Vandel laughed. He liked the kid. Harris Chang had an easy way of talking with strangers that was unusual in anyone, let alone a Chinese-American first lieutenant.
“What’s Flagstaff like?” asked Vandel.
“It’s like America, except more so. There’s desert on either side, but Flagstaff is up in these big mountains that rise out of nothing. The climb is so steep coming up from Phoenix that people get altitude sickness. Not really, but it feels that way. We have trout streams and forests, and a ton of snow in the winter. We have cowboys and Indians, for real, especially Indians. And we have a little Chinatown, about half a block long. Nice place.”
“And now you’re in Iraq, you poor bastard.”
“I’ll be here nine more months. Mom says that when I come home, they’re going to give me a parade. People are very patriotic in Flagstaff. They feel guilty when they see soldiers.”
“The whole goddamn country feels guilty. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the flip side of patriotism.”
Chang looked away. He wanted patriotism to be unambiguous.
“Deep water, sir,” he said.
“Forget it,” said Vandel. He paused. They were finished with their meal. “I need to clean up before I see the boss.” He had an appointment upstairs with the ambassador. He started toward the door, then stopped, and came back.
“Listen, lieutenant, when your tour here is up, you’re going to be thinking about what to do. The Army can be a great life, especially for someone who’s gone to Ranger school and punched the right buttons. But my outfit needs smart people like you. We challenge people. We color outside the lines.”
“The CIA?” asked Chang. He had never thought about working for the agency until that moment.
“Yes, indeed. We pay better, promote faster, and give more responsibility. Plus, we’re habituated to secrets. We’re eastern in that way. We almost never tell the truth.”
Vandel laughed to signal that he was joking. But Chang just nodded.
“I never considered it, sir, to be honest.”
“Well, do think about it. My gut tells me you’d be good at the work. You’ve got a talent we call ‘rapport,’ which is really just the ability to talk to people. You’ve got it, and a lot more, I suspect. We’ve got a special transition program for military officers who want to join the agency. We have an associate director for military affairs who oversees paramilitary stuff. But I’m thinking you’re an operator, like me. Plus, you’ve saved my life. So I have to be nice to you. You’d have the wind at your back.”
Chang’s eyes were wide as silver dollars. He was shaking his head. Two hours before, listening to the self-enforced ignorance of his MNSTC-I colleagues, he had been thinking to himself that the U.S. Army might not be his dream job, after all. And now here was someone offering a serious alternative.
“That’s a lot for me to think about. No parades in your line of work.”
“Nope. No parades. No black and white. No bullshit. Or at least, less of it than you have to deal with in the military. Mostly just life.”
Vandel stood. He shook the young lieutenant’s hand. His gray eyes studied Chang one last time.
“Let’s stay in touch,” he said. “Something tells me you might be our guy.”
Well before Harris Chang’s nine months were up, he began filing the paperwork for military officers to apply to the agency. A lot of it involved HR crap that Chang ignored, about annual leave, credit for years of service, and transfer of his savings plan.
What interested him was the description of what an operations officer does. It included a series of questions: “Do I thrive on challenge and significant responsibility? Am I self-reliant, self-confident, adaptable, and flexible? Do I work effectively on teams and individually? Am I open to critical feedback? Do I learn from it and adjust?”
Harris Chang knew that he fit the description. It might have been written for him. It helped that John Vandel, the Baghdad chief of station, appended a personal recommendation to his application, and that he forwarded it personally to the drones at Headquarters who handled military transitions. He copied the then-deputy director for operations.
It was fate. Harris Chang was a natural. He had the wind at his back.
10.
OLD TOWN, ALEXANDRIA
Kate Sturm called Denise Ford and asked if she could stop by her home that evening after work. She didn’t say why, and Ford was worried at first. Sturm was a player: She had an office on the Seventh Floor and was said to be the closest adviser to the deputy director for operations, a man who navigated the corridors at Headquarters like a barracuda through a coral reef. Why would Sturm want to pay a visit out of the blue? She was a fellow member of the Old Girls club, but they hadn’t talked in months.
Ford lived alone in a town house in Old Town, Alexandria. It was a fine two-story brick home built in the early nineteenth century, back when the city was a thriving port. She had painted the façade a creamy off-white, the shade of tapioca pudding, and affixed a plaque next to her doorbell designating the house as part of the Alexandria Historical District. She had filled it with the fine things that a CIA officer with a keen eye can bring back from overseas: Chinese silk draperies, antique rugs from Persia, a fine Federal-style dining table with Hepplewhite chairs and sideboard.
Denise Ford was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, with a round face and a high forehead. She took good care of herself. Her skin had a smooth glow that hinted at artful maintenance. That evening, home from work, she wore a well-fitting pair of jeans and a tailored tweed jacket she had bought at Max Mara. Her hair was pinned up above her long neck. She wore wide-framed tortoiseshell glasses that were both stylish and bookish.
Ford sat in her study waiting for her visitor. Open on her lap was a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. She wished she could still read it in the original, but her French had gone soft. “I retain only one confused impression from my earliest days: It is all red, black, and warm,” she read. Ford tried to concentrate but the words blurred. She thumbed the pages, looking for the passage where the young woman first met her brilliant but unreliable lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, and then put the book aside.
The doorbell rang eventually, and Ford welcomed her guest. Sturm apologized for late-breaking developments that had kept her at the office. She was a big, reassuring woman, less particular about her appearance than Ford, but someone whose form conveyed robust health and power. She was dressed in her customary black pants suit, set off this evening by a string of pearls. Nobody who handled as many critical secrets as Sturm did could be described as serene, but she had a steady calm and self-confidence.
“The house looks beautiful,” said Sturm as she walked into the small, well-appointed living room. “I haven’t been here since your Christmas party two years ago.”
“I have time to putter,” answered Ford.
The place was indeed immaculate, the silver frames on the family photographs were all polished, the annuals were planted just so in the garden. She was a woman who thought about appearances.
“Let me get you a glass of something,” Ford offered. “What would you like?”
“I’ll have a beer,” said Sturm.
Ford retreated to the kitchen and returned with a tray carrying a bottle of Sam Adams, a glass of Napa chardonnay for herself, and a plate with cheese and crackers. She brought a glass for Sturm’s beer, but her guest took a first swallow from the bottle.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I called,” Sturm said. “It’s nothing bad.”
“That’s a relief. I thought you might have come to tell me I was fired.”
“The opposite,” said Sturm. “We were talking about you today at work. Me and John Vandel and some other people.”
“I’m surprised he even remembers who I am,” said Ford. “Our paths don’t cross too much.”
“We were talking about something you did a few years ago, when we were trying to figure out what the Russ
ians knew about supercomputing.”
“Oh, that.” She laughed. “I gather it worked out. I never got all the details of what you folks did with it, but I’m glad that people haven’t forgotten. That’s nice.”
Ford smiled, warmly, and took a sip of her wine.
“Remind me of how that went down. You were inside the Russian quantum computing program, right?”
“ ‘Inside’ overstates things.” Ford laughed again. “We had a program at S&T that we were running with IARPA to monitor all the technical journals in Russian. We used machine-learning algorithms to digest the journal articles and predict what the Russians were doing. I made some good guesses about where the secret labs were and what they were chasing. Then we threw it over the wall to Operations.”
Sturm rapped her knuckles on the coffee table, in gentle approval, and took another swig of beer. Ford handed her the cheese plate, but Sturm wanted to keep talking.
“Vandel remembered that this program of yours showed that the Russians were chasing the wrong rabbit in their quantum research. I don’t get this stuff, but is that basically right? Explain it for the non-science major.”
Ford peered over the top of her glasses, curiously, cleared her throat, and then began talking, slowly and carefully. People didn’t usually ask her about her work.
“You know what ‘qubits’ are, right? Quantum bits that are zero and one at the same time. The problem that has been driving scientists crazy is how to assemble enough of them, and keep them stable long enough, to do real computation. So, the Russians decided that rather than trying to add more qubits, they would increase the dimensions of these bits. So, rather than having just two states in a qubit, they would have three in a ‘qutrit,’ or four in ‘ququart,’ all the way up to the hypothetical number ‘D,’ in a ‘qudit.’ Does that make any sense?”
“Not entirely, but I gather the Russians made a mistake with this ‘qudit’ hypothesis.”
“A serious mistake. One of our black projects had tried the same approach a few years before, and we knew it was a blind alley. But the engineers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Russian Quantum Center were in love with the idea. The Russians are chess players. They’re addicted to complexity. I found the lab in Kazan that was doing most of the work, and the names of the engineers there, and I passed the information on to Vandel’s people. They chummed the water.”
“You got all this from reading journals?”
“Pretty much. The computers did the reading. I supplied the intuition.”
Sturm clinked her beer bottle against Ford’s wine glass.
“You should have gotten a medal. Or at least a promotion.”
“Right.” Ford’s voice trailed off, far away. Defeated.
“Pisses me off, sometimes,” said Sturm after another drink of beer. She loved the agency, but she hated the way women got shunted off into marginal areas, where they were glorified “reports officers,” serving the male “case officers.”
“Lots of people wanted credit on this one. They had more friends on the Seventh Floor, I guess. But hey, welcome to my world. People always remember your screw-ups better than your successes. Story of my career.”
“Yeah, so can we talk about that? You used to be in Operations, before you went to S&T. But there was a problem in Paris. What happened?”
“Is this a job interview?”
“Sort of. I’ll explain in a minute. Tell me about Paris.”
Ford sat back in her chair. “Oh, you don’t want to hear that. It’s ancient history.”
“Yes, I do want to know. Vandel asked me about it today, when I proposed you as a resource person for a special compartment we’re creating. He said you got ‘splashed,’ but he didn’t say why.”
Ford nodded, warily. She sat back in her chair. She didn’t really want to tell this story, but now she had no choice.
“Here’s the short version: I had integrated cover in Paris at the International Energy Agency. I was developing a French nuclear scientist. I was getting ready to pitch him when he tried to have sex. When I said no, he got suspicious. Eventually he went to the French security service, they ran surveillance, and I was cooked. The interior minister called in our ambassador and told him that I was persona non grata. If we behaved, no publicity. End of story.”
“The sex part is infuriating.”
“Maybe. But that’s life for a woman case officer: If you get close to a man, he assumes you want to screw him. I could have played along. I was recently divorced. Ambitious women COs sleep with their agents all the time. Probably that’s what I should have done.”
“Outrageous.” Sturm shook her head. “But why did you leave Operations and go to S&T?”
“My cover was busted. And after Paris, the DO seemed to think I was ‘accident prone.’ They offered me jobs, but they were crap. When I complained, they decided I was a troublemaker. It seemed easier to get a new start with S&T. I’ve always been kind of a gadget-girl, anyway. And now I have my own lily pad.”
“You’re now assistant deputy director for external programs, right? What does that involve?”
Ford laughed.
“I go to meetings, basically. I talk to scientists who are getting funding. I clear stuff with other agencies. Whatever the S&T director thinks is too boring for him to listen to, he sends me.”
“Perfect!” said Sturm. “I mean, I’m sorry you’re stuck in this dead-end job, and I’ll try to help fix that, but you’re the ideal person to help us with the special project I was telling you about. We need a tech road map.”
“Great. But I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you explain?” Ford was leaning forward in her chair now.
“Sorry. I can’t read you into the details. Not yet, anyway. We need technical support, basically. We need someone who knows computer science. In particular, we need someone with expertise in quantum computing. Could you handle that?”
“Sure.” Ford shrugged. “I deal with quantum projects all the time. Overt funding and covert, both. I’m not an engineer, but I know my way around.”
Sturm took a last gulp of her beer and rose from her seat. She shook Ford’s hand, and then she gave her a sisterly hug.
“This will be good. It will get you back in circulation. Hopefully, it will lead to other things. Please don’t tell anyone about our conversation. Sorry to be so vague, but I’ll come back to you soon on this. I think we can use your talents on something important.”
“I’m glad you came,” said Ford, as she walked Sturm to the door and let her out into the cool October evening. And Ford was glad, as she sat back in her chair and finished what was left of her wine. But she was also uneasy. Being put on the shelf, overlooked and ignored, had become comfortable, in its way. The anonymity suited her. Being noticed again came with baggage she wasn’t sure she wanted to carry.
She poured herself another glass of wine and walked back to the living room. She turned off the lights and sat in the dark, her face illuminated occasionally by the beam of headlights from a passing car on Prince Street. Her mind flickered among many times and places, but her first thought was of Paris, where things had begun to go bad.
11.
OLD TOWN, ALEXANDRIA
Denise Ford worked in the unfashionable 15th arrondissement, just downriver from the Eiffel Tower. At lunchtime, she liked to get a baguette sandwich from a boulangerie on the Avenue du Suffren and find a place on the grass in the Champs de Mars where she could eat her lunch and read a book. It was a short walk from the International Energy Agency. She loved the commotion of tourists along the Quai Branly, the slow chug of the barges moving upstream, and the view of the old Beaux Arts buildings that framed the park. She was in her early thirties; her divorce had been an emancipation; her colleagues envied the Paris assignment and teased her about how soon she would become a station chief.
She met Jean-Christophe Arras the first time at one of those déjeuners sur l’herbe. She saw him sitting on the Champs
, eating his own baguette, and she said hello and sat down nearby. After an awkward minute, they began talking. They worked together, it turned out, on different floors. Fancy that!
It wasn’t as accidental as it looked. Ford had targeted the French scientist from the moment she arrived at the IEA. He was one of the French technical representatives on the IEA secretariat, with a doctorate in nuclear physics. The station ran his traces; he had served in the military with the Force de Frappe. At that time, the CIA didn’t run many operations against French government targets. But in the case of Monsieur Arras, Denise Ford requested that this rule be suspended.
The station chief didn’t like the operation. He was a heavyset, hard-drinking dinosaur who wasn’t convinced that women case officers were useful for anything other than spotting potential recruits. Honey traps, he understood. Recruiting prostitutes, he understood. Women case officers who recruited foreign scientists to spy for the CIA, he didn’t understand. But he approved Arras as a “developmental.” Soon, after more lunches with her French colleague, Ford began filing intelligence reports. Her developmental got a cryptonym. The EUR division chief sent her a cable commending her and urging her to take the case to the next level.
She had planned that night carefully: She wore a black dress she had bought at Dolce and Gabbana. That was a mistake, probably. She chose a restaurant on the Avenue Rapp and asked him to meet her there. It was a small, intimate place, a neighborhood secret for people who lived in the 7th arrondissement. Another mistake. He was waiting when she arrived; he seemed startled by how elegant she looked. When she sat down, she knew that he thought she was coming onto him. Men are vain; when a pretty woman suggests dinner, they think they understand what’s going on.
How do we remember the moments when our lives begin to go off track? A series of little misjudgments, small moments that have big consequences. After dinner, she asked if he wanted to come back to her apartment, which was nearby on Rue de l’Université. She was thinking that she could draw him out on French nuclear consultations with Moscow. In her mind, she was an intelligence officer doing her job.
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