Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  “Easy to say, Adam. Easy to say. A lot more difficult to execute. How many times have I heard you promise that things will be different—only to find they never are? At least for once it’s you who has a reason to end it.”

  There was something he had to ask, although he dreaded the answer. “Is the reason why you’re saying that you’re not even willing to try that you still have feelings for Abdel Nasser? Do you think you have a future with him?”

  She froze. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what? Are you pregnant or something?”

  “Jesus, Adam! What is it with you? Of course I’m not fucking pregnant! But Abdel Nasser is dead. He was killed by the Marines who rescued me, because they thought he was one of the terrorists. And all of it was my fault. Never mind the fact he was my lover. He was also my agent, and I failed to protect him. His safety was my responsibility, and I totally let him down. And that’s another reason I want to separate. Even if I hadn’t been through what I have been, making our marriage function again would probably have been impossible. As it is, I don’t have the energy, and frankly, I don’t deserve it. I ought to be on my own.”

  “Oh, Morgan.”

  She was weeping now, her body convulsed by her sobs. Maybe a hug would have made her feel better, but he made no move; he knew she would push him away again. They were both alone in their grief.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said finally. “It was Gary, and all those other bastards who were working with him. So let’s get them! Let’s make sure they pay for what they’ve done.”

  Her tears were subsiding, and at last she turned to face him again. “You still don’t get it, do you? I can’t do anything. That’s what my meeting with Gary was about. He made it crystal clear that if I say anything to anyone about what I think he’s done, that DVD will be everywhere—not just all over the Agency, but in the press. Never mind my career. Think what that would do to the children. Somehow he always manages it; however many lives have been lost or shattered, Gary comes out on top.”

  Adam held his face in his hands. For once, he had no rebuttal. Meanwhile, he still had to make his own confession. “This doesn’t mean we have to end our marriage. There’s so much good still there; we just have to rediscover it. You talk about the kids, but you know as well as I do how much they would hate it if we were to give up now. But since we’re leveling with each other, you need to know I haven’t been entirely blameless myself.”

  “For heaven’s sake! Are you finally going to fess up that you fucked one of those hot young paralegals when you were on one of your trips in the South? Really, don’t bother. Save your breath. I guessed you did that a long time ago. It isn’t important.”

  “Actually you’re wrong about that, and you always were. But what I need to tell you is more recent. In fact it happened right after I saw your DVD. I was feeling pretty cut-up. I’d been in Gaza only a day or two earlier and got caught in a firefight. Almost got myself killed. So I guess I was in a vulnerable condition.”

  “So. What happened—not that I’m in any position to judge you.”

  He took a deep breath. “I slept with Ronnie Wasserman. She was in Tel Aviv. It only happened once, and the sex really wasn’t that great, but there it is.”

  He had not expected Morgan’s response: she began to laugh. “Ronnie? Ronnie bake-sale Wasserman? Oh Adam, do you really think that I don’t know she’s been after you for years? I said I’m in no position to judge you, but you’re telling me you fucked Ronnie Wasserman while I was a hostage? I have to say, I expected better of you than that.”

  “I know you can’t stand her. But she’s really not that bad. Earlier, when I was still back home and you had just disappeared, she was a rock for us all.”

  “She was a rock, was she? Ronnie Wasserman, who’s never managed to do an honest day’s work in her life, except in order to get a man? Listen. I know she’s a fabulous cook and all, and I’m sure she told you you’re the greatest lawyer since Justice Learned Hand, but trust me, baby, after our divorce, you really can do better than that. I know you were feeling hurt, but you must have been really desperate. Jesus. While I was being tortured by a homicidal lunatic, you were having revenge sex with a soccer widow.”

  “Well, I had to tell you.”

  “I’m not mad about it. Only disappointed. But it also confirms everything I’ve been saying. If you can get off with Ronnie Wasserman, you really shouldn’t be with someone like me. But now, if you don’t mind, I need some sleep. I’m facing a flight and then a long debrief, and I’d like to be fresh. So enough now. Like the Arabs say: hallas.”

  Morgan lay down, turned off her bedside light, and closed her eyes.

  “Goodnight. I love you, Morgan,” Adam said. “And I really, really don’t want a divorce. Just so you know.”

  Morgan said nothing.

  He didn’t try to touch her. He lay down on the bed’s opposite side, a wide gulf of mattress between them. He heard her breathing become more rhythmic, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. He always slept on his front, but he lay on his back, motionless, ready for another waking night. The worst of the many thoughts spinning in his head was that Morgan might be right.

  * SCIF: Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a soundproof room regularly swept for bugs, as found in many US government buildings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Friday, July 21, 2007

  “We seem to be trapped,” Adam says. “I reckon there’s more than a hundred of them. Your first and last day picking up the kids from Phil and Jim, and it looks like we’re going to be late.”

  After days of gray invisibility, the afternoon sun is making the damp earth steam. Free at last from the MI6 safe house in Suffolk—or rather, safe Jacobean mansion—Morgan has joined her husband for a stroll before they collect their children at the end of the school term. Since being driven to Adam’s parents’ home at the beginning of the week, she’s kept a low profile; while she’s still in England, the Agency doesn’t want her to be recognized. But to go to the school just once doesn’t seem like so much of a risk, and anyhow, she’s wearing sunglasses. At least she’ll get to see where they’ve been studying, and it’s her final chance; they’re all booked on a United Airlines flight to Dulles on Monday. Sherry and Rob will meet them at the airport, and then stay a few days while they settle back in. At last they’ll be together, the former victim and the team who facilitated her rescue, her husband and her dad.

  Unfortunately, before beginning their present adventure, she and Adam didn’t quite foresee the consequences of recent meteorological events. Three days ago, more rain hit southern England’s already-saturated soil in just a few hours than would normally fall in a month. At this time of year, Port Meadow, the broad plain through which the Isis flows a couple of miles above the center of Oxford, ought to be a glorious expanse of grass and flowers, with the river a shining ribbon at its heart. Instead, Thames Water has had to open the sluice gates upstream lest the city be inundated, and the meadow has become a vast, gray sheet of murky water. The cows that graze there have been pinned into a narrow strip of grass around the edge, where any nourishment to be had has rapidly been eaten.

  Just above the water level there’s a narrow concrete causeway, which leads from the dry portion of the meadow to Burgess Field, a nature reserve, whose slightly higher altitude has also kept it dry. Grazing there is forbidden. But when they saw Morgan and Adam walking down the causeway, the hungry beasts began to follow them. The reserve’s main cow-sized gate is locked; Adam and Morgan slipped in via the narrow kissing gate to its side. Where the first cows led, all have followed. Having completed their stroll around the reserve, the two human beings have returned to the gateway to find the only path out blocked by thousands of tons of bovine flesh. The stench is strong. As they stand dumbly on the causeway, the flood waters on either side, many of the animals have been emptying their bowels.

  Adam stands on the five-bar gate and waves his arms. “Bleurghh!” he
yells. “Go home! Bleurghh, aaghh, yalla!”

  Nothing happens. He tries cow language: “Moo! Ummhh! Moo!”

  One or two cows moo back. He picks up a hefty stick, and, stretching out across the gate, he taps the rump of the nearest animal. “Yee ha! C’mon now! Bleurghh!”

  Very slowly, the cow begins to advance, tottering a little on its hooves. Its nose brushes the haunches of the beast in front, and almost imperceptibly, a ripple of forward movement begins, like a line of cars getting out of a highway traffic jam. It’s going to take a good many minutes before the path is clear.

  Adam turns to Morgan. She’s laughing and smiling unaffectedly, not only with her mouth, but her eyes. It’s a sight he hasn’t seen for many months.

  “You tell them, cowboy,” she says. “Easy to guess that you weren’t raised on a ranch. Still, it’s good to know that once again, I’m no longer a prisoner.”

  Morgan’s debrief, she has to admit, went much better than she had feared. Charrington House, the facility provided by MI6, turned out to be a haven, with lavish grounds in which to walk when it wasn’t raining, a heated swimming pool, and a well-equipped gym, where every two days she was given a dreamy therapeutic massage. Her bedroom, with three big leaded windows, a gigantic bed, and one of the new flat-screen TVs, would not have disgraced a five-star spa resort. The food—exquisitely prepared by a young, security-vetted chef from Northern Ireland—was not only delicious, but chosen carefully to ease her battered digestive system’s reentry to the world of civilized cuisine. She has stopped vomiting, and after sixteen days there, she has put on seven pounds. Thanks to the regular exercise, her muscle tone is coming back; she is starting once more to acknowledge her body as her own. One afternoon, she was taken to a hairdressing salon in Woodbridge, where a local stylist made a decent job of her hair. The patches of white are there to stay, but Morgan has resigned herself to joining the millions of women with highlights. In times gone by, Charrington House was used to house Soviet defectors, and it amuses Morgan to think that she has occupied the same lodgings as some of the Cold War’s most notable spies.

  To her delight, Adam and the children were allowed to visit her three times, driven across to Suffolk in an MI6 car that picked them up from Oxford. But most helpful of all have been her sessions with Eva David, an Israeli psychologist experienced in handling abused POWs, who seems to possess an intuitive understanding of what has been distressing her most. She has none of the awkwardness Morgan might have expected in a Brit, and tackles matters head-on. “You are blaming yourself for your agent’s death. This I have encountered with people in your profession many times. But punishing yourself will not bring him back, and nor will punishing other people close to you. Eventually, you will embrace this at a fundamental, emotional level. For the time being, rationalize it, and when you feel yourself sliding into self-destructive melancholy, fight back—just as you did against your captors when you were a hostage.”

  It does not take the pain and guilt away, but it makes them easier to deal with. Dr. David has also taught her some simple cognitive-behavioral techniques. Thus armed, Morgan battles her demons. Naturally, she hasn’t told Dr. David that Abdel Nasser was her lover; in the CIA, she suspects, patient confidentiality is a somewhat malleable concept. On the other hand, it does seem that, for the moment, that particular secret is still safe.

  The intelligence component of her days at “Charrers,” as some of the MI6 personnel there called it, was also tolerable. She had never come across the officers who debriefed her before, and unless she finds herself in a similar situation, they assure her, she probably never will again. Joel, an intense young New Yorker, and Peggy, a matronly soul from Nebraska, had researched her case with impressive diligence before they started, and took pains to ensure that their meetings did not add to her stress. They never lasted more than two hours, and took place in a comfortable, airy drawing room, with plenty of excellent coffee and a choice of sodas always on hand.

  In the face of Gary’s threat, Morgan has decided to capitulate. There was simply no other choice. How she hates this, but sometimes, she reasons, bullies are simply too strong, and so she has said nothing to Joel and Peggy about her first trip to Erez, her meetings with Ben-Meir, and her last conversation with Abu Mustafa. But then, these are not the issues that interest them. They want to know everything she can tell them about her kidnappers’ identities, backgrounds, means of organizing themselves, rhetoric, communications, liaison with the Yemenis, and—most critically—all she can remember of what she gave up under interrogation. All of it, they must assume, was passed on by Abu Mustafa to Karim, and thus in turn to the global jihadist network.

  When she told them about the day she was waterboarded, they sounded suitably impressed. “Not many people can deal with that,” Peggy said. “There are cases from the literature, but they’re few and far between. And of course they would have cut off your agent’s head in front of you if you hadn’t finally given in. As I don’t have to tell you, that’s how they roll. At least you gave the poor guy a chance.”

  As for Zainab, when Morgan described her rape and abrupt departure from the Rafah apartment block, she could sense her debriefers salivating—was she someone the Agency should pitch as a recruit? “Leave her alone,” Morgan said. “Hasn’t she been through enough? But if you really want to do some good, get her a US visa and a college scholarship. If anyone deserves the chance to make a new life, she does.” Joel promised he would look into it. Somehow, Morgan doubts whether anything will come of it.

  Toward the end of her stay, they asked her about how she saw her future with the Agency. If she chose to stay, they said, she could have her pick of assignments. “I still can’t begin to think about it,” Morgan said. “It’s just too soon.” The Agency, she reflects later, is not the only department of her life to which that statement applies.

  Since his wife’s arrival in Oxford, Adam has sensed the changes in her. There are still periods when she seems irritable or morose, but they have not returned to the subjects they discussed on that agonizing night in Dubai.

  Her recovery, he knows, has only just begun. During his last visit to Charrington House, while Morgan ambled in the garden with the children, Dr. David took him aside and warned him that she would never be without the mental scars, and that how she would feel six or twelve months later was still impossible to tell. He ought to seek advice in dealing with the psychological legacy of his own experiences, too, she said. It was not every Washington lawyer who had been forced to kill in order to save his own life, though that, as she gently pointed out, was something he and Morgan had in common.

  Over the past few days, they have gradually told each other everything. Learning how close Adam came to being killed seemed to make Morgan appalled. At the same time, she could not help but admit she was impressed that a man who had previously found his triumphs in citing obscure legal opinions stepped up in the way that he did. She has come to accept that in the end, what he did was right. “I know I ran big risks,” he told her one night, as they sat on the garden deck together, finishing a bottle of Sauternes. “And as you’re well aware, I’m an atheist. But I somehow had this belief that I was going to be all right; that something was protecting me. In the end, that’s why I didn’t hesitate.”

  When he said this, Morgan shuddered.

  “You getting cold?” Adam asked.

  “No. I’m fine. It’s just … well, I had the exact opposite feeling. I never quite articulated it to myself, but right through that last trip, in the days before I was kidnapped, I had this sense of dread; if I’d had the courage to listen to my instincts, I’d have been on the next plane home. But for all the shitty reasons you know too much about, I couldn’t. I had to see it through, whatever the consequences.”

  That night, for the first time since her release, Adam tried to make love to her.

  But though she let him hold her, she said she wasn’t ready. “Not yet. I don’t know when. I’m sorry, I just can’t fully
relax.”

  Today, just before they left for their stroll, Adam checked his email to find a message from Ronnie. He shared its contents with Morgan as soon as he read it.

  “Dearest Adam,” it began, “first I can only apologize for what I said on the phone when last we spoke. You were going through a terrible time, and the last thing I should have done was add to the pressure.

  “Anyhow, I wanted to let you know how thrilled I am at the news of Morgan’s release, and I know it must mean the world to the kids. I’m sure you must have played a part in it, and that she must be very proud. Please pass on my warmest regards: I hope we can all be friends again when we’re back in Bethesda.

  “Meanwhile, I’m still in Israel, and my big news is that I’ve started dating someone. His name’s Ya’acov, and he’s a widower who works in a high-tech start-up. We met one night four weeks ago, when Rachelle asked some friends for dinner. I guess she was trying to set me up. Anyhow, it worked. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be an adoptive sabra, too. See you at the wedding (lol)! Bye for now, and have a good flight home. Love to Charlie and Aimee, xxoo Ronit.”

  “A widower, huh?” was Morgan’s first response. “Well, I’ll keep my mouth shut on the subject of Ronnie, or do I mean Ronit. Except to say, do the math. If she met Ya’acov nearly four weeks ago, she didn’t take long to get over you, did she? It did break my heart to think of her grieving over losing you. And I’m so looking forward to us all being friends in Bethesda; my God, the woman has no shame. Well, let’s hope the sex is better with Ya’acov than it seems to have been with you.”

  At last the cow jam has thinned enough to allow them to make progress down the causeway, and they gingerly pick their way along it between the steaming piles of ordure.

  “We’ve still got a few minutes,” Adam says. “The school is just across the railway bridge, and then you’re right there.”

  When they arrive at the line of modern red-brick buildings, there’s already a swelling crowd of parents and children outside the open gates, squinting in the unfamiliar sunlight, clutching bags of sports kit, lunch boxes, and artwork. They make their way into the playground outside the classrooms. Farewells are being said all around them, and vacation plans discussed.