Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  “I really didn’t want things to get all fucked-up and weird,” he answered gently. “I really did want to be friends.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  A while later, the class was called to the conference room for a briefing on our training schedule. At a break, Paul stood up to get a cup of coffee from the vending machine in the hall. As he walked out of the room, I caught sight of Nathan. His eyes, for an instant unguarded, followed the muscles of Paul’s back, flexed underneath his cotton shirt. A look of blurry yearning passed over Nathan’s face, and suddenly I understood.

  As spring neared, everyone in the class began to prepare for the fitness test we had to pass to qualify for the summer’s paramilitary training course. I started running and lifting weights. Some of the other women began to get together to work out every afternoon, trotting companionably together around the Agency’s little loop trail on the Headquarters campus grounds. Deer appeared along that path from time to time, watching the runners with shy curiosity.

  I would have liked to join them, but Jade, who had been a drill sergeant in the Army and had served in Somalia, had unofficially taken charge of the training. Jade’s Vietnamese parents had perished in the war. She had been taken into an orphanage until she was adopted by an American couple. In general, the Vietnamese are rather small-boned. Not Jade. She was large and strong, with well-developed shoulders and quadriceps. Her face was broad; there was the hint of something Inuit or Eskimo in her features, and her voice was deep and husky, almost expectorating. She walked with a muscular, determined stride. She had been a tennis champion in college and still looked as if she were aching to smash things.

  At first, I found Jade unobjectionable, if perhaps unnaturally affectionate. Although we didn’t know each other well, she often hugged me and put her arm around my shoulders as if we’d known each other for years. I received a birthday card from her that read “You are such a Sweetie, you have a heart of gold and I’m so proud to know you!” Although we were officially forbidden from sending personal e-mail over the Agency network, everyone did anyway, and frequently I received messages from Jade with greetings such as, “Whazzup sister! Hope you’re having a great day!”

  But at the same time, Jade seemed always to be in high dudgeon with one or another member of the class, usually because of some perceived slight or snub. She wrote indignant letters to those who invoked her ire. “You are always cold and arrogant to me!” she wrote to Allison, the triathlete and show-jumper. “You do not even say good morning when I walk into the room! I feel that I have tried to behave with civility to you, but you continue to treat me with bad manners and disrespect!”

  Allison printed out the letter and showed it to some of the other trainees: “She’s obviously wacko,” Allison said to me. “But still, what if someone takes her seriously? Has she been going around saying these things to everyone behind my back?”

  She had been, of course. None of us had stood up for Allison, either; we were all vaguely afraid of Jade.

  Paul shrugged when I related Allison’s story to him: “I told you so. Jade’s like the Department of Defense. She needs an enemy to justify her existence.”

  Shortly after this, a remarkably odd thing happened: Brenda Argus, the director of the Clandestine Service Trainee Program, received a missive comprised of letters and words cut out from newspapers and magazines, like an old-fashioned ransom note from the days of silent movies. It denounced Jade for sending slanderous personal letters via interoffice e-mail. “INveStigate thIs Woman!” the note demanded.

  Word of the weird letter spread quickly, with everyone wondering who could have written it. Jade might have a few screws loose, we agreed, discussing the matter in thrilled whispers among ourselves, but anyone who had the time or disposition to sit home alone clipping words out of the Ladies’ Home Journal to denounce a colleague shouldn’t be trusted with our nation’s security. Brenda Argus launched an investigation but never found the author of the note; it was untraceable, even by the CIA’s finest forensic experts.

  Jade took the event as the occasion to launch a campaign of extermination against her enemies. She pulled each of us aside in turn to question the patriotism of the others and cast aspersions on their characters. Driving home one afternoon, I had a flash of insight: The author of the note was Jade herself. It was her personal Reichstag fire. Of course, I had no evidence for this; it was just an intuition. And the mystery was never solved, proving that while the author may have been mad, he or she had something of a talent for covert ops.

  After the incident, Jade’s disapproval came to focus on me. Perhaps she sensed my suspicions about her, or perhaps it was because of my relationship with Paul, whom she hated. The friendship cards and the sisterly hugs came to an abrupt end, and she began to snort and roll her eyes every time I entered the room. No matter what I said in her presence, she would shoot meaningful looks at the people around her, as if to say, “Do you see what I mean?” I ignored her as best I could, hoping she would lose interest. And when she began leading the other women in the afternoon fitness training, I decided to go running alone.

  Sure enough, after a few weeks her animus turned to someone else. The next object of her vitriol was Iris, the only black woman in our class. I’d noticed Iris from the start, because she was strikingly pretty. She was tall and gazelle-slender, with aristocratic high cheekbones and long, sooty eyelashes that raised and lowered like Japanese fans, causing her to appear perpetually caught in a moment of childish wonder. She dressed in the Chanel suits and St. John’s knits she had purchased in her former life—as an investment banker in New York—wearing them with dramatic jewelry and matching scarves, walking down the gray corridors at Headquarters with a model’s prancing, swivel-hipped gait. With her delicate elegance, I expected Iris to be a tender flower, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

  Jade had a habit of honking her nose like a foghorn, then excavating its contents with pistonlike motions at very great lengths, then examining her handkerchief, then blasting the damned thing again. She could make a lecture unbearable. Iris was sitting next to her during a mandatory security briefing, and after Jade’s fifth honk in so many minutes, Iris lost her patience: “Jade, sweetie, you think you could wait until after class before launching any more steamships from that harbor?” Jade was mortified, and thereafter spared no opportunity to question Iris’s devotion to country and fitness for service. “I knew women like that in the Army,” Jade told everyone who would listen. “I can spot a team player and I can spot someone who isn’t, and believe me, she is not the person you want covering you in a firefight.”

  One night during happy hour at Fajita Pete’s, after a few margaritas, Iris overheard Jade making a catty comment about the shortness of Iris’s skirt, which displayed her endless legs. Iris lost her temper. She stood up. “Jade, would you mind enlightening me? Why do you feel obliged to be such a goddamned bitch?”

  Jade, squaring her broad shoulders, asked Iris how she dared to “get in my face like that” and launched into a lecture that began “Let me tell you what I think of your—”

  And then, to everyone’s astonishment, Iris hauled off and punched Jade in the nose.

  The other students separated them as they grappled like fairground wrestlers on the floor, Iris’s Persol sunglasses spinning across the room, never to be found again, Jade energetically attempting to force Iris’s shapely head into a plate of refried beans.

  Somehow, miraculously, word of the spat never made it back to Headquarters, and neither of them was ever disciplined. But among the students, the imbroglio became legendary almost before Iris’s fist connected. Did you hear about the catfight? They had to be pried apart with a crowbar.

  I admired Iris’s nerve and told her so in the ladies’ room the next day. “It’s about time someone stood up to her. You’re a brave woman. I’d sooner tangle with Mike Tyson.” Iris looked pleased with herself. She invited me to lunch.

  Iris came from a
hardworking family in South Carolina. Her mother was a housekeeper and her father a mechanic. After putting herself through business school by waiting tables, Iris discovered that she loathed business, so she decided to join the CIA instead. I never understood exactly why. She spoke quickly and breathlessly and had a short attention span; talking to her was like having a hummingbird land on your arm: She fluttered for a few seconds and then flew off.

  Soon, when it was warm enough, she and I began to take our lunch outside every day, at the picnic tables by the triptych constructed from a fragment of the Berlin Wall. I loved that monument, with FREEDOM spray-painted on its facade. It was a communication through time and space that made the Agency and its mission feel noble. We chattered and gossiped. I told her about Paul and swore her to secrecy. She clucked sympathetically. “He’s not that great-looking,” she said. “Skinny as a bag of bones.” She made the word skinny sound like a moral defect.

  Iris had been dating a security officer since the week we’d joined the Agency. Brad was a handsome, gentle man who had come to brief our class during CIA 101. He had taken one look at Iris and determined that he would consecrate his life to worshipping at her feet. “You’re like some exotic bird who flew into my house,” he told her after the first night they spent together, “and all I want to do is figure out how to make you happy so you’ll stay.” Iris’s desk was covered in the cards he sent her. Iris seemed fond of Brad—she was clearly congratulating herself for at last having the maturity and self-respect to choose a man who treated her well—but I could tell that she was already bored out of her tree.

  Spring arrived. The cherry trees on the Mall bloomed like giant tufts of cotton candy. I finished my rotation, never finding out what had happened to PINEAPPLE. I began another rotation, working on the Balkans. Jade and I stayed out of each other’s way, but whenever Iris and Jade found themselves in the same room, they eyed each other like lions circling the body of a freshly killed antelope.

  I was eager to get down to the Farm, where it was said the real training began. The novelty of driving into Headquarters every morning was still keen, but the desk work was not as dramatic as I’d imagined it would be. I carried files from one office to another, and I went to administrative meetings that no one else in the branch wanted to go to, taking the minutes.

  I went out a few times with men I met on my rotations. Most of the men in our class were married. Gordon, who worked in the Directorate of Science and Technology, had dark Latin good looks, but he drank too much and his conversation was focused entirely on things he wanted to buy: a Bang & Olufsen stereo, a Miata, a big-screen television, a satellite dish. I went out once with Mark, another trainee, but over dinner I noticed that he made smacking noises when he ate. When he asked me out again, I declined politely.

  Seeing men who didn’t work for the Agency was problematic: How do you construct a relationship with someone when you begin by lying about where you work? What do you talk about over dinner if you’re supposed to be a budget analyst but you don’t know a thing about budgets? The standard wisdom was that you couldn’t tell someone you were dating where you really worked unless you were engaged to be married. I’d heard that some men waited until after the wedding, just to be on the safe side. My aunt, who truly believed I worked for the USDA, set me up on a blind date with a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. He spent our dinner carefully impressing it upon me that he had access to classified information. “It’s an enormous responsibility,” he assured me.

  So at night, I went home alone. I told myself that was just fine, and on most evenings, it really was.

  CHAPTER 3

  I can’t say much about my first impressions of Stan, because I don’t remember meeting him. Some people form part of a nameless, faceless mass, and Stan was among them, anonymous and vague. He was a pale, fat man with small eyes and very spiky thick red hair that stood straight up from his head like the bristles of a shoe brush. He made no impression on me, none, one way or the other. I had probably been introduced to him, but I didn’t remember his name; I once heard someone refer to him as “you know, that guy who looks like a cockatoo.” I believe Paul once told me he was very clever and knew a lot about computers.

  My first clear memory of Stan dates from the first time our class went down to the Farm, about six months after our induction into the Agency, for the fitness test. We traveled in a bus driven by bald-headed Eppie, a man who held Top Secret clearances in order to chauffeur CIA employees from one clandestine facility to another. When we escaped the Beltway traffic, I could see wildflowers from the window; it was my first spring in Virginia and the countryside was apple-green and lush. We stopped at a shopping mall for burgers and fries, and chattered enthusiastically with excitement, dribbling fries and Coke all over the bus.

  It was still light when we arrived. The Farm did indeed look like a farm or a summer camp, with rolling green hills carpeted in violets and dandelions, shimmering in the pale gold light. The scent of pitch pine creosote mingled with the smell of laundry soap. A woodchuck stood on its hind legs; a deer ran across the road. Mother ducks and geese paddled in circles around a small pond, trailed in earnest defiles by fuzzy chicks. Signs pointed to dormitories with names like Daisy and Blossom. The instructors met our bus at the dormitories, just as years ago my counselors had met us at Chief Spotted Snake Camp in the Adirondacks. When they directed us to our bunk beds, I felt for a moment that I had tunneled back in time and that archery lessons and pony rides were about to begin.

  We were taken to an enormous depot where the training supplies were kept, and fitted for camouflage gear. The instructors told us that the fitness test would begin at five the next morning. We all went to the campus bar that evening, a shabby little affair with cheap beer, an ancient billiards table and a dartboard. We drank too much, thrilled to be in the country and finally beginning what we imagined would be the real adventure. When the alarm went off the next morning, we were all hungover.

  Spring that year lasted all of about a week: It had turned hot and humid overnight. The instructors warned us to drink a lot of water. We were divided into teams, and Stan was in mine. For the first exercise, we were handed the parts of an M-16 and told to assemble it. I might as well have extracted my own appendix with a pair of pruning shears and a bottle of disinfectant. Fortunately, someone else on the team knew what to do, and we managed to put the thing together in reasonable time. We then used ropes to ford a chasm and carried a dummy—he was supposed to be an injured man—across a swamp. I had no idea what the point of these exercises was, but we were all extremely keen to excel at them.

  Next, we were put through an obstacle course that involved crawling through mud, swinging overhand across ravines, shimmying up ropes, and hopping from one tree stump to another. Midway through the course, which began with a half-mile run in our heavy boots, Stan, sweating horribly and panting, announced that he was suffering from heat exhaustion and had to stop for water. He said this as if it were somehow our fault. He’s faking it, the lazy fuck, I thought, annoyed because until that point our team had been acquitting itself decently.

  Later, he told me that he had been crushed with embarrassment—it was the first time he had been near me and he’d hoped to cut a manly figure. But I barely noticed him that morning; my attention was elsewhere. Paul was swinging and shimmying through the obstacle course as if it were an amusing little bagatelle. His skin seemed caramelized in the light, and he glowed with sweat and the exhilaration of assembling machine guns.

  I passed the fitness test. Stan failed, and I didn’t see him again for months. He was sent back to Headquarters to ride a desk. They didn’t fire the people who failed the test: Paramilitary training was now optional. In the CIA’s early days it had been mandatory, of course; recruits had spent a full year in battle fatigues, learning to shoot straight and blow up bridges. But in an age of satellites and high-tech gadgetry, these skills were obsolete, so the course had been shortened to a single summer. If you had other t
alents, you could skip the class entirely and still expect a rosy career. It was more a hazing ritual than anything else, a rite of passage that linked us in spirit to the Office of Strategic Services and Wild Bill Donovan. We felt that we were somehow carrying on an important tradition. Those who failed the fitness test were held in contempt by the rest of the class.

  Those who passed were divided into teams of eight. Paul was on another team and so was Iris. Nathan was on my team, but at least Jade wasn’t. She was on Iris’s. I looked at Iris sympathetically when the team assignments were announced. Jade caught my glance and pursed her lips disapprovingly.

  The instructors issued our gear—water bottles, army-issue uniforms, backpacks, heavy plastic rifles—and sent us to our communal dormitories to prepare for the weeks ahead. I spent that evening organizing my new equipment and trying to catch glimpses of myself in camouflage.

  As ordered, the class assembled the next morning at dawn for a hike in our combat boots, carrying backpacks weighted down with sandbags. Calisthenics followed, then a sprint around the obstacle course. Jade sang out the cadence as we hiked. A small woman named Annette couldn’t make it through the pushups; she gave up and rolled over on her side. “I grew up in an orphanage,” Jade hissed, “and I just don’t understand people who give up at the first sign of hardship.”

  Paul rolled his eyes and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “It’s paramilitary training—not military, paramilitary. If I wanted to be in the fucking military, I’d still be in the fucking military. And I don’t give a fuck if she grew up in a tiger trap.”

  Annette looked at him gratefully.

  After the morning workout, we traipsed off to the chow hall. The cafeteria was staffed by large, slow-moving black women with security clearances who served up flapjacks, waffles, eggs, gravy, and grits, all accompanied by thick slabs of bacon. Well-built men sauntered in wearing camouflage gear or black paramilitary trousers and T-shirts, and we could overhear an odd covert-action patois—“Where ya been, Jake?”