EXFIL

by Anthony C. Patton

  If I had learned anything from my career in intelligence, it was to not reach conclusions too soon, but my cloudy intuition combined with fragments of recollection weren’t presenting a promising picture. The ladies hadn’t left any clues, but I sat heavily on the bed and rubbed my head, groaning when I saw a ring of white residue at the bottom of a glass on the nightstand.

  Holy shit.

  I couldn’t distinguish the smell and opted to not taste it, but it didn’t take a genius to conclude that they had drugged me. The only relevant question was why?

  My first thought was theft, but nothing was missing. I didn’t have any classified information, either, which took me down the rabbit hole.

  In light of what had happened in Bangkok with Captain Chen, it was possible that the purpose of this threesome was to film me in a compromising position. However, this would suggest that Anna was working for the Chinese, which seemed unlikely because this single act would reveal her crime with China and allow me to report her to the FBI.

  Getting caught might end my marriage, but I could use the fact that I had been drugged as my defense, combined with a single-minded obsession to get promoted—mea culpa.

  Not to mention, I would never betray my country, no matter what the cost.

  I imagined a scenario in which I, like that Middle Eastern diplomat, would cheerfully offer to buy a copy of the video. Whoever thought they could compromise me this way, if that indeed is what was happening, didn’t do their homework.

  I had the sneaking suspicion that my next meeting with Jade Envy would be revealing.

  My best thinking was often done in the shower, the calming hot water, isolation, and combination of fine and gross motor skills allowing me to achieve clarity.

  While soaping up my pits and groin, I recalled a wild night in Bangkok with Jewel.

  Most normal men are squeamish about discussing anything related to their ass since it served a single purpose and had no place in sexual activity. Most men didn’t have a problem including a woman’s ass in sex, but the man’s ass was off limits, which was why I had initially sought to resist Jewel’s proposal to include anal beads during one of our drunken evenings.

  It had taken some convincing on her part, but I finally relented when she explained that the pleasure men experienced had nothing to do with any latent homosexual tendencies. Inserting the beads was out of my comfort zone, but a smile had filled her face, and mine, as she removed them with a steady tug as I reached orgasm, with more pleasure than I was willing to admit.

  As a matter of principle, to prevent this pleasure from becoming a habit or a perversion, I declared it a one-time event. As the soaping in the shower continued, however, I realized that my ass was now feeling the same way it had after the anal bead session. Filming me with anal beads or a dildo would be an unwelcome addition to an otherwise embarrassing video, but the fact remained that I had been drugged and couldn’t be coerced with such a video anyway.

  Under normal circumstances, an Intelligence Officer would report this incident up the chain of command immediately, to nip any potential counterintelligence issues in the bud.

  The idea was that by reporting the names and details, we could conduct deep dives in the databases to uncover links to other nefarious activity. Someone else might have met “Judy,” if that was even her name. In this case, however, we were in the U.S. with an American woman, and “Judy” might even have been a foreign national, so I decided that the best option was to collect more information before making any embarrassing revelations.

  ◆◆◆

  I was late for a meeting with Brett and Nguyen, so I called them from the car to apologize. Brett quipped that he would prefer to avoid seeing me for the foreseeable future.

  I told him I couldn’t agree more.

  “Looks like you had a rough night,” Brett said with a smirk and sipped his coffee as Nguyen looked up from his file deep in thought.

  “I bought tacos from a street vendor last night,” I said and rubbed my stomach, which prompted sympathetic cringes from both.

  Women could invoke women’s problems, and men could invoke digestive problems.

  “Congratulations again on stopping the cyberattack,” Nguyen said. “That was one of the best successes we’ve had in a long time.”

  “You finally have your work of art,” Brett said.

  “Thanks,” I said, pretending to be flattered, but certain it wasn’t true. “I still categorize this success as science. A great success, but not art, yet.”

  “When is your next meeting with Jade Envy?” Nguyen asked, making the transition to his code name even within the confines of a secure conference room.

  “Two days,” I said. “I’m heading up to West Point tonight to visit the family and interview for jobs.”

  “Well, I’m sure Beth will be thrilled to have you back,” Brett said. “Good luck with the brigadier general promotion—coming up soon, right?”

  “Yes, thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting to happen, but Brett and Nguyen were oblivious to the previous night’s events. “Fingers crossed.”

  Brett slid a piece of paper my way, bearing a handwritten list. “For the next meeting, we compiled a list of questions. If he’s willing to answer these, we’ll know he’s the real deal.”

  I perused the questions—mostly technical jargon.

  “After the successful operation, do we still doubt whether he’s the real deal?”

  Nguyen nodded to suggest I had a good point. “We don’t know what the Chinese would be willing to give up for a controlled operation. In this case, they used a commercial off-the-shelf tool, which wasn’t consistent with previous attacks. These questions address their most guarded secrets, things we know they would never willingly reveal.”

  Even the best Intelligence Officers were blinded by their own success. Of course we had to continue vetting Jade Envy to verify that he was working for us, not against us.

  “Just curious, but is he still under surveillance?” I queried.

  “We thought it was prudent to keep him under 24-hour surveillance after the recruitment,” Nguyen said and shifted in his chair. “Why do you ask?”

  Brett leaned back, with a glance at Nguyen.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was curious whether there’s been any unusual activity since the recruitment.” Neither responded. “Why, what’s going on?”

  “The surveillance team assigned to Jade Envy called about an hour ago to say they lost him,” Nguyen said. “He was running errands, but the team lost him at a strip mall near a Metro stop.”

  “Was he evading surveillance or did they lose him?” I asked, knowing full well that shifting from vehicle to metro was a great way to lose surveillance.

  “Well, he’s a professional,” Nguyen said. “So, we keep the surveillance team a safe distance away to avoid detection.”

  “Surveillance teams never admit to making a mistake,” Brett added, raising a scenario the FBI would want to ignore. “You can discuss it with him during the next meeting.”

  “Is this the first time they lost him?” I asked.

  Both nodded. Our best surveillance teams rarely made mistakes, which meant we often over-analyzed the unavoidable few mistakes to reach the wrong conclusion. In this case, Jade Envy probably had taken steps to ensure that the surveillance teams didn’t lose him during his day-to-day business, to make his deliberate escapes seem like bad luck.

  I couldn’t rule out the possibility of a misunderstanding and called Anna at work.

  If the person asked who I was, I could say I was calling about her security clearance. I didn’t anticipate any issues, but mental preparation was the key to success—aim first, then shoot. But I was concerned to hear that Anna no longer worked at the J6. It wasn’t clear whether she’d had an annual contract, a month-to-month contract, or a voluntary separation. It would’ve been unusual to ask too many questions, but it made me wonder why she hadn’t told me.

  If she had answer
ed the phone in her cheery voice, unaware that Judy had drugged me, all would have been well. Instead, all the wrong pieces were rapidly falling into place, forming an ugly jigsaw puzzle, the picture of which I’d rather not have uncovered. Given the complexity and subtlety of intelligence, two or three relevant points were often sufficient to confirm a theory, if you possessed the ability to work at a high level of abstraction to fill in the gaps.

  My next stop was Anna’s condominium.

  After all, it was possible that her contract simply had ended and she was transferring to a new gig, which might result in a few days at home during the transition.

  I found myself in unfamiliar territory.

  Being honest with myself, I had no idea what was going on.

  In the surveillance game, the Intelligence Officer was the rabbit, the person being followed by the surveillance team, and detecting surveillance was easy.

  On the other hand, detecting surveillance without tipping your hand that you were trying to detect surveillance wasn’t easy. Intelligence Officers rarely conducted surveillance themselves, but it was where I found myself this day, parked outside of Anna’s condo.

  It didn’t take long to realize that I could never work on a surveillance team.

  Catching a spy in the act would get the blood pumping, but the unavoidable countless hours sitting in parked cars or following targets during their routine activity—home to work, work to home, visiting the park with the kids, etc.—would drive me insane.

  I glimpsed Anna in her condo window as I flipped through a newspaper with oblivious pedestrians walking by.

  She was wearing running clothes and talking on the phone with a smile. The most important observation was seeing the call end, which prompted me to start the car and focus on the ramp leading to the underground parking garage. I imagined Anna locking the door, taking the elevator down to the garage, walking to her car, and exiting the parking lot.

  On cue, she departed in a red Volkswagen Passat, looked both ways, and turned left when the coast was clear. I put my car in drive and began my pursuit as my heart raced.

  As a military attaché, I wasn’t trained to conduct surveillance detection like my colleagues in the clandestine world, but I understood the concept and realized that I had one advantage on my side: I was following a potential source, not a trained Intelligence Officer like Jade Envy, who would spot me in short order.

  It probably wasn’t a coincidence that the FBI surveillance team lost Jade Envy on this day, or that Jade Envy lost them.

  I followed Anna down I-66 toward D.C., crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and continued toward Glover Archbold Park, where she parked and stretched by the side of the road before starting her jog. Following her along the trail wasn’t an option, so I drove residential roads to parallel the trail the best I could, stopping every few blocks to keep an eye on her.

  She seemed to be moving at a leisurely pace—a long way to drive for a run, for sure.

  After several blocks, I made a judgment call.

  The roads wouldn’t allow me to parallel her indefinitely, and she was now approaching a patch of trees a few blocks down the trail, so I parked, donned a baseball cap and sunglasses, and hustled to the slope of a hill with a good view of the trail on either side of the trees.

  There was no one approaching from the other direction, north to south, and I calculated it would take Anna about fifteen seconds to appear again on the other side of the patch of trees. To my relief, she did, and continued running without missing a stride. I was relieved as I stood to walk to my car, but my heart raced when I saw Jade Envy exit the patch of trees and walk in the opposite direction. He glanced both ways but never looked back my way.

  Then, he walked until he entered a residential area, and was gone.

  Confirming that Anna was Jade Envy’s spy was a success, but it had just made my life far more complicated than I was willing to admit. I now understood what I was up against. Anna had probably given him a copy of a video from the night with Judy, but I couldn’t share this information with CIA and FBI because it confirmed that Jade Envy was working against us. He had clearly given me the information about the Pentagon cyberattack during the last meeting to make us believe he was working for us—to bolster his bona fides.

  Anna’s semester in China now made sense. Whatever access she lacked, it seemed they hoped to get from me, but it would take a lot more than a sex film to motivate me to betray my country.

  TWENTY

  At this point, a reasonable man would have accepted the teaching position at West Point and called it a day. But I wasn’t a reasonable man. On the outside chance that I might get promoted to brigadier general, it would take almost a year to pin on the star, so they would have plenty of time to find me a new position commensurate with my rank.

  I could turn over Jade Envy to a new handler to be with my family after more than a year of separation. By the time anyone figured out that he wasn’t working for us—at least not in the way we would like to imagine—they wouldn’t blame me because I had been instructed to pitch him too early in the relationship. He’d said yes and had given us information to stop a cyberattack.

  I didn’t know why Jade Envy and Anna were working against me, so my only option was to double down and let the game play out a few more moves before making a final decision.

  In a worst-case scenario, they would ask me for classified information and I would refuse—end of story. In fact, I would advise them of our plans to arrest Anna and declare Jade Envy persona non grata, which they had to consider a real possibility.

  Any admission of guilt for my misdeeds wouldn’t land me in jail, but it would ruin my career. But if by some miracle I were to escape from this unscathed, it would be as if nothing had ever happened. I could just get back to my life with everyone none the wiser.

  The long drive to West Point helped me clear my mind and consider my options with greater clarity. I didn’t have the West Point decal on my rental vehicle, but Beth had put me on the access list. Rolling through campus eased my concerns as I reflected on the innocence of my four years here—my desire to make my family proud, my desire to serve my country, and my desire to one day attain the rank of general and lead troops in combat. Many officers ended up jaded later in their careers, after missed promotions and missed opportunities, but this was often delayed by the idealism that had launched their careers after graduation.

  The campus seemed smaller and less awe-inspiring than it once had, like going to a childhood park and seeing a small slide that once had seemed like a towering, precipitous drop.

  Those were simpler times, for sure, but the atmosphere West Point nurtured to inculcate the next generation of Army officers with Army values had a powerful effect on young minds.

  I stopped my car and waited as a platoon of cadets crossed the street in double-time formation with rhythmic steps (left, right, left, right), belting a Jody along the lines of, “I don’t know but I’ve been told.” There was something magical about having a team in step. These fine young cadets would one day make our great nation proud. If I’d had a colonel decal on my windshield, they would have saluted, but it would also have disrupted their rhythm. I preferred to observe them without being recognized.

  I arrived after the end of the duty day, at dusk, but didn’t feel like I was coming home, which was why I’d brought flowers and a bottle of wine. I knew Beth and the boys were waiting for me, but I also felt as though I was going to her house.

  She was the one assigned here, a great assignment at that. If something were to happen to me, she would continue working and raising our boys without missing a beat.

  The man in me felt insecure about the family no longer depending on me the way they used to, but the real worry was that my career was fading into the sunset. I was just another anonymous colonel, whereas Beth had leapfrogged several steps up the pyramid with many years ahead of her. I was excited for her and wanted her to succeed, but I couldn’t help but think that other off
icers surely must have been wondering what had happened to me.

  I knocked on the door and poked my head inside. “Anybody home?”

  The smell of dinner grabbed my attention, followed by the sound of socked feet thumping down the stairs. “There they are!” I said to Andrew and Troy with bear hugs as Beth approached from the kitchen wearing an apron and wiping her hands with a towel.

  “Something smells great,” I said and kissed her on the cheek.

  “We’re having guests,” she said and accepted the flowers and wine. “Why don’t you help the boys with their homework?”

  I admired the furniture and decorations as Beth returned to the kitchen. Every picture and trinket was still perfectly in place. Her attention to detail never ceased to amaze me.

  I didn’t know why but I was relieved to see that I was still included in the family photographs hanging on the walls. The boys and I discussed everything but homework—girls, sports, television, when I was moving back, and so on. They had grown up in an environment of soldiers deploying or being separated from their families. It didn’t take a lot of explaining to make my story credible, but it was clear to me that Beth had led them to believe that I would be joining them soon.

  I was troubled by the sense that they were getting along fine without me, evidenced by the way their bedrooms were clean and their books and school supplies lay organized on their desks.

  I was proud that I had set them on the right path, which included discipline techniques not condoned these days—we spanked them—but I missed the days of giving them baths, helping them eat, or teaching them to ride a bike.

  The easy way to fix my situation—foot stomp—of course, was to accept a teaching position with Beth and enjoy the boys’ last years before going off to college. If only life were so simple. I certainly wasn’t the first man who wouldn’t do the reasonable thing.

  I was surprised that Beth had taken this opportunity to host a dinner party, but discerned her intentions in no time. The guests included Brigadier General Warren, the Commandant of Cadets, and Colonel Briggs, the senior military instructor of the Department of Social Sciences, where Beth was teaching as a civilian. They arrived in dress shirts and slacks, with cordial handshakes and enough tidbits about my career to suggest that Beth had briefed them.