The Right Hand

by Derek Haas

  The first few nights, he was terrified he would wake to find the cane removed and Egorov standing in its place, that half smile disappearing behind his beard as he summoned the large men with gloves. But no one had punished him yet, and still his cane remained where he left it.

  Scrape. Scrape. The point was growing sharp. He would work at it for a few minutes more, alone, with just his thoughts in the darkness to keep him company.

  Adams stood in the lobby of the Renaissance hotel on Dupont Circle, waiting for the black Lincoln. He checked himself in the glass next to the elevator. Laura had bought him a new suit and picked out a matching tie and shirt. With so much going on in his head, he fired few neurons thinking about the way he dressed. This was what a great wife did—picked up his slack without asking. If he wasn’t going to put any effort into the way he looked, she would make sure he dressed the part of a confident Central Intelligence district chief.

  Right on time, a dark Lincoln pulled up to the curb and a young black officer ducked out of the driver’s door and opened the rear door for him. Adams slid into the backseat and shook hands with Director Manning.

  Contrary to expectations, Manning was a garrulous, warm personality with razor instincts and a gambler’s guts. He’d survived two administrations by knowing which cards to lay down and which to keep tucked under the table.

  He smiled at Adams. “Thanks for pit stopping in DC, Michael. How was the flight?”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “You never do.”

  The driver eased the car into the soup of traffic and headed toward the highway.

  “The reason I wanted to grab you on your way to Prague…Michael, I’m gonna ask a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “I’m gonna ask you to step up for me and run European Ops.”

  Adams tried to keep emotion off his face but wasn’t sure he succeeded. Manning gave him a break by keeping his eyes forward.

  “Now, I know it’s a bit of an uproot, but I gotta put a man on that horse I know can ride it without getting tossed to the ground, understand?”

  Adams spread his hands. “I’d say I’d think about it but you aren’t going to let me, are you?”

  “No, sir, I’m not.”

  “Then I accept.”

  “Good man. I wanted to get this in so you could announce it at the district head meeting and start to plan your transfer while you’re there.”

  “You haven’t told Dan?”

  Dan Clausen was the head of the New York district office and had made no bones about his interest in taking over EurOps.

  “If he wants to talk after, I’m all ears, but he’s doing a fine job in New York and that’s just the right size sandbox for him.”

  Clausen was not going to take this well, but it was part of the game and he’d have to lick his wounds and wait for the next opportunity. Adams wondered about the other district heads…what would their eyes look like when he announced the Director’s decision? He had to admire Manning’s tact: implying that this promotion would be doing him a favor instead of the other way around.

  The car eased onto the beltway and headed toward Virginia.

  What the hell is Laura going to say? Adams thought. But he knew the answer. She’s going to take up the slack like she always does.

  He smiled to himself and turned his eyes out the window as they passed the Jefferson Memorial, lit up bright against the soft purple of the evening sky.

  Later, Adams stood along the Mall about halfway between the Washington and Lincoln Monuments. The moon was out and the park was well lit, but only a few tourists mingled on the far side of the reflecting pool. Adams liked it here. It might have been sentimental or saccharine, but he always felt a swell of patriotism when he visited the park. Reflecting Pool was an appropriate name; he caught his image in the still water and his thoughts turned to the telephone call that had changed his life.

  Unlike many of his peers, Adams had sought out employment in Central Intelligence, rather than the other way around. He was a mathematics major at Princeton, had stayed there to receive his master’s, and was staring down a long ivy-covered corridor at a career in academics. In the course of doing a spot of background work for his thesis, he’d stumbled across an obscure reference in the Journal of Mathematics Research. It pointed to an intelligence report that cited the burgeoning recruitment of young mathematicians into the CIA. He went to the library and read up all he could on American intelligence in the late twentieth century, contacted the placement office in Langley, and on a whim, filled out an application, stuck a stamp on it, and mailed it in.

  Two months later, he had forgotten all about it, had defended his thesis and passed his oral exams, and had grown serious about asking Laura to marry him. He still couldn’t believe that of all the men falling over her on that campus, she had chosen him. Each day, he felt sure she would stop seeing him, would laugh, explain it was all a joke, but that day never came.

  The phone rang one night as they sat on his couch, watching a David Lynch movie on his secondhand VCR. “Mr. Adams?”

  “Yes. This is Michael Adams.”

  “This is Kandus Simpson with the Central Intelligence Agency. We’d like you to travel to Virginia tomorrow morning for a formal interview.”

  He hung up, his throat dry. When he told Laura, she beamed and hugged him. He proposed marriage that night. Whatever was going to happen to him, it would happen to them together.

  The interview lasted nearly a week. It was unlike any corporate interview he’d ever heard of. It started with the basics—discussion of his goals and merits, where he’d worked, attended school, his family life, where he’d traveled, any extracurricular activities in which he’d participated. That first round concluded after a few pleasant hours in a few different offices.

  At the end of that day, they asked him if he’d stay the night in Virginia; they might want to speak to him further. They put him up at a Doubletree and he slept uncomfortably, analyzing and reanalyzing the answers he’d given until they were all jumbled and he couldn’t remember anything, even the questions.

  The next morning, they added a lie detector to the mix. He was grilled about the European travels he had gone on during the summer after his sophomore year, a summer backpacking adventure that was so innocent as to be laughable, only no one in the room was laughing. They knew everywhere he’d been, everywhere he’d used his parents’ credit card, every train ticket he’d bought. He tried to answer in as careful and considered a manner as he could, but he simply couldn’t remember all the details. The dates when he’d visited Prague, the date when he’d missed his train in Berlin, the night he’d spent in a hospital in Paris. They knew more than he did. He tried to find some meaning, any meaning, in the examiner’s expression, but he was at a loss. He asked for a break and they denied him one. At that point, he realized that they were testing more than his answers, maybe they were testing the way he responded, the way he handled the process as a whole. He was determined not to give them a single reason to doubt him. He had always been good at concentration, and he focused like a laser. When later they asked if he would like some water, he politely declined and told them to keep going.

  Again they put him up in the Doubletree, and again he barely slept. He wanted to call Laura, but something told him maybe they were still watching him, even in this hotel room, and he would give them no arrows in their quill with which to shoot down his application.

  The following two days were filled with math examinations. The exams started out easily enough, advanced algebra, spatial relationships, programming basics, but then they made the examinations progressively tougher. They introduced outside elements, like loud music and flashing lights, and still made him fill out paperwork, or move puzzle pieces around, or decode difficult ciphers. His concentration never flagged.

  On the fifth day, he was seated with three other mathematicians and they were given a complex problem to solve. One man in the group, an older man with hard eyes and
a clean-shaven face, insisted on his way of doing things, even though Adams could clearly see he was leading them down the wrong path. Adams started to interrupt him, but the man was insistent to the point of belligerence. They had been working half a day when the man suddenly erased half of their whiteboard and insisted they start over.

  Adams had had enough. To the surprise of the other two younger men, who were frustrated but resigned that they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem with the third man making it so difficult, Adams stood up and told the angry man to leave. The man stared at him incredulously with those hard eyes, but Adams folded his arms across his chest and stood his ground.

  In an even voice that never rose, Adams dressed him down while outlining why he was wrong, why he was a bully, why he was actually retarding the process instead of moving it forward, and why, as a team, they wouldn’t solve the problem while he remained in the room.

  The man started to protest again, and Adams just shook his head, pointed to the door, and said, “Leave.” The man approached Adams as if he were going to hit him in the face, but instead handed him his erasable marker and left.

  “Now, let’s get to it,” Adams said to the other two, and they redoubled their efforts, solving the problem with only a few minutes to spare before their time was up.

  For the fifth straight night, Adams was asked to stay in Virginia, and this time, he called Laura from the hotel phone, told her he was okay and that he loved her, and that he had no idea whether he was going to have a career in intelligence or she was going to be a professor’s wife. Her voice was strong and supportive on the other end of the line. “All I want is for you to do what you love, and for us to be together.” He hung up, feeling as refreshed as if he’d taken a shower. That night, he had his first good night’s sleep since he’d arrived.

  On the sixth day, he sat in a waiting room, staring at a clock on the wall. They had always come for him within a minute of 8 a.m., and here it was already ten till nine, and no one had checked to see if he was in the room. After an eternity, a door opened and a woman he hadn’t met before ushered him down a corridor.

  At the end stood a door with a nameplate: DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ANDREW MANNING. The woman opened the door and Adams walked inside. A man stood up from behind the desk and crossed toward him. Adams was shocked. It was the man from the fifth day, the one who had been so disruptive, the man Adams had forced to leave.

  He smiled, his eyes much softer than they had been before, and stuck out his hand. “Welcome to Central Intelligence, Michael. I’m Deputy Director Manning. I must say, you’ve impressed the hell out of me.”

  For the first time in nearly a week, Adams was flustered. “Thank you.”

  “We’re expecting great things from you,” Manning said, draped his arm over Adams’s shoulder, and guided him to a chair.

  All these years later, Adams believed he had finally exceeded those expectations. His reflection in the pool hadn’t changed; not even an insect had landed on the water to upset its smoothness.

  His phone rang and he retrieved it from his pocket.

  “Sir?”

  “Hello, Warren. Are we on a secure line?”

  He waited a few seconds, then heard the familiar clicks and beeps. “We are now.”

  “I have some news, and I expect you to be discreet.”

  “Of course.” He could hear the tremor in Warren’s voice, and it pleased him. His wife might have to fake her enthusiasm for this promotion, but Warren would barely be able to contain his glee. Adams realized that was probably why he wanted to tell Warren first but pushed that thought from his mind.

  “The DCI asked me to head EurOps. It won’t be announced until the district heads’ meeting in Prague, but I want you to start thinking about the transition.”

  “Yes, of course. Discreetly, of course. Yes. I’m on it. Right away.”

  “I knew you would be, Warren.” Adams hesitated for a second, then proceeded. “I’m going to promote you to case officer after I settle in. You’ve proven to me you’re ready.”

  “I appreciate that, sir. Nothing would please me more.”

  “I know. I’ll talk to you after I land in Europe.”

  “Yes, sir. And thank you for your faith in me.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  Adams hung up and smiled. He felt a paternal pride, and maybe that was why he had risen as far and as fast as he had: because he felt as if the Agency were a family. His family.

  A couple passed him on their way toward the Washington Monument, and he watched their hands clasp in the reflection of the pool.

  Chapter Seven

  HE LET her cry.

  Two hours directly north of Vladivostok, they found an empty country house, not much more than a log cabin that would’ve made Huckleberry Finn feel right at home. It stood alone, deep off a crooked dirt road, surrounded by old-growth forest and so dusty as to cause clouds to rise from their footsteps. In the years since Communism, so many of these dachas had simply been abandoned. With a confusion of property rights, elderly owners found it easier to just jettison a property than to fill out the mounds of requisite paperwork. Of course, many of these citizens had died, and the records of the houses’ existence had died with them.

  Clay didn’t interrupt her sobbing, didn’t offer a handkerchief, didn’t rest his hand on her shoulder. Her stepbrother had died, her world had crumbled, and every dream she had held for her life had evaporated. She had learned one of life’s cruelest lessons: sometimes you pay for other people’s mistakes.

  So he let her cry and he did not hold it against her. He had learned that lesson many years before, a different life ago.

  Austin Clay was born to Craig and Melissa Clay under a blisteringly hot Louisiana sun. His father had waited too late to drive his mother to the hospital, and she had given birth to Austin pulled to the side of the road, his father stooped half in and half out of the passenger seat. Austin was the city in which he had been conceived. Although his parents remembered the location, the night itself was a little fuzzy. That town did three things right—barbecue, beer, and music—and the Clays partook of all three over the course of that weekend.

  Austin was loved. That had been clear to him from the time before he could consciously remember. It was a feeling; it was images: his father’s arms, his mother’s hair, the toys, the crib, a laugh, a kiss, friends, a blanket, a bear, sunshine, a fire, a song, bare feet, warmth, laughter. They were there, with him, part of him, real, as real as he made them.

  His father worked for a candymaker and smelled of sugar. His mother worked in the front office of a car dealership but took a leave of absence to have him and never went back. They lived in a house on a street lined with houses just like theirs, where wooden fences marked the property lines but all the neighbors knew each other by first name. He remembered that his mom made costumes for him: a pirate with a paper beard one day and a cowboy with a gold star pinned to his shirt the next. He was loved; she loved him; she told him every morning, whispered it to him every night. He could climb into her voice and take a nap.

  They died with their names on a police report but not in the paper. They had hired a babysitter to give them a night out, a respite, an evening for themselves. When they stopped at the grocery store, it had been because of a joke. He pretended he was going to take her to the deli counter, but he really had reservations at the French restaurant downtown. It was their sixth anniversary.

  A former employee named Larry Blank walked into the store holding an automatic pistol. He had been fired three days earlier, when it was discovered he had drilled a hole into the women’s bathroom and he was caught with his pants down in the adjacent broom closet. When his wife learned of the circumstances surrounding his sudden dismissal, she absconded with their two children. Blank thought the manager of the store, Steve Latier, must’ve told her the details of his sudden ouster. Latier was a gossip who liked to flap his gums and had ogled Blank’s wife on more than one occasi
on when she came in to buy diapers. The disgraced employee didn’t have much of a plan except to kill that prissy asshole, but—as he admitted to the court-appointed psychiatrist later—when he psyched himself up to walk into the store and shoot, he saw only red, bright red, went through the automatic doors, and started firing. He remembered nothing from there, not how many times he pulled the trigger, not how long it all took—just red, and then he was knocked off his feet by the same officious son of a bitch he had walked in to kill. When he later learned he had ended the lives of seven people, including a state senator, his response had been “No,” as if they were telling him something that had happened to someone else. “No, that couldn’t be right.”

  The state senator, a popular Mormon who had served three terms and was short-listed for a congressional run, received all the press, of course. Clay’s mother and father were always included within the phrase and six others.

  They left no wills. They weren’t yet in their thirties and thought they had all the time in the world. Wills, trusts—those were for old people, for sick people. What did they have to bequeath, anyway? They were just getting started.

  Craig Clay had a brother named Bobby. A court investigator found him on a sailboat docked in San Diego. He was the only living relative of the six-year-old boy left behind when his parents were murdered simply for walking into the wrong grocery store at the wrong time.

  Bobby cleaned himself up, put on a button-down shirt, clean jeans, and socks, flew halfway across the country, and appeared in court to claim the boy and the two-hundred-and-eighty-seven-thousand-dollar life insurance payout. Forty-eight hours later, Austin Clay stepped onto his uncle’s boat for the first time. He would rarely step off it for the next nine years.