Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Andrew kept watching the computer screen and the agony of his prisoner as lights flashed and sirens wailed. Abruptly, he pressed buttons that turned off the lights and the siren. He wanted to create ten minutes of peace, ten minutes in which the prisoner would be unable to relax, dreading the further assault on his senses. It was a hell that the prisoner would soon do anything to end.

  Except, Andrew thought.

  The day you become most sure of something, that’s the day you need to start doubting it. His father’s words echoed in Andrew’s memory as he thought about his conviction that the only sure method of interrogation was his own. But was it possible that. . .

  A threatening idea wormed into Andrew’s imagination. An operative could be trained to add one perception onto another and then another until he or she could monitor multiple conversations while reading a book and listening to brassy music.

  Then why couldn’t an operative of a different sort be trained to endure deepening cold, throbbing lights, and wailing sirens for three and a half days without sleep? The first time would be agony, but the agony of the second time would perhaps be less because it was familiar. The third time would be a learning experience, testing methods of self-hypnotism to make the onslaught less painful.

  Watching the prisoner’s supposed anguish, Andrew felt empty. Could an enemy become that sophisticated? If they learned NLP in order to defeat it, if they practiced being water-boarded in order to control their reactions to it, why couldn’t they educate themselves in other methods of interrogation in order to defeat those? Any group whose members blew themselves up or infected themselves with smallpox to destroy their enemies and thus attain paradise was capable of anything.

  Andrew pressed buttons on his computer keyboard and caused the strobe lights and siren to resume in the prisoner’s cold cell. Imagining the blare, he watched the sleepless prisoner scream.

  Or was the prisoner only pretending to have reached the limit of his endurance? Andrew had the troubling sense that the man on the screen was reacting predictably, almost on schedule, as if the prisoner had been trained to know what to anticipate and was behaving the way an interrogator would expect.

  But how can I be sure? Andrew wondered. How much further do I need to push him in order to be confident he isn’t faking? Four and a half days? Five? Longer? Can anyone survive that and remain sane?

  Andrew recalled his father telling him about one of the most dramatic interrogations in American espionage. During the 1960s, a Soviet defector came to Washington and told the CIA that he knew about numerous Soviet moles in the U.S. intelligence system. His accusations resulted in investigations that came close to immobilizing the Agency.

  Soon afterward, a second Soviet defector came to Washington and accused the first defector of being a double agent sent by the Soviets to paralyze the Agency by making false accusations about moles within it. In turn, the first defector claimed that the second defector was the true double agent and had been sent to discredit him.

  These conflicting accusations finally brought American intelligence operations to a standstill. To break the stasis, the second defector, who’d been promised money, a new identity, and a consulting position with the Agency, was taken to a secret confinement facility where he was interrogated periodically for the next five years. Most of that time was spent in solitary confinement in a small cell with a narrow cot and a single lightbulb in the ceiling. He was given nothing to read. He couldn’t speak to anyone. He was allowed to bathe only once a week. Except for the passage of the seasons, he had no idea what day or week, month or year it was. He tried making a calendar, using threads from a blanket, but each time he completed one, his guards destroyed it. His boarded window prevented him from ever breathing fresh air. In summer, his room felt like a sweatbox. For five hundred and sixty-two days of those five years, he was questioned intensely, sometimes around the clock. But despite his prolonged ordeal, he never recanted his accusation, nor did the first defector, even though their stories were mutually contradictory and one of them must have been lying. Nobody ever learned the truth.

  Five years, Andrew thought. Maybe I’m being too easy. Maybe I need more time.

  Suddenly wishing for the innocent era of Sodium Pentothal, he pressed another button and watched the prisoner wail.

  It seemed the man would never stop.

  <>

  * * * *

  SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN

  Andrew Klavan

  I knew why she had come—of course I did—but I fell for her anyway—of course. That was what she’d been designed for and who I was, who they’d made me. I didn’t even question it much, to be honest. I’d come to hate philosophizing of that sort by then. Endless discussions about nature versus nurture or fate versus free will. In the end, what are you even talking about really? Nothing: the way words work, the way the human brain puts ideas together—what we’re capable of conceiving, I mean, not the real, underlying truth of the matter. I’m sure there’s some logic to a person’s life and all that. Some algorithm of accident and providence and inborn character that explains it. Maybe God can work it out, if he exists and has a calculator handy. Maybe even he shrugs the whole thing off as a pain in the celestial ass.

  But for me, in the event, it was more poetry than philosophy or math. I saw her and I thought, “Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it?” She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate. And I fell for her, even knowing why she’d come.

  * * * *

  I had premonitions of the end as soon as I read about the train wreck. I saw it on the Drudge Report over my morning coffee and suspected right away it was one of ours. A computer glitch on the D.C.-New York corridor. A head-on collision, twenty-seven dead, no one, seemingly, to blame. They were still digging bodies from the smoking wreckage when the FBI announced it wasn’t terrorism. A likely story. Of course it was terrorism. By afternoon and through the two days following, various Islamist groups were claiming credit by way of various YouTube videos featuring various magi with greasy beards and colorful noses and utterly ridiculous hats. That was a likely story, too. Those hate-crazy clowns—they didn’t have the network for it, not in this country.

  Which meant it was a genuine riddle. Because we did have the network, but we had no cause.

  * * * *

  I worried at it for a day or two, trying to sort out the possibilities. Stein was our man on the eastern railways, and I suppose, after so many decades of silence and unknowing, he might have just flipped and pressed the button. But he was always a stolid character, unlikely to go rogue. And anyway, instinct told me this was something else, something more disturbing. It had the smell of genuine catastrophe.

  Finally, the anxiety got to be too much for me. I decided to take a risk. I couldn’t contact Stein himself, of course. If we weren’t active, it would be a useless danger. If we were, it would mean death to us both. Using my cover, I called a contact at the Agency instead—a threat analyst in the New York office—and he and I took a lunchtime stroll around the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.

  There was nothing particularly strange about this. There are plenty of gabby spooks around. You’d be surprised. A lot of these guys are just overeducated bureaucrats playing Spy vs. Spy. They graduate with an ideology and maybe some computer skills but no real sense of evil whatsoever. Secrecy doesn’t mean that much to them. Gossip is the only real talent they have—and the only real power they have—and they know you have to give to get. Buy them a drink and they’ll spill state secrets like your Aunt May talking about Cousin Jane’s abortion: all raised eyebrows and confidential murmurs and theoretically subtle hints you’d have to be an idiot not to understand.

  But Jay—I’ll call him Jay—was different. He’d been in Afghanistan, for one thing. He’d seen the sort of things people do to one another on the strength of bad religion or through the logic of misguided ideas or just out of plain monkey meanness. He knew the moral univers
e was not a simple machine in which you pour goodness in one end and goodness reliably comes out the other. All this made him better at his job than the academic whiz kids, more circumspect, more paranoid and thoughtful, less likely to make an easy trade for information. Subtlety, in fact, was the whole point for him. The unsaid thing that left open a world of possibilities. Which was his world—because, the way Jay saw it, you never really knew.

  We were on the walkway beside the wreckage pit, moving in slow, measured steps amid a quick, jerky, time-lapse lunch crowd. We were shoulder to shoulder, our eyes front. Both of us in overcoats, both of us with our hands in our pockets. It was a biting October day.

  Jay made the slightest gesture with his head toward the damage. Not dramatic at all—barely perceptible. But just enough to answer my objections to blaming the jihadis, just enough to say, They did that, didn’t they?

  “That was different,” I said. Muttering, tight-lipped. “Primitive. Plus they got lucky. Plus we were stupid then.”

  “Oh, we’re stupid now,” he said with a laugh. “Believe me.”

  “Still.”

  He looked at me as we walked along—looked until I turned and read his eyes. I saw that he was puzzled, too; he smelled catastrophe, too.

  “You know something?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. I didn’t. “There was some chatter before the fact,” I said. “They knew it was on the way.”

  This was just a guess, but I felt sure it was a good one. It was the only reason I could think of why the YouTube wise men in their absurd hats should have had any measure of credibility with Jay at all. I could tell by his reaction that I’d gotten it right. There had been chatter. They had known.

  Jay pursed his lips and let out a breath, a whispered whistle. We both faced front again. I saw him nodding from the corner of my eyes, confirming my suspicions.

  “So why are there no fingerprints?” he wondered aloud.

  * * * *

  Well, exactly. That was the question. Because the Arabs leave fingerprints. They pretty much have to. They pretty much want to, but even if they didn’t, they would. Because they don’t have the network. They aren’t implanted, integrated, invisible the way we are. How could they be? Think of our preparation, the time we had to establish ourselves here. Time enough, in fact, so that the whole point and purpose of us passed away.

  Which brought me right back where I’d started. They had the cause but not the network. We had the network but not the cause. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and it had me worried. I kept circling around it in my mind as I walked uptown on Broadway toward my office.

  It was a long walk in the brisk, wistful weather. Soon enough, the useless round of reasoning wore itself out, and I wasn’t thinking at all anymore but had drifted instead into daydreams.

  I’d always been like that, a dreamer, all my life. Lately, though, the quality of the dreams had changed. There was an aspect of compulsion to them, maybe even of addiction. They’d acquired a disturbing and ambient realism, too. I was there sometimes almost more than I was here. I wanted to be there more. I found a kind of peace when I was dreaming that I never had otherwise.

  It was always about the Village. Always about Centerville. Not memories of my childhood, mind you. I had those, too, but the daydreams were something different, something more pathetic really, when you consider it. In the daydreams, I was in my hometown again but as a man in his early thirties, say, a man some quarter century younger than I am now but some fifteen years older than I was when I left the Village for good. I suppose, if you wanted to get psychological about it, you could say I was imagining myself at my father’s age, the age my father was when I was little. But I think, more to the point, I was dreaming about myself at an age when I was still romantic but not unrecognizably young, more like myself than a seventeen-year-old but vigorous enough to play the handsome hero of a love story.

  That’s what they were, my daydreams: love stories. Their plots are too childish and embarrassing to go into at length, but a few details give their flavor. The setting played a major role: Centerville’s green lawns and trim clapboard houses, the Stars and Stripes waving above the verandas, the bikes and trikes rattling along the sidewalks. Churches, parks and ponds, and elm-shaded walkways. And the school, of course, the gray, shingled, all-American elementary school. The world of my boyhood, in other words.

  She—the girl, the love interest—was variously named Mary or Sally or Jane. Smith was always her last name. Mary or Sally or Jane Smith. She was always very prim and proper— sometimes shy, sometimes warm and outgoing, but always proper and modest as good women were back there, back then. That, I think, was the heart of what I pined for. Not the Village’s peaceful lawns and houses—or not only its lawns and houses and tree-lined walks—but the sweetness of its women, their virginity or at least their virtue or at least what I had thought as a boy was their virtue and had so admired and desired and loved.

  The rest of the daydream—the plot—was, as I say, all nonsense. I would be some romantic figure just home from some war or adventure, usually with a dashing scar on my cheek to show for it. There would be misunderstandings and separations, physical heroism sometimes and finally reconciliation, even marriage, even, if I was dreaming at leisure in the solitude of my apartment, a wedding night. Insipid, adolescent scenarios, I know, but it would be difficult to overstate how engrossed I could become in them, how soothing it was to me to return in my mind to the innocence and peace of that American smalltown setting, circa 1960, to reexperience the virtue and propriety of women in the days before radicalism and feminism and sex on demand. That old and innocent America, all gone now, all forever gone.

  Walking home from Ground Zero that day, I was so immersed, in fact, that I reached the middle of Washington Square Park before I came back to myself—and then I woke to my surroundings with a sort of breathless rush, a threatening flutter of panic. I stood still by the dry, leaf-littered fountain. I stood with my hands in my pockets and scanned swaths of landscape to the right and the left of the marble arch. Then I turned around and scanned the paths behind me. I had the unnerving sense that I was being followed or watched. I was almost sure of it. My eyes went over the faces of the few people sitting on the benches, the few sitting on the rim of the fountain, and the several others passing on the walks beneath the naked trees. I had the feeling that I had seen someone I knew or recognized, that it was that that had jolted me out of my daydreaming fugue state.

  But there was no one. After another moment or two, I moved on. I was rattled, but uncertain what to make of it. On the one hand, my spycraft had grown rusty from long disuse, and I was doubtful it could be trusted. On the other hand, I hated even to entertain the thought that this train wreck and its riddles might mark a return to the paranoia of the bad days.

  * * * *

  The bad days, as I still thought of them, came in the early nineties, after the system collapsed and the wall came tumbling down. Communication with our controls, always infrequent, had ceased entirely and, forbidden to make contact with one another, we were completely in the dark. Sleepers—any undercover operatives, but sleepers especially—are always in danger of losing their sense of purpose, of becoming so immersed and identified with the culture they’ve infiltrated that they become estranged from their motherland and their mission. But now our purpose was lost in fact; our motherland and mission were gone well and truly. What’s the point of a Soviet pretending to be an American once the Soviet Union no longer exists?

  That little conundrum was inner hell enough, believe me, but then the deaths began. Three of us in the space of a year and a half. David Cumberland, the movie director, collapsed on top of a terrified starlet after he or she or his dealer or personal assistant or someone, the investigators never determined who, misjudged the ratio of morphine to cocaine in one of his speedballs. Then Kent Sheffield went out the window of a Paris hotel in the wake of rumors he’d embezzled some of his clients’ investments. And finally, Jonatha
n Synge, one of the first of the Internet billionaires, went down with his twenty-six-foot sailboat in the choppy waves outside the Golden Gate. All of which could have been coincidental or could have meant that the network was blown and the Americans were mopping up or that our own masters were getting rid of us, covering their tracks in light of the new situation. The uncertainty only added to the terror of it.

  And the terror, I will not lie, was awful. There was no information, no contact, nothing but the deaths and the waiting. I was rudderless and ceaselessly afraid. My discipline collapsed. I started drinking. My marriage, such as it was, unraveled into a series of affairs and violent arguments and “discussions” that were even more vicious arguments in disguise. I couldn’t tell Sharon the truth, of course, so our fights were always off the point and only served to increase my isolation.