Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  * * *

  —

  You’re taught to ask an asset two questions when you meet her: How much time do you have? And Did you get here safely? A friend came back from Iraq when we were new though still cynical, and the polygrapher wanted to know if he’d asked the questions. He said, I met my asset when he was running down the street screaming, “They’re behind me!” This is theory versus practice. “They’re behind me” isn’t espionage, it’s anarchy. Often what we’re engaging in is anarchy.

  * * *

  —

  I volunteered to go to Iraq. I will never forget telling your father I wanted to leave where I was, telling him, “I want to be in the war.” He laughed. “You’re in the war, idiot.” There was a map on the wall where we were and Noel stood up and pointed to the city I was working in then, in Asia. “Here,” he said. “Here what,” I said. I was cocky then. “It depends on your definition of the word war,” he said. He moved his hand over the map, over Europe, over Asia, not stopping until his hand was hovering out over the Pacific Ocean. He looked right at me and repeated: “Here.” And then I understood. “Choose your battle,” he said.

  And so I chose.

  Risk.

  When they were dating, the man who would become her husband told Anna his love of music came from fooling around in cars as a teenager. “You know, the radio,” he said. Later he would tell her it was actually something else, a way out of his dyslexia, away from “the cage” of words. He would tell her that books always intimidated him while music never had. He would tell her how he felt complete confidence in his opinion of one thing—how something sounded. The first time he took her to see one of his artists, a female pop star who’d once played in bars but by then was selling out stadiums, they walked onstage before the show. He led her to the piano and she listened as he played. She realized he was also an artist, though he would shy away from that word. He played a simple song, one she recognized, and as it ended he hit one key over and over, plink, plink, plink.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A,” he said. “The key of A.” He told her what A major means, which celebrated songs had been written in that key. Then he leaned in and kept talking and kept leaning and talking until he was on her and around her. He led her away to some room in that stadium and when he said, “I am in love with you,” it was not only the first time he had said it, it was also the moment she knew she could say it back, the ultimate risk.

  She had never been the girl guys took backstage. She had never attracted someone so incandescent. She wasn’t sure how where she came from had led her to him, to a world away from the one into which she’d been born. She was ready to travel. With him, she was ready. She felt complete confidence in her opinion of that.

  Q.

  A.

  My grandparents went to exotic places. China, Russia. I remember my grandmother lining up little ivory elephants on the floor she’d bought in the markets in Asia. They were interested in the world, specifically in China and Russia, which is why those were the places I had wanted to go from a very early age. I wasn’t interested in Rome.

  * * *

  —

  A Chinese Embassy official pulled me aside after a press conference on the lawn of the White House once. I was young, only an intern. She asked me to go for coffee, which I did. She asked about my interest in China. And she offered me a gift: a white ivory elephant.

  * * *

  —

  Over time you learn when someone’s coming on to you for manners and when someone’s coming on to you for need. You learn to deflect a sophisticated advance, or to flip a broad one. When someone wants something from you, you have power. Later, when I would stay up nights in the safe house, I would ask myself what was so different about what I was doing from what that Chinese official had done. Absolutely nothing, is the answer. Nothing was different about what I would do and what was once done to me. Espionage is flirt and empathy before it’s anything else.

  HRH.

  Rock stars. Arriving at the hotel for the honeymoon, Anna was thinking about rock stars. If she were a rock star, she thought, this was definitely the place she’d run away to, channeling lyric brilliance with room service and sunlight. It amused her to see her husband welcomed like a king at the desk. They knew him from past visits, trips he’d described to her as all parties and no sleep. He was HRH by transitive property here, via links to real rock stars, the ones he’d discovered and produced, here heralded for and there defended against a feral press, the ones he’d fawned over in greenrooms of late-night shows and cleaned up when being clean was required. The real rock stars, who channeled real brilliance in places like this one, on diets of foie gras and French cabernet. Arriving at the hotel for their honeymoon, her husband announced with apology that he had to go to Nice to see a band playing there that afternoon. She didn’t want to go, and they didn’t argue. When she asked the concierge for directions to the tennis court, he said, “What a perfect day for sports, love, swim, nap.” And her king leaned, his hip against hers, and added, “Though not necessarily in that order.”

  Q.

  A.

  I had started taking classes on intelligence during undergrad and ended up in a seminar called The Intelligence Community. The stated goal of the class was to reinforce the necessity of intelligence, though I had the very clear if perhaps paranoid idea that the real goal of the class was to act as a sort of human resources outpost. One day the professor took me for a drink that became dinner. Four hours later he was telling me everything about clandestine operations. “Clandestine is something completely hidden from view,” he told me, “as opposed to covert, which means something that appears as something else. Most people think they’re the same thing.” He asked me for my phone number, and the next morning I got a call from a woman who said, “I work at the recruitment center.” The process had begun. A week later I was sitting in an unmarked office building in northern Virginia with fifteen other people. The meeting was framed as a chance for us to learn about the Agency but it was immediately obvious it was in fact a chance for the Agency to learn about us. Clandestine and covert, in other words. Everything we did was being observed.

  Swim.

  It’s not quite sporting, is it. That’s what Noel used to say about golf, mocking a thing that wasn’t quite a game but rather posing as one, in his view. Noel never played golf but often used that line when the subject came up, as it seemed to increasingly as he aged. Anna had started using them, too. When the guy at the bar asked for olives, the bartender placed three olives in a small crystal dish. “Not quite sporting, is it,” she’d said, and he had laughed. She was rarely laughing in those days.

  * * *

  —

  After they’d returned from Switzerland, in February, Anna was sad and her husband was anxious, and the misalignment of their mourning moods caused a rift. His relationship with his own father was broken, so he’d started looking to Noel for things he’d never had, absorbing the whole Oedipal package in the process. One night that spring they were up late in bed. She was crying.

  “I miss him, too,” he said.

  In the wake of the loss, she would see that the coolness she’d initially been drawn to in him was only a shell, easily cracked. They were entering a period of new depth, as happens after tragedy.

  * * *

  —

  “How about a swim,” said the guy at the bar. He held out the last olive, an offering to accompany the invitation. She looked out the window down the gravel-lined lane that led from the hotel to the sea, lined by palm trees. She had nothing to do before dinner. Well, why not?

  Q.

  A.

  The finest case officers are usually introverts. I knew some pretty fierce paramilitary officers who were extremely introverted, which you wouldn’t expect if you track the clichés. Introverted doesn’t mean you sit around and read and pray and don’t wat
ch basketball. It means you gather your energy in private. It means you don’t need the party. One of my finest instructors was extremely introverted. It was one of her most powerful tools. When I asked her once if she was as shy as she seemed, she said she wasn’t shy at all.

  Her husband had been murdered in Lebanon. They had both worked at the station in Beirut. She was in her sixties when I met her. She delivered the speech and the lesson I would later deliver many times myself, the first speech you hear in the first class you take. The speech is designed to catch a fish, and someone always takes the bait. It goes something like: Welcome. You are here today to learn what we do. We find vulnerabilities in people, and exploit them. Perhaps someone is poor. Perhaps someone has a gambling problem or a sick child or an outstanding debt. Everyone has vulnerabilities, you say. If exploited properly, every single person can be turned to work against their country in order to service their vulnerability. Then you end with a variation on: Welcome. Does everyone agree? Inevitably someone shouts out, Yes! Everyone is vulnerable! That’s your fish. Everyone does not have vulnerabilities, Anna. Vulnerability is a choice. And espionage is a crime. That’s the lesson.

  Each meeting in the early weeks takes place at a different location. You receive maps with no directions and have to find your way. The instructors talk to you about the art of manipulation and the necessity of discretion, that rare thing everyone admires but so few possess. Years later, I served with that instructor. She had worked with your father and knew him well. She was the one through whom I truly got to know him and later she provided the link when I needed his lifeline. She was pregnant at the time her husband died. She stayed on in Beirut and raised her daughter there. She said your parents came to see her, and the baby, on their honeymoon. She said they were the most beautiful couple she had ever seen. She said they were madly in love.

  Trellis.

  Anna thought about that swim as she sat at her desk, six weeks later, staring again at the first chapter, the first video, “Rooms,” God, Heaven. Why had he sent her this? What did it mean.

  I believe there is a God, the little boy had said.

  And in His brain there are rooms, he had said.

  And there is a room where you can go and know if there is a God or not, he had said.

  And also there is a room, where one dies.

  He listed these things casually, without emotion, as one might list ingredients for the perfect chocolate cake. On describing each room he raised one tiny finger at a time—for parents, for children, for friends. It was clear to Anna that what he was saying was an answer to a question, that here was a child trying to make sense of things, as children do. He was trying to be heard. He was saying, Of course there is someone who will protect me. He was taking the biblical “in my Father’s house are many mansions,” and applying it to something he understood—a home. Anna Googled the biblical passage. In my Father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. The little boy added the idea of a room where we go to know that God exists. A fine improvement, she thought. Though there was no mention of joy, no courtyard for her required space, no hibiscus or bougainvillea. There was no iron gate and no glass trellis, no view of the sea. Those had been her father’s ideas. Noel, the poet.

  She clicked back to the Menu page, the one with all those chapter titles, all innocuous words seemingly meaning nothing, “Rooms” for the one about Heaven’s rooms, “Falcon” for the one with the falcon, “Christmas” for Christmas—you see the pattern. Anna looked at that list until she finally saw it, right in the center, staring, shouting, the one word that aligned with something relevant—to her. A word that echoed with what he had said the day they met. “Silencer.”

  * * *

  —

  “Silencer” opened with another home video, the little boy tying a bandanna around his brother’s eyes, playfully, a child’s game. The boy has on his most serious face as he instructs his brother to “tell me a secret.” And then before the other boy can say anything, the video cuts out and goes to a blank black screen. Anna waited. She somehow knew something was coming. And then it did. Another video started. It was Noel.

  * * *

  —

  He was seated at a table in an empty room with bright lights. In a high-backed chair, wires strapped to his chest and his wrists. It was a younger Noel, of maybe ten years ago, she could tell by the level of gray in his hair. He had taken his tie off and placed it on the table. When he looked up at the camera, it was as if he were looking right at her.

  At that moment Anna wished she could crack open the laptop, climb inside, bring him back. She pressed pause. She wasn’t ready for this, whatever this was, confession, indictment, reveal, apology.

  * * *

  —

  “Of course I believe in you,” Noel had said, standing behind her and holding her shoulders on the day before the wedding, Swiss sun shining through the icicled glass. She was looking in the full-length mirror at the chalet, wearing her wedding dress, after the final fitting. She was wondering what it would feel like to move from “fiancée” to “wife.”

  “Tell me again,” she had said.

  “I believe in you.”

  Q.

  A.

  Not once in the entire recruitment process did I ever see a piece of paper with the letters CIA on it nor did I ever hear anyone mention those letters nor did I ever set foot in Headquarters, at Langley. The letter of employment I would receive didn’t say anything about the Agency, either. I showed it to my father and told him about the interviews and the buildings and the vulnerability speech. And my father said, What makes you think these people are actually CIA? He had a point.

  * * *

  —

  I was told I had to undergo a background check, which included a polygraph. Ames passed the polygraph though Catholics, in particular, have a hard time with them. It’s our guilt. I know a Catholic girl who responded, I’ve killed Jesus, in answer to the question, Have you ever killed anyone? The test administrator then said, emotionlessly, And other than the son of God, have you killed anyone? Belief systems can get in the way.

  * * *

  —

  When the offer package arrived it had an eagle on the cover and a letter with a starting salary and date. It said to show up at Headquarters, though it did not provide an address. Enclosed with the letter was a simple map, unmarked, of northern Virginia. Inductive learning, Department of Visual Effects. And the thing is, I had a moment of doubt. I had a moment of thinking, This is an absolutely insane thing to do with my life. Your father opened his speech in the China Ops course with, “Welcome to the asylum.”

  Provincial.

  When Anna caught up to him, at the base of the path, he held his arms out wide, as if to say, Look at me. It wasn’t a gesture of affection—it was self-deprecation; it was, Look at me, in these silly red swim trunks. Look at me, so out of shape. Look at me, about to dive into the ocean with a woman I just met and don’t know. Look at me, and trust. She looked at him and thought, You’re allowed to be happy, Anna.

  When he’d proposed the swim she’d said it would be too cold.

  “It’s September,” she’d said, though she’d packed her swimsuit.

  “You only need to swim to where it’s warm,” he said.

  “Ha, do you have a map?”

  “It only gets warm once you’ve swum past the buoys.”

  He was her height, and looked maybe ten to fifteen years older, though his height and his looks weren’t the first things Anna had tracked. The first thing she’d tracked was his comfort with quiet, like he felt no pressure to fill silence. It reminded her of Noel. Her father could sit for long periods of time without saying anything, a trait that drove Lulu into outer space with rage. Lulu felt his willed silences were selfish, that they were Noel’s way of controll
ing situations by refusing to participate. “I have nothing to add,” he would say, which wasn’t plausible to anyone who knew him.

  And of course what happens when one person says nothing is that another person talks to fill the silence, just as Anna had done at the bar. The guy she had only just met already knew some critical things about her while she knew absolutely nothing about him. She knew he was American. She knew he had been visiting friends in Paris and come south for the weekend. She assumed his work afforded him travel to places she’d never been—Jakarta, Beijing, Harare, Dubai. He told her he had lived in Hong Kong and that Hong Kong was provincial, that all the Americans there lived like kings. The casual pairing of “king” with “provincial” made her laugh.

  “What’s the definition of a provincial king,” she asked him.

  “Well, their definition involves lots of golf.”

  He said he gravitated to the Middle East because he found Europe boring. “Rome is provincial,” he said. “Paris is provincial.” Now he was teasing. He said the hardest part of living life in the places he did was that he spoke neither Arabic nor Chinese. Though that didn’t turn out to be entirely true.