How to Catch a Russian Spy

by Naveed Jamali

  We had life down to a careful science. I’d meet my friends outside the school on Friday and Saturday nights, then we’d head off to the houses of whichever parents wouldn’t be around. We weren’t bad kids, just a bunch of overprivileged brats who, like many teenagers, considered themselves untouchable (exactly how I don’t want my own children to be). We had too much money, too much booze, and way too much time. Even we understood that. The Hastings Bubble, we called our lives back then. The cops might hate us and everything we stood for, but what were they going to do? If they tried to arrest us, someone’s parents would only call the chief of police to express firm displeasure. Everyone knew how that would turn out.

  My own parents watched with their usual distant dismay, convinced I wasn’t using my gifts to their full potential but hoping that, when I was finally ready, I’d come around. Sadly, there wasn’t the slightest sign of that in sight.

  Senior year, this son of doctoral- and master’s-degree holders applied to exactly zero colleges. I ducked my appointments in the guidance office. I deflected all questions from concerned adults. I didn’t see any reason to rush into whatever it was that might be coming next. How could it ever be sweeter than this? At graduation, the principal called my name. I walked onstage in my cap and gown. My parents sat with the other parents in the audience. But I was the student who got the empty leather case with no diploma. When all my credits had been tallied, I had inexplicably come up one course short. I told myself I couldn’t let that get me down. There was always a way to make something work. To become an official high school graduate, I enrolled in a life-drawing class at Westchester Community College. I chose that class because I’d heard they had naked models.

  As things turned out, my drawing skills didn’t show any special promise. But I was pleased to discover the naked-model rumors were true—right up to the second class, when the nubile female grad student was replaced by a pudgy fifty-five-year-old with man boobs and a beard. I told myself that was what the teacher must have meant by “suffering for your art.”

  That August, with an actual diploma in hand, I rode with my parents into the city and signed up for courses at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. I wasn’t enrolled in a degree program, though the courses I took could later count toward one. But at least I was out of the house in Hastings. I could say I was going to college. I could stay in an apartment my parents owned on Riverside Drive. And I could pick my own roommates. I wondered if I could major in Just Hanging Out.

  * * *

  I took a couple of political science classes and joined the Army ROTC. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps wasn’t too popular on the Hunter campus—or at any of the other New York colleges, as far as I could tell. Our unit from Hunter was so tiny that we met on the Fordham University campus along with students from Columbia, NYU, and a couple of other schools.

  I didn’t depend on those few ROTC cadets for my college experience. I had lots of friends and friends of friends living in the city, and I made time for many of them. Early freshman year, I ran into a guy named Peter, who’d gone to school with my old kindergarten pal Jason. Peter was a freshman at Columbia, living on the fifth floor of Shapiro Hall at 115th Street and Riverside Drive, a five-minute walk from my apartment.

  “We should get together,” I said.

  “Let’s do it,” he agreed.

  I went up to his dorm a few times and met some of his Columbia friends. Columbia was an Ivy League college, but it wasn’t all tests and homework for Peter. We spent hours playing Doom and Duke Nukem, first-person shooter video games.

  Living across the hall from Peter was a cute girl named Ava Brent. She was thin with dark, wavy hair and an easy, quiet charm—friendly and open without being pushy or loud. I heard she was a biology major.

  “Nice socks,” I said one day as she was sitting in the fifth-floor TV lounge with her legs up on the coffee table. She laughed and said nothing.

  Nice socks? I thought. I’d better think of something smarter for this girl. I vowed to find even more reasons to hang out at Peter’s dorm. A week after the sock flirt, I saw Ava sitting in her dorm room with the door open. I stuck my head in and said hi. As we exchanged bland pleasantries, I noticed a book in her bookcase, Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. The story involves a California housewife, Oedipa Maas, whose rich ex-lover dies, leaving her as coexecutor of his estate. She gradually discovers and begins to unravel what may or may not have been a worldwide conspiracy.

  “You read this?” I asked her, reaching over and pulling the book off the shelf.

  “Yes.”

  “That book was totally formative for me,” I told her.

  “It’s great,” she agreed.

  No one I knew had ever read that book, let alone called it great. “So is her boyfriend a secret agent, or is the woman going crazy?” I asked Ava.

  “It could go either way,” she said. “It’s the shades of gray that make the story interesting.”

  I had no idea what a powerful life lesson that would turn out to be. But I do remember exactly what I was thinking as I stood in her doorway and we discussed Pynchon’s postmodernism: Wow! She’s smart, she’s pretty—and she reads Pynchon? This could be good.

  Maybe that’s the way guys eventually grow up. I had an active mind, but nothing had grabbed my interest other than my odd obsession with military hardware. Then came Ava. This was a girl I could talk to. She wasn’t just hanging out on campus, having “the college experience.” She was actually going to college—you know, studying and learning stuff. And I even had the feeling she might like me.

  I asked her when her birthday was.

  “February fourteenth,” she said.

  “Mine’s the twentieth,” I said.

  That had to mean something, right?

  We made an agreement that night. We would get together for our birthdays, over two months away. “Neither one of us should spend our birthday alone,” I said.

  My material was getting better, I thought.

  Our first real date was February 12, 1995, at a Chinese restaurant she liked, Empire Szechuan on West Ninety-sixth Street. On our second date, I took her to an Italian place I liked near the Off-Broadway theaters on West Forty-second Street.

  She told me about her research and asked what I’d been reading. I said I’d been on a tear through recent Vietnam books. I was taking a course at the time on the My Lai massacre. Even though I was half-Pakistani, I told her, I wasn’t into the wars and political turmoil of the Middle East. “Larger global things, mostly,” I said. “The Cold War, the Soviets. The Middle East doesn’t pique my curiosity.”

  It turned out we had all kinds of things in common. Ava was born in the city and moved with her family to Westchester. But her parents moved back to the city a year before the Jamalis fled to the suburbs. We both spent kindergarten in the city—she at Bank Street, me at Calhoun—living four blocks apart. The summer after seventh grade, we had another near miss at Buck’s Rock sleepaway camp in Milford, Connecticut. The only reason we didn’t end up as campmates was I was sent home with chicken pox during the first session and she came just for the second one.

  “I remember that summer, eating a hamburger, trying not to scratch my chicken pox, and listening to the sound track from Good Morning Vietnam,” I told her. “Louis Armstrong was singing ‘What a Wonderful World.’ I played that song over and over again—as a twelve-year-old!”

  She didn’t laugh at my childhood eccentricities. And now the two of us were hanging out together a few short blocks from where my mother and father had met three decades before.

  “This is a little creepy,” Ava said when I told her that.

  “I know,” I told her. “I don’t care.”

  * * *

  Despite all the biography we shared, Ava was in many ways my exact opposite. She was grounded and focused. She was an incredib
ly dedicated student. She worked in a lab. She took seven classes one semester, including developmental biology and James Joyce.

  The dating grew more serious. At the start of sophomore year, Ava moved out of her dorm at Columbia. She split her time between my place on 112th Street and her old bedroom at home. We got two fish together, Franny and Zooey. I made some small changes of my own. I shifted into a degree program at Hunter. I couldn’t deny it: Ava’s seriousness about her schoolwork was rubbing off on me. I wasn’t ready to take seven courses in one semester. But as I watched her with awe, I knew I could be working so much more intensely. She was studying hard and making progress and impressing her teachers, not to mention me, and getting maddeningly perfect grades. She didn’t try to make me feel bad about this. But yes, I noticed the difference.

  Gradually, I began to think: Maybe I can aim a little higher here. Maybe I can live up to my long-rumored promise. Maybe I can do more. In the fall of my sophomore year, on the typewriter in Ava’s parents’ apartment, with her sitting in a chair next to me, I typed out an application to New York University. That spring I learned I’d been accepted and quickly agreed to attend in time for junior year.

  What finally motivated me?

  I wanted to please Ava, to show her I wasn’t just a charming fuck-off. But there was also something inside of me, a voice I’d been doing my best not to listen to, a voice that all through high school—even earlier—I had pretended wasn’t there. Now, with my attention being focused by the most driven young woman I had ever met, I was finally willing to listen to that voice. “Time to quit hiding,” it said. “Time to step on the gas and get on a road to somewhere. Time to cut out the shit.” I answered the voice with a stern message of my own: “Don’t. Fuck. This. Up.”

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  AMERICA ATTACKED

  I knew Ava was going places. So I wasn’t remotely surprised when she was offered a place in a highly selective PhD program at Harvard University in the field of biological and biomedical sciences with a special interest in genetics. Neither one of us especially wanted to leave New York. But Harvard was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and seemed intent on staying there. So Ava and I loaded up our car, a 1999 Pontiac Trans Am Firehawk, metallic navy blue, and headed up Interstate 95, excited to be going off on this new adventure together.

  We found a comfortable second-floor apartment on Queensberry Street in Boston’s Fenway section. Ava dove into her graduate program, and I was lucky to land a programming position at Harvard.

  Computer programmers aren’t known for being early risers. Noon to two a.m.—those are programmer hours. Most of the programmers I’ve worked with put in long hours, often crazy-long hours. But even at big companies and major universities, the programmers hardly ever start before nine or ten a.m.

  As in so many other facets of my life, I didn’t fit the mold at all. I liked to wake up early. I’d have a predawn breakfast with Ava before she rushed off to her lab. Then I’d head to the University Information Systems office at 1730 Cambridge Street, arriving by seven-thirty or seven-forty-five. I’d badge into the building. I’d grab a coffee in the food court. I’d climb the stairs to the UIS nerve center on the second floor. Then I’d weave my way past all the empty beige cubicles and darkened monitor screens, past the beanbag chairs and the dartboard, past the remote-controlled cars and bowls of Twizzlers, to the far side of our large open-plan workspace. I’d settle into my own beige cubicle and my ergonomic Aeron chair. Then I’d get in a quiet couple of hours of code writing before the rest of the animals came in.

  The office was basically a frat house for nerds, as casual in its tone as the work was intense. This was Harvard, but preppy it was not. If I wore chinos and a button-down shirt to the office, people would immediately ask, “You going to a wedding, or do you have a job interview?” The same people who provided the tech support for this billion-dollar university would also “Hasselhoff” each other’s computers, replacing all the icons with grinning photos of Baywatch hunk David Hasselhoff. Between eight-thirty and nine a.m., just before most people began trickling in, I’d head downstairs to check in with any other early arrivers.

  * * *

  September 11, 2001, started out like any other day at the office. But when I wandered downstairs a minute or two before nine, I noticed people clustered around several monitors at the far end of the room. Though I was too far away to make out faces, it was hard not to notice how still everyone was.

  As I approached, no one looked up. They were laser-focused on what I could now see was the CNN.com logo and large-type headline: PLANE STRIKES WORLD TRADE CENTER.

  It was a short alert at that point. No explanations. No on-the-record confirmations. Few actual details. No one was saying yet whether this was an accident or something scarier. All they were reporting was that at 8:46 a.m., on a bright and clear morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 had flown into an upper floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. First responders were on the scene. There were mass casualties.

  Looking back, I wish I’d said something insightful, eloquent, or profound. All I said was “Holy shit!” Then I said it again: “Holy shit!”

  And that was just the start of it. Soon after the horrifying news broke, there was much we didn’t know. That the plane had taken off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, just a few miles from where we were watching, bound for Los Angeles International Airport. That fifteen minutes into the flight, five al-Qaeda members with box cutters had overpowered the captain and first officer. That one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had taken the controls and veered the plane south toward New York. That 102 minutes after impact, the North Tower would crumble to earth with devastating results. That this flight was only the first of four planes, two from Boston, that were hijacked that morning, each with its own deadly results.

  When the second plane crashed into the South Tower seventeen horrifying minutes later, we knew: This was no accident. It was a coordinated attack on America. But the full scope of the day revealed itself only gradually, to me and everyone. We had TV screens mounted around the office. But all they displayed were network and server loads, not actual TV. As more and more people around the world logged on to the Internet for World Trade Center updates, the CNN site refreshed more and more slowly. After a few more minutes, the site wouldn’t come up at all. Even then, I recognized how ridiculous this was, to be at the technology hub of the greatest university on Planet Earth and, at the worst possible moment, totally unable to follow an unfolding, world-changing event.

  We made our way to a conference room on the building’s third floor, where someone found a big-butt 1980s television set with rabbit ears. Thank God for Zenith.

  By then, the second plane had hit the South Tower, and the TV had live pictures of frantic people waving from the upper floors while first responders raced into the buildings just as frantically from the chaotic street.

  All the while, people were starting to show up for the day. Some had heard. Some hadn’t. A woman named Susan, who used to work at the World Trade Center, burst into tears, thinking about all the people she knew who still worked there. Someone else mentioned that half a dozen people on the Information Services staff had been scheduled to fly from Logan that morning to a conference.

  “Could they have been on one of the planes?” someone asked. No one answered. No one knew. It was too terrible to contemplate.

  I called Ava at the lab but couldn’t reach her. I left Cambridge in the Firehawk and put the car in the garage two blocks away from our apartment on Queensberry Street. As I walked home, I saw a young couple on the sidewalk, loading their car with two mountain bikes. Were they totally oblivious to what was happening? Were they heading to the country in a panicked retreat? I wasn’t sure, but I thought I knew. In those earliest hours, the reality had not yet reached everyone’s lives. Not yet.

  The city was totally stra
nge. There were people walking around, but no one seemed to be talking. The sky was quiet, too. Planes from Logan flew over the Fenway constantly, but not on this day. The airport had clearly been shut down. I looked up and saw two F-15 fighter jets flying low enough for me to see they had missiles loaded on their racks.

  That was when I burst into tears, which I hadn’t done in probably ten years. There I was, a self-conscious adult male, crying as I walked along Queensberry Street. I didn’t care who saw me. I cried the rest of the way home.

  I went inside the empty apartment and dead-bolted the door. I don’t know what I thought that would protect me against. It was instinct. I finally turned on a proper TV. The cable was working perfectly. I started flipping around the various news channels, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and the local Boston stations. Every one of them had wall-to-wall coverage. I began calling people in New York. My parents in Westchester. A couple of friends I knew had jobs in downtown Manhattan. I felt like I had to speak to all of them.

  America was under attack, and no one knew for certain who was responsible. Our military installations around the world were placed on DEFCON 3, the highest state of alert since 1973’s Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt. When the towers collapsed, U.S. troops happened to be conducting exercises along the Russian border.

  We’d had plenty of conflict and numerous enemies over the years. But on 9/11, it was our fiercest and long-running enemy who made the first call. President Vladimir Putin phoned President George W. Bush. The American president was aboard Air Force One when the call came in. Putin offered condolences and solidarity against brutal acts of terror. He told Bush that, given what had just occurred, Russian troops would immediately stand down.