Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  * * *

  —

  I started as a clandestine service trainee on a Sunday. I remember because I’d called home and my mother was telling me about the sermon planned for that day in our church. She said it would be about Moses and the thou-shalt-nots. I think she was only saying that to taunt me. She had become increasingly concerned with what she felt was a sort of moral relativism in my line of work. She’d skipped right over glamour to the ethics of the thing. I always admired her for that. Most people stop at glamour, in my experience. Most people mistake this vast bureaucracy for a Maserati fueled with intrigue and sex.

  * * *

  —

  None of the doors there have locks. Everything you do is observed all the time, by everyone; you are ranked, though the rankings are secret. The Farm becomes home, becomes life, for six to nine months, sometimes more. When the fire marshal spoke to us at orientation he said, “I have no idea what you guys are doing here, I’m not cleared for that, all I know is that I have personally installed smoke detectors in each of your rooms and I want you to know, there is no camera in those smoke alarms, so please don’t rip them out.” He’d spent a lot of time replacing ripped-out smoke alarms.

  * * *

  —

  What they do to you over those months in this elegant laboratory is a test of trust. If you lie in bed long enough looking at one of those alarms, you begin to doubt. You begin to doubt yourself. Even if you know you are being observed, over time human nature—or let’s call it desire—prevails. Over time, people are going to do whatever they are going to do to survive.

  * * *

  —

  You are introduced on your very first day to a mythical place, a country that does not exist but within which you will be operating now, as if you were newly stationed in Austria, or Chile. You’re given policy briefings on illusory policies. Your instructors impersonate diplomats who don’t really exist but who serve on behalf of this foreign place. And while there are very real police stationed right outside the Farm gates who carry very real guns, once inside you find another level of law enforcement, cars marked with symbols of the fictional place. You are told to respect them as if they were real.

  So in this one place, which technically does not exist, you find another place, which literally does not exist. The former has no map though the latter does. It takes attention to remember where the real ends and the illusion begins. Later, you apply this same skill to yourself. Once you start deploying, you require an ability to know where you end and where you begin, which nesting doll is at your center. You won’t want to lose track of the belief that the last and central nesting doll is you, the real you, your soul. Until you have to.

  The Farm is about buying into the idea that not one, but all of those nesting dolls are you. The ability to inhabit all of them without doubt is essential to survival.

  Baby.

  When you don’t really have a mother you are likely to be ambivalent about becoming one. Anna was. Her mother had left when she was so little, but she had stayed in touch. There were always cards for special days and lavish Christmas gifts, always unexpected visits at the most inconvenient times. Her mother operated on the assumption she was wanted and welcome, despite her poor choices. Lulu lived adamantly opposed to the idea that her choices left wreckage in their wake. In the weeks preceding Anna’s wedding she began calling her daughter daily, beating the drum about a baby. Already. And ironically.

  “I’ll forgive you for not including me in your wedding if you forgive me for telling you you’re on the edge of your fertility,” she told her daughter, who was then barely thirty.

  “Edge?” Anna asked, wondering whether the fertility graph looks like a line or a bell curve, deciding it looks like a cliff. “And we’re not having a wedding, we’re having a minister and Daddy and that’s it,” Anna answered.

  “Is your fiancé too fancy to include me?”

  “He’s not fancy at all, he’s busy. It’s logistics. We will be there because we love it there and it’s Valentine’s Day and we can ski.” There, Switzerland.

  “Well, you’ll need a dress,” Lulu said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you should think about a baby.”

  “I will add that to the list, thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  Anna hadn’t given having children much thought. For the first time in her life she felt a sense of calm, of order. She felt she had someone who would take care of her. In those days, she wanted what he wanted. She would have a baby if he wanted one and she might not need to if he didn’t. It was classic premarital logic, which is to say not logic at all. It was a certain phase of love.

  “Do we want a baby?” He laughed when she asked him. “Stand up. Put your arm out.” And she did.

  “I am going to press your arm down,” he said. “Like this. If you want a baby you will resist against my pressure, if you want a baby you won’t let me push your arm down to your side.”

  “What is this game,” she said, and held her arm out. He never ceased to surprise her.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  Though as he started to press down, she drew her arm back.

  “I don’t want to play,” she told him.

  “It’s not a game.”

  He explained he had learned this from his thesis adviser at Brown. He described going to meet his adviser fall of junior year, terrified to say he was considering dropping out. “I didn’t know what I wanted, I wasn’t sure. I wanted his blessing or I wanted him to tell me to go. He told me to hold out my arm and think about what I wanted. He said, ‘Do you want to stay in school?’ When he pressed down on my arm, I didn’t resist. Then he made me put my arm out again and said, ‘Do you want to leave and make music?’ and he pressed down and I resisted.”

  “I don’t understand,” Anna said.

  “The body knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Sometimes we don’t want to put words around a thing. Even if we know what we want.”

  He lifted up her shirt and knelt down and kissed her on the navel. “The body knows, baby,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  想—the Chinese character for “want” literally means “I am thinking,” though depending on the context, it can mean “I want,” too. When Anna’s boyfriend, who would soon be her husband and who would rapidly take their lives in an entirely unexpected direction said, “The body knows,” her response was, “Well, this body is keeping that knowledge a secret.”

  Q.

  A.

  There were six students in the unit I was part of at the Farm. One was a Delta Force officer who’d recently completed an inpatient program at Walter Reed. His family was invited to join him in the final week for a series of psychiatric sessions. He’d told the doctor he didn’t need the sessions, that he was fine and performing well past par, that he didn’t believe in psychiatry, that post-traumatic stress was a liberal conceit. The doctor asked if he believed in science. And then he held up a scan and said, “You have nineteen lesions on your brain. You need help.” Sometimes we can’t feel or see the injuries we’ve sustained. Sometimes there are no scars because sometimes the body lies.

  * * *

  —

  To commit espionage, you need a place to do it. You learn how to select a place, how to travel to it undetected, then disappear. And while you don’t want to meet an asset in Times Square, you don’t necessarily want to meet them in the desert, either. Choosing places is an art. By the end of my time at the Farm I could map the cities of Richmond and Williamsburg in my sleep.

  Sometimes you meet an asset you’ve never seen before. You know the person you are meeting is the person you are meant to meet by using a classic trick called a “verbal parole.” It’s a pre-agreed-upon exchange, something you say plus something the asset repli
es. A parole stays with you for the course of a career and for the course of the life of an asset.

  You can lose track of an asset, of course, if something goes wrong. A war starts, a coup. Your father famously once reopened a relationship after a decade using an old parole. He was witty with his, of course; he always keyed them to history, things like, How is the winter in Moscow? Ask Napoleon. The most important parole I would ever use was, Are you waiting for Sweet Virginia? Yes, my name is Ron Wood.

  Lions.

  Anna thought the video would tell her why Noel went up the mountain that day, and who those men were leaving the chalet as she returned. She thought it would say something about the reason and the cause, something about Noel placing his downhill ski at such an angle that he set the shelf of snow in motion, it was a choice, it was a plan, at least that would make it clear. At least, she could picture that. And forgive. He had never said goodbye. When she arrived home that day she had passed the men on their way out, they were wearing suits and shoes not suited for snow. She’d gone straight to the porch where she’d found the remains of the lunch, cheese and bread and fruit, a bottle of red wine uncorked but untouched. Anna remembered looking at the plates and telling herself she would clean it up later, that first she had to clean up herself. She had gone back inside. She had taken a shower. Her husband was away purchasing the rings, though they had chosen them together. He would arrive home that night and she would cook supper; Noel would serve as sous-chef for the fondue. The correct temperature for oil to boil cheese versus meat was on her mind as she stood under the water and washed the blood off her face from the slip she’d had at the base, a tiny cut on her jawline, not serious. Everything was laid out on her bed for the following day, her dress, shoes, white ribbons to wrap around the bouquet. She put her hair in a towel and, wearing a robe and boots, she cleaned the porch, washed the dishes, checked her phone. There was a text from her mother sending love. Anna wrote back that she loved her, too. She called the minister and they talked about her wish for simplicity in the service. He asked if she wanted anything else read aloud, perhaps a poem, which led to talking about poetry. She told him she’d tried to find something about joy but had failed, how all her favorite poets wrote mainly about despair. “Joy is less interesting,” said the minister, who was Irish, and understood poets, which made her laugh. She dried her hair, put on jeans, and opened a book. She hadn’t once wondered where Noel was, she’d assumed he had gone into town to buy bread or out for a walk. Her mind wasn’t moving to places of worry that day it was moving to calm. Around four o’clock she fell asleep, snow was falling. When the avalanche started less than half an hour later, it woke her, it sounded like the mountain breaking open. At the start, an avalanche sounds like a low roar, like thunder. Or like lions.

  Q.

  A.

  What is intelligence? Intelligence is information leaders need to keep us safe. Though all information isn’t necessarily intelligence. Intelligence has to be new. Time and relevance are critical. If an MI6 archive newly reveals that Churchill’s sister served in Paris under Vichy, that’s intelligence. Saying Putin has offensive cyberweapons, that’s not. Before and after meetings with your asset, you talk to the reports officer and she gives guidance as to what qualifies as intelligence. Intelligence isn’t found via a search engine. And it’s rarely found via a polygraph. The day they traveled to see your father, they weren’t looking for intelligence, Anna, they were looking for confirmation. Those men who came up from Geneva weren’t there to absolve him, which was what he was told. They were there to indict him, and to have him indict me. They were three hammers in search of a nail.

  Little Dipper, North Star.

  Her husband would hate it if he ever thought he was hurting her. On their “honeymoon,” he wasn’t tracking Anna’s drift. Which is why he wasn’t worried when she walked out of the restaurant that night. He saw her go. He may have even seen her talking to another man. But he didn’t know what they were talking about, and when she returned he didn’t inquire. She was his now, that was that, proposal, ring, boom, done. His confidence in the institution of marriage was sort of interesting, given his distrust of institutions generally. At least, then.

  * * *

  —

  What else had he told her that night. A story about a polygraph. The whole idea of the polygraph struck Anna as very strange, like a form of torture.

  “It is a little like torture,” he had said, laughing. “Though one doesn’t make jokes about torture.” The story was about someone who was so upset by the question he was asked that he had simply stood up, torn off the wires, and walked out.

  “Can you really tear the wires off?” she’d asked, thinking that sounded so radical, thinking it was something she would never do.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you done that?”

  “No.”

  “Tearing wires off sounds painful,” she said.

  They were looking at the stars while her husband sat inside on one of his myriad mobile devices, changing the world. They looked at the stars and he said, “No one ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a starry night again, man.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Joni Mitchell.”

  “Joni Mitchell?”

  “That’s what she told her audience once.”

  “I like it.”

  “Any artist can tire, even of their masterpieces.”

  “Yes. Or simply tire of performing on demand.”

  He took a step toward her and didn’t say anything. At that moment, she had elected to believe it was absolute coincidence they were meeting again, now.

  “When you lose someone you love, you only want to be around the people who loved him, too,” Anna said. She had one hand on her stomach.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He loved you.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said.

  “Do you know why he tore off the wires and walked out?”

  She could see the Little Dipper, the North Star. She could hear Noel saying, Make a wish, kid. “Yes,” she said. “He was tired of performing, too.”

  Q.

  A.

  At the Agency everyone thinks they’re better than everyone else. It’s human nature. The analysts think they’re the brightest, and the operatives think they are. The Special Activities guys think they are, as they have a combat background. East Asia looks down on Latin America, and in China Ops we thought Latin America was absurd. Though perhaps they are simply relaxed. When my colleagues in Santiago launched surveillance routes they would stop and get haircuts on the way. In Hong Kong, you took hours, sometimes days, to plan each route, each site, each parole. You had to be meticulous. Of course the Russia House guys think they’re the brightest, the tip of the American intelligence spear. This is the essential quality of the place. Everyone’s at the tip in his own mind, it depends on your description of the shape of the spear.

  Where you land is determined through a series of conversations and trades in a room you never see. After you graduate, the division heads sit around a table and talk and barter. It’s a draft. Everyone wants the best picks. And people gravitate to environments that match their temperament. Some guys want to take siestas and drink sangria. Some guys want to date Thai girls. I had studied China. I spoke Chinese. Arriving with my profile and not wanting China Ops might make someone think I wasn’t playing straight. It might place me right back in the laps of those magicians with their coins.

  I fell in love with China before I went to work against her. Your father understood this choice, he had lived the arc of that contradiction, too. He had grown up looking to China as an example, and he admired the Chinese people’s aesthetic. He admired their sense of history. He was meticulous, as you know. He was private. He was at peace with a little moral relativism if the end justified the means. He could sit through a meeting without saying
a thing, then, at the end, deliver the most important analysis of the situation. Or in stations, the most important intelligence. He was forgiven his certain arrogance. I was told that in an early polygraph he responded to the question, “Are you faithful to your wife?” with the question, “Why, are we in kindergarten?” He wore that side of himself rarely though, he was never sharp, always looking for ways to elevate others, ways out of taking credit. He knew credit came with prominence and with prominence came risk.

  His China Ops talk opened with him pointing out that when you arrive in certain divisions, like Africa or Europe, they congratulate you. When you arrive in China Ops there are no congratulations. A door opens and you’re asked when your last poly was. And at that everyone laughed, we had all experienced that, that’s how traditions evolve. You experience something, it shocks you, then you replicate the experience for the next guy in line. Your father’s China Ops talk ended with him saying, If you’re not comfortable with hypocrisy you can leave right now.

  He knew suspicion is contraindicated with confidence, that a lack of trust explodes trust, self-fulfills our worst prophecies. He would say, We must trust one another or die. Or, Ten guilty go free lest one innocent hang, yes. He would say, This is America, come on. Loyalty. Your father understood the shape of the spear, Anna. Glamour comes from being at the tip, but power comes from elsewhere.

  Dare.

  “Truth that” had become code between them. Her husband might say it to deflate a crisis or to place Anna at ease. He would say it walking into parties that he knew made her nervous, he would whisper it into her ear before the start of the season of endless awards shows; there was always just one more and she was shy on the press lines. He would say it before they dove into icy East End pools or before taking tequila shots at the Carlyle bar. “Truth that” meant “It’s true” but also “I’m here.” Increasingly it meant “You’re not alone.”