“How did you know? About Sean?”
“We didn’t. We suspected. And it seemed like if he was alive, eventually he’d let you know.”
“You made a good shadow. You were always there.”
“In real life I’m just a normal guy who made a deal with his elderly neighbor. I take her dog for a walk every morning, and in exchange she lets me take out her trash every week and play handyman around her house once in a while.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a nice man, Chris. If that’s your real name.”
“I can’t really say.”
* * *
Finally, the police and ambulances had gone. All the other agencies had followed and even Chris had ambled away. At the end, there was just Sean and Sam.
And me.
Sean stooped to let Sam down. As his feet touched the ground, he slipped his hand into Sean’s and stretched the other one out toward me. And suddenly Sam and I were both caught up in Sean’s arms, locked together in his tight embrace. “It’s going to be all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
I broke down, sobbing.
Sam put a gentle hand to my cheek and patted it. “It’s okay, Mommy.” He slipped an arm around my neck in a hug and then laid his head on my shoulder. “It’s like I said the whole time. Daddy was just in the wormhole.”
79
Sean’s resurrection was a seven-day wonder. We decided to tell everyone that he’d been on a confidential mission and that I’d been given misinformation about his death; it was just a big interagency screwup. It was a testament to how many people in Washington had spent time either doing secret stuff or pulling their hair out communicating between agencies that people accepted it as true.
Jim couldn’t seem to stop slapping Sean on the back. June couldn’t bear to see him with an empty plate. We spent several nights, the three of us, sleeping in their guest room bed before moving into a furnished apartment. There, we waited for the insurance company to settle the claim on the house while we tried to get used to the new universe in which we were living.
As I was emptying the dishwasher one night, my phone rang. The old one.
I fished it out of my pocket. “Georgia Brennan speaking.”
“Georgie? Hey. It’s Ted.”
“Ted.” Ted? It took me a moment to place him. Ted. My boss. From work. “Hi.”
“Hey. Yeah. Well, we’ve got it all figured out.”
“All what figured out?”
“How to cover you. We straightened it out. We can put you on another contract for a while. Yeah. So I was hoping you could come back in next Monday. Start up again.”
Come back? Start up again? “No.”
“What?”
“No. I said no. I can’t.” In that former lifetime, when I used to work for Ted, I would have added, “Sorry.” But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I hung up instead.
I’d been putting out some feelers in the world of quantum science. It was a small community, so it didn’t take long for word to get out that I was looking for a job. I wanted to work with people who were willing to look at things with clear eyes and challenge their assumptions. I needed to be with people who pursued truth with the same passion that Washington pursued power.
As the story hit the news, Russia insisted that Hoffman was a rogue operative and that he was not, and never had been at any time ever, acting as a government agent. To their credit, cable TV news analysts were nearly unanimous in decrying that statement as false.
Hoffman started to talk. He was a longtime Russian plant. They’d created an East German cover story for him, allowing him to “escape” through the Berlin Wall in order to set him up as a sleeper agent in the West. He’d run my father for years.
He revealed the locations of the dead drops my father used to pass information back to him and the part my mother had played in passing those messages. I had been the bridge between them, but she had provided the signal. Key words in her Instagram posts let Hoffman know when my father had a message for him. Key words in the comments Hoffman left, under a false name, on her blog let them know when he had information for them.
The gray cars I’d been noticing had been both FBI tails and objects of my paranoia. It turns out 20 percent of cars in the US are silver or gray. The fact that the car the Russians drove, the one that had killed Edgars, and the one I had seen on the way to Mr. Wallace’s were also gray? Pure coincidence.
My mother’s relations in Mobile quietly began to put it around that what my mother had done just proved her ancestry. Why else would she have killed her own husband? Everyone knew her branch of the family was slightly odd. It went back to the beginning, to the family’s colonial roots. The French had been there way back when, so was it really any wonder? Everybody knew you could never trust the French.
She would have hated knowing they were saying that.
I had told the FBI to look into deaths associated with the veterans of my father’s old units. Eventually the news got out that there had been a purge of personnel who had served under him, and a web-based conspiracy began to gather steam. The claim was that a third party had been bumping people off in order to smear my father’s reputation. The false-flag theory became a rallying cry for crazies and crackpots across the nation that winter. They thought it incomprehensible that my father would have done all those things people were whispering about. And on top of that, it just didn’t make any sense to them. He was General JB Slater, for goodness’ sake!
In spite of everything, I wanted to feel bad for my mom and dad. I thought I should feel bad for them. They were my parents, after all. And the only grandparents Sam had ever known. But I was never really their daughter. I’d been a prop, a useful tool in their espionage toolkit. And they’d stood by while the Russians tried to kill my husband, hurt my son, and silence me.
I settled instead on pity. And disgust.
I rebuffed all requests for interviews. A few extra-zealous reporters tracked me down, but I stopped answering my cell phone and refused to open the door to anyone. And after a while, people went back to the familiar comfort of believing what they wanted and left me alone.
The army offered Sean his old job, but he declined. He’d decided to write a book on my parents instead. He wrangled with the government over his security clearance, but considering that he wasn’t really dead and that his clearance hadn’t yet expired, he was allowed to keep it. That meant he could include much of what we’d discovered, although the book would have to be vetted by the appropriate authorities. Though the finer details of my parents’ actions hadn’t yet been released, enough clickbait was circulating—“Beauty Queen Killer!” “Hometown Boy Gone Bad!”—that it was generating buzz. Though the book wouldn’t be published until summer, it was already breaking records for advance sales.
At one point he asked me what I thought had happened. How a four-star general, the quintessential boy next door from Arkansas, could have become one of the worst spies our nation had ever known. I told him that my father had gotten lost one dark and stormy night in Iraq and he’d never managed to find his way home.
Chris must have been good for his word, because in January the Senate Intelligence Committee asked me to testify, offering immunity in return. Several lawyers with high-powered Washington reputations reached out to offer their services. I interviewed them all and chose the one who laughed when I made a joke about the theory of relativity.
As I got dressed the morning of the first day of the hearing, I chose my clothes with care. I needed to dress in order to elicit the response I hoped for. If I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed to look like I took myself seriously.
My mother had taught me that.
For all intents and purposes, I was the sole survivor of the JB Slater family. I was the one entrusted with my father’s legacy. In some respects, he’d been a good father. In all respects, he’d been a bad patriot. He used to tell me that you only offer an excuse if you’ve failed at your duty. That’s how I looked
on his justifications for collaborating with Hoffman: they were all excuses.
* * *
I’d only visited Jenn at work once or twice during all the years she’d spent on the Hill, so the maze of corridors in the Senate building was incomprehensible. As I walked deeper into the building, the bursts of camera flashes and the number of microphones shoved toward my face increased. My lawyer and her assistant played defense, clearing a path for me.
The hearing room was rife with cameras. As I sat behind a table at the front, most of them turned toward me. Though we’d asked for a closed hearing, the committee had denied the request.
Jenn’s senator held a seat on the committee. His prematurely silver hair and those intensely blue eyes were instantly recognizable from the years he’d spent in government. As the chairwoman pulled the microphone toward her chest and began speaking, he looked at me.
I met Senator Rydel’s eyes. Smiled.
A look of confusion marred his famously rugged features for a moment, as if he was wondering whether he knew me.
I was remembering the conversation I’d had with Jenn the night she was killed. After Rydel had read the information I’d provided, her father and mine had been in the same situation. The Russians had been able to blackmail them from one side and Jenn’s senator from the other. But one thing had never been clear: Who was going to play that role, apply that pressure, to the senator? I hadn’t yet mentioned his name to the FBI. With Jenn gone, he must have been thinking he was free and clear.
The chairwoman called the room to order and then introduced me to the committee.
As I scanned the senators sitting before me, incredibly, Jenn’s senator winked at me.
“Ms. Brennan.” The chairwoman smiled. “Don’t worry. We don’t plan to keep you long. Please rise and raise your right hand.”
I stood.
“Do you affirm that the testimony you’re about to give this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
Did I ever.
Author Note
Several years ago I was listening to George Musser talk about his book Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything on NPR. Something deep inside told me I needed to read this book. It’s an instinct I’ve come to rely on. Long before I know what I’m going to write next, my subconscious is already at work on the story idea. So what else could I do but obey? Confession time: I am not a quantum physicist. I never even had the chance to take physics in high school. But I’ve never been able to choose my characters; they choose me. I did a lot of catch-up reading in order to weave physics into this book. It’s no one’s fault but my own if I didn’t get it right.
Another subject that required research was the first Gulf War of the modern era. It took place from August 1990–February 1991. In response to Iraq’s August 2 invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush authorized Operation Desert Shield on August 7. The United Nations Security Council gave Iraq’s president a deadline of midnight on January 16, 1991, to withdraw from Kuwait. In the early hours of January 17, once the deadline lapsed, President Bush gave the order for the air offensive, Operation Desert Storm, to begin. Over 88,000 tons of bombs were dropped by coalition forces in over 100,000 sorties during a five-week period. The ground campaign, Desert Sabre (originally called Desert Sword), began on February 24. The ground war lasted only 100 hours before Iraqi resistance was destroyed and President Bush called for a cease-fire on February 28.
As mentioned in the story, General Franks, commander of the US Army’s VII Corps, originally stressed that his troops should keep moving during the opening phase of the ground campaign and should not become decisively engaged with the enemy. Everyone was supposed to keep to the plan. When the order went out that evening to pause, it was puzzling; pausing was the one thing no one was supposed to do. But Franks was worried about the possibility of friendly fire that night.
The Soviets were indeed present in Iraq, prior to and during the war, as long-time Iraqi allies. They had trained and equipped the Iraqi army. Under Soviet President Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet military had been obliged to retreat from Eastern Europe, and the defense budget had declined. The prestige the military had maintained during the decades of Soviet power was gone. Is it any wonder that they attempted to carve out a place of power for themselves behind the scenes as they worked to broker a peace treaty? But were the Soviets actually present in the desert to fight alongside the Iraqis as I depicted? Not that I could find. And not that anyone ever reported. That was purely a product of my imagination.
The Gulf War left Soviet credibility badly damaged. The Soviet weapons Iraqis used were no match for the coalition’s technologically advanced arsenals. The military training the Soviets provided the Iraqis had only led to their defeat. There was an attempted coup in the USSR on August 18, 1991, led by the KGB. It weakened President Gorbachev’s hold on power. By December 8, the USSR was officially dismantled. On December 25, Gorbachev was “demoted,” becoming only president of Russia.
As I was developing this story, I knew JB Slater’s betrayal had to do with something that happened in the desert during the ground war. I didn’t spend too much time early on trying to figure it out because unexpected things always happen during wars. I trusted that during my research I would come across something, some incident, I could work into my plot. Imagine my dismay toward the end of my first draft when I was reminded that the war was an undisputed triumph, meticulously planned and executed, using the most technologically-advanced weapons. And it lasted a mere 100 hours from start to finish. Yikes! I was ready to shred the whole manuscript.
All my fears were allayed, however, when I read about the poor weather conditions that first day of battle. I have never been more delighted to see the words, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The underlying theme of this story is, of course, the search for truth. I’ve spent a lot of time the past three years thinking about the topic. It’s been alarming to watch as truth has lost ground to opinion. As a culture we have decided to base our beliefs not on the meticulously crafted scaffolding of verifiable fact, but on the flimsy foundation of things we wish were true. Worse, we’ve decided that everyone can have their own truth. But if your truth isn’t true for someone else, then by definition, it’s not actually true.
We are all more than entitled to our own experiences, which in turn can shape our world views, but truth is something that cannot be modified by any of us. Truth exists in the wild; no one owns it. It just is—whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not. And it doesn’t depend on any of us for its survival.
As a person to whom words matter very much, the devaluation of truth scares me. It should scare you too. But I also believe that a longing for truth is embedded in the human heart. And if truth really does exist independent of you and me, I have faith that our search must eventually lead us toward each other.
Discussion Questions
What sound, scent, or image never fails to take you back in time to a memory of a particular person, place, or experience?
How have you lived your life: with curiosity, in hot pursuit of the truth? Ambivalent toward the truth? Afraid of what you might discover if you found out the truth?
You may have heard the saying “all truth is God’s truth.” Do you agree?
Is truth good or bad? Moral or immoral?
How far will you go to pursue truth? At what point does the pursuit become too costly?
In Chapter 52, Georgie is grappling with whether she can trust Sean. “Everyone trusted someone until they realized they couldn’t. Everyone thought they knew what love was until they discovered they didn’t. Everyone thought they knew the truth until they found out it was a lie. But how do you let go of one to take hold of the other?” Have you ever clung to a person who wasn’t trustworthy, a love that wasn’t true, or an idea that wasn’t honest? Why? What
role do the head and the heart play in those calculations?
Have you ever had an experience that led you to question everything? How did you distinguish the truth from the lies?
One of the most difficult challenges we can face is to change a long-held belief to fit a newly acquired set of facts. It’s less difficult to alter that new set of facts to fit the long-held belief. In other words, it’s much easier to lie to ourselves than admit that we were wrong about something. Why do you think that is? Can you think of a time when this tension played out in your life? Which choice did you make?
How do you define the word heroic?
Acknowledgments
Writing a novel is a group project. I am incredibly thankful that when I proposed the idea of a contemporary suspense novel to my agent, Natasha Kern, she didn’t even blink. She encouraged me. I am even more incredibly grateful that when I sent her my best first attempt at this novel, she didn’t cry. Instead, she told me how to make it better and then referred me to Jennifer Fisher of JSF Editing. I will always be grateful that this story found its way into her capable hands.
Jocelyn Bailey deserves more praise than I can possibly give her. This story was above my abilities in many ways, and there were multiple points at which I could have fallen down during the editing process, but she kept believing I could pull it off. Jocelyn’s enthusiasm and encouragement for the story made me do my best not to let her down. And then Erin Healy helped take everything to the next level and showed me how to be a stronger, cleaner writer. I am also thankful to Jodi Hughes who shepherded this book through the final stages of the publishing process.
And that’s just the start.
Ryan Carpenter graciously talked to me about being a military historian and took me on a tour of the Pentagon. Mike Phillips shared with me his personal experience of coming across a land mine during Desert Sabre. Any discrepancies between my words and their reality are my fault, not theirs.
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