Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  He glances at his phone. “Five minutes,” he says.

  I hold my hand out toward the handset. “May I?” I ask. He clicks the battery out himself and lays it on the table. “Thanks,” I say and lay my watch on the table. “Sounds like we need to be quick. If anyone interrupts us, we’re here because you want to buy some art.” I pull a pile of art magazines out of my backpack and scatter them around us. It’s a flimsy cover, likely to fall apart the moment he and I are questioned separately, but with only five minutes for the meeting, it’s all the time I can spare. I become still and look into his eyes.

  “Why did you trigger the meeting?” I ask.

  “My Chechen hookup went dark,” he says, and from the previous meeting notes, I know that he means the broker he was tasked to approach for a chunk of uranium. “Might have gotten himself wrapped up, I don’t know. Or killed. My commander wants me to find someone new.”

  It’s a hell of an opportunity, getting to direct al Qa’ida’s choice of nuclear arms dealer. One that’s going to require some consultation with HQS.

  “I’d like to get some input from my people here,” I say. “Can we meet again in a few days? How long do you have to decide on a name?”

  “Five minutes,” he repeats, holding my eye. I search his gaze for a beat. He looks frightened inside there, somewhere under the calm demeanor.

  “Are you being followed?” I ask him.

  “Not right now. But I’m traveling with someone. He watches me. I could only get away for a second. If I don’t have a name when I get back, I’ll get pulled off this task. They’re blaming me for the Chechen dead end.” His green eyes look at mine with pleading. “I tried, okay? If you hadn’t blown up Hiroshima, they wouldn’t be looking for these things to begin with. Just let me leave them, okay? I just want to move on with my life.”

  Karim is one of only a handful of sources with access to al Qa’ida’s nuclear aspirations. Losing him would be a devastating blow. There’s no time to consult with HQS. I roll the dice.

  “All right, look, I’m going to introduce you to a Hungarian named Jakab. Draw out the introductory conversations as long as you can.”

  “He’s credible?” Karim asks. In his voice I hear the subtext: Can I bet my life on using his name?

  “He’s credible,” I say.

  “But you’re going to stop him from actually selling them anything,” he says.

  “Karim, you told us you couldn’t bear the idea of stooping as low as Saddam. In his case, it was chemical weapons. In this case, it would be what? A suitcase nuke? Women and children. Young people. Your brother.” He looks as though he might cry.

  I write an e-mail address and password on an index card. It’s a crapshoot—an account I haven’t yet set up. For all I know, the username is taken. But I can’t compromise an existing account, so there’s nothing for it but to take the chance. Birdclawbroomfly@hotmail.com.

  “Log in and check the Drafts folder. I’ll have left you a message of introduction to Jakab there. You can correspond with him the same way.”

  He takes it from me, his eyes still on mine. They are impossibly sorrowful, like a Miyazaki character’s, searching for someone to trust.

  “You’re a good brother,” I tell him. “And a good man. We’ll find a way through this.”

  He nods, as though he doesn’t quite have the confidence to speak without crying.

  “You’re doing the right thing, Karim.”

  * * *

  —

  When I get back to the Virginia safe house, it’s happy hour. My boss pours me a whiskey.

  “Holy hell, if he’d have quit, we’d be explaining ourselves on the seventh floor,” he says, referring to the level at HQS where senior leadership sits. “You did good this time.” He raises a glass. “To the schmuck whisperer,” he says, and the name sticks like glue.

  They’re not wrong. Many of our sources are schmucks—brokers and fighters looking to sell death or deliver it. But some reserved corner of their secret selves is still human, too. And it’s a good operative’s job to find it. Speak to that hidden humanity and you’ve got yourself an ally. That’s the theory, anyway.

  And it seems to be working. Jakab appreciates the introduction, and Karim stretches it out as long as possible. It earns me credibility with both of them. But it’s a dangerous game, playing against the ticking clock of an actual sale. And it’s one we’re playing on multiple boards simultaneously, recruiting brokers and fighters across three continents as we move slowly up the traffickers’ ranks.

  On my rare trips into HQS, I can’t tell anyone I see in the halls where the safe house is or what kind of operations we run from it. Even Dean thinks I’m in language training for an eventual move to a base in China, though he knows not to ask too many questions about my nonprogressing ability to order Chinese takeout every time he’s home.

  It’s not always easy, keeping secrets from spies. One middle manager corners me after a briefing at HQS and asks for driving directions to our safe house. When I explain that he’ll need to apply for access, he tells me how high his clearance is. Tells me how many tours he’s done. How many awards he has. How high his pay grade is. Everything short of how much he can bench-press. None of which exempts him from the requirement to apply. But the fact that I, a woman—a girl—have information he cannot demand from me seems to infuriate him. He tells me to drive him to the safe house or risk being fired. I drive him to the administrative building where he can file his application for access instead. When I pull into the parking lot, he gets out of the car and spits on the ground.

  “You better hope you don’t get reported,” he says. I freeze up. Complying with the security procedures was the right thing to do, I know, but he has power in this world and I don’t.

  “I’m just trying to follow the rules,” I say.

  “Would be a shame if someone filed a complaint. Sexual harassment maybe,” he says and smiles. For days after that, my pulse still quickens each time I check my e-mail. Suppose he makes good on his threat and manufactures some offense. What the hell would I say?

  Being a woman at the Agency is to belong to a small club—a club whose members don’t yet eat often in the exclusive seventh-floor dining room, reserved for senior leadership, or kick back after work at the gentlemen’s clubs that pepper McLean. There are a few female managers I think would believe me, having experienced the same pressure to bend the rules for male bosses. But they themselves are mostly outranked by members of the old boys’ club who’ve served together in the camaraderie of the Cold War days. All that machismo is destined to change. Not two decades hence, the unique skill set women bring to this work—the emotional intelligence, aptitude for multitasking, and keen intuition that make women such exceptional operatives—will propel female officers to the highest roles of leadership across the organization. But in that parking lot on that lonely afternoon, women don’t yet have the power to protect their own. And I fear for my job.

  A week or so later, my chief calls me into his office. I wait for the slap in the face, prepare myself to hear whatever outrageous claim has been made to punish me for standing up to a man accustomed to making rules bend to his will. But instead, my boss tells me our operation is working, and we need to shift into higher gear. The dealers think my art business is cover for a weapons brokerage. As we move higher up the ladder, we need to be sure that the brokerage doesn’t have any American fingerprints on it. We want as distant a home base as possible, to offset any attention our success might bring our way and create plenty of blue water between the business I’m using to run this operation and the Stars and Stripes, which funds it. In short, he’s moving me to Shanghai.

  My relief at not being fired is immediately drowned out by a flood of adrenaline. Moving this program overseas is a big step—a vote of confidence and an upshift in the level of danger. I’m determined to rise to the task.r />
  My cover will be establishing an Asian office for the business, he tells me, focused on emerging artists throughout the Middle East. Up until now, my fictional career in tribal artwork has been for the benefit of customs agents on my brief trips overseas and my family and friends back home. Neither ever spent more than twenty minutes asking me questions about it. Once in China, it will be a twenty-four/seven fiction, requiring as much time and attention as a real business, but I’ll need to make space for my operational work, too. I go through a one-week crash-course MBA, designed to make sure I know my balance sheet from my cap table, should I be questioned by foreign authorities. I receive express instructions not to conduct any part of any operation in China itself. It’s to be a home base only, though I’m told to expect near-constant surveillance nonetheless.

  All actual operational activity will happen in other countries, mostly under my true name but sometimes under an alias, which means flying to a different country, swapping out my documents, and continuing to the operational destination with my fictional identity in hand. The point of nonofficial cover is to keep the stench of officialdom at bay, so doc swaps can’t be undertaken in embassies. Instead, we rely mostly on the brush pass, a piece of tradecraft that involves timing a stroll to intersect with another operative’s path in a predesignated location—a tunnel or alleyway, somewhere secluded enough that no trailing surveillance has the chance to see documents exchanged between us as we pass without breaking stride.

  Brush passes require a fair bit of planning, with both operatives conducting surveillance detection routes on their way to the act. Once I have my new alias docs in hand, there’s the matter of memorizing my new identity before getting back to the airport, an activity usually undertaken in a bathroom stall, and the sprinkling of the included pocket litter through my backpack and luggage: grocery store receipts and birthday cards to reinforce the cover. All that hassle means that working in alias isn’t the most efficient way to tackle a meeting, but it can be the most effective, especially when identities need to be protected—when the destination government is an adversary or we need to keep a firewall between one asset and another. The chief instructs me to pick up an extra set of alias docs before I leave, in case I have to travel incognito without time to arrange a swap.

  Finally, he tells me that Dean and I face a choice. I either deploy alone and we’re forbidden to have contact for the six years I’ll be overseas. Or it’s another administrative marriage. We can move to China together, but only if we tie the knot before we leave.

  When we’re on R&R in Hawaii, I prepare myself to talk with Dean about this, but he beats me to it with a ring on a windswept bluff underneath the mural of a sea turtle. “Your boss talk to you, too?” I ask him, and he kisses me.

  “Six years apart or a lifetime together—not much of a quandary,” he says. We’ve never even uttered the word “love” to each other. Never lived in the same city. Never met each other’s families. It’s a proposal made of practicality, and it’s out of practicality that I accept. He’s the most talented officer I know. Six years is a long time to work alone. We both know that. And in knowing that we both know it, we are happy. Our little circle of pragmatic honesty in the midst of a swirl of fiction.

  15

  That night, I watch his eyes dart behind closed lids as he sleeps. I wish I could see what he’s seeing, wish I could experience his memories, his fears, his flashbacks, his dreams. But he’s as opaque to me as I am to him. He wouldn’t recognize my soul, I know, if he met it outside my body. He couldn’t identify my memories of Laura’s laugh or Danny’s grace. Wouldn’t understand my hunger to memorialize them by finding some way forward.

  “You can’t exactly end the war from inside the war machine,” he’d said, laughing, in the gazebo when we first met.

  “What if that’s the only place you can end it?” I asked him. And in changing the subject, he sealed off from himself a part of me that couldn’t be reopened.

  Still, spies are no stranger to locked compartments, and we’ve found a mutual respect in the areas that remain. It’s okay that he doesn’t know how much the lies that come with our work are beginning to bother me, how I’m starting to have trouble shedding my cover even when I’m alone. I’ve been pretending to be an arms dealer pretending to be an art dealer for over a year now, and it’s harder to tell which part of me is her and which part of me is me. Would I be able to make the same impact if I lived life in my true skin?

  Dean startles in his sleep, and I know he’d tell my mind to hush if he could hear it. Maybe he’s right. It’s no time to contemplate peeling off the armor just as we’re about to wade deeper into war. The ring he gave me hangs loose on my finger, like a life preserver or a shackle. Either way, it will keep me tied to my moorings. And that’s better than the void just now.

  We get married two days before Dean’s birthday, alone on a beach in Zanzibar. At twenty-seven years old, I look at him as the local priest holds our hands together on a bleached white strip of sand and explains the seriousness of what we are doing. I realize then that I don’t know Dean at all. But it’s a leap of faith. And at that point, though he doesn’t know me either, he’s just about the closest thing there is to someone who does. He’s been through the same training, the same bureaucratic labyrinth of unjustified lies wrapped up in justified ones. He knows some, not all, of my factual secrets, even if he doesn’t know any of my spiritual ones. And somehow that feels good enough.

  The next morning, we fight. I can’t remember what about. And I sit next to him beside a swimming pool, in the sudden, isolated silence, feeling the years of not knowing each other stretching out ahead, wondering if it might have been less lonely to deploy alone after all.

  The day after that is his birthday, and I blow up balloons during the night so the hotel room will be full of them when he wakes. I want to make him smile, erase the fearful what-have-we-done’s of the day before. But instead the balloons startle him when he steps on one in the dark, and the squeal sets off memories of somewhere unsafe, then anger at having been made to remember.

  By the time we leave Zanzibar, a kind of muted pragmatism has set in, fueled by mutual respect and the unspoken sense that mission trumps emotion. We’re on track to finish our separate tours of duty and deploy together the next month. There’s no reversing course.

  On the way to the airport, as our hotel van winds its way through the predawn jungle roads, a truck suddenly screams past us and turns sharply to cut us off. It’s a classic ambush move, and Tanzania is a tinderbox just then. We exchange looks, ready to get the hell off the X. Dean uses his eyes to propose an exit strategy. I nod, almost imperceptibly. Our bodies flood with adrenaline. The man in the truck jumps out, runs toward the van, throws something at the driver. The driver grins back at us. “Forgot this,” he says, holding up his cell phone. We exhale. Dean gives my hand a squeeze. In that moment, I know he has my back. And it occurs to me, as we pick up speed through the jungle, that having each other’s backs is pretty much all we can ask of ourselves just then.

  * * *

  —

  When we get back to work, the chief swings by my desk.

  “Congratulations,” he says, with a nod at my ring. “You married the Agency.” I give him a half-smile. He’s not wrong. “Now take my advice and start pretending you mean it. This whole thing’s going to be a lot easier on you if you start accepting you’re in it for life.”

  I think about his words that afternoon as I line up downtown to pick up my alias passport.

  Our operational docs are issued by the real DMV or passport authority or Social Security Administration, unflagged to almost anyone in those offices, save a highly cleared liaison officer who slips our applications through the system unchecked. Perfectly authentic documents mean less chance of ending up in a foreign prison. They also mean more hours in DMV-style waiting rooms, listening to numbers gets called while Judge Judy pl
ays on mute.

  I sit in a hard plastic chair and replay the chief’s words in my head. Accept that you’re in it for life. That’s what he said. It sounds obvious, clichéd, even, like fortune cookie wisdom, but the more I think about it, the more compelling it becomes. Maybe living a lie hurts only so long as I keep reminding myself it’s a lie. Maybe if I just act like it’s real, believe it’s real, even when I’m alone, maybe someday the longing for life without cover will disappear and my shell will just become my skin.

  “Let’s go all in,” I tell Dean when he gets back from Afghanistan for the last time. And together, we decide to throw away the Pill.

  We rent a little house on a leafy road in northern Virginia. It’s old and creaky, with two tiny bedrooms side by side—ours on the left and an empty one on the right. We’ll have moved overseas before any baby could possibly come, but the doorway of that room smiles at me every time I walk up the stairs.

  Out back, there’s a scraggly field, full of bumps and bare patches and scattered wildflowers. We sit there some nights, on the wooden back steps, drinking wine and watching the lightning bugs blink their way across the dusk. One time, we see a bat swoop down from under the eaves.

  “Think he lives with us?” I ask.

  “Just freak out about it,” Dean says.

  “I can handle al Qa’ida. Pretty sure I can handle a bat,” I answer. “Why, you squeamish?”

  “My mom used to be. One got stuck in our living room when I was a kid. Fluttering and flying all over the place. Mom was screaming at my dad to get it out, but the ceiling was too high and he couldn’t reach it. He went straight out to the garage and came back with a tennis racket and a screwdriver. Pinned the bat against the wall with the racket and stabbed it to death with the screwdriver, right above the fireplace. Blood splatter was there the whole rest of my childhood. And every time I looked at it, I thought, ‘That’s my dad. That’s a real man. That’s how a man protects his castle,’ you know?”