Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a happy memory. I want to hug him. Want to tell him I’m sorry he saw that. But he’s smiling and pouring more wine, like the story is a fond one.

  “Did your dad ever talk about the war?” I ask. He looks at me curiously, as if it’s a non sequitur.

  “Vietnam?” he asks. “Not really. It fucked him up. He doesn’t mention it much.”

  I think of the room directly beneath us, the basement Dean’s turned into his man cave, its walls lined with combat gear he no longer needs.

  “It can be addictive, though,” I say.

  “You’re saying he took it out on the bat?” Dean asks. It’s an air ball—one of those moments that could turn into a fight. We sit there for a beat, charged with defensiveness and worry. Then he softens. Presses the hair off my face and kisses me. I’m glad for the escape. It lurks in the back of my mind, though, the specter of trauma handed down from father to son. Were they so different, Vietnam and Afghanistan? What bats will Dean one day need to kill?

  “You’re a loon, you know that?” he asks, and before I can think anymore, we find our way naked to bed.

  The month before we deploy, I go with my mom to CarMax to sell my car. We’re squeezing every last second out of our time together, best friends clinging to a phase of life we know will never return. Sitting at the plastic table in the waiting area, beside the vending machines, I pull out a pregnancy test to show her. Two pink lines that will become a person eight months hence. I’ve thought a hundred times about the day my mom and I would get to share this news, but never, in all those times, did I dream it would be in a CarMax waiting room on my way to live undercover in China. My mom looks at me wistfully. “Can’t you work with American artists?”

  “Have to break down the barriers,” I say. “Share foreign points of view.”

  “Can’t you do that from here?” she asks.

  “Someday,” I say. And catch myself praying it’s true.

  * * *

  —

  Dean and I arrive in Shanghai in the windswept cold of January. There are to be no trips home at first, no connection with the States at all. Plucked free of all remaining moorings, I have a harder and harder time remembering which part of me is real.

  An actor friend of mine likes to tell this story. It starts with him agreeing to play a homeless heroin addict on the streets of L.A. He’s a Daniel Day-Lewis type, so a month before they start filming, he sets out to immerse himself in the role. First, he locks his apartment door and gives the key to his girlfriend. Then he catches a bus to skid row. And then he buys some smack.

  When his girlfriend comes to find him thirty days later, he’s living under a tarp pinned between a dumpster and a wall. He’s lost fifteen pounds. He’s gained a tattoo. He kicks the air as she approaches. “C’mon, sweets,” she says. “You start shooting on Monday.”

  At this point in the telling, my friend likes to roll up his sleeve, pat the inside of his forearm, and say, “So I tell her I’m already shooting.” Wry smile. “And she gets right in my face. She looks me in the eyes. And she says, ‘Jake, you’re an actor. You’re researching a part.’ And I look right back at her and say, ‘I am?’ ”

  Pretending is like that. The better you get at it, the more you forget you’re doing it. Until one day you wake up behind a dumpster.

  Or in my case, in a Chinese hotel room, staring at the smoke detector’s blinking red light in the dark.

  I’m pretty good at pretending by this point. Professional, even. But I’ve always had breaks—time back in D.C. between trips, time in the safe house with Jon and Neil and Pete, time at the pub with Mike and Dave—a makeshift family of others who share my dual reality. This is my first time living the lie around the clock. The years of deception yawn ahead, like an ink-black void. No moments of respite, no footholds from which to touch the truth. Just us and our covcom and our fictions, layer upon layer of lies.

  We’re staying in a hotel in Shanghai while we look for a permanent house. Langley has told us to assume that the room is wired for surveillance, audio and visual, night vision and all.

  My husband is asleep beside me, his breathing still not totally familiar. Our baby is beginning to uncurl beneath my navel.

  Maybe it’s the jet lag. Or the pregnancy hormones. Or the idea of a roomful of strangers gawking at our naked bodies somewhere outside Beijing. But no matter how many blinking lights I count, I can’t fall asleep.

  The stillness is getting to me, smothering me with its false sense of security. Nothing to worry about, Amaryllis. Just them watching us watching them. The spy game. The natural way of things. Go to sleep.

  Blink, one, two, three, blink.

  Go to sleep.

  Until finally I give up and climb out of bed, slide open the bathroom door, and flip on the light. Everything is as it should be. Sink, mirror, flower in its little blown-glass vase. The contemporary design of anonymous business hotels everywhere. And yet, from behind pinhole and fixture, they’re watching.

  “Just pretend to be yourself,” Langley has taught us, apparently without irony.

  I pee. Wash my hands. Make a face at myself in the mirror. Silently ask myself after each beat, “What would I do next? If I were really me?” I’ve asked myself that question in other hotel rooms in other countries. But it’s here, in this Chinese bathroom at dawn, that I realize I don’t know the answer.

  It’s startling, like being passed a note from my waking self to alert me that I’m actually in the midst of a dream.

  Suddenly, the sink and the mirror and the blown-glass vase seem like nothing more than a stage scrim—realistic enough, but transient and cartoonish, the way I imagine things look on the holodeck of the starship Enterprise, ready to collapse back into their flexible atomic superstate at the touch of a button, like so much cosmic Silly Putty. I stare at my hands, resting on the cold marble swirl. Even they are something slightly less than real. I’m overwhelmed with the sudden and unsettling understanding that I’m neck-deep in a game of make-believe. And the game is so convincing, I have no idea when it began. Or who the “I” is that’s playing it.

  My brain sparks with an almost assaultive sensation of homecoming. Then plunges into a flooding, liquid-amber calm that feels so otherworldly, I exhale this slow Lamaze-type breath, because I don’t want to get chucked back out of the wormhole.

  I stare at the back of one hand and know somehow that if I move it, move even a finger, I’ll melt back into the game. I stay there for a spell—a gently gawking tourist in a place both alien and familiar, like the first time I visited Shwedagon Pagoda or sat on my grandmother’s grave. But camera-ridden hotel rooms in China are no place for self-inquiry. So I move my hand. And turn off the light.

  I walk back across the muted carpet. Climb back into the beige bed. Close my eyes and ask myself, in the clingy, sterile quiet, when exactly it was I started pretending, so I can work forward from there, like using Version History in Google Docs.

  I expect my brain to answer with memories of CIA training, my first packet of alias docs, maybe, or the first time I was trained to take a polygraph pretending to be someone I wasn’t. But my waking self passes me one more note that night, in the form of a memory far older than any of those. One of those memories is so deeply packed away that I have to unfold its sepia edges gently, in case they turn to dust in my hands.

  I was three, maybe, and sitting in a wooden high chair with my back to the window in our kitchen in Washington, D.C. My mom was upset. I don’t remember what about. But she was magical and fierce. Like a character from D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. The beating heart of our clan, she was the source of love and tenderness and poetry in our world. And like all poets’ hearts, she felt life deeply, radiating joy and despair, often in the same afternoon.

  I was afraid of her sadness the way other kids were afraid of thunder. T
hreatening not because it caused actual damage—my mom always returned to her sunny disposition—but because it seemed otherworldly, this strange, percussive force that arrived without warning to tear the sky in two.

  Ben was at the kitchen table beside me. Our hermit crabs, Freddie and Laura, were hiding out in their terrarium on the counter. Mom was scrubbing the clean sink with a clenched sponge, like if she just applied enough elbow grease, she might be able to dissolve something painful only she could see.

  Then suddenly she stopped.

  Her face went calm. She set about stirring the saucepan on the stove, as though she hadn’t a care in the world.

  I must have imagined it, I thought. Then her eyes went to the window behind me and her smile crumbled. She dropped the spoon back in the pot, and faster than it had evaporated, her sadness returned.

  A bunch of pedestrians had walked by on the brick sidewalk outside. Mom’s recovery, her smile and pot stirring, had been for them—strolling strangers, peering in on our world from beyond.

  For them, she’d been exactly what she thought they wanted her to be. A Stepford wife, immune to frustration and fear and pain. For us, she’d returned to what she was. A beautiful, sparkling human, experiencing the full range of that brilliant, agonizing condition.

  It is, I think, my earliest memory. And the first time I understood the difference between the way we were and the way grown-ups wanted other people to think we were.

  I didn’t know then that twenty years later, I’d be pretending to be someone else for a living, pretending to be someone else for my country. Didn’t know I’d be reliving the moment from a hotel room bed in Shanghai. Nor that one day, not too many years hence, my mother would write me a letter that would help me answer the same questions she had so many years ago set me to asking. That in loving me enough to share her lessons, she would save me.

  The hotel heater kicks on and my jet lag kicks in. Enough questions for one night, I tell myself, and beneath the blinking light, I surrender to sleep.

  16

  The next morning, we meet our real estate agent on the Bund, the walkway along the river that splits Shanghai in two. On one side of the water, the ancient temples of Chinese yesteryear line the cobbled streets of the French concession. On the other side, a seemingly science fiction vision of tomorrow rises in brushed chrome and glass, dotted with sky needles and suspended bulbous orbs.

  “Look,” she says, after the mandatory exchange of greetings and pleasantries. “It’s always the same. The foreigners are gazing at the historic buildings, looking backward, toward the past. But the Chinese tourists, the ones who come from the villages to see Shanghai for the first time, they are always gazing across the river, with their eyes on the future.” It seems like a poetic oversimplification, but a quick glance up and down the Bund confirms it’s true. Westerners are snapping pictures of crumbling antique roofs. Between them, a Chinese family stands very still, everyone’s hands plunged in their pockets against the cold, gazing at the skyscrapers across the way. There is pride in their faces, as the wind comes off the water, like pioneers in sight of the promised land.

  “Which side are you looking to live on?” the real estate agent asks.

  “Hate to be clichéd,” Dean says, “but we’re suckers for history.”

  She smiles at the quaintness. “Well, we’d better get a move on. Most of the old lane houses are scheduled for destruction in the next ten years. Let’s get you one while we still can!”

  We settle on a ramshackle, beautiful redbrick affair, filled with an assortment of wooden opium beds and carved chests. It’s a journey through China’s past, a trove of antiques stashed here by a local businessman who hit it big and upgraded to right angles and reflective steel. There is a magic to this little house, a musty tomb of centuries past. And it’s cheap, which earns us a few goodwill points back at Langley.

  * * *

  —

  Like Russia, China is a hard-target country, meaning it uses the most aggressive, sophisticated counterespionage tactics in the world. We’re not planning to conduct any operations in-country, but Chinese intelligence doesn’t know that, and its agents make it clear that they plan to find out. From the moment we step foot on the ground, our every move is watched. It’s subtle at first. China loves its static surveillance—street sellers who get paid to jot down the time whenever a foreigner comes or goes. They’re a lot harder to detect than surveillance teams that move with a target across time and distance. But soon their reaching for pencil and notebook each time we pass becomes as noticeable as the eyes of forest creatures on an evening hike. When I leave a pashmina shawl in a taxi, it’s returned to my front door by a policeman in uniform, despite our having paid for the ride in cash and not having told the driver our address.

  “You should take care to keep track of your things,” the policeman says as he stoops beneath a string of our neighbor’s dried fish.

  “Why bother when you do such a good job keeping track of them for us?” Dean asks from over my shoulder. I cringe. So much for keeping a polite, nonalerting profile.

  “Thank you, Officer,” I say and press the door closed. I lock it, as though that actually means anything. Then walk back into the living room we’ve been told is probably bugged.

  The only way to handle being watched is to give the watchers nothing to see. We set about creating a normal-looking home for two young art dealers, Dean having been assigned to share my cover, so that we’re running a family business. We sign up for language classes and start going to art world parties. We begin to make a name for ourselves, even if Dean looks a bit out of place, with his massive shoulders and military posture. There are operations I’m asked to undertake that Dean doesn’t know about. I presume there are operations he is asked to undertake that I don’t know about. We don’t talk about work. We don’t talk about anything of importance, briefed as we have been that our house is under surveillance, that even our housekeeper, a wraithlike presence named Ayi, works for Beijing, that we should have sex regularly but not too regularly, keep it hot but not too hot, that we should live our private life with the twenty-four/seven knowledge that its purpose is to give those watching the distinct impression that we don’t know anyone is watching.

  Operational orders arrive by way of our covcom—questions headquarters wants us to ask existing assets, traces our desk officers have run on sources we might recruit, approvals for the plans we file in advance of each third-country meeting. A few months in, I send a cable to say that I’m ready to pull the trigger on Jakab’s recruitment. He’s written to tell me that he plans to be in Thailand the following week, on his way to Indonesia. I’ve felt for a while now that he’s on the brink of being ready to work with us. Ideally, I’d like to give it a few more meetings before I lay everything on the table, but Indonesia is the stomping ground of Jemaah Islamiyah, al Qa’ida’s arm in Southeast Asia and the group behind the Bali nightclub bombings that stole the lives of two hundred people as they enjoyed an evening out. With a suitcase nuke or a chunk of HEU in their hands, there’s no telling what JI’s jihadists might do. I can’t risk waiting until the timing is perfect, maybe missing the opportunity to stop a weapon from changing hands. Headquarters approves and suggests that Dean and I travel together under the guise of a babymoon.

  “Why not,” Dean replies when I ask him. “Maybe we’ll catch a full-moon party.” The island Jakab’s visiting is famous for all-night beach raves on the brightest night of each month.

  “I might have to duck out for a minute,” I tell him and he nods, knowing not to ask.

  * * *

  —

  We arrive in Bangkok and board a puddle jumper to the island of Ko Tao. We’re operational, I know. I’m here in-country to meet a would-be asset for a clandestine recruitment pitch. But still I vibrate a little with girlish pleasure as I take Dean’s hand for our landing. Outside the window stretch beaches of whi
te sand and milky green sea. After the dinge of Shanghai, it’s lush and inviting, all freshness and possibility. It occurs to me that we might be able to reset here, snap out of the mutually imposed silence that’s sucked the air from the last few months. Get to know each other in the raw, the way a married couple should, the way nobody living in a wired house ever could.

  I’m due to meet Jakab a few hours after we land. “See you at the hotel?” I ask Dean as we emerge blinking into the Ko Tao sunset. He puts an arm around me as we walk across the runway, toward the thatched roof that serves as baggage claim.

  “Can’t imagine you could get in too much trouble here,” he says, surveying the palm trees. “But be careful anyway.”

  “Promise,” I say and flag down a cab.

  I’ve booked a suite at a separate hotel so that Jakab and I will have a private place to talk. Recruitment conversations are best had far away from curious passersby. Ideally, the potential source knows what is coming and is ready for it, somewhere deep down. “Think of it like a marriage proposal,” my boss once told me. “You don’t want to just pop the question out of the blue. You’ve got to start dropping a few hints. Test the waters. Make sure they’re going to say yes. Make sure they’re going to say, ‘I thought you’d never ask!’ ” But like all marriage proposals, there’s always the risk of miscalculation, the risk of drama. And in the world of recruiting spies, drama is best handled in private.

  I run a surveillance detection route from the airport to be sure I don’t have a tail. Taxi to a dress shop, tuk-tuk to the island’s new mall, exit on foot to jump a songthaew the rest of the way. It’s brief yet effective. I could throw in a few more stops, but it’s obvious I’m not covered and I’d rather get to the room early to be sure the layout is right. Better to find suites where the sitting room has a door to block any view of the bed. Helps avoid sending mixed signals. This one is perfect.