“Do you think they’ll fire me?”
“I have to say I don’t know much about what the Special Investigations Branch does. But I’m sure they’ll figure out that you’re a good person. You know, it bothers me. So many people here have serious problems. A guy in my division just left a whole 201 file in a taxi in Warsaw. We had to exfiltrate the asset because he screwed up so bad. As far as I know, they’re not breathing down his neck. Why are they singling you out?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why they singled Iris out, either.”
“This goddamned place,” he said, gesturing in a vague parabola. “There are just too many assholes here.” It was the most aggressive thing I’d ever heard him say. It made me wonder exactly what his relationship with the CIA was like and whether it wasn’t more complicated than I’d realized.
“Brad,” I said. “Do you like working here?”
The minute I asked, I realized there was another mother lode of resentment left for me to mine. His brow knit together and he sat up a bit in his chair. “When I joined this place,” he said, “I believed I would be judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin.”
I wondered where this could possibly be going. But I prepared myself to listen sympathetically and to take close mental notes. Brad explained that he’d now been passed over for promotion three times in favor of women of color—“don’t get me wrong. I love women of color. I mean, you know that”—but truly, he said, he had been more qualified, more experienced and had put in his dues. It wasn’t fair.
I agreed, I said. It was an outrage.
On Friday, I met Brad for coffee at our customary time. It was a pleasant afternoon. I suggested we take our cups outside to the courtyard so that I could smoke. We sat at a table near the Kryptos sculpture, a dense matrix of letters crisscrossed against a curving verdigris scroll, set in a stone-filled pond. No one knew what it meant and no one much cared anymore. Every so often some geek would post another crackpot theory about it on the Internet. A cryptologist from California had recently declared that he’d broken the code: Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqclusion. No one knew what iqclusion meant. The Director of Central Intelligence, to whom the secret was historically passed by his predecessor, declined to confirm or deny the accuracy of the interpretation.
Brad wedged his legs under the table and yawned, stretching his neck from side to side and loosening up his jaw muscles for a really long discussion about whatever it was that Iris had recently said or not said and how she said it and what she meant to say and what she really meant.
We deconstructed Brad’s latest phone conversation with Iris for a few minutes. Our conversation revolved around the meaning of miss, as in “I’ve missed talking to you.” This was the sentiment Iris offered Brad at (I imagined) about 7:15 the night prior, since she’d hung up with me at 7:10 and I had suggested at 7:05 that it would be natural just to miss talking to Brad. Brad and I discussed the plausible interpretations of her comment: Was that an inclusive or an exclusive usage of the word? Was talking to him the only thing she missed or the only thing she wasn’t too frightened to admit missing?
I told him that I had spoken to her too. She was very close, I said, to insight. She was reflecting deeply on her problems with intimacy and commitment. “I’m trying to help her acknowledge her unhealthy patterns,” I said. “I think it’s really important that as a friend, I speak the truth to her, instead of validating her excuses for not facing up to her fears.” Brad couldn’t have agreed more. He put his left foot on his right knee. So did I. He stretched out a kink in his neck. So did I.
The time had come, I decided, to get to the point.
Major fault line: Needs me to win back Iris.
Ancillary fault lines: Resents the Agency because he’s been passed over for promotion. Resents them for taking Iris away.
I burst into spectacular sobs.
“What is it?” he said with helpless, clumsy concern. “What’s the matter?”
I continued to weep. “I can’t tell you,” I gasped.
“You can. Please talk about it. You need to talk about it.” He reached over and touched my shoulder in a horribly awkward but touching gesture of solidarity. He had the terrified look men always get in the face of feminine tears.
I inhaled and tilted my eyes heavenward. In between sobs, I forced out a question. “Brad?” I choked. “If you and Iris were to get back together, would you be able to completely trust her?” I took a tissue out of my handbag and began blowing my nose.
“I don’t know,” he said nervously. “I guess it would take time to rebuild the trust.”
I took a few deep breaths, croaked out a few more damp sobs, and said, “Trust is so important.” I spent a few moments on soft, subtle weeping. “Trust is really important. It’s really hard to be in a relationship without trust.” I blinked a few times, took a few more deep breaths, and then blew my nose again.
“You’re having a problem with Stan, aren’t you?”
I started to cry again, and nodded.
Brad squeezed my shoulder and looked at me earnestly. “You don’t think he’s cheating on you, do you?” I had no doubt he was prepared to break Stan’s kneecaps with the butt of a hunting rifle if it were true.
“I think … I think it’s worse … I think he may be the one who reported me to Security.”
He exhaled.
So did I.
“Whoa,” he said at last.
We let my confession settle in the air. I rubbed my eyes.
He sucked on the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “I’m a security officer, but I would never report someone I loved for some minor infraction. That’s just sick. Have you talked openly and honestly with Stan about your fears?”
“I have, but I don’t know if I can trust him. It’s driving me crazy. I want to trust him, but I just can’t, and I don’t know if it’s because I shouldn’t or if it’s because I’m crazy.” My eyes filled with tears again. It wasn’t an act.
“Wow. I’m really sorry you’re going through this.”
“It’s the not knowing. You know how you feel not knowing what Iris is thinking? Imagine magnifying that ten times. Imagine thinking that Iris had gone out of her way to stab you in the back.”
His shoulders seemed to broaden; I could tell the thought enraged him.
“And I don’t know why it is that around here they seem to pick on people like you and me and Iris. You know they wouldn’t be investigating me if I were one of them.”
Looking at him, looking at the anger on his face and feeling his protective hand on my shoulder, I could tell that it was going to happen. My body filled with an almost sexual tension.
“Selena, let me run something past you.”
I nodded. Yes. Oh God, yes. Don’t stop.
“They keep those investigations pretty tight, and I can’t promise I could find out anything, but Stan is in my division—I might be able to ask a few questions and see what I could find out.”
I remembered what they had told us down at the Farm: Treason should seem like his excellent idea.
“Would you want me to do that?” he asked.
I regarded him with wonder, like a Guatemalan peasant staring at an icon of the Madonna that had just commenced to weep. “Could you? I hadn’t thought of that. Could you do that? I really just need to know the truth—you understand that, don’t you?”
“Let me see what I can do.”
God help me, I had recruited him.
CHAPTER 10
RAINBOW, unfortunately, was not alone in reasoning that if he and Lipscomb were the only ones with access to the salmon-yield figures, one of them had loose lips. Lipscomb too was capable of solving this equation. One week after his lunch with C/O ROSENBLATT, RAINBOW was relieved of his job. Placed on indefinite administrative leave and barred from attending further meetings, he had been told to begin looking for new employment immediately. Lipscomb had
told him how very disappointed in him he was. “I don’t know what happened here,” he said, “but I can’t have you working for me if I can’t trust you.”
RAINBOW recounted this to C/O ROSENBLATT at their scheduled meeting in the case officer’s hotel room. He told the story in the flat, robotic voice of a man in deep shock. He did not cry or curse; he said only that he had no idea what he would do now. RAINBOW was, I suppose, lucky. Had this been Iraq and not Canada, electric shocks would have been applied to his genitals. He would have been bound and hung by his feet; nails would have been pounded into his hands; his tongue would have been cut off while he was still alive. He would have been immersed in a vat of acid, and if that didn’t finish him off, his throat would have been slit like a sheep’s—probably in front of his family, who would have received the same treatment. C/O ROSENBLATT did not, of course, try to cheer him up by pointing this out. He said only that he was deeply sorry to hear that RAINBOW had lost his job and was sure that he would land on his feet.
RAINBOW asked if he could keep consulting for Chicken of the Sea. “I still know more about salmon than anyone else in Canada,” he said. “I could keep writing reports. It doesn’t even have to be salmon—it could be sturgeon, trout, lobster … whatever.”
C/O ROSENBLATT replied that he was terribly sorry, but the budget for consulting had just been cut. “I don’t make these decisions,” he said regretfully. “The guys in management do. Consulting’s the first thing to go when they’re tightening the belt. We’ve had to let a lot of good people go. It’s a damned shame.”
Without access, RAINBOW was of no use to us anymore.
RAINBOW seemed too beaten to be angry. He sank deeper into his armchair, as if he wished it would swallow him, and put his hand to his temple. An ambulance with a deafening siren passed by outside. C/O ROSENBLATT lifted his head instinctively in the direction of the noise, but RAINBOW didn’t seem to notice. After a minute or so, RAINBOW looked up. His pale eyes flitted for a moment around the room; his face registered no interest in his surroundings. At last he rose and walked to the door. He carried himself as if his parka were lined with lead. He didn’t say good-bye.
My supervisor hadn’t seen the cable yet. When I told him about it, he shook his head. “What a shame,” he said. “The irony is, Agriculture is going to be shouting at us, because they’re not getting the numbers. They screw up, we carry the can. Tell ROSENBLATT to step up the development of SEAGULL—we need to get that guy on board soonest.”
The crisp, sunny autumn had become soggy. I wore a sweater that morning but was still cold when I hiked in from the parking lot. Virginia, the office’s institutional memory, was warning me about the upcoming renovation of the parking lot. As she was telling me that I should plan to drive to work at least a half hour earlier, my phone twittered. I picked it up, assuming it would be yet another bozo who needed to know the name of the prime minister of Canada, but it was Brad. His tone was urgent.
He asked if I’d meet him in the cafeteria, but at that time of day, the cafeteria was packed, and I was worried about running into Stan. That, I thought, would be distinctly suboptimal tradecraft. Nan had once asked a logistics officer in the Turkrapistani Air Force to go bowling with her on a Thursday night. The instructor flunked her: That night was the county police bowl-off. “How was I supposed to know?” she asked petulantly. “That’s your goddamned problem, Nan,” the instructor told her. “You going to put How was I supposed to know? in a cable to Headquarters when your asset gets whacked because you paraded him in front of a goddamned police bowl-off?” I told Brad I needed to pick up a file in the basement, and asked him to meet me there, by the men’s room near the yellow elevator. I couldn’t think of a place in the building with less foot traffic.
I stood outside the men’s lavatory, waiting. There was a dull ache in my stomach. I hadn’t had breakfast. The muscles in my forehead and neck tightened. I heard the sound of a toilet flushing; a moment later a plump man with fat, mottled cheeks emerged from the men’s room, shaking his hands dry. I heard heavy footsteps behind me and turned around: It was Brad. I walked in his direction and we met mid-corridor, near the closed door of an office marked only with a number.
“Hi,” I said. I leaned against the wall and so did he. His jaw was twitching a bit, and he was shaking the pencil in his hand in a nervous, palsied rhythm.
Brad spoke: “All I could find out is that they sent a memorandum to the division to make sure he was paid overtime for coming in on a weekend.”
“Who sent what?”
“The Special Investigations Branch. They sent a memorandum to our division.”
It took a second to register. My heart began to gallop. “When did they send it?”
“Stan was at the Special Investigations Branch a month before you graduated from the Farm. On a weekend. SIB wanted to make sure he got overtime.”
It was a month before we’d graduated that Stan had gone back to Headquarters for that seminar on covert finance. It was then that he had come back accusing me of making a fool of him with Kirk.
They were paying him overtime to inform on me.
I looked at Brad and saw the pity in his eyes, and felt my own eyes cloud with tears. I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above me, and for a second I thought I would vomit. I realized I couldn’t make it all the way down to the ladies’ room. I would have to rush for the men’s. Brad put out a hand to steady me, and the fear passed.
“Do you know what he said to them?” I asked.
Brad shook his head. He said he couldn’t ask: He didn’t have a need to know.
Between receiving that news and returning to my office, something must have happened. After all, I went from the basement to my cubicle in Canada. I must have taken the yellow elevator—that would have been the most logical route. Perhaps I bid my fellow elevator travelers a good day; perhaps I stopped in the ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face. I don’t rightly know. My mind has considerately pushed the delete button on the memories of those minutes, presumably on the grounds that I would find them upsetting. I appreciate that.
Memory recommences in Technicolor and Dolby sound from the moment I returned to my office and sat on my padded swivel chair. The light on my phone was blinking; I entered my code to listen to the message: Stan had called to say his class would be over late that evening, and did I mind picking up his dry cleaning?
When he finished, the recorded operator told me to press three to repeat the message. I pressed three over and over and over, listening to Stan’s familiar voice. The fucking hypocrite. He wants me to pick up his fucking dry cleaning? I thought about what Stan must have done and how he must have done it. The snooping—had he guessed my password, or did he crack it with some handy gizmo he’d borrowed from the office? I thought of him reading my mail, with that scandalized, guilty thrill that snoops feel. How did he justify that to himself? Did he tell himself he was just curious? He must have stored away in his mind the fact that I’d committed security violations, making mental note of my Achilles heel in the event he should ever need to exploit it. He deliberately marched to the Special Investigations Branch and turned me in. And he did it because he was a jealous, pathetic, vengeful fat fuck. Did he tell himself he did it out of patriotism? Then he hid it from me, and lied about it—over and over and over. Not just in words but in deeds. I thought of every time he’d touched me since that weekend. I had been seduced under false pretenses. It seemed like rape.
Janet was right: I didn’t owe Stan, that son of a bitch, anything.
Janet took notes this time, a lot of them. Her cast must have just come off; she still grimaced as she wrote.
“Let’s review what you just told me,” she said. “He told you that he wasn’t like the other trainees and that he had special responsibilities at Headquarters.”
“Yes.”
“He told you that he had designed operations known only to three other people: the DCI, the head of the Special Activities Branch,
and the president of the European Central Bank.”
“Yes.”
“He told you that his involvement in this project occurred while the other trainees were in paramilitary training.”
“Yes.”
“And he told you that if either of you discussed this operation with anyone, you would both go to jail.”
“Yes.”
“But he said nothing at all about the nature of the operation.”
“No.”
“Are you absolutely certain of that?”
“Yes.”
“Does he seem to have any unusual source of funds?”
“No.”
“You did the right thing by coming here today, Selena.”
We had taken separate cars that day because Stan had a division meeting late in the afternoon. By the time he came home, I had already packed my belongings and put them in the car.
Stan walked in as I was carrying the last box out of the apartment. “What’s going on?” he said. “What are you doing?”
I put down the box and stared at him, then shouted, “How could you do that to me?”
“Do what?” His eyes were panicky.
“Cut the crap, Stan. I know. You turned me in to Security. You read my mail and you turned me in.”
“Selena, calm down. Calm down. Don’t do this to us. Whatever they told you, it’s not true.”
“You manipulative fat son of a bitch. How could you?”
Stan’s face reddened. “Selena, don’t talk to me in that tone of voice.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, you fat fucking sanctimonious prick!”
“Don’t blame me because you sent those fucking e-mails! I’m not the one who spread my legs for the entire universe!”
I picked up my box and walked out the door.
How many days elapsed between then and the next phone call from the Special Investigations Branch? Was it two? Three? I’m not sure. The next few days were foggy. I slept on Iris’s couch, or tried to sleep. What obsessed me wasn’t that he had turned me in—people do crazy, vengeful things in moments of jealousy. What I didn’t understand was how I hadn’t known. I had lived with this man in close quarters for months. We had talked about everything imaginable, sung songs together, shopped for groceries, taken bubble baths, broken bread, made love, woken up in each other’s arms. I thought I knew him, but Iris was right: I didn’t know folks. I should have been able to tell. I should have been able to tell from the moment he betrayed me, but I couldn’t. He was that good.
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