When Tim entered the room, Pam was sitting up with her back against the bed board, looking at herself in the mirror across the room as she brushed her long blonde hair.
“Oh, my darling, what a sweet thing for you to do,” Pam said, smiling as Tim placed the tray in front of her.
Tim took his cup of coffee from Pam’s tray and walked over to the window. He saw two men in military fatigues speaking with each other. “Exactly how much security do you have, Pam?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you that, Timothy.” Pam took a bite of her eggs. “But enough. Why do you need to know?”
“Well, it would be pretty difficult for me to walk out of here. It’s really a long walk back to Baltimore,” Tim said, half joking.
“Well, first of all, the security is not here because of you. And by the way, you are not a prisoner here. If you want to go home to Baltimore, then just say so. I can arrange for a ride.” Pam took another bite of her eggs. “I was hoping that we could spend the weekend together and talk over some things. Last night’s meeting did not really go as planned, and you should have been better prepared. That’s on me.”
“Yes, I agree,” Tim responded. “If you had told me that the entire purpose of our reunion was to assassinate the President,” Tim paused to make sure that he had Pam’s attention, “then perhaps I would have moved to Canada.”
“If Sebastian and I had not brought you back, Tim, you would still be wandering around Baltimore. But that’s another subject.” Pam finished the food on her plate and began to drink her orange juice.
“Anyhow, I really do not see this operation as a plot to assassinate the President. It is much more than that. It is a chance for the United States to take corrective action. Historically, this country has always taken corrective action when faced with adversity, starting with the Civil War of the 1860s. And believe me, we are on the verge of another one right now.”
Perhaps Pam was right about that. Tim could not recall a time when the country was so divided, and many people, especially the younger ones, no longer had faith in the electoral process. Maybe laws should be changed where the winner of an election would have to receive at least 60% of the popular vote or a runoff election would be required. However, that probably would not completely satisfy everyone. The losers would still whine like always.
“Sebastian said last night that the Agency predicted that the President would win in 2016 and not the woman? How did you know?” Tim asked Pam.
“First of all, people lie, so you have to include that in your calculation, and anyone conducting an honest poll would know that. The problem is that the poll takers already have a bias. Most pollsters really wanted her to win so they would be on the right side of history, and they were looking for any data to support that.”
Gunshots sounded somewhere in the woods, and Pam turned her head for a second before continuing. “Hell, I wanted her to win, but I was 90% sure she would not.”
Pam did appear sorry that a woman had not yet been elected President, but in her mind, the first woman to hold the office would most likely be a Republican. Men just would not trust a woman Democrat.
More shots sounded outside, and Tim was beginning to get concerned. “Pam, is there any chance we’re being attacked?”
“Oh, that’s just the boys playing some type of war game in the woods. It’s one of the disadvantages of living here. The Agency likes to have these training exercises, and our woods here are very similar to the ones in Eastern Europe.”
“Don’t the neighbors complain?”
“We don’t have any neighbors for five miles in any direction. You don’t remember much about living here, do you, Tim?”
“Well, I certainly don’t recall any paramilitary training happening in my backyard,” Tim replied, laughing.
“That is something new, and I admit it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s also part of the deal.”
“The deal” Pam was talking about was that she did not own the house. It belonged to the Agency, although it was listed in Pam’s name for tax purposes.
Pam finished her breakfast and got out of bed. She gave Tim a kiss and thanked him again for providing breakfast, then headed to her bathroom.
“Tim? I have to go into Leesburg and do some grocery shopping. I thought you could come with me and get out of the house for a while. Interested?”
“Yes, I would love that,” Tim replied.
“Okay, give me thirty minutes. Maybe we can have lunch.”
“Yeah, that would be great,” he answered, still looking at the men in fatigues.
It did cross Tim’s mind that he could probably ditch Pam in town and make his way back to Baltimore, but why bother? It would be easy enough for Sebastian and Pam to find him again. He could, of course, go to the police, but who would believe him? He no longer knew anyone at Langley or the FBI. At one point in his career, Tim had been badged into the FBI at both Headquarters and Quantico, meaning he could walk right into the buildings and speak to almost anyone, but those days were long gone. On the other hand, both Sebastian and Pam most likely still had contacts at the FBI, and a phone call would be all it would take. “Hello FBI, this is CIA Agent Pam Hall, and my husband thinks he’s invented a killer fork which will be used to assassinate the President.” Tim had to laugh at the absurdity of his situation.
Pam came bounding down the front steps wearing a very tight pair of blue jeans with brown boots and a white cable knit sweater. “Ready to go?” she asked cheerfully.
“Lead the way,” Tim responded, following her out of the house.
“I can’t wait to show you my new car,” Pam said.
Darrel came around to the front of the house from somewhere in the back. Pam saw him and waved. “We’re going to Leesburg, Darrel. Do you need anything?”
“No, ma’am, but thank you for asking.”
“He’s such a nice kid, don’t you think, Tim?”
Tim did not know how nice Darrel was or was not. All he knew was that, like Toby Wheeler, Darrel was built like an NFL linebacker and could most likely tear Tim into two pieces.
“I guess, Pam. How long has he been around?”
“Oh, not long. Maybe about a week now. We never know who we’re going to get. Langley just sends me a profile before they get here so I can make sure they’re legitimate.”
“So, where’s the secret security room?” Tim thought that he might as well ask just to see how Pam would answer.
“It wouldn’t be a secret room if I told you where it was,” Pam answered with a laugh. “But I’ll tell you what: if you can figure out exactly where it is, I’ll give you a tour.”
“You know, Pam, when things slow down, you and I could start hosting Spy House Weekends and sell tickets.”
For a second Pam seemed to take Tim seriously, but then she started to laugh again. “Tim, you’re such a funny guy!”
Chapter 21
Pam’s new car, a black Mercedes S560, was more like a 4-star hotel than a regular automobile. In order to be polite, Tim had planned to ask Pam if she would like him to drive. Now, Tim was happy he had not. In all honesty, Tim didn’t believe that he could figure out how to drive the S560. At least not at first. The car did almost everything short of driving itself.
“I feel like a queen driving this car,” Pam explained as she turned right onto US Route 15 to Leesburg, and Tim knew that she was telling him the truth. Pam began to describe each of the car’s features. The ventilated and heated front seats, KEYLESS-GO, active parking assist... Yes, the car would park itself, and Pam even demonstrated this feature by stopping at the elementary school parking lot in Luckett, Virginia.
“Nothing like falling in love with a car, is there, Pam?” Tim said, but Pam freely admitted it to be true.
Tim had Googled Pam’s S560 to see that the MSRP was in the vicinity of eleven hundred thousand dollars. Where the hell did Pam come up with that kind of money? Tim wondered, but then he thought about it. Pam was probably pulling down somewhere around $
140K to $150K a year at the Agency, and she did not have a house payment. Pam had also earned a fair amount of danger pay over the years, which she most likely put away. So sure, he guessed she could afford it and was not being paid off by the Russians.
The Aldrich Ames incident in the ‘90s really woke everyone up at Langley, and management started paying close attention to everyone’s lifestyle. Pam and Tim hadn’t known Ames personally, but they did know a lot of people who did. One friend of Pam’s who worked in the Russian section told her about how Ames would always come around to her desk and ask what she was working on. He apparently did that to many people. That in itself did not arouse any suspicion, but Pam’s friend felt that Ames must have used something that she had unintentionally revealed. People died because of Aldrich Ames, and Pam’s friend quit the Agency soon after Ames was convicted. She just couldn’t take it any longer.
Pam and Tim, on the other hand, had always lived rather cheaply. After they were married, they lived in an apartment in Falls Church. Next, they rented a house in Vienna, Virginia. They never considered buying because they were never at home. They never bothered to have children because neither Pam nor Tim would give up their jobs in order to be together. In the 1980s and ‘90s, married agents could not be assigned to the same overseas office. This was the reason why many of the women Pam had trained with gave up their careers. They married their Agency husbands and started families.
So not only were Pam and Tim never home, but when they were away, they were at different locations around the world. Management finally began to relax the married rule, but by then both Pam and Tim were working stateside. Pam and Tim did go on missions together, especially after 9/11, but they were never posted overseas again. Tim recalled thinking that running a safe house would be a great way of ending his career, but Pam thought it was a dead-end assignment. There was just one more job to do, something in China regarding intellectual property. That was the last thing Tim remembered.
Pam was still talking about the new Mercedes. “Look at this, Tim!” she called out as she let the car momentarily drift toward oncoming traffic. All sorts of bells and lights began to sound as Pam guided her vehicle back. “Now that’s what I call a safety feature,” Pam almost screamed with excitement. She was certainly having a good time, Tim thought.
As Tim and Pam drove closer to Leesburg, the two-lane Route 15 became a four-lane highway. Tim had observed that there were now many more new homes on each side of the road. Big 5,000 square foot houses that must cost at least $700,000 each. When Tim first started coming out to this part of Northern Virginia in the 1980s, there was maybe 50,000 people in Loudoun County. Now, there were 60,000 in Leesburg alone, and it was still growing.
Pam took the exit from the Route 15 bypass to Route 7 east. They were heading for Wegmans, a high-end grocery store. It was noon on a Saturday. The place would be packed.
Wegmans was similar to Whole Foods, except Wegmans carried more stuff. A lot more stuff. It was the kind of place where one could spend an entire day, and a few people actually did. You could shop there, eat there, and shop some more; and although items would be on sale from time to time, it was in no way cheap.
At one time, the entire DC area was dominated by basically two grocery stores: Safeway, which was headquartered in Oakland, California, and Giant Foods, which was once locally owned. That all began to change in the 1990s, as other grocery store chains from the South and Northeast expanded into the region. Not that the increased competition lowered food prices. To the contrary, food prices actually rose in the DC metro area, especially in the District of Columbia. This all made Tim feel that the price of food did not follow the normal rules of economics. It was not supply and demand pricing, it was “how much are they willing to pay” pricing, and the citizens of Leesburg and Loudoun County appeared to be willing to pay a lot.
They could pay a lot because they made a lot of money working for companies that contracted with the U.S. government. Defense contracting, to be precise. Many homes boasted incomes of over $200,000, which in turn gave Loudoun County the highest median household income in the United States. Yet, Loudoun was not the only county in the DC metro area. At least eight other counties in Maryland and Northern Virginia were in the top 20. The other counties with high median household incomes were clustered either around New York City or San Francisco, which included Silicon Valley.
However, it was not the amount of income that impressed Tim, but the contrast with the other places in the world that he’d visited. In some countries, a paved road was something to behold, and Tim often wondered what would happen if he could transport a group of citizens from one of these poor counties to Loudoun County for a day and bring them over to Wegmans. These people might first faint at seeing the quantity and quality of goods available, then ask why they didn’t have the same.
For decades, consumerism was part of the foundation of US foreign policy, with the US sending messages like, “Increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable,” or “If you behave yourself and reject your form of government, all of this can be yours.” But it never seemed to work out that way. The citizens of Cuba, for example (or at least the ones that were still holding on to the dream), appeared to love their leader Fidel until the day he died and apparently still embraced that particular brand of socialism. To Tim, it seemed like the Cubans were saying, “Sure, life sucks down here, but making life better is not our job, it’s the government’s job.”
Pam’s voice brought Tim back from his daydream about the economic inequities of the world. “Now watch this, Tim.” She had lined up to a parallel parking space. Although there were plenty of open parking spots where she could have simply just pulled in, Pam pressed a button, and the S560 dutifully began to park itself.
When the car had finished, it beeped as if to say, “all done.” “Thank you,” Pam answered.
“Have you given it a name yet?” Tim asked.
“Given who a name?”
“The car. Have you given the car a name?”
“It’s a car, Tim. It doesn’t need a name. Quit being silly,” Pam teased as she pressed the auto lock button.
The 560 made three different sounds as it was locking, but, to Tim, the car also sounded as if it were saying, “Quit being silly.”
Pam grabbed a discarded shopping cart and handed it over to Tim. “Take this. There probably won’t be any inside.” And she was right.
The first section they visited was produce, and Pam went right to work examining various fruits and vegetables. Tim thought about how casual she was. Have a meeting about assassinating the President the night before, do the week’s shopping the next day. Pam had an amazing ability to compartmentalize almost everything in her life.
For that matter, so did Mary Ann. Maybe that was the one thing that Pam and Mary Ann had in common. Maybe it was what had attracted Tim to these two women in the first place. Tim was what his late grandmother used to call a “worry wart.” As a child, Tim’s grandmother would often come over to watch Tim while his parents were at work. Tim would always be fretting about money, since it was the one thing, he heard his parents constantly discuss. These discussions would filter down to Tim, and he would then express his concerns to his grandmother by saying, “I hope we have enough money for the mortgage payment” or “I hope we have enough money for food.”
Tim’s grandmother never directly addressed her grandchild’s concerns; if she had, she might have solved what would become a lifelong problem. Instead, all she would say to Tim was, “Don’t be a worry wart,” or “You’re being a worry wart, Timmy.” She never simply said, “Tim, your parents make lots of money, so there’s no reason for you to worry about losing your house or having nothing to eat.”
Most adults did not have those kinds of discussions with their children back in the 1960s. If a child had concerns about the family income these days, on the other hand, some parents would probably arrange a meeting between their children and their accountants in order to al
lay any concerns. That was just how life seemed to roll...from one extreme to the other.
Pam had now entered the meat, chicken, and fish department and was trying to determine how fresh the precooked shrimp was. “Would you like some shrimp before dinner tonight?” she asked Tim.
“Sure, honey,” Tim replied.
“I think the flounder looks good. You like flounder, don’t you?”
Tim thought that most fish, including flounder, tasted about the same, but Pam seemed to be enjoying the whole shopping experience with him, so there was no reason to disrupt the vibe. “Yes, I love flounder. Are you planning on frying it?”
“Yes, with breadcrumbs,” Pam said but she had become interested in another kind of fish on the ice and began to ask the fish man questions about it.
Pam was behaving a lot like Mary Ann would if the two of them were to go grocery shopping, which Tim thought was rather peculiar. Speaking of Mary Ann, maybe this would be a good time to try calling her. Tim pushed the shopping cart over to Pam. “Where are the restrooms in this place, Pam?”
“Up front by the check-out lines,” Pam replied, pointing in the general direction.
“Okay, thanks,” Tim said as he began to walk to the front of the store.
“Tim?” Pam called after him. “I’ll be over by the frozen foods.”
Tim waved and began to walk. When he was sure that he was out of Pam’s sight, though, he pulled out his iPhone and told it to call Mary Ann.
She picked up on the first ring. “Where the fuck are you, Tim? You told me that you would be back by now!”
Ordinarily, Tim would have tried to say something funny in order to ease the tension, but there was no time to screw around. “Are you okay, Mary Ann? Where is Toby? Did he hurt you?”
“Well, the short answer is yes, I’m okay. Toby is out, and yes he did hurt me—but again, I am okay.”
The Adults in the Room Page 13