It was an old phone, a Motorola, predating smartphones like the Samsung Ann had bought him a few years back. He kept the Motorola charged, telling himself that he needed it only to check the time during his frequent bouts of insomnia, the numerals displayed boldly enough on its greenish face for him to see them without his reading glasses, but in truth he’d yearned for it to ring, yearned to be invited back to the table just one more time.
But now, as he stared at the phone, feeling it pulse in his hand, a sudden dread almost had him killing the call and shoving the phone away.
But he pressed the lozenge-shaped button and said, “Yes?”
“Downstairs, five minutes,” a flat, uninflected Midwestern voice said.
A voice from his past that took him back to endless days and nights in windowless rooms with torpid air-conditioning and soul-sucking strip lights, where, fueled by stale coffee and bitter cigarettes, he’d sparred with the custodians of the world’s freedoms. Men and women who, for all their veneer of civility, formulated strategies that had left dead brown babies with flies walking across their eyes.
The phone was mute in Town’s hand and he quit the bed, feeling the chill despite his pajamas, and limped to the closet to get dressed. The limp the legacy of the suicide bomb in Afghanistan that’d ended his career.
- - -
Town stepped out of the Park Slope brownstone his canny wife had bought with a small inheritance three decades ago—long before he met her and years before property prices in this part of Brooklyn went through the roof—and shivered as he walked down the steps to the sidewalk, his brogues scuffing a light frosting of snow.
With his shock of gray hair, and his corduroys and tweed jacket, he looked like a retired academic.
A black SUV cruised up and a young man in a suit stepped down from the passenger seat and opened the rear door for Town. With no word of greeting or apology the man played a portable scanner over Town’s body before allowing him up into the vehicle.
No sooner had Town’s rump touched leather then the car slid away from the curb and cruised down the deserted street. Not much happening at 1:45 AM on a Tuesday morning in February. He looked across at the man who sat with an arm resting on the bin of the door. A man constructed from blocks piled atop one another, a square, neckless head balancing on square shoulders.
“Pete,” Dave Golding said.
Golding worked for the presidency and liaised with the intelligence services, and Town, as a CIA case officer, had often briefed him. They had never liked one another, and had found themselves frequently in opposition on matters of policy, so it surprised Town to see him here.
“And why have you dragged me from my warm bed?” Town said.
“Of course you’re familiar with Catherine Finch?”
“Yes.”
“She was killed a few hours ago in a drone strike in Raqqa. Collateral damage.”
“Regrettable.”
“The target was Ahmed Assir.”
“The Jersey Jihadist?” Town asked.
“The same.”
“There must’ve been fist bumps in the Situation Room.”
“Not exactly.”
Town looked at Golding, his old intuition grinding to life. “Why not?”
“Because the president never sanctioned the strike on Assir.”
“Then who did?”
“Jesus, you know what it’s like, everybody’s got a drone program. Kids who were playing first person shooter games until yesterday are now twiddling joysticks in containers outside Vegas. This one is bouncing between JSOC, CentCom and your old outfit. Fact is, the strike on Assir isn’t too much of a deal, but taking out Catherine Finch… Well, that’s a monumental fuck up. She has become that dangerous thing. A symbol. A symbol of peace.”
“Yes, she has. For those ill-disposed toward us.”
“And it threatens the president’s attempts to broker a Middle East peace accord.”
“You don’t seriously believe he can succeed where all his predecessors failed?”
“Well, this president is a dangerous creature,” Golding said. “He stands alone, freed from the dictates of his own party, able to horse-trade with whomever the hell he chooses.”
“He’s driven by ego. Yet again his braggadocio will outmatch his talents.”
“Maybe. Nevertheless he’s reaching for the big brass ring, looking for a place in the history books. And, amazingly, he’s had some unexpected success.”
When Town just stared at him Golding shrugged. “I understand your skepticism, Pete. Look, I virtually had to zip tie his hands to stop him tweeting this, but there are talks happening in a few days. In secret. Old enemies are going to sit down together after many long years. Talks that could result in the signing of the first of many accords.”
“So?”
“So, the last thing we need is this. Us killing Catherine Finch is going to blowtorch the fucking olive branch, Pete, and barbecue that little white dove.”
Town said, “Yes, it will.”
“Which is their intention.”
“Whose intention?”
Golding shrugged. “The guys in the shadows. The guys who, for many and various reasons, do not want peace in the Middle East.”
“If you start talking Deep State, I’ll start whistling the theme from the X Files.”
Golding chuckled. A sound like stones being shaken in a can. “We were often on opposite sides, Pete.”
“The forces of light and the forces of darkness.”
“And I was usually right there in the shadows.”
“Yes you were.”
“Well, maybe I’m getting old and soft, but I find myself lying staring up at the ceiling at night thinking a lot of things...”
“Don’t we all?”
“Perhaps. But I find that I want him to succeed. I want his self-aggrandizing fucking scheme to bear fruit.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Tired of scorching earth, stretching truths and starting unwinnable wars?”
“Maybe,” Golding said.
“Noble of you.”
“Hardly. Just pragmatic.”
“And what do you want from me?”
“We need to keep a lid on this Catherine Finch thing for a few days. Just until this round of peace talks is done. Enough will be in place by then for the fallout around her death to be contained.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“I remember you in those briefing sessions, years ago. You were always a story man, weren’t you, Pete?”
“Meaning?”
“You always knew that being interesting was often more valuable than being informed, or even being right.”
“You saying I was a liar?”
“No, but you knew what to highlight and what to leave unspoken. You were quiet. Not flashy. Kinda gray. Cultivated this serious, scholarly, thing and it worked for you. But I always thought you should have been in advertising or even TV.”
Town stared at Golding and realized how badly he’d underestimated this man.
“I remember you in a briefing, not long after 9/11. You were counseling caution. You were saying the WOMD thing was bullshit. You were saying that the conversation needed to be changed, that we needed to look in another direction. That the American people, the world, could be sold on an approach other than a call to arms. That the drama of a peaceful alternative was just as compelling as that of a war. It was just how the story was told. You paused and you looked around the table and you said, ‘Just remember, everything that has ever happened in this country’s history has wound up as entertainment.’”
“Hardly an original observation.”
“Maybe not, but it stayed with me. It pointed to an essential truth: it’s all about the ability to control the narrative, to dominate the news cycle.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“It’s where you’re going, Pete?”
“Me?”
“Yes.
You.”
“And where am I going?”
“To Los Angeles,” Golding said. “To keep Catherine Finch alive for just three more fucking days.”
FOUR
Ann Town had spied for the Soviets during the Reagan era when the leadership of her country (a loathsome marriage of ignorance and arrogance) was everything she’d hated, and as she stood at the bedroom window of the brownstone watching her husband climb into the black SUV and drive away into the night, she was gripped by the irrational but unshakable fear that this visit was to inform Pete of what she had once been.
She bolted for the en suite and puked up the dinner she’d eaten with Pete at their local trattoria.
The meal had been followed by a nightcap of single malt in front of the fire downstairs, Ann kicking off her penny loafers and Pete massaging her feet while Sinatra crooned about a summer wind blowing in from across the sea. They’d made love on the sofa, slowly and sweetly, and afterward Ann had rested her head on Pete’s lap while he watched Husbands—a movie he must’ve seen a hundred times and never tired of. Before she was lulled into a doze by Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara bemoaning their stale marriages, she’d gazed up at Pete’s face lit by the flickering tube, still a handsome man (in an understated way that snuck up on you) at sixty-one, the grooves in his cheeks and the weave of wrinkles around his eyes only adding to his appeal.
When the movie had ended they’d gone up to bed and she’d slept while Pete had read and waged his nightly war with insomnia.
When his old phone had rung she’d thought she was dreaming, the ring tone—a harsh electronic impersonation of a marimba—taking her back to the times when he’d ghosted away to do whatever he’d done, the details of which had remained mostly hidden from her.
For the first five years of their marriage they’d commuted—or, rather, she had—between the brownstone and his cramped apartment in McLean, Virginia, near CIA headquarters, until he’d fallen from favor and was sent abroad, given mostly hardship posts. She’d told him to quit but he hadn’t been ready, and often months had passed when they hadn’t seen each other.
Then came the bomb and after he’d been discharged from the hospital and given a medal and a handshake he’d moved in with her. And they had been happy, she thought, even though she sometimes saw a look in his eye that hinted at an unspoken loss.
Ann stood up from the bathroom floor and flushed and washed her face and brushed her teeth.
She was surprised at how low the terror had taken her, for she did not think of herself as a fearful person. As a photographer she had found herself in more than a few wars and had held her nerve. And, of course, she had been a spy. An agent working for her country’s greatest enemy during the most frigid years of the Cold War, warming herself on a brazier of moral righteousness—that and her youth insulating her from fear.
But, as she inspected her pale and blotchy face in the mirror, she wondered if she’d suddenly gotten old, and if fear, now that it had slipped in like a thief in the night, would dog her until her deathbed.
Unconsciously looking for a way to root herself, she went through to her study, where she was Ann Longhurst not Ann Town, the walls lined with the photographs she had taken during a nearly forty-year career that had made her, if not famous, then respected, with more awards than she could remember.
Photographs of forgotten wars and faded rock singers and dead movie stars and unread writers and burned-out funny men. All black and white. All shot on her battered old Leica. She used only available light, her work made distinct by the raw intimacy that came from embedding herself—long before the term was coined—with the objects of her interest, becoming invisible enough to take photographs that, at their best, achieved a kind of revelatory transcendence that stripped their subjects bare.
“Surgery by shutter,” Susan Sontag had called a photo essay Ann had done on a stand-up comedian who’d freebased himself to death days after she’d photographed him.
She drew her robe around her lean body and sat on the edge of her desk and looked at her favorite picture, an image of Pavarotti slumped on a bench in the Piazza San Marco at dawn, taken at the height of his tax scandal. The burly tenor had caroused with an almost menacing determination after his performance in Venice, and then had allowed Ann to follow him as he’d wandered into the deserted square. She’d captured the beleaguered man in his rumpled tux and loosened tie staring down at the patterned floor as a flock of pigeons, startled by a boat’s horn, had taken flight behind him in a boiling cloud.
Ann stepped away from the desk and went to the window and looked down at the empty street, telling herself that tonight’s business was about something else. It had nothing to do with her silliness of thirty years ago, when she’d handed over scraps gleaned from American “advisors” in flyblown bars on the fringes of Asian and African warzones, or reported the conversations of congressmen and senators on Third World junkets who’d allowed her in when they were shit-faced and horny enough to be indiscreet.
Silliness that had come to its natural end when the Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had shattered into pieces and there had been nobody left to be interested in her gossip. Even her erstwhile KGB handler and sometime lover, Arkady Andropov, had become merely a fragrant memory.
When she’d started sleeping with Pete Town over a decade later and had discovered that he was a CIA case officer she’d had the crazy notion that he was hunting her, that his seduction was a ruse, and she’d waited for the worst to happen.
But it never had and she’d happily accepted the truth: she’d been a minnow, too insignificant to show up on any CIA radar, and after they’d married and Pete had retired she’d allowed any lingering traces of anxiety to evaporate as she’d watched her husband drift free of the world of secrets that had held him for so long.
Until this. Tonight.
Ann heard the scrape of Pete’s key in the door and went and stood at the top of the stairs. When she saw her hand clutching the banister so tightly that her knuckles were white, she forced herself to relax.
He closed the door and looked up at her. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“No. I think it was the ravioli. A little rich. I woke and you were gone.”
He walked up toward her and she could read nothing in his expression.
“Where did you go, Pete?”
“I took a drive with a man from back in the day.”
“CIA?”
“The presidency.”
“And?”
“He wants me to do something.”
The fear had left her sour and hollow and her head throbbed and, now that she knew that the nocturnal visit had nothing to do with her, a sullen, liverish anger seeped into her blood.
They were in the bedroom and Pete put a Samsonite bag on the bed and removed a suit from the closet. The gray suit she hadn’t seen in years. She hated that suit. When he wore it he became reduced, somehow, as if his light were dimmed.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I won’t be gone for long.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
He folded the suit into the bag, his long fingers still stained by the nicotine of the cigarettes he’d quit when he’d retired.
Pete crossed to the en suite and as he packed his Dopp kit he looked at her in the mirror. “I’m going to Los Angeles.”
“What for?”
“They need something done out there.”
“Off the books?”
“Yes.”
“So they need a lackey?” she said. “Or a scapegoat?”
He didn’t reply, just walked back into the bedroom and stowed the toiletry pouch and closed the zipper of the bag. When he leaned in to kiss her she stepped away.
“They’re waiting,” he said and lifted the bag and walked out the door.
FIVE
Rick Finch was in his bedroom doing blow off the perky tits of the UCLA sophomore when his doorbell rang. He ignored it and carried on snortin
g like a truffle hog.
The girl—Jean? Jane? June?—said, “Aren’t you going to get that?”
Finch licked the powdery residue off her nipples. “Probably some Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said, his voice muffled.
The girl laughed as she pushed him away. “At three in the morning?”
“True. This is L.A., so it must be those fucking Scientologists.”
She giggled again. He’d met her earlier that night after he and a group of families of hostages had spoken about their loved ones in captivity—as the others had insisted on calling them—at a UCLA symposium on global terror. It was the first invitation he’d had in a while. The crowd had been pretty sympathetic, but he’d still had to field some tough questions about Catherine’s videos.
The money had been risible. The organizers had asked him for a freebie, but he’d managed to claw a gratuity out of them that had at least covered his gas and the drinks he’d bought the girl at a Westside bar after the panel discussion, the wide-eyed kid dripping with empathy and ready to do anything to soothe his tormented soul.
The doorbell went again and he stood, nearly tripping as he stepped into his jeans.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’d better get that.”
He stumbled through the house and hit the porch light and opened the front door to reveal a gray-haired man with a gray face dressed in a gray suit.
“My name is Ronald Abernathy,” the man said and flashed some kind of ID that Finch couldn’t read. “I’m with the State Department.”
Finch blinked, trying to focus. “Is this about Catherine?”
“You’re not alone, are you?” the gray man asked.
Finch shook his head. “No.”
“Okay,” the man said and, uninvited, stepped into the living room, looking around at the mess of empty bottles and junk food containers. “Why don’t you get rid of your friend and then we’ll talk?”
He went through to the kitchen.
Double Down Page 2
