In the army, “secure the building” means have your guys surround the building. In the navy it means lock the doors and keep the key. In the air force it means negotiate a long-term lease with low costs. And for marines it means make the building disappear. Everyone has his strategy. Everyone has her point of view. Ask me to secure a building, and the first thing I will do is ask you where the building is. My point of view is, location, location, location. Because if the building is in London or Beirut or Ankara, that’s one thing. If it’s in Beijing, that’s another.
* * *
—
I was a loyal soldier, Anna. There were no wires strapped to my wrists when it was my turn to walk out. When my time came I simply disappeared. The last thing your father did before he died was not a crime it was an act of concision, and grace. Grace, the free favor of God, the salvation of sinners, the bestowal of His gifts. Grace. Anna.
Godfather.
“Your husband’s going to run for the Senate seat, Anna.” She was sitting in the dark little library of a townhouse on East Seventy-third Street, thinking back to that day in the atrium. Then, she’d thought I’m just trying to change the world was just a line.
* * *
—
She’d been summoned here by an old friend of Noel’s, Edmund, a de facto if not de jure godfather, the one who had been at the White House for that state dinner. Edmund sat on the board of Noel’s company, but the origin of their bond was the fact that they’d lived together at law school and then later lost wives the same year. They had helped each other heal, once.
* * *
—
Edmund found another wife, then divorced her, and then found a third, Edmund had survived and thrived; Edmund looked sixty at seventy-nine. And Edmund had been very focused on Anna since the avalanche. He would call and write and take her for long lunches or quiet dinners, where he would encourage her to work less and eat more. He’d send her tickets to basketball games, or the opera. He’d invite her out to the country for weekends. He was the kind of New Yorker who called Connecticut “the country.” When she quit the Ford Foundation he sent flowers with a note, “Good choice.”
* * *
—
Edmund’s son, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, was exactly Anna’s age but the dream of a match between them had never evolved past a high school kiss. When she heard the word “senator,” it occurred to her she would have really loved a neurosurgeon. So serious, saving lives. Though neurosurgeons are as prone to narcissism as any music producer or politician, aren’t they.
Edmund’s library walls were lined in dark green fabric. Hunting prints hung in rows suspended from silk ribbons, additions of the new wife, to Anna’s amusement. Her godfather didn’t hunt and probably hated those prints but rules loosen in later marriages, or perhaps simply later on down the line. The second wife had liked new things and the third liked old ones, and eventually Edmund didn’t care. His defining trait was his evenness. He was happy as long as he knew what was happening in the world and as long as his Rolodex afforded a role in it. He loved jokes, and Anna had heard him tell his favorite one a hundred times. It was about marriage.
* * *
—
“I have these friends,” he would say. “They have the perfect marriage. They signed a contract early on indicating that the wife would make all the little decisions and the husband would make all the big ones.” Whoever was listening would then ask what defined a little decision. “A little decision is something like, Where do we live or how many children do we have, how do we manage the money and where do we spend holidays?” And whoever was listening would ask, now sensing the joke, what then defined a big decision. “What to do about the Middle East, of course. What to do about China.” The joke always got a laugh, though Anna’s response to it was visceral, as she saw some truth in it. She guessed this had likely been the story of her parents, in the beginning. Somewhere along the line maybe Lulu had wanted in on the larger decisions. Or maybe it was Noel who changed. One of them had altered the contract.
* * *
—
As a teenager Anna had smoked cigarettes out the windows of the townhouse with the future neurosurgeon. There was a fireplace with a Rubens above it, surrounded by gold and crystal bowls of candied ginger on glass nesting tables. Edmund was always occupied, it was rare that he summoned her. “Even Warren Beatty will one day be eighty,” he told people when they remarked on his stamina. In the last year alone he’d flown to Africa with Interpol to track elephant poachers before ending up in Dallas to mediate a dispute between an NFL owner and his offensive-line coach. Apparently a lull in the action now afforded him time to get her husband into office.
Anna listened to everything he had to say before giving her view.
“It’s just preposterous.”
“It’s absolutely not, given current conditions.”
“Is current conditions a euphemism for his money?”
Anna guessed that the reason she was being told the news in this way was to take the edge off her reaction, to prepare her to believe and to behave. She wished her husband had told her while his head was in her lap. The fact that he hadn’t indicated he was afraid of her.
“Is he afraid to tell me himself?”
“I asked him to let me talk to you first.”
“Am I that unruly?”
“Simply softening the blow. This is not quite what you signed on for.”
Anna thought about the decisions, and the contracts.
“He’s not a politician.”
Edmund took some ginger from the bowl. He knew the challenge at hand was not an argument he had to win but rather a set of emotions he had to navigate, and order.
“He’s not a politician. What would you say are his gifts, Anna?”
“He’s very good at parties, with people. He is very good at spotting talent.”
“Yes.”
“He has an endless appetite for new sources of affirmation. He’s a workaholic. He’s an idealist.”
Edmund said nothing.
“But he can’t win,” Anna said.
“With my help I think he can,” Edmund said. “It’s a game of branding, really. And this cycle is a fluke, there is really no competition.”
“Branding?”
“Branding and money, fair enough.”
“When is the election?”
“November.” It was June. “Anna, he has it all.”
* * *
—
Noel had loved politics. He would have loved the idea of his daughter in this role. He often told people his one regret was never running for office. He always said the only thing you regret is the thing you do not do.
The Rubens was an ink drawing of a child looking down.
“Why am I here?” Anna asked.
“I need to know you’re not going to leave,” Edmund said.
And while Anna thought about that and about the viability of becoming pregnant if their lives took this turn, he added, “He only has it all if he has you.”
Q.
A.
You never have consecutive tours in the same place. They don’t want you losing perspective. They don’t want you falling in love with that country. In the old days, and I mean the really old, golden days of diplomacy, an envoy would be dispatched to a city. And it might quite likely be in a region for which that envoy had a pre-existing passion. A country or continent the envoy had knowledge of, perhaps even had family or emotional connections to, perhaps he had studied its history in school or spent a university term there. It’s possible the envoy had spent his entire life hoping to live there one day. In those days, when an envoy was dispatched, he would learn the local language. He would often marry a local girl and become deeply tied to the town. A dream come true, what’s better than that. Though at some point in these cases the
re often came a time when the envoy began viewing his true country as the place he was stationed. Imagine visiting China in the 1800s and your ambassador arrives to welcome you wearing a Ching dynasty robe. Suddenly, he might not be the finest representative for the United States anymore. People said your father fell too hard for Asia, that his love affair with Asia was the death of his love affair with your mother, the bending of his moral compass. I say people are jealous. I say Noel’s love for Asia taught him who he was. That’s true love.
Senator.
She’d selected a dress for the press. It wasn’t a color she otherwise would have worn but seemed suitable considering the occasion. Her husband was announcing his intention to run for senator of New York. And though on that morning he had two formidable opponents for the primary, one would be indicted after sexual assault allegations then the other would drop out for reasons that were never quite clear. Politics was always a game that seemed at once rigged and unpredictable; a new era defined by rage, and Twitter, made it all the more so.
* * *
—
At thirty-six, with no prior political experience, the election only months away, he was tagged by the media as arrogant and absurd on the one hand, audacious and impressive on the other. Jake didn’t have a chance, the papers said. He didn’t understand the party machine, he hadn’t kissed the rings. Though the outcome of the race didn’t really matter to the candidate; winning was never his goal. The choice to run wasn’t about Senate reform or a love of his adopted home state. The choice was a play to change. Once the race was over, Anna’s husband would no longer be what he had been before; he would be a viable member of the political elite, someone engaged in serious things. Once the race was over, he could play on an entirely new field.
* * *
—
And this was how the donors and the party had pitched it to him. The party operatives saw a chance to make their careers with this charismatic long shot, an untested candidate, a true nonpolitician, a creative founder of a music company fresh from sale. He was young and he was bright. In ways he was the perfect candidate for an era where charisma lapped experience.
* * *
—
The night of the announcement Anna sat quietly in a corner, considering the hem of her dress. It was lined with tiny suede embroidered daisies. When one of the young handlers offered her Perrier, she asked for a Heineken. She looked at the man she had married and considered the fact that he didn’t have a chance. And yet there he was. Risk never bothered him. Anna thought about her childhood, the eggshells, about being in a place that felt safe. She fingered the daisies and told herself it was time to focus on the present. Her husband was having a tiny microphone clipped to his lapel. Tonight was the end of the era of eggshells.
“What are your interests?” asked the campaign manager, who sat beside her, who looked all of twelve.
“Interests?” Anna said.
“You know, hobbies, skills, likes and dislikes, do you cook or whatever? Chess?” He had a sense of humor. “We can’t assign profiles until we know who you are. People will want to know you,” he said. He liked the Zimbabwean story. He liked the Phi Beta Kappa.
Anna felt an arm slip around her waist. The candidate was wearing a suit, which he had about twice a year until now, now it would become the uniform. Anna had always envied how easy everything was for him, how he could move an idea from inception to launch with the bat of an eye, placing the right rolled calls. How he could throw on a shirt and look like a god. How he could say he would sell his company and pivot and in six months they were walking out into a blitzkrieg of cameras. She experienced life as a climb. He experienced it as a fast skate across fresh ice. In either case, of course, one can fall.
The Ford Foundation phoned. They wanted her back. Princeton called. Would she sit on the board? Old friends emailed, Let’s have lunch, come be partner, what’s it feel like, are you free for opening night of Bohème? “A surfeit of honey,” Noel would have called all this, by which he meant lots of sweet stuff, options, deal flow. The phrase also meant decadence—excess. It wasn’t quite a compliment.
Lulu called to ask if it was true and whether Anna wanted her there for the announcement.
“That’s kind of you, but no,” she told her mother.
“Do we think he knows whether he’s really a Democrat or a Republican,” Lulu asked, drily.
One of the aides opened the doors to the hotel suite that had become their temporary home and motioned to the candidate that it was time.
“I love you,” he said, and lifted her hand to his mouth. He looked right at her. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said. She closed her fingers around his wrist and held tightly. Then someone clapped and suddenly everyone started moving. He slipped his wrist free. He moved ahead of her and staffers closed the space between them. “Here we go,” she could hear him shout out, to everyone and to no one in particular.
Q.
A.
You don’t have many hobbies as a case officer. You acquire the hobbies of the source you’re developing. Your versatility in acquiring new interests is critical to your success. You have a source who loves soccer, you watch the World Cup and maybe even learn to play. You have a source who loves beer, you become an expert in European microbrew technologies, perhaps it turns out you’re related to the Anheuser-Busch family, maybe your roommate in prep school was a Stroh. And you are developing these new skill sets and passions while under the cover of your day job, so your days become busy. You build the architecture of the larger lie of who you are through the architecture of the little lies, your likes and dislikes, your desire to become the person your source needs you to be. This illusory architecture is in service of the mission. This architecture is the mission. You’re constantly learning new cover details, Social Security number, grad school girlfriend, favorite French film or modern novel or sculpture in the Louvre. This is increasingly how you spend your downtime, memorizing who you are about to become, forgetting who you once were. Memorize, forget, memorize, forget. Repeat. At any one time you will have five to ten different mobile phones for five to ten different yous. At night, you will lay those phones out in a line on the desk or the coffee table or even the bed. You remove the batteries. One of those phones is the one that may ring if there’s a bomb threat. One is the one that rings if an asset is in trouble. The phones are nannies for children in your care. That was tradecraft, Anna, a table full of phones.
A table full of phones is not a life.
* * *
—
If you have only one asset and one phone, then that’s one you can never turn off, the one from which you can never remove the battery, never not acknowledge when it rings. It becomes the source of everything. A device. Or, more precisely, a voice on the other end of a line you can neither predict nor control.
Fish.
“Marines are skilled at suffering,” said a man in uniform seated at the head of the table.
“So are debutantes,” said the hostess, seated to his right.
It was a fundraiser for Jake’s campaign, hosted by people she didn’t know but who had arrived at the inner sanctum of their lives recently by virtue of a check they’d written, and then by further virtue of subsequent checks they’d inspired others to write. They were “bundlers,” people who took pleasure in matching political candidates with sources of funds, like casting directors matching actors to parts. There was an art to it. It wasn’t just who had cash, not at the highest levels, and especially not in this case, with an unorthodox candidate and urgent time frame. It was the quality as well as the quantity of the money that mattered, and bundlers speak of funds as being deployed, like soldiers in a time of war. This particular couple was known for opening their opulent home as a kind of deployment, and it didn’t disappoint. They’d purchased two double-wide brick townhouses on either side of a city block, with a garden
running in between them lined with wild roses and a slim, sunken lap pool. They believed in God and country. They believed Jake’s opponent was a criminal. They believed the outcome of this election was critical.
“America is at a tipping point,” the hostess said in her opening toast. “We needed a deus ex machina and here he is.” She made a motion with her tumbler to the candidate. Anna’s husband rose to speak. They had stayed up late the night before, going over what he would talk about.
“Don’t forget humility,” she’d told him.
“What’s that again,” he’d teased. The last weeks had been a lesson in how quickly things can shift, how suddenly someone who has been unknown in one context can become central, how there are second acts in American lives and here they were, having theirs.
It was only a dinner “for ten,” which meant ten thousand dollars per person, not ten in attendance. Anna still believed her husband would lose and that then they’d be back to their old lives, easy anonymity, the absence of “seasoned” advisers minding each choice.
The decadence of never caring what anyone else thinks.
There was no more decadence now.
Once upon a time the candidate had admired his bride’s irreverence, it came in such contrast to what he called “the rest of the package.” Those who knew her well accepted irreverence as an essential part of Anna, what separated her out in a sea of other girls who had gone to certain schools and been trained for a certain kind of life. Those circles of early privilege interlocked to form an impenetrable fortress, well armed against entrance of the new, though occasionally exceptions were made. It was a club, and clubs were one thing Anna had always rejected. It was genetic.
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