for leverage, progress on some angle or project of their own.” The distaste on Walter’s face was obvious, Brennan thought; for a second, he thought about the year past and wondered again why they both did it, why it was still important to them.
The thought was interrupted by a new arrival. Even with the door in his left rear periphery, Brennan spotted her the moment she walked in, her cream-colored overcoat sticking out like a neon light in the dingy surroundings. He turned his head quickly, knowing everyone at the bar would be doing the same.
“You know her?” he said quietly to Lang.
“Familiar. Can’t place her.” They both knew that could be good or bad, and it merely heightened the tension. Brennan got up. “I’m out of here. Call me.” He moved towards the back door.
Lang nodded in return. Brennan didn’t need to explain; Walter was an old hand. When someone suddenly appears who’s out of place, it’s better for an agent keeping a low profile to play the short odds and get out. Otherwise, questions might ensue, or conflict, or both.
The woman approached Lang’s table, watching Brennan for a moment as he disappeared through the pub’s back door. She was young, Lang thought, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight, five-seven, fit but not muscular, short brown hair, wearing heels, which aren’t conducive to a foot chase. If she was an operative, she was playing a cover. In fact, she reminded him of his ex-wife, Vicki, at the same age.
“Mr. Lang?”
Lang took a casual sip of his pint of draft. Then he leaned back against the booth. “I’m sorry; I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure…” If her hand goes into her purse too quickly, he thought, it’s a quick downward heel strike to her ankle bone. In those stilettos, it’ll break like a twig.
She held out a hand to shake. “Alex, Alex Malone.” She glanced at the back door. “I think I scared your friend off. Sorry about that.”
Walter waved a hand at the door. “It’s nothing. He had to run, get back to work. You’d like him.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, architect from Michigan, in town for a lecture at George Washington.”
She nodded and smiled. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“That depends what you’d like to talk about, miss.”
“May I sit?”
He gestured to the opposing bench. “Please.”
She sat down, placing her purse on the seat next to her. “A friend of mine at State suggested you’d be the person to talk to. I’m working on a story about…”
He stood up and cut her off. “Good day, Miss Malone. I don’t talk to the press.”
She stood up with him. “Please! Mr. Lang, my pieces have wide readership, and I really think we can help each other…”
Lang paused for a second and studied her. She had an earnest face, an expression of hope and nervousness. He’d seen it before on young reporters; he hadn’t talked to them, either. “Not interested, miss.” He headed for the back door.
“I’d like to talk about David Fenton-Wright,” she said.
He stopped in his tracks again. That was a surprise, which was probably why she’d thrown it out, a last gambit to keep him interested. But Lang had been around too long. “No one’s stopping you,” he said, before pushing the back door open and stepping outside into the bright sun.
As he made his way to his car, Lang made a mental note to run a check on Alex Malone. Anyone who knew his habits well enough to find him at the Czech pub was someone he needed to worry about.
When Brennan got home, Carolyn considered not asking him what had happened.
She was in the kitchen, cutting vegetables for the casserole she’d planned to make for dinner, her
pale golden hair pulled back, cheeks flushed from the heat. The cutting board was covered in tiny pieces of celery, onion and carrot; occasionally, as she chopped, she’d push a piece towards the pile too firmly and have to scoop it up off the cheap yellow-and-white tile floor.
She’d known the answer before he left, but was forbidden from telling him. They knew it would happen when they got together, that sharing careers in intelligence would be difficult. Careers full of secrets, twists and turns that married couples weren’t supposed to take, worse by far than the secrets couples normally keep.
She had plenty of other things to worry about, too. She worried that she’d never look again like she did before she’d had kids, or whether she’d even find enough time to get back into shape. And she worried about her husband, who had come and gone throughout their marriage, disappearing for weeks at a time on national security issues.
It wasn’t getting any easier, she told herself. Maybe if they could just find more time for each other, they’d stop feeling tense, resentful. The trip could give them that, time to just spend with each other, no expectations. Lately, everything had been an argument; the simplest things seemed to prompt harsh words, like they’d lost patience with one another after years of diplomacy.
“Babe,” he said perfunctorily as he closed the front door behind him and hung his coat up. He didn’t sound down or up, but it was obvious he wasn’t going back to work. Not that she needed any sort of explanation; David had made it clear to her that Joe was persona non grata at the agency as long as he was deputy director.
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she kept chopping; he retrieved a can of beer from the fridge nearby. “Are the kids excited about the trip?” he asked.
“I suspect the fact that we’re going to be within a couple of hours of a certain theme park is why they’ve been such little angels all week. I take it the answer was no.”
“You take it correctly,” he said. He popped the beer can open, slurping away the froth that rose quickly. He stared at the can for a moment, obviously more satisfied with it than with the rest of his day. “They let Walter give me the news in person, which is a typically cowardly David Fenton-Wright move, trying to make Walter feel guilty for the deputy director’s failed mission.”
The one advantage to a wife with Top Secret security clearance was that Brennan could talk about work. Sometimes. Sometimes, she really didn’t need to know the details. In this case, he knew, she was probably fully versed in what was going on; she was probably bursting to talk to him about it even before he got home. He’d stopped being delicate about her boss in front of her. A year off the job did that to a guy.
She paused in her chopping, tense at the return of the push-and-pull between her career at the agency and Joe. She didn’t want to talk about that stuff.
He looked annoyed, standing there in a sweater and jeans, beer can in hand. She just wanted it to go away. “Well, for four weeks we get to put all that stuff to one side, right?”
“That’s the general idea,” he said. “A little sun, a little fun, a little vino…” For professional reasons, Brennan rarely drank. He was planning on putting his normal routines to one side for the duration. “This was a really good idea, I have to admit.”
She reached over and grasped his right hand in her left, then squeezed it. It was quick, but it said a lot, he thought. She knew how isolated he felt, how cut adrift. And she was trying to be there for him, even though he seemed to make her uncomfortable these days, as often as not.
Brennan said, “Where are the kids? I don’t get the big ‘daddy, daddy!’ greeting anymore.”
Carolyn turned back to her work. She picked up her knife and scraped the diced vegetables off of the cutting board and into a bowl. “They’re six and seven, now, hon; they’re getting less clingy as they get older.”
It was stunning to Brennan to contemplate how quickly they’d grown. Josh was becoming a little version of his father, only instead of intelligence work he was the foreman of the world’s least-efficient Tonka construction company. Jessica was so smart, always head of her class, always the playground mediator, getting along with everybody. He was amazed, when he truly thought about it, at the job Carolyn had done; he was away too much to take any credit. He worried sometimes that his relationship with them would fall by the wayside, as it had with his own father, who had spent twenty years in the military, often posted overseas and on occasion without his family.
He moved over to her and put his arms around her waist. “Do they have their mother’s wisdom?”
“They do, I think.”
“And do they have their father’s good looks?”
She slapped him with a tea towel. “That’s a terrifying thought. Especially Jessica. Let’s just hope they avoid your lactose intolerance and the subsequent wind damage.”
He let go of her waist, and she laughed. “Hey!” he said. “No fair!” They caught the moment, the look in each other’s eyes of happiness and comfort, exactly as it had been when they were younger and delirious with each other.
And then it faded, and they let it go, smiles slowly disappearing, both acutely aware that the tension in their lives was pulling them further apart.
Carolyn turned back to her vegetables.
She said, “It’ll be good, you know? It’ll be good to get away for a while, leave the Beltway behind.”
“And when we get back?” he said. They knew eventually she’d have to make a decision; he didn’t want her to return to work. It wasn’t as if they were hurting for money and they were both skilled, able. But he couldn’t ask her to stay away.
She stopped chopping again and gave him a strained smile. “Let’s worry about that when we get to it, okay babe?” Then she changed the subject as adroitly as possible. “How was Walter?”
“Tense; which is to say, he was Walter. He’s still chewing antacids like candy and blaming himself for everything. He thinks the NSA has a mole in the agency feeding it budget damage.”
“He always thinks there are moles in the agency,” Carolyn said, walking over to the refrigerator. She opened it and retrieved the stewing beef she’d bought that morning. She took it back to the cutting board. “And he’s probably right. I’m sure we’ve probably got people looking in on a few of our colleagues as well. Some things never change.”
Brennan looked around for toys or other signs of play. “Where are the kids, anyway?”
“Backyard.”
He walked to the window over the kitchen sink. Jessica had Josh down on the ground. She had him pinned, her knees on his arms. She was growing faster than her brother and was several inches taller, her long blonde hair hanging down over his face.
“Hey!” Brennan called. Then he opened the window, a turning handle swinging it outward. “Hey! Jessie, get off your brother!”
“He tried to stick gum in my hair!”
“Let him up! Josh, leave your sister alone!”
They got up reluctantly, dusting themselves off. Brennan contemplated how surreal it was, to be surrounded by so many normalcies; how stark the contrast was with Barranquilla, or Fallujah, or Sri Lanka. He’d always told himself that, for all his sense of duty, he preferred home. Watching his kids, his wife a few feet away supporting him, it was the first time he was certain of it. Maybe…
He shook the thought off. He’d never been one to settle, to lose focus or give up early. He loved his job, believed in it. His kids gave him joy, but the work gave him purpose. Brennan took his beer into the living room, grabbing the remote control from its familiar spot on the arm of the old tan leather couch and turning on the six-year-old TV. She’d left it on CSPAN, and a press conference was about to start. The anchor was talking about the committee hearing earlier that day.
“And that was Sen. David Morris, the veteran Republican from Alabama, on his disappointment in today’s testimony. Again, hearings into the recent CIA Colombian operation scandal are closed to the public for reasons of national security, a fact
that opposition politicians have called deplorable. And with that, we take you now to the press availability at the government services building with Sen. John Younger, the President’s economic security advisor and a National Security Council member. Our correspondent, Tom Barr, has been there waiting for his speech. Tom?”
Brennan turned the volume down then changed the channel completely. He’d had enough of that world for one day.
Senator Younger watched the television on the corner of his desk with growing amusement. The senator was medium height, stocky, with a crown of greying hair and strong features, eyebrows too bushy for their own good. He was leaning back in the antique typing chair that sat behind his desk. The TV feed was a recording of the earlier press conference by Senator Morris. Younger chuckled heartily and shook his head; Morris looked a hundred and twenty years old. Addison March must have cringed watching it, imagining the puzzled looks on the faces of a key demographic.
Younger’s own presser had been smooth by comparison, a few quick jokes, some pithy quotes for the reporters he knew fairly well. His phone intercom sounded. “Sir, Mark Fitzpatrick from the National Security Agency is here to see you.”
“Send him in in Alice,” Younger said, his eyes still on the now-mute press conference. He couldn’t help but beam a smile as Fitzpatrick joined him.
“Senator. You look like you just won a new car.” The NSA man liked the senator. In another life, Fitzpatrick figured, he’d have been longshoreman or a shop teacher.
“Mark, my boy. Good to see you.”
“You must be watching Morris.”
“He’s like a wrecked steamship about to crash into port. He wrangled his way onto the select committee without March having much to say in it, and now it’s costing him. He looks like another old, white Republican beating up on POTUS.”
“Don’t these people watch the numbers? The public loves this stuff; rogue agents on unauthorized rescue missions, undercover operations taking on nefarious drug dealers. If we could figure out the name of the nut who went in and grabbed Lang, we could run him for VP. If they keep this up,” Fitzpatrick suggested, “you’ll be in an ideal position to announce…”
