Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  Bali’s not a black site.

  Or is it?

  Intimacy.

  What is intimacy?

  Anna had always been looking to replicate that original deep connection, looking to get back to that kitchen, those eggshells, her father’s rolled-up shirtsleeves. The rolling up of those sleeves was a way of committing.

  In the months after Noel died she would try to cook, only to find herself unable to finish even the simplest thing. She would market, and prepare. She would read recipes. Then she would order pizza. Her husband, accustomed to having his meals ready on arrival home, found this unsettling.

  “Maybe we should get some help,” he said one night.

  “What kind of help?” She was picturing a hospital room.

  “Like a chef?” When he wasn’t sure how she would react, he often framed ideas as questions.

  “The use of the word chef is what’s wrong with the world,” she responded, thinking how at one time people simply called them cooks, but now everyone who reached a certain level of life had to have a chef, had to have things prepared, had no mess to make, let alone to clean up. Her husband had increasingly taken to car services then, flying first-class, and other forms of economic insulation and grandeur. She felt it was an assault on her values, all this ostentation. He felt it was simple practicality.

  “I want to make it easier,” he told her.

  “If you hire me a chef I am leaving,” she said, pouting, and they both laughed and let it go and it was pizza and rage for six months before she went to him and said, “Maybe one night a week we could get some help.”

  “Why don’t I just take you out once a week?” And they started this tradition and it lasted three weeks. He was busy. She didn’t care. He was scared. And she was numb.

  Numb and lucky, is what everyone around them thought. She had married a wunderkind, after all, a prodigy who had won his first Grammy at twenty-six, who seemed to have started out of the gate to adulthood minting money through art. How glamorous they were, at that gate. And Anna initially absorbed the admiration of her husband’s peers, who found her Ford work inspiring, if foreign, the idea someone might work hard for no financial return, engage in things like curing diseases, or famine. She found his set cool, if exhausting. How many times can you eat dinner at eleven? How many times can you wait backstage and express awe, and gratitude. Sex had been there once but had evaporated early, leaving only the experience of success in its wake. The experience of success can be visceral but it is also cold.

  Their lives lacked intimacy.

  Neither one of them wanted to blame the avalanche; that would feel at once too easy and too real.

  * * *

  —

  They had paired as their peers had, on education and rule, though he was more editorial in his choice; he knew how to spot a unicorn and trap her. He liked that she’d grown up on Fifth Avenue. She liked that he’d dropped out of Brown to produce a record with friends. When one of those friends founded a label, he’d gone along for the ride, and would ask her to come along, too, when they met. “I’m going to be in Rolling Stone,” he told her casually, on their first date, at the River Café in Brooklyn. When he asked her to marry him only weeks later, she said yes and he said, “Really?” The speed of the proposal was interpreted by those who knew him as characteristic, his lack of patience, how when he wanted, he wanted. When he wanted, he took. Though the speed of the proposal was in fact about his insecurity. He was desperate not to lose her. First date to proposal was less than a year, though it would be a while before they got around to a wedding.

  * * *

  —

  The engagement party, though they called it that, actually wasn’t one, as it took place the fall following the wedding. They had five hundred, mainly his list, most of whom seemed to be publicists or other players from the concentric circles that formed around artists. He found a space on Wall Street or, more precisely, above Wall Street, on the highest floor in the tallest building. It looked out over everything, including the reflecting pools.

  “I have vertigo,” Anna said when she walked into the room, saw the view.

  “Oh, baby, if you fall, just use your wings.”

  Around midnight a few of them snuck off and boarded a sailboat owned by a record company. There was a captain, and a crew, things to eat passed on trays, probably molly in the bathroom, though she never saw it. They cruised the harbor and anchored near the Statue of Liberty. Anna was thinking, Wow, though no one said “Wow” out loud. One rarely commented on the spectacular in this set.

  This set, his set. They had a kind of earned entitlement, a sense they were where they were because they were gifted. This philosophy was foreign to her and, as foreign things often are, initially seductive, before reason or instinct sets in, before we return to ourselves. She lay down on the deck and looked up at the stars. She was wondering whether all the exceptional moments in her life would now come through him, whether that was in fact what she had said yes to, the exceptional, an exceptional life.

  He came over to lie down beside her. She pointed to the Statue of Liberty and said, almost defiantly, “Wow.” He rolled to face her and said, “You’re better than wow.”

  Intimacy is the ability to understand what someone is trying to tell you. Intimacy is listening. It was in that period, when she was looking for that deep connection, for something to make her feel again, that the package arrived in the mail.

  * * *

  —

  Donovan used the silencer because it was a cool new toy. Donovan also understood that when you’re going to do something spectacular, like place a bullet in the Oval Office wall, you need protection.

  Q.

  A.

  When I started you’d have two phones on your desk, black for outside calls and green for “internals.” The evolution of encryption is cyclical, at some point someone always says, This process isn’t working for me, I need to make this process less transparent. At some point someone always says, Get me a better phone. Only a better phone is an illusion, you can’t trust phones. The only thing you can trust, aside from talking face-to-face, is a letter with one author and one recipient. A letter has a level of control.

  An Aardwolf is a letter from the chief to the director or even the president, and it’s one person’s thoughts and impressions, which is to say it’s not necessarily intelligence. Unlike reports its tone is intimate, candid. Forty-Three famously had his Aardwolfs delivered in person. Kennan’s “Sources of Soviet Conduct” was a kind of State Department Aardwolf. I am sure you know it, your father’s favorite. Kennan was writing from Moscow in 1946 and essentially saying, Hey, Mr. President, you think you know the Soviets but you don’t. Let me tell you who they are. Let me tell you because I am here, I understand, I see clearly. You can’t see clearly unless you’re there. I think your father loved Kennan because he also felt misunderstood. He never wrote a “Sources of Chinese Conduct.” I think he would have liked to. Sometimes pure intelligence can’t capture the nuances of a situation, especially in a crisis.

  * * *

  —

  Your father wrote me letters he called his “Aardwolfs from the Station of One,” by which he meant the philosophical station he then manned from retirement, halfway around the world. When Indonesia was blowing up they sent me to Jakarta; I ate ice cream at the Hilton while the Marriott was bombed. I took that job after your father wrote a letter about Indonesia’s importance, and after he sent me a handwritten note of two words, “Take it.”

  Crisis.

  Her mother. Her mother had done everything right, so why not throw a wrench in that record and do something spectacularly wrong.

  When she was a little child, Anna’s understanding of her mother was based on this idea of a record begging to be broken. Her mother’s choice, she told herself, was a question of patterns, of expectations, of record. Records
of Everything Right are not only unsustainable, they’re exhausting. Girls who do everything right occasionally need to smash a phone into a wall.

  This was how Anna processed the idea that a parent could ever leave a child. And as with all rationalizations, this one worked until it didn’t, until Anna grew up and needed something more specific, like an answer, or an apology. Because letters don’t quite cut it, do they, even ones as beautifully written and carefully conceived as the ones Lulu had sent through the years. Lulu poured herself into pages of descriptions of a place or an idea or an emotion, as soldiers on front lines once did for their lovers back home. It wasn’t quite the right form for a parent to take with a child, especially a parent who had abdicated the throne.

  The day his wife left, Noel had blown into the kitchen and, with an air of disbelief, said, “Your mother’s gone.” The kitchen was off the foyer lined with gray de Gournay paper. An armada of magnolia leaves always exploded from a center, circular table.

  Noel knelt down to his daughter’s height and repeated himself.

  “Mommy’s gone.”

  “What?” was all Anna said.

  “Mommy’s gone away.” And then he added, “And I will never leave you.”

  He didn’t cry so she didn’t either; little girls cue off their dads. Eventually Anna could barely experience anything without checking Noel’s views on it, affording his views veto power over her own. The night Lulu left, Noel let his daughter eat dinner on a tray in his bed watching cartoons. She remembered the tray was made of red lacquer and that she ate Lucky Charms with half-and-half. She didn’t know he had placed her in his bedroom so she wouldn’t hear him crying in the library.

  It wasn’t in Noel’s nature to show emotions, not that Anna would have seen them if it had been. He threw himself into the act of replacing the absent parent, as if it had been his fault his wife left, though everyone knew it wasn’t. Every teacher conference, every tennis lesson, he was there. Once people had early-era cell phones, Noel was the first to adhere to strict protocols of when it was appropriate to use one, and when not. When: at work. Not: at home. When: in emergencies. Not: in crises.

  “What’s the difference between an emergency and a crisis?” Anna asked.

  “Length of duration.” He always had a view.

  * * *

  —

  Anna became a proxy for her mother, growing up fast enough to play the role of partner for him in ways. It was an arrangement that worked for both of them. By her twenties she was so used to assuming the role of date, or hostess, she no longer thought about where she ended and where what her mother had once been began. There would never be a stepmother, but there were lots of “girls.” Noel named them numerically—One and Two and Three—et cetera. As in, “Opera with Two tonight.” Or, “The French Open with Five.” It was his way of keeping it casual, preserving distance. Or perhaps it was his way of protecting Anna, providing the illusion that he was always open to her mother coming home.

  The girls came and went, most electing to leave before being demoted by Noel from “true potential” to “femme du jour.” There was a brilliant Swiss economist, who arrived with tiny Toblerones from duty-free. There was a British MP who brought teddy bears from Hamleys. A Russian ballerina who gave Anna her first set of toe shoes, which she never wore. The ballerina hung around. She didn’t mind being “available.”

  Once, in that era, her father had taken her to a state dinner at the White House in honor of the president of China. Anna asked if China had evolved from an enemy into a friend.

  “Countries are people, too,” was Noel’s answer.

  All she remembered about that night was that her father spoke perfect Chinese and seemed to know a lot of people, and that the first lady wore red. Anna eventually concluded the difference between an emergency and a crisis is that an emergency means life-or-death while a crisis means I need someone to listen to what I am going through. By thirty-five, she hadn’t yet suffered an emergency, but she was living more or less in a permanent state of crisis.

  Q.

  A.

  I finally arrived in a station where I would stay for a while. I was increasingly confident which is of course when God throws you that ball. God manifests in many ways in the intelligence world, usually to remind you that however brilliant you think you are, there is always someone who knows more. Whenever you think you’ve arrived on the inside, it’s revealed there’s another level of classification off-limits to your level, another nesting doll inside the one you inhabit and have come to call home.

  I was a consular officer. That was my cover job. I was actively and every day and all day looking to recruit an asset, to accomplish what we’d been taught was the goal, which is completing the agent-recruitment cycle. They call it a cycle and draw it in a circle even though it’s a timeline. S for spot, A for assess, D for develop, which is courtship, a little seduction, and lots of promises. During D the asset’s issued a code name. Then R is for recruit, when you finally pop the question. And you never ask that question unless you know the answer with absolute certainty. Once she says yes, you’re in business. There are no more trips to Rio. You’re married, you’re running the source.

  T is for terminate.

  If at any point you’re asked if you’re CIA, you’re trained to turn your answer into a question. You’re trained to say, “Why, what do you think about CIA?” I’ve looked into the eyes of many men and women and said I have absolutely nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency. I’ve developed sources in strip bars and in Starbucks. I’ve pretended to know Bill Gates and Bono. I’ve even claimed to be descended from the finest horse-breeding family in America.

  I believe in ends and means, Anna. I believe there are some things that simply can never be said.

  Hard Targets

  What can and can’t be said. Anna had ideas about this, some learned, some developed. Her father raised her to say less as a rule and, as life got complex, she found this rule helpful across categories. Certain things simply couldn’t be said.

  She decided it couldn’t be said that she had met a man on her honeymoon who knew her name and who knew her father and who told her he would send her something in the mail, something related to her father.

  “It’s not a bomb, is it?” she had asked, sort of teasing, sort of not.

  “Actually, it kind of is,” was his answer. “Though it won’t hurt you.”

  It couldn’t be said that in addition to the video there was a note and a series of photographs held together with a silver money clip engraved with the Chinese character chenmo—“silence.” The photographs had place-names written across them in red ink: MANILA, JAKARTA, BEIJING. They were photographs of her father as a young man. One showed him wearing formal Asian dress with a pretty girl on each arm. The girls were wearing light-blue silk flowered dresses and their faces were purposefully blurred. Anna had seen faces purposefully blurred like that in history books, or sometimes in tabloids. It’s a protective measure. Written across that photograph right below the word NANJING was written HARD TARGETS, a joke. The girls’ dresses reminded Anna of new curtains she’d put in their apartment downtown. “My something blue,” she’d said aloud to herself, as she’d installed them the morning of the engagement party.

  Do you have a daughter?

  Noel plays with the tie on the table.

  Yes.

  What’s her name.

  Anna.

  Noel looks into the camera.

  Grace.

  Grace?

  It means grace.

  The note was written on a card with her father’s initials at the top in gray Roman font. Two words were written in his hand: Take it.

  Take what?

  Q.

  A.

  The Farm is about buying into an idea. It’s about participating in a tradition that started with recru
itments at Yale in the forties, with Des FitzGerald and Tracy Barnes. It came down by way of those Cuban beaches, to Tora Bora, to today. As you go through all of the absurd exercises, through car pickups, brush passes, dead drops, you think about the people who preceded you. As you learn about verbal paroles and visual recognition signals, you have a sense that understanding these things will be important to ensuring national security. What else can you tell yourself? You have to make it have meaning.

  * * *

  —

  It’s called the Farm because where it is looks like farmland. It’s beautiful. It’s the preeminent espionage training ground in the world. And it’s in rural Virginia, and no, they don’t make maps of it to sell in any gift shop. There is no gift shop. There is no Farm. Most people know exactly where it is and what it’s called but it’s still technically classified. It’s a massive, sprawling complex, a military base, basically. When you walk around you might see people jumping out of planes. It takes thirty minutes to drive across the campus, though no one calls it a campus, and it’s actually prime real estate. The only thing that shatters the idyll are gunshots going off. When on occasion we have visitors flown in, the pilots black out the windows. As they descend they will sort of loop around so the passengers won’t know where they are, in theory. I mean, at least they make the effort. The illusion of location classification in the age of Google Maps is just that, an illusion. We hold on to certain illusions because they matter. Though I wouldn’t try to storm the Farm gates.