Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  * * *

  —

  What is civic duty, anyway, and what are its limits? Is it a crime to keep a thing private? A life isn’t a law class, open for enrollment, structured to educate and illumine. A life is emotions, relative bases for comparison, instincts, survival, chaos. In her final round of interviews Anna told two guys from the Bureau that, yes, she had met the man in the photograph at Cap d’Antibes, and not only that, she had met him not once, but twice. She told them she’d met him first in the bar at the hotel and then, later, outside the restaurant by the water. She told them about the weather and the lobsters, about the menus printed in French and Russian, the latter for the oligarchs, and about the dress she had worn, which was new. In a state of exhaustion, near despair, Anna finally elected to tell them everything—almost.

  There are some things that can never be said.

  The interrogation was coming to an end.

  “Did he ever mention a location, a meeting point?”

  Anna thought about the silvery fish her husband caught on August trips to Alaska. Don’t the salmon ever learn?

  “Is there anything else.”

  And Anna looked over them and out the window. She saw nothing but clouds.

  “No, there is nothing else.”

  Q.

  A.

  What’s the definition of a crisis?

  In the old days, everything was cables. Cables require work—encryption, printers, decryption. And so they inspired concision. Fewer words meant less work. Old cables on even the most critical and complex subjects read like tone poems, as in TIMBER SYCAMORE, UPDATE. As in PLAYA GIRON, MAYDAY. Or PLEASE REPORT FOR POLYGRAPH. Today you have texting. Today you get an instant message telling you it’s time for a poly.

  It’s easy to slip up in an instant message.

  Maybe in the poly they ask if you’ve ever leaked sensitive information via text message. And, as you believe you have not, you deny it. So they ask again. You deny it. They keep asking and you keep saying no until you begin to question your own interpretation of events, or your sanity, you begin to doubt your own recollection of the content of that text. You start to wonder if this will all end if you simply say, “Yes.”

  Yes is a mirage in the desert, Anna.

  If you’re indefinitely suspended as the result of a poly, you can’t travel or work. You’re told nothing about your case. Indefinite suspension is like a bomb threat. Faced with the threat of a bomb, people act irrationally. Faced with the threat of a bomb, you crawl to the mirage.

  Grenade.

  It had to do with interrogation techniques. That was what cracked her, exploded the grace. That was what elevated everything. They knew exactly what they were doing. They always do.

  * * *

  —

  The counterespionage team had returned. They had declared in advance that this would be their last visit, the last interrogation. And then there was no interrogation at all. They had arrived only to tell her it was over. Jake was in the room, and she heard him catch his breath.

  “You’re done,” they said, and Anna’s husband put his hands over his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Then, while one of the men started in about national security and the “origins of single-scope polygraphs,” about Noel’s brilliance as a businessman and the candidate’s chance at a win, Anna looked up at the ceiling. She wondered if the recessed lights obscured bugs for sound. She looked at the mirror over the mantel, and wondered if it held a camera. What would it take to design a room so that everything within it was recorded? What would it take to make a place safe and clean?

  One of the men said something about sheets with high thread counts and Bonne Maman jams in silver cups, about the Château Lafite in the minibar. “No enhanced interrogations took place in rooms like this,” he said.

  Her husband sort of half rose up, a gesture that would have been chivalric if he’d carried it to conclusion, but he didn’t. He was now living in that place of willed ambivalence posing as stances taken, a place absent emotional resolve—politics.

  And for a moment the clean, safe room was silent, as if a grenade had been rolled across the floor. A joke coupling French jams and enhanced interrogation was a kind of grenade, still pinned, still palmed in the hand of the assassin. A threat. It meant, We are more dangerous than you are. It meant, You’re in over your head. It tapped Anna’s central fear, of being seen as something she’d spent her entire life trying to escape.

  What do you do with all your rage. You embrace it.

  * * *

  —

  What comes after BC?

  * * *

  —

  Later, when they were alone, Jake told Anna he was going to win. His opponent was dropping out, apparently there was a family issue.

  “Also, they love our story.”

  And part of Anna wanted to ask, Which story is that. The story of their marriage. The story of his spectacular conversion, Saint Paul of Brown, and the Boom Boom Room. Was it her silent, graceful demeanor, her privileged impenetrability, the sex appeal of scandal. Or was it simply that they were new.

  And she closed her eyes to try to see what was coming next, but all she could see was black.

  And then she remembered what comes after BC. Of course. AD.

  Q.

  A.

  Paranoia is a common theme in the literature of espionage. What inspires acute paranoia is the thing you don’t know. Something at close range you nonetheless cannot define. Something you’re experiencing but cannot source. Why am I under investigation, for example. Visitations from a witch, for another. Hunger in the absence of food. Paranoia is purely protocol in spook life.

  I had to accompany a diplomatic pouch once, an acute exercise in paranoia. The pouch can hold a diamond or a diplomat. It’s the principle of immunity in transit. The pouches are not subject to investigation, or search. Governments use them to send things back and forth through their embassies. I wasn’t cleared to know what was inside it that day. I wore it strapped to my wrist. I flew Jakarta to Singapore to Tokyo to San Francisco to DC. It could have contained weapons. It could have contained a shiny thing.

  The poly technician sometimes travels with the machine inside a dip pouch. When technicians travel, they cede home-court advantage, they tend to get paranoid, this shifts the dynamic. One might wonder if it skews the results.

  Toys.

  “He caught the bus,” Edmund said. “The dog caught the bus.”

  He was talking about the candidate, this now all-but-certain, impending victory. He was looking around the suite, someone had sent in a rack of dresses for Anna to choose from. A television ran news on mute in the background. Everything was the election, everything was the ramifications for the state, the rise of a candidate willfully exploding party expectations and poised to color outside the lines, a candidate not opposed to God, a candidate who loved his wife and who built and sold a business and came from nothing and seemed to have it all. Edmund looked at the television. The crawl mapped weather, and exit polls.

  “It’s really a philosophical question, isn’t it, what happens when the dog catches the bus. What does the dog actually want?”

  Anna felt like telling Edmund that if her husband was the dog, then he had been the one driving the bus, but she didn’t, and Edmund went on. “Is the dog catching the bus a fairy-tale outcome or a nightmare?” It amused her to see him in a state of mild shock, and joy. The toymaker when his toy soldier starts to walk.

  Anna had invited Edmund to the hotel. She wanted to understand the things she didn’t know. She thought Edmund could explain to her what was happening. And also, Edmund must know the history. “Your father always wanted to go to China, Anna. In school he wrote an essay about Asia, how he hoped to learn from it by traveling there.” Anna remembered Noel’s advice on entering Princeton, w
hat he’d said about how understanding China was essential to understanding the world. “Travel to China wasn’t easy in the old days, especially in his line of work. When he heard some of his colleagues were heading out to Beijing, he asked permission to join their trip.”

  * * *

  —

  In his line of work. Some of his colleagues.

  * * *

  —

  Anna was picturing the rows of Lucite deal toys. At lunch at her father’s office there was a lady who came around and ordered takeout, whatever you wanted. Anna once asked for fries from one deli and a shake from another, testing limits, as little girls do.

  * * *

  —

  “And what else,” Anna said.

  “He was told that the answer to his request was neither yes nor no.”

  “Well, he never took no for an answer.”

  “Never. So he took the request to someone more senior.”

  “And.”

  “And he was told that the answer was neither yes nor no. Which is sort of how they talk there, or did at that time. It wasn’t such a big deal, it wasn’t like he was doing some high-level national security work, Anna, he was having fun, it was meant to be a short post-Virginia thing, serve the country and all that, he knew he would have to leave and go out and make money, that was always the goal.”

  * * *

  —

  Money is not the metric.

  * * *

  —

  He wanted freedom, is what he really wanted.

  * * *

  —

  She was nine that day at her father’s office when she’d gotten her shake and her fries, and when Noel found out, he was horrified. You are the last person here who can act like a princess, he had said. The next time she visited, a shake and fries from those two different delis were waiting for her. Noel’s carrots always lapped his sticks.

  * * *

  —

  “He was finally told that if he wanted an answer he would have to have it directly from the director. The day before your father walked into Stans Turner’s office, Turner had fired eight hundred employees.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “Your father was fearless. He walked right in and asked to go to China. Later, an aide told him he went to China because Turner thought he had guts.”

  Edmund walked over to the dresses. “These look expensive,” he said. “Maybe too expensive.”

  “He was fearless,” Anna said.

  “He spent more than a week in prison,” Edmund said, turning around to look at her. “And, as you now know, he got to know another prisoner. Who happened to be one of the wealthiest men in China. Later, that other prisoner introduced Noel to his family, to his children, and to his granddaughter.”

  He pulled one of the dresses from the rack. It was white.

  “This one, I think,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “And then what?”

  “And then what depends on your point of view. Only no one really knows how Noel ended up in that prison. Did the Chinese government set it all up? Did we? Who really gave him that bottle of alcohol? Who sent him into that square? There are no accidents, Anna.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I believe your father thought he was doing a good thing. I believe he followed orders. And I believe everything that came after was real. He built the business. Maybe he had help. Everyone gets help somewhere.” He put the dress back on the rack and looked at Anna. “God, he loved you. That was true.”

  Anna stood up and walked to a wooden chest of drawers on the other side of the room. They would be moving that night to a larger suite for the final lead-up to the election. A silk robe was folded on top of the chest. She thought about a bath.

  “Maybe he helped the girl because he thought she was in danger.”

  “I don’t care,” Anna said.

  “Maybe he helped her because she reminded him of you.”

  “I am going to take a bath.”

  “She hated her family and she wanted out of China. She spied for us, and then she made a deal. Noel was the one who brokered the deal.”

  Anna could see the silver cup, her gift engraved with POET. Perhaps it wasn’t his favorite deal toy after all.

  “They have theories, but no facts, now. They have optimal outcomes, confirmation biases.”

  “Was the avalanche an optimal outcome?”

  “The avalanche was weather.”

  On the TV screen, riots in Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia.

  “You’re about to become very visible,” Edmund told her.

  “Yes. I’m trying to decide if that’s a fairy tale or a nightmare.”

  “I loved him, too, you know.”

  Anna walked over to him and kissed him on the cheek. “I know you did.” And then she said, “Don’t worry, I’ll behave.”

  Q.

  A.

  Have you ever received conflicting weather reports and as a result found yourself unable to make a decision? It happens all the time. One says, Clear, highs of seventy. And the other says, Ice storms. One says, The actions you’re about to take have been vetted and authorized by legal counsel. One says, Use your judgment and don’t fuck this up. Conflicting expert opinions can be disorienting. Perhaps at times that’s exactly the point of having experts.

  You don’t want to end up in a Chinese jail, Anna.

  It turns out both men were being watched. The officers who arrested them did a strange thing, placing the American and the Chinese in adjacent cells. Or not strange at all, there are no accidents in China, perhaps there are no accidents anywhere in our world. It’s possible the Chinese government sent that man to find Noel. That Chinese man gave your father extraordinary information in that jail, information that expedited Noel’s rise through the ranks, which afforded him the option to carve out the role he served.

  Some say information that afforded his fortune.

  It’s possible that during those days in that prison the Chinese offered Noel introductions to several powerful Chinese families, ones that still seed the highest diplomatic ranks and who send their sons and daughters abroad to Harvard or Princeton or Yale under pseudonyms. Perhaps Noel promised to help with the Harvard kids. A kind of godfather—de jure, if not de facto.

  The question they asked your father the day of the avalanche was not whether I was a spy, Anna. The question they asked was whether he was one.

  You will receive conflicting reports.

  It’s only weather.

  You receive them, you make choices, you let go.

  Lock.

  “Let’s,” he said. The candidate, high on joy, was running his hand over Anna’s belly. The polls were in, things looked increasingly like a lock. “I want,” he said.

  Q.

  A.

  Espionage is lonely. In most cases you’re the only one who has ever met your asset. How she is portrayed, impressions others have of her, it’s all up to you. It’s up to you to portray her how you see her, up to you to prepare the reports of what she’s said. Once you invite another officer into the equation, you’re giving up control in exchange for a kind of confirmation of your work. This loss of control is brilliantly built into the system but it comes at a price. At a certain point in the lifespan of every asset someone else will meet her, take her over, run her. This “turnover” is a kind of tragedy and an affirmation. The failure or success of a turnover is a critical metric by which you are judged.

  Blood.

  Five, four, three—and then the cameraman held up two fingers, then one, and then Anna was live on the local news discussing the election. She was wearing her uniform, a slate-gray pantsuit, a light pink blouse, choices that had been vetted and voted appropriately feminine, unintimidating. And apparently also “true to who you are.�
� That’s what the campaign manager had said when Anna walked into the studio, his PDAs buzzing in their holsters.

  There were three correspondents seated around an oblong glass table, two men, one woman. Anna barely had her earpiece in when they started asking questions.

  What’s it like to be married to someone so dynamic?

  It’s never boring.

  Is your husband a revolutionary?

  I prefer the word “rebel.”

  What does he do to relax?

  He plays the piano.

  What do you do to relax?

  I listen.

  Are you surprised at his success after such a brief time in this field?

  Not really, no, he tends to come and conquer.

  * * *

  —

  Though even as she tried to be calm and maybe even on the margin amusing, Anna was thinking about the day her father died, perhaps as a hedge against anxiety or more frightening thoughts, the way you think about rainbows while being rolled into Anesthesia.

  Conditions were spectacular then, and she’d gone backcountry skiing with a guide all morning while Noel drove to the airport to collect his guests. He had told her some business associates were coming for lunch to discuss his commitment to a cause. Her guide had said how proud he was of her recent improvements, and when they’d reached the peak and the sky started darkening, he’d dared her to race him down one last time. She was winning until, on the final hill, she hit a slick of ice and fell, nicking her chin.