His political risk statisticians had been wrong, as had the early liberal pundits. It turned out Anna was his finest asset; the voters loved her. Their love increased in elegant, precise proportion to her retreat from them, or was it her retreat from him, a willingness to give her man up to them and to their demands, a willingness not to want. No one knew what she wanted though they all asked. Will you be taking a formal role in your husband’s office? No. Will you be announcing a cause you intend to pursue? No. Will you be going back to the Ford Foundation? No. No. No.
December was descending and soon Lulu would be, too. While Anna remained icy, her mother was treating the whole reappearance as a religious experience, one in which she herself was the prophet. “You need me now, darling.” That kind of thing. And, “Thank God I can help,” apropos of a new home in the city and another down in Washington. Only Anna wasn’t a little girl anymore. Lulu’s choices had freed her daughter. Her choices made it all right for Anna to take what she needed from her mother and discard the rest. There is power in discarding the rest.
On the very day Lulu was set to arrive, an unusual subject line appeared in Anna’s inbox:
PAINT A STARRY NIGHT AGAIN, MAN
All those men had told her if he was ever in contact, to call them immediately.
They had told her she should have nothing to do with him.
They had told her he posed a threat.
You can never really clean out a desk, can you.
The marriage was intact. The baby question finally had been put to rest. Emotions were aligned and she even had started to think about working again.
It was a time for quiet and order. This email was chaos.
And all those cymbidiums, dendrobiums, and phalaenopsis in their black lacquered pots. They needed water. This email was water for her.
She knew she would open it, and what it would say. She knew what her response would be.
Q.
A.
Six weeks before her exfiltration I was alone, it was Christmas Eve. I had a little tree with white lights. I remember wondering what the hell I was doing, if I had the appetite for risk this thing would require. I was thinking about my childhood, how on Christmas Eve we would exchange wishes for the coming year. My wish that night was easy. I wanted her out, safe. Christmas morning Noel phoned. He asked if I knew what deus ex machina meant. And then he said, “Because I think we’re going to need one.”
Block Tackles.
It wasn’t that she wanted something else, it was that she wanted what she once had. Anna wanted to roll back clocks, to sit in that atrium again wearing her glasses and her optimism, or even further, to the period of literature and nuance, a more academic stance against the world, before she gave it all up for the rational. She wanted to have her then-boyfriend-now-husband appear again and sit down on that bench in those jeans, have him tell her how he would change the world. Instead of saying nothing, she would have said something, maybe she would have even leaned in and kissed him, maybe she would have taken a lead. Maybe she might have said, Let’s run away together and start new. Anna wasn’t trained for risks, though. She was trained for holding back, and responding. In that way, they were absolute opposites. He was always moving forward, always eyeing goals, never letting the perfect block-tackle the good, believing. By the time she had moved toward intense interest in him, there was already a ring on her finger. And by the time she knew she was ready to take a true risk, one that involved not only her own life but the lives of others, her husband had placed them inside a life where taking risks was no longer only irresponsible, it was forbidden. Her husband had clarified what he wanted, where he was going, and how he planned to get there. There would be increasingly less space for her choices in this new arc of things. Though when it came time for her to ask for what she needed, he would not say no. He knew it would be her way out of the place she had been hiding. He knew letting her go was his insurance she would return to him.
Q.
A.
In the Salem trials, this interesting thing evolved. I call it the circular structure of the judgment. All the so-called afflicted, the ones giving the testimonies, were presumed innocent. They had seen and been abused by witches so they themselves could not be condemned. Innocent by virtue of illuminating the guilty. This structure creates all kinds of problems. It places the entire system at risk. Golden lassos.
If you’re sitting overseas in a black site and a lawyer tells you it’s acceptable to XYZ, who are you to say, No, that’s against the law. Who are you to say, I prefer not to. An active choice to contradict a legal opinion that’s in line with the mission would be arrogant, absurd, like telling the weatherman all that snow on her screen looks like clear blue skies. You follow orders in this line of work. You’re not God. You’re a case officer.
The only agency that grants immunity is the Justice Department, and the relationship between Justice and CIA has never been strong. Justice can blink, and change your life. At two o’clock you’re on the front lines fighting ISIS in El Alamein. At three o’clock you’re on an Interpol arrest list. You’re placed in a windowless room and asked whether you’ve ever engaged in a violent plot to overthrow the U.S. government. I did something fully vetted and approved by legal counsel, the result of which was the extraction of actionable intelligence. And then Justice blinked.
I wasn’t unique, this was happening all over the place, demotions framed as promotions, “rest” a wrist slap for actions they themselves had designed but could no longer tolerate.
It was clear I would be stripped of my asset.
There was no one else who could understand her, Anna.
Our chief used to say she bled red, white, and blue.
You follow orders in this line of work. On occasion, you make a choice where it’s not a question of high seventies versus ice storms. It’s not a question of whether to employ eyewash or what the length of your last surveillance route was, it’s not about the viability of dead-drop locations, the size of the safe house, protocol. That’s all math. When you’re making a choice to save a life, the numbers evaporate and you’re left with a vastly more complex thing: a human being.
Espionage isn’t a math problem, Anna.
It’s a painting.
Choice.
PAINT A STARRY NIGHT AGAIN, MAN.
She was trying not to think about his email. She left the bed and ordered room service. The hotel suite had started with Edmund’s vision for a small, private campaign headquarters uptown. But the definition of what the suite was changed as it became the place they slept and ate, as Jake began referring to it as “home.” What defines a home anyhow. She wasn’t sure. She drew the curtain to see the sun starting to come up. She turned her phone off and then turned it on again. That email wasn’t going anywhere until she opened it.
There’s that annoying issue with the things we don’t want to think about. Try not to think about pink elephants and you’ll be condemned to think of nothing else. Try not to think about starry nights, Anna, is what she was telling herself as she moved around the suite, sitting in the chair where she had sat to answer the questions, at the little desk where she worked and watched and rewatched the boy tell his story of the rooms, lying on the daybed where she’d napped on dozens of fall afternoons, waiting for her husband to come home, the kitchen they hadn’t once cooked in. It was as if she were looking for a safe space. Or for forgetting.
Of course refusing to open an email like the one sitting in her inbox would be an almost revolutionary act, an almost impossibly disciplined choice. The problem was that Anna knew one thing no one else knew. He was reaching out to her to tell her something. There would be a disclosure in that email. And perhaps there would also be an invitation. Because that night he had told her, “I will find you,” and she believed him.
When you lose someone, it’s almost impossible, for a period of time, to let
go of the illusion that he is coming back, that he is just around the next corner, that he is about to walk into the room where you are, and turn on the light, and come to you. This is the essence of mourning.
Anna lay back down on the bed, her husband still asleep by her side.
She knew she should press delete.
* * *
—
You tell her I am a good man, Noel says, his voice cracking as emotion enters it.
He says this right before the video cuts out.
Tell her.
Tell who?
You tell her. You tell her that. You tell her that.
Come on, America. Loyalty.
It is better that ten guilty go free than one innocent be condemned, isn’t it?
You tell her that.
At the point the video cuts out, the tiny time stamp at the bottom reads 5:32. Noel’s interrogation had lasted, at that point, five hours, thirty-two minutes. And while Anna couldn’t possibly guess what would come after that thirty-second minute, she could guess with some certainty who Noel meant by “you” and “her.” He was talking about his daughter. He was talking about Anna. He wanted her approval. Or perhaps her forgiveness. The video was the start of something—for him, which would come back to her in time.
Anna knew she should tell someone about all of it, shouldn’t she, the USB, the hard targets, fishing lessons at the Cap, now the email. She should file a report, lend testimony to the record, admit the visitation.
She had seen a witch, after all. She should confess, if only as protection.
Any other choice really wasn’t appropriate.
Q.
A.
Turnover was not an option until it was the only option, funny how that works. I knew the perfect person to deliver her to, to succeed me, who would understand her history uniquely and approach the task of handling her with empathy and rigor, the one who had been assessed by the toughest critic. Her turnover would require an exfiltration, and that would solder the end of things for me. I would have to get her out, deliver her safely, and then disappear. And when I thought about this, Anna, I felt relief. I was ready. Joy needs her space.
Christmas.
Her husband always placed a piece of jewelry in the toe of her Christmas stocking. This year though, Anna wanted less. She was hopeful this year’s jewel might be a poem he’d written. Maybe tickets for a trip. A gesture, an experience. Though things were busy things felt newly calm. The sprint was over and now they were in the early stages of training for the next race.
It was early December, Manhattan silent under snow, TriBeCa’s glass boxes glowing through thin coats of frost. They now had two people living with them, which she felt was preposterous even as he assured her it was essential.
“It’s just assistance,” he told her.
“Assistance, like a chef?” she said, making air quotes around the word “assistance.” She truly didn’t know. He now had three assistants in his office, one who handled phones, one who handled paper, one who handled him. Her husband, who had never bothered to get his license, now had two cars equipped with two drivers. Anna felt that there were too many intrusions. As the uptown renovation continued, periodically he accused her of willfully slowing its pace, ensuring her hold on the loft as a symbol of whatever was left of their prior lives.
“Not like a chef. More like a microwave,” he said, lovingly, but with an edge.
The night she hung the stockings she told him, “Please don’t do anything special this year.”
“Only coal for you, baby.” He started stepping her backward into their bedroom, a modified fox-trot, foreplay. “Key of A,” he said.
Q.
A.
Noel taught me how to boil an egg. He taught me how to crack an egg, too. He could do it with one hand, as you know. One hard, swift crack, that’s the trick of it. You have to come down hard enough the first time. He told me if one can crack an egg and put meat in a pan, that’s enough. I still can’t cook much more than eggs and a burger.
In my station, if you recruited a new source, you got a Pakistani version of the British officer’s swagger stick. Inside the stick was a knife. Everyone kept these swagger sticks on their desks. And the officer with the most reports in any given month received a porcelain statue, you would place that on your desk, too. If, in the course of the year, you had the statue on your desk for the majority of the time, it meant you were the highest-ranked intelligence producer. During the years I ran her as a source, that statue just sat on my desk, it never moved. At times I would generate ten reports from one meeting with her. And when I knew it was all about to end, I took the statue into my chief’s office and placed it high on a shelf. I knew he would find it after I was gone. He would know what I was trying to say.
Periodically the polygraphers would ask me about the statue. Periodically, they would question the volume of intelligence coming from one source, as if I were running ten assets and pretending it was all one person. They couldn’t quite believe the truth, which was that we had struck gold in the most unlikely place. That was her blessing and her curse, the fact that she couldn’t get the information out quickly enough, like I was her priest and she was coming to confess. She would sit in the safe house for five hours and not stop. I would make her eggs at three a.m. and again at six a.m. And then she would stand up and go to work, and the next week we would start all over again. I started buying more eggs. She believed what she was doing was critical to her survival. She saw her time with me as bearing witness.
Angels.
In the park, a sea of snow angels.
Looking at them, Anna thought, I will remember this.
Anna believed memory was an act of will. She believed the same about forgetting.
She had forgotten almost all of her Russian, and most of the novels. She had forgotten almost all of her Chinese and the maps of Asia her professor would hang on the blackboard as illustration of Asia’s expanse. “Perspective,” he told his students. Anna had certainly forgotten what life was like before their lives now, this pace. She’d forgotten what her mother said as Lulu removed the book from the shelf on nights when she read to her daughter, and she’d forgotten her father’s response when she told him she had met the love of her life and planned to marry him. She could no longer recall her first nanny’s name, or the brand of biscuits she’d loved as a child. She’d forgotten all of Noel’s girlfriends, even the tall brunette who didn’t care that he never wanted to marry her and wanted only to feel close to the magic everyone felt in his presence. She’d even forgotten all the boys she’d slept with at Princeton, the ones who came after the one she first loved. Anna was wrong about memory, though. Memory is not an act of will. Memory has a mind of its own.
After all, as hard as she tried, Anna could not forget those men leaving the chalet that day, and she could not forget her race past the rocks at the Cap, how quietly he came up by her side. She could not forget that first fundraising dinner and the marine with his house on fire, or the former director asking if the drawing above Edmund’s mantel was a Rubens. When she thought about the man who allegedly had committed crimes against his country, she could not forget the boy he had once been, rolling down the dunes, calling to the falcon. She could not forget what her husband said when she told him, the day after the election, that she needed to take a trip, a little space. To clarify, she wrapped her fingers around his wrists and said, “Microwave.” He understood.
* * *
—
In the park the parents affirmed the art of their little angels.
Memory is as reliable as a forecast, which is to say not reliable at all. People say it rarely snows in April. People say avalanches in the Alps are on the rise. “An exceptionally icy base” was the phrase the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité used to describe the reasons for the unstable snowpack that season. “Even on slopes of t
hirty degrees,” the report read, “expect instability.” At that time. In those conditions. No one was making snow angels on that day in the Alps. The teams that go up the mountain looking for bodies after an avalanche know they aren’t really in the rescue business.
* * *
—
Anna would not forget her father in the weeks before he died. His friend with the Fiat had run into trouble with the banks, and Noel was helping him negotiate with the Swiss authorities. The thing had made the papers but hadn’t yet landed in court, and Noel’s friend planned to try to transfer his case to another jurisdiction, a place where he could call on the European equivalent of the Fifth Amendment, and not talk. Noel thought that was a bad idea. “The truth will set you free,” Noel told his friend. Anna asked her father if he actually believed that. “Yes,” he said. “If the truth approves of your exit plan.”
Red, White, Blue Page 17
