Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  I unzip my backpack and pull out a few art books I’ve brought in case we get interrupted and need to explain the purpose of our meeting. Then I fill up my little Zen fountain with water from the bathroom sink and plug it in. It’s a strange piece of gear to carry but more elegant than turning on the bathroom taps. Running water makes the best sound-masking since it can’t be replicated, the way television programs or music can. On the off chance that this room is wired for audio surveillance, the Thai service could look up any TV show that was playing and cancel it out to improve the quality of the recording. But water flows differently every time—there’s no way to replicate it and reclaim the lost conversation beneath. That, and it makes for a much more calming accompaniment to a recruitment pitch than the blinking buzzers and bells of late-night Asian TV.

  I check my watch. Jakab will be here soon. If he were an established asset, I’d be arranging the blinds in such a way as to signal to him, on the street, that it’s safe to come up. But he hasn’t been recruited yet. We have no secret commo plan, no agreed-upon language of signals to exchange. For now, it’s still old-fashioned phone calls. I tell him the suite number and put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

  When he arrives, he is singing. I can hear him coming down the hall. It’s a shame he’ll have to stop doing that. I rather like the lilt of his voice. But it’s not the most secure way to approach a clandestine meeting, crooning to the heavens for everyone to hear.

  When I open the door, I’m startled, as I always am, at how little his face resembles his voice. He greets me in accented English. His diction has a stickiness to it, like he’s just eaten a spoonful of peanut butter. He kisses the air beside my left cheek, then my right. He smells of aftershave and sweat.

  “Any problem finding the place?” I ask as I grab him a beer. It’s the first in a sequence of questions I’ll ask more formally at the start of every meeting once he’s fully recruited. They go by an acronym: STINC, which stands for Security (Any run-ins with the local service on your way here?), Time (How long do we have?), Intelligence (Any emergency information to share?), Next meeting (If we get interrupted, when can we meet back up?), and Cover (Here’s the reason we’re together right now, should anyone happen to ask). I can’t be quite so overt with Jakab just yet, so I knead the questions a bit until they feel more conversational and doughy. He sits and answers with hand gestures and grunts, his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, his beer balanced on the arm of his chair.

  “I brought some materials about our newest crop of artists,” I finish, reviewing our ostensible reason for meeting. He nods without looking at the books. “This one uses casts of artifacts from Hiroshima.” I point to an image on one of the pages. “Wristwatches frozen in time. Shreds of school uniforms burned off the backs of schoolchildren as they ran.”

  “Can I smoke?” he asks.

  “Of course.” I open the window to keep the fire alarm from squawking but leave the gauzy drape pulled shut. “Stressful month?” By now I’ve realized that Jakab is that endearing brand of hard-ass who is perpetually quitting cigarettes but never seems to succeed. I have an ashtray on the launchpad.

  “Fuck. The Hungarian economy. No jobs, nothing. And still the government spends.” He whistles, like he’s watching a pile of cash on fire. “So much spending you can’t believe it.”

  “Must be frustrating,” I say. He looks up at me as he lights his cigarette.

  “Goddamn sponge pigs,” he says, exhaling the first drag. “Racking up debt same as the Communists. No better. They’re all crooks.”

  “They should be looking out for you. That’s their job, the government. To take care of the people.” I know he will laugh, and he does.

  “Nobody’s taking care of us but us,” he says.

  “Your people should be so lucky.”

  “Huh?” he asks.

  “To have you taking care of them.”

  “Oh,” he laughs. “Sure. Well, not much I can do beyond taking care of myself.”

  I let it hang there for a minute. This perfect opening. This big, fat “if only” hanging in the room like a Nintendo power-up, just suspended there for the taking.

  “What if there were?”

  He holds my eye contact while he inhales, then exhales. He’s waiting for me to elaborate. For a beat or two, I let him. He’s mush on the inside, really. Gentle and protective. More like his voice than his face.

  “Those special channels I mentioned having to Washington,” I say. “The friends I talk to there. What if we could work together to take care of your people? To take care of you.”

  He stares at me a beat longer. Then he laughs.

  “You have confused me with Batman,” he says.

  I crack a grin. “No confusion, Jakab. You hold life and death in your hands, no? You’re not selling encyclopedias.”

  “Military surplus.”

  “Nuclear precursors,” I correct him gently.

  “Half of it doesn’t even work.” He lights another cigarette. “What does that help my people anyway?”

  “You think they’re never going to use one of those things in Europe? You put this stuff out there in the world, you sell to people who kill civilians, kill young people, who’s to say their next target won’t be in your hometown?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Hungary doesn’t participate in this worthless war. No one has any reason to hurt us,” he says.

  I edge my seat closer to his and lock into his gaze. “If they use one of these things anywhere, it’s going to hurt you, Jakab. What do you think’s going to happen to that horrible economy you were talking about if a terrorist group detonates a dirty bomb or a tactical nuke? Even if it’s halfway around the globe. It’s going to make today’s economy look like the boom times. And all the people you know back home—the ones who are just holding on—they’re going to get taken to the woodshed. People will be jobless. People will be homeless. People will be desperate. And desperate people make violent choices. What goes around comes around, Jakab. You get to decide. You get to write your country’s future. Sell your people out or save them like the heroes of those songs you always sing. It’s your call.”

  He’s not smoking now. He’s just staring at the lit end of his cigarette, head-on, like there are answers rolled in there.

  “You want me to stop selling.” He mulls it over. “Who d’you work for? CIA?”

  “Not stop, exactly. And yes, I work for CIA.”

  He looks up at me. I resist the temptation to fill the silence.

  “So, what? I have to work with you or you arrest me?”

  “Nothing like that, Jakab. I respect you far too much to pull anything like that. Look. We’re friends. I know you. I know that your grandfather was killed when Communists took over your country. I know that you don’t trust big government. I know what you want for your people. The freedom to live a good life. To work a good job and be left alone. I get it. I want that, too. And that’s not what happens when the whole world is at war. That’s not what happens when people are afraid. What happens is more government, not less. More laws, more prisons, more executions. We’re in a unique position, you and I. We’re two friends who happen to have contacts in special places. You know the groups trying to buy this stuff, and I know the people trying to stop them. Together, we can make sure you never worry about the economy again. We can make sure your family never wants for food or medicine or education again. But more than that, we can work to make the world a little less like the one that killed your grandfather and a little more like the one you want your boys to inherit.”

  “A pretty speech,” he says in his sticky voice, but I can hear that he wants to believe it.

  “Jakab, if not us, who? If not now, when? Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.’ Well, you and I, we have that lever and that place to stand. We can save
thousands, maybe millions of lives. We can make people a little less afraid. Because it’s only fearful people who tolerate the kind of government you hate. Fear empowers fascism, and together we can make the world a little less fearful, Jakab. That doesn’t happen every day.”

  There is a beat of silence. And then he looks up at me with the eyes of a believer. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

  We’re over the hump now.

  “We’ll work that out together. It’s going to depend on the moment. You’ll tell me about your business, who your buyers are, what they’re interested in buying and why. Then together we’ll decide the best way to make sure your weapons don’t go boom.”

  “They’ll kill me,” he says. This great goliath of a man, struggling with the prospect of sharing his grandfather’s fate.

  “I won’t let that happen, Jakab. Think about it. I’ve been protecting you for almost a year now. Making sure we haven’t been seen together in public. Staying off text messages. Keeping our phone calls vague. You may not have realized it, but I’ve had your back for a long time now, preparing everything in case you wanted to jump to the light side. You’re my friend first, Jakab. You have a family. I have a family. We’re in this together. Because otherwise it could be our kids who have the uniforms burned off their backs.” I can feel the movement beneath my navel, a flutter of forming arms and legs to remind me that I’m not kidding.

  “How does it work?” he asks. “How often would I see you?”

  “As often as you get a weapons order. Or a shipment. As often as you want to tell me something.”

  “How do I contact you?”

  I pull out a Starbucks gift card. “If you need me, buy a latte. Then meet me here twenty-four hours later. If it’s an emergency, call me. When I pick up, ask to speak to Marina. I’ll tell you you’ve got the wrong number. You hang up. And I’ll call you back from a secure line.”

  “Do I get paid?”

  “You get to tell your grandkids you saved the world for them.” He looks at me like he can’t eat bragging rights. “And I’ll make sure you get compensated for your time. One thousand dollars a month to start. Let’s see how it goes.”

  He sits still for a minute. No cigarette, no beer, no words. And in that silence, I know he’s working his way toward yes.

  “Don’t get me killed,” he says.

  “Deal,” I say. And I take out a piece of paper with the terms of our agreement typed in Courier font. It specifies that Jakab will be working with the CIA. It outlines the fee he will be paid and the expenses for which he will be reimbursed. At the bottom there is a blank line for each of us to sign. It’s a strange piece of fiction, the idea that I would ever walk onto the street with this most incriminating of documents, signed and executed between me and an arms dealer. But the signing of names carries psychological heft, and so headquarters likes us to go through the motions to cement the commitment, even though I’ll destroy the paper as soon as he leaves. I lay the document on the table and raise my beer in the air. I haven’t drunk any, but Jakab doesn’t know I’m pregnant and assets don’t like to drink alone, so I keep up the masquerade.

  “To your grandfather,” I say. “May he be watching.”

  “And to our grandchildren,” he says. “May they survive.”

  He hugs me. A sudden bear hug followed by a return to formality. Then he signs up to stop a nuclear winter with the blue ink of a cheap hotel pen.

  After he leaves, I fold the document into pleats, like the geisha fans we used to make in elementary school. Then I set the accordion on its end atop the toilet bowl water and light it on fire. It’s an old Russia House trick to keep the smoke to a minimum and contain the ash. When our agreement is converted to floating black flakes, I flush and set about packing up the books and the beer and the fountain. I walk out the back of the hotel, onto the beach. The place Dean and I are staying is on this same strip of sand. The moon is bright and the music is pulsing and I pull off my shoes to walk in the surf on my way to find him. For a few minutes, it all seems possible. Preventing nuclear war. Making my marriage real. Going all in.

  Then I get to our empty hotel room to find a hastily scrawled note: “Had to go work. See you at home.”

  17

  Back in Shanghai, the silence sets in once more. Dean and I have been together for a couple of years at this point, but we’ve spent most of those years separated by oceans and deserts and mountains, working different operations in different war zones. Though we technically shared our little home in Virginia, we were both traveling too much to know the familiarity that grows from the prolonged sharing of space. Shanghai is the first time we’ve truly lived in the same house in the same city, and every habit, every tic, every turn of phrase is unfamiliar. Each day, we playact at marital bliss for the watching eyes. Each day, we feel more heavily the truth that we are strangers. I curl up in the evenings on the old daybed in the corner of our lane house and watch him play pirated video games, searching his face for some way in, some way to know him. And each day, like a cosmic ticking clock, the life we’ve made together grows beneath my navel, asking me, from the inside out, to make our family real before he or she is born.

  I’m not sure if Dean regrets leaving Afghanistan or regrets going there to begin with. Don’t know whether the frustration that simmers beneath the edge in his voice is trauma or longing. I question whether the fact that he’s killed means he needs to believe in war. Wonder if he remembers I became a spy to wage peace.

  I can’t ask him any of this aloud, because the walls are listening. So I shift to the world of double meaning. A touch on the wrist here, a coded reference there. And in response, his voice changes, a hardness creeps in. It’s like attempting communication inside a Dalí painting, with every detail interpretable a dozen ways and no master glossary to keep us from traveling universes apart.

  On my return from Thailand, my stomach beginning to swell with four months of new life, we cook spaghetti Bolognese. Dean knows that the babymoon was a cover but has no idea what the operation really might have been or whether it succeeded.

  “How was the collection?” he asks.

  “Important,” I reply, touching his hand as he gives the sauté pan a jerk. “Really interesting investigation of peace.”

  “Those exhibitions all strike me as phony,” he says, pouring the meat sauce over the noodles as Ayi tidies the kitchen beside us.

  “This one felt different,” I say.

  “Don’t they always?” He walks out of the kitchen, carrying our plates.

  I follow him. Ayi follows me.

  “The artist’s point is that we should never stop trying,” I say as I take a bite.

  “Sounds like the artist is a child,” he says. We chew in silence.

  “Or a mother,” I answer. The maid brings over a plate of candies.

  “Sucker?” he says, offering me a lollipop.

  I excuse myself, walk into the bathroom, and close the door. Three months later, a debriefer at Langley asks me what made me cry that night; the question is supported by a surveillance photo, taken from the vicinity of the bathroom mirror, that shows my eyes closed, silent tears carving their slow way down my cheeks, my hands at rest on the curve of my unborn child.

  “Morning sickness,” I tell him. “You guys are watching us over there?”

  “Nope, they are,” he says. “We’re just watching them.”

  Dean buys pirated video games set in the same region he was deployed to back in Afghanistan. I know he misses it. I know how good he was at it. I know he gave it up to be with me. I want to tell him I’m sorry he’s stuck in this remote prison of silence, far away from his colleagues and watering holes and adrenaline-soaked purpose. But I can’t say any of that out loud. So instead, we live in something like spiritual silence, watching Project Runway and Entourage, a pantomime of normality between surveillance
routes and dead drops and covert cables to HQS in anachronistic all caps.

  There is a wall between us, and we can’t follow the age-old advice—communicate!—because we’re explicitly forbidden from saying anything that might suggest vulnerability in our marriage anywhere in-country. We take walks sometimes, when the tension becomes unbearable, around lakes in parks, my hands on my rounded belly as we talk out of the sides of our mouths. And every few months we return to D.C., and the countless points of friction come tumbling out of us, like air rushing from a balloon, only to dissipate unprocessed amid the joy of being home and the swirl of HQS debriefings.

  The surge in Iraq has worked to turn the tide against al Qa’ida for the time being, and most of my operations are in other countries now, tracking brokers via Jakab and the others in his network. It never stops haunting my dreams, the potential for Hiroshima on our watch. Many of the deals we track are scams. Organized crime syndicates get rich selling harmless “red mercury” the way high school drug dealers make their pocket money peddling oregano. Even the technology that’s real is usually incomplete or broken by the time it passes hands. Or too complex to operate without a team of experts and a government cleanroom. But all it takes is one—one little nuke in a suitcase and 9/11 would look like the opening act.

  Six months into the pregnancy, I begin feeling the baby’s hiccups around the same time every day, like little internal question marks. Should a future mom really be out preventing the sale of WMDs to terrorists? Could a future mom possibly choose not to?

  In between operations, I curl up in Dean’s arms back in the silence of Shanghai. We still don’t really know each other, but we both know the life growing inside me. This child is the only truth we share completely. Dean holds my hand during each prenatal visit. One day, he doesn’t even drop it when we get to the privacy of the taxi. “How about that heartbeat?” he asks.