The Exile

by Andrew Britton

  At least, that was the usual state of affairs. Today, in deference to the status of his mysterious visitor, he had made an effort to spruce up his appearance. He was wearing a crisp white dress shirt, a dark blue suit of worsted wool, and polished wing tips. A scarlet tie completed the picture. He was extremely uncomfortable—the tie was cutting off his air, and probably contributing to his reflux in some arcane medical way—but with three decades of government service in his portfolio, Reynolds knew when it was time to make a show of himself, and this was one of those rare occasions.

  He had learned of the impending visit the previous day. When his secretary appeared in the door to announce that Scott Linton was on the line, Reynolds had smiled and heaved a sigh of relief. Even before he’d picked up the phone, he knew what it meant. Linton was a heavy hitter, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs at the State Department, and his call could only mean one thing: that the U.S. Embassy to the Republic of the Sudan was about to be closed down, its staff pulled out of the country. With Linton’s call, it had looked like the long wait was over. The president had finally decided to make a stand.

  When he picked up the phone, though, it had not been Linton on the line. Instead, a young man had asked him to hold for Brynn Fitzgerald, the secretary of state. Reynolds, in a state of shock, had stuttered a few clumsy words in response to Fitzgerald’s greeting, but before he could redeem himself, she had come straight to the point. A man whom she murkily described as—quote unquote—a consultant to the president would be arriving in Khartoum the following day, and she would appreciate it if Reynolds would extend him every courtesy during his stay in the country, which she characterized as open-ended…again, using her exact words.

  Although Fitzgerald had relayed this request with unfailing courtesy, Reynolds was left with the distinct impression that the consultant’s visit was not to be taken lightly. The veiled speech seemed only to confirm this notion, as did Fitzgerald’s next instructions, which were delivered in a much firmer tone. Reynolds was to keep the consultant’s visit a closely guarded secret. No one was to be told about it, and there was to be no record of his arrival or departure at the embassy. Reynolds, with no room or desire to argue, had agreed readily to these conditions, and Fitzgerald had promptly ended the call, leaving him with the better part of a day to muse over the strange conversation and what it might mean for him and his staff of seventy.

  Although he had come up with plenty of possibilities, Reynolds had not been able to hit on the true nature of the consultant’s mission in Sudan. He could think of nothing that would justify such secrecy, or a call from someone as highly placed as Brynn Fitzgerald. In fact, the whole thing was so unusual that he had started to think he had dreamed it up.

  But that clearly wasn’t the case. His secretary was standing in the door, and she was trying to get his attention.

  “Yes, Joyce?” he asked, though he already knew.

  “Your three o’clock is here, sir. He’s on the way up.”

  Reynolds nodded and pulled at his tie. He still had no idea why the consultant had traveled as far as he had, or what he might possibly want, for that matter. But there was no point in worrying about it now. He had waited this long, after all, and he would have his answers soon enough.

  “Good,” he said. “When he arrives, send him right in.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  The redbrick town house that served as both home and office to Allison Dearborn, PsyD, EdD, was located in the Bolton Hill section of Baltimore, a short drive from the grand Victorian dome and towers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she had completed her residency in the midnineties, after an earlier internship at Mayo, and now served as an affiliate clinical psychologist. For five years in between, she’d worked in Washington, D.C., as a screening, evaluation, and crisis-intervention counselor for the CIA…although once the Agency recognized her outstanding skills as a therapist, the latter area of specialization had come to occupy most of her time. Inside and outside the office.

  When she left her position in 2008, Allison had insisted it was because she was a generalist by inclination and wanted to pursue various areas of academic study. It was a nice, pat reason she’d known would roll smoothly off her tongue and leave her superiors with few openings to urge that she reconsider her choice. Dreams and goals represented the intangible and, precisely for that reason, were hard to poke holes in. If she’d told the truth, namely, that her decision had been based on mental fatigue, there would have been a barrage of suggestions and incentives, which she’d have had to swat off one by one. Take some downtime, ease your caseload, and how about we shift more of the obviously tough and complicated cases over to other therapists till you’ve reenergized your battery? Meanwhile, we can certainly slot you in for more frequent out-of-town conferences. Arrange for you to occasionally travel inside and outside the country. Rome, for example. Have you been to Rome? There’s also Milan. Or our Paris branch. In springtime. Where enchanted music rises from the banks of the Seine and perfume fills every boulevard.

  Allison had always appreciated the respect she got from the Agency. She had likewise known it was much deserved. Her success rate was in the upper percentile—meaning she kept most of her patients productive or curbed their dropout rate. Her bosses therefore would have bent over backward to accommodate her if it meant she’d stay on; she was sure of it because they’d done it in the past. But at the time of her resignation she’d been disinclined to keep fouling off their pitches, however well-intentioned they might be.

  And so Allison had claimed she needed a change based on personal objectives beyond and distinct from the job, and let it stand at that. She’d been careful to say nothing about the intensity in the eyes of her patients, and what it was like to feel them searing into her own, those looks speaking volumes about the fires burning inside them, communicating hidden rage, guilt, anxiety and, for some, nightmarish horrors beyond what they were able to share in words. Nor had she mentioned the nights she’d spent lying awake in the dark, agonizing over each one of those patients, worrying what might happen if she committed the smallest error in judgment or just had a momentary slip of attention. There were many individuals with aggression issues, deep-rooted guilt, even core identity conflicts, often compounded by drug or alcohol abuse. Some were trying to reacclimate themselves after returning from some foreign hell. Others had been on covert assignments and were trying to maintain some inner balance between their secret lives and honest, open relationships with families and friends.

  Shortly before leaving the Agency, Allison had read an air force study that said over half the airmen on foreign deployment who committed suicide had attended regular counseling sessions. She’d had a strong hunch the numbers were similar, or greater, in the CIA. While she had been fortunate enough to have never lost a patient, Allison had spoken with other highly capable mental health professionals within the organization who weren’t quite as lucky and beat themselves up regularly over the ones they had failed to save. And although she’d known better than to make her thoughts known to them, she always wondered, as they doubtless did, what key point in someone’s unraveling had been missed. And why.

  The questions had plagued her throughout her tenure at the Agency. Shrinks were as vulnerable to obsessive fears as anyone, and the one that had haunted Allison during her frequent sleepless nights was the possibility that her concentration might blink while someone was baring a dark, pained corner of his soul, just blink as some vital, wounded part of him briefly reared like a fanged undersea serpent from some hidden inner recess, and that she’d wake up the next day to read about him taking a Glock to his head and pulling the trigger, or overdosing on some prescription tranquilizer cocktail, or hanging himself while alone in a cheap roadside motel room. Or maybe taking the wife, kids, and brand-new puppy with him when he drove his car off a cliff.

  As a therapist, Allison knew, your humanity was the tether that connected you to your patients; i
n fact, it could be a lifeline to some of them. But she recognized it was also a potential trip wire for the most volatile personalities. There was very little margin for error when interacting with them, and the danger, in her mind, was that the slightest lapse could have grave ramifications. Was it that you suddenly realized you’d forgotten to mail your loan payment in time to avoid late fees? Locked yourself out of the car? Neglected to open the pet door for the cat that morning? Or maybe to schedule a visit with the dermatologist to remove the suspicious little bump over your eyelid?

  At the CIA Allison had frequently dealt with the institutional stigma against admitting to psychological problems. It had worn rather thin at times from the very beginning, but the real strains had sprung from the reality that she was very often playing for mortal stakes.

  Now Allison, a tall, willowy blonde in her midthirties with her hair pulled back in a French twist, wearing small, round diamond earrings, a long-sleeved Ralph Lauren stretch polo under a matching gray sweater jacket, gray wool dress pants with flared bottoms, and peep-toe black suede dress heels, entered her second-story office with its window overlooking the poplar trees and cobblestone sidewalks along Murielle Lane. Pausing to pour herself a strong black cup of Italian roast, she went swiftly across the room from the coffee maker, then sat down behind her large oak desk. The antique pendulum wall clock to her right—a made-in-Germany Hermle Black Forest she’d picked up at a yard sale near her niece’s home in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, of all places—said it was a quarter to ten. Jonathan Harper was due for their hastily scheduled powwow in fifteen minutes. But if he held true to form, he would arrive in no more than ten, barring a calamitous traffic jam on the Capital Beltway.

  She drank her coffee, settling in for the presumably brief wait. She hadn’t thought about her CIA days for a while. But then it had been quite some time since she’d gotten a call from Harper, though he was still nominally under her care. Looking back on her eight years with the Agency, she considered it sad irony that its intelligence gatherers had assembled comprehensive reports on the major causes of death for every country and region in the world—not to mention almost every profession—but had failed to address its own problems in that regard. If you were interested in what took people’s lives in Belarus, Algeria, or the Indian subcontinent, the information could be instantly plucked from its databases with a scroll and a click. Reach into the intercontinental grab bag for any of that data, and the Agency could—and typically did—generate reams of material on who was dying from childhood leukemia or old age, genetic conditions or environmental contaminants, pandemics, accidents, violent crime…and so on and so forth, including self-inflicted means. Incorporating these analyses into its overall intelligence tapestry, the CIA made recommendations on foreign strategy and policy to diplomats, and the loftiest of generals and heads of state…yet as an organization still had not quite figured out how to look inward. Or as one fellow academic, who wrote a white paper on the subject, had put it to Allison, the Agency was choking on evolutionary exhaust when it came to maintaining the mental health of its employees.

  His snooty language aside, it was accurate that the CIA topped the list of government agencies whose human resources too often jumped aboard the Downbound Express into suicide and depression. And it had held that inglorious distinction for quite some time, followed closely by the Feebs, local police departments, all five armed services, and that old bad joke punch line, the rain-or-shine U.S. Postal Service…which, in absolute fairness, technically operated as a private enterprise and fell into a different pot from the others. Over the past decade, in fact, with field operatives increasingly deployed to countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and other war-on-terror hellholes, where poverty, disease, and the atrocities of armed thugs were so widespread as to be virtually atmospheric, the rates of depression and suicide had soared to unprecedented heights. According to the most recent studies, two-thirds as many agents had died by their own hand than had been officially killed in the performance of duty. Officially, because in her mind the line wasn’t nearly that clear-cut. As Benjamin Disraeli was once supposed to have said, “There were lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

  Of course, it wasn’t about numbers for Allison, not in the end, besides their underscoring what she already knew from her up close contact with men and women who had returned from the field or were engaged in clandestine ops. It was really pretty basic: stress and trauma were no less destructive than bullets.

  The day Allison submitted her resignation, her department head, Edward Rockland, had made a strong, earnest appeal for her to stay on, offering to shift her to an analysis and research job within the Directorate of Intelligence, where she would have a chance for consultancies with senior government policymakers. When she’d declined the offer, he’d asked her to at least do him the favor of speaking with the deputy director of Management and Services, Office of Personnel, to see if there was anything else that might be done to convince her. Rockland was a legitimately decent guy who took good care of his people, and though she’d agreed to it out of respect for him, Allison was convinced he’d viewed that second meeting much as she had—as a requisite formality. Though she had heard him out with all due deference, his reconciled tone had made it evident that he had very little doubt her decision was a firm one.

  Allison had brought that same polite yet unassailable demeanor to her sit-down with the DD-MS, although she went into it with an added measure of remove. Psychologically and emotionally, she was already well out the door, and all she could think about while quietly listening to his pitch was that old William Blake poem “The Tiger,” with several lines in particular nearly jumping from her lips: In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?

  The thing she’d recognized in herself upon deciding to leave the Agency was that she could no longer spend all her days trying to seize the fire in the eyes of its most damaged operatives. The heat was too strong; its overflow into her own daily life too consuming.

  But there was a major catch. In the thirty-two years since she’d come kicking, bottom down, into the American heartland via C-section, Allison had learned there was nearly always a catch somewhere. And for her it had been lurking inside her.

  What was it she had been thinking about irony? As loath as she was to admit it, it was her constant yet maddening companion through life, a disobedient pooch she walked on a long leash while complaining it was always out of control. Because the inescapable paradox at her core, one she’d first done her best to disregard while formulating her exit strategy from the Central Intelligence Agency, and then closed off from her mind as she gave her spiel not once, but twice, was that she not only took gratification from helping people with dire psychological problems—and had chosen her vocation precisely for that reason—but was fascinated by the prospect of tackling cases others deemed tough or insoluble.

  Although she now spent the bulk of her time doing research and lecturing at the university on Charles Street, Allison had found herself missing the rewards of people in need and had gradually begun taking a select number of Agency patients on referral.

  Jonathan Harper had been the first of them, and the one that made her realize she could take on others on a limited basis without once again succumbing to the sort of nervous tension that had given her constant, tightly wound insomnia throughout her latter months with the Agency. And the whole thing had been pure serendipity.

  It would have sufficiently floored her if someone of Harper’s stature had sought her out on his own, but the wild, wild coincidence was that their connection had come through his wife, Julie, whom Allison had met during her time at Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota, long before she’d ever heard of Jonathan Harper or set foot in Langley. An attractive, slightly plump woman with a warm maternal disposition, Julie had been a head nurse at the clinic and had been considerably older than Allison when they’d gotten to know each other while treating a breast cancer pa
tient who’d opted for in-house counseling. Always the type to take young people under her wing—particularly a green psych intern for whom buying groceries took a backseat to paying off student loans—Julie had invited her over to her place for dinner one evening after a late conference. Besides being pleasant, intelligent company, she had turned out to be quite the gourmet cook, making her company an irresistible draw for a young woman who considered preparing unburned toast a proud accomplishment even when she could afford the luxury of a trip to the supermarket.

  At the time, Allison had known Julie’s husband did sensitive work for the federal government and occasionally spent extended periods overseas on what she assumed were diplomatic missions. But neither she nor anyone else at Mayo ever had the slightest inkling that he was CIA…which was, of course, how he wanted things. Or to put it more correctly, how things had to be for the welfare of Harper and his family.

  That carefully preserved secrecy about the nature of his work had never changed. Harper remained unknown to the vast majority of Americans. As the Agency’s deputy director, he was the second most powerful person in the organizational hierarchy. Individuals in his position weren’t supposed to be photographed in the newspapers or to appear with policy wonks on televised Sunday morning political shoot-outs. He was among the quiet ones. The ones who did the work of keeping the country safe and secure from behind the scenes. Anonymity was an essential part of his curriculum vitae.