Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  I called the office via the special number we were given for emergencies. Only Paul and Iris visited me in the hospital. Iris brought flowers and a shiny helium balloon printed with GET WELL SOON! and a picture of Garfield. She fussed over me. “Oh my God,” she said, fluttering around the bed, arranging things. “Trust you to get appendicitis right before the toughest part of training.”

  I spent the week after returning home sleeping. The only consolation was that at least I could lie in bed until it was time to go back to the Farm.

  I was by no means back to normal by the day I drove back to the Farm, and I had none of the sense of ebullient expectation I’d had the last time we went down. The surgeons seemed to have removed not only my appendix but my bravado. Many of us were expected to flunk out in the coming months, and I suspected I was a prime candidate.

  There were to be no more boisterous weekly bus rides. We would be driving ourselves to and from the Farm each week; the curriculum would require us to meet imaginary assets throughout the region, and we needed our cars to drive to the meetings. I drove to the Farm alone through a vile hailstorm, traffic heavy and ominous on the interstate, praying that I would remember the way. When at last I arrived, I saw that the once green hills were covered in frost and the trees were bare, their branches like spider legs.

  I hauled my suitcase over the icy parking lot and up to the room I’d been assigned. We had shared communal barracks in paramilitary training, but now we each had a small room to ourselves, in a utilitarian dormitory. Mine was small, simple, and clean, almost antiseptic, with a concrete balcony that opened onto a view of another concrete building.

  I set down my suitcase and stood in the doorway, contemplating the twin bed with starched white sheets and the powder blue blanket tucked around the mattress in neat hospital corners. Above the bed, a bland seascape stared from the wall, the kind of mass-manufactured pastel one finds in a motel. The carpet was thin and fuzzy, wall-to-wall drab, a color immune to staining. I looked in the bathroom, half expecting to see a ribbon around the toilet indicating that it had been sanitized for my protection. No ribbon, but the bathroom smelled of industrial-grade cleanser, so perhaps it had been sanitized nonetheless.

  I sat on the bed. The sheets smelled of bleach, and the blanket was neither soft nor warm. There was no television, no radio. No plants. I was the only living thing in the room.

  I wondered if there were cameras installed in the walls. I looked closely at the fire detector, which sat sullenly on the ceiling like an eye, but I found nothing—not that I would have known what to look for. I had brought a few books with me but didn’t feel like reading. It was too cold to go for a walk.

  I had sublet my apartment in McLean and put my things in storage to save on rent while I was away. I would be spending weekends here as well as weeks.

  I realized that I was feeling sorry for myself. I told myself to suck it up. After all, I said to myself, you joined the CIA, not the Girl Scouts.

  Hal Hertz, the course director, strode to the center of the stage to address us. He gripped the podium with both hands. “Listen up, gang,” he said. “You’re in for a tough time. If you think this is all bullshit, you’re gonna be in for a rude surprise. The day after you graduate, you could be meeting assets. You could be on a plane for Bogotá or Moscow. People’s lives and this country’s security will depend on you. So take this seriously, because if you don’t, you’re out of here. Look around you: A lot of the people you see aren’t going to be here at the end of this class. Because if we don’t think you have the chops, we aren’t going to let you graduate. Everyone understand?”

  He was bald and angular; he wore a goatee and a narrow tie. The veins stood out along his temples and forehead. His dark eyebrows pointed to the tip of his long, thin nose; he had flared nostrils and bloodless lips; his face was lean and cold.

  “We’re going to test you. We’re going to see how you handle surprises. We’re going to see how you handle stress. How you perform when you’ve had no sleep. How you handle being watched. How you handle criticism. We’re going to see if you make mistakes. We’re going to see if you make them twice, and if you do, you won’t be around for long. We’re going to see how you work with other people. Yes, those are closed-circuit cameras in the conference rooms. No, there aren’t any in your bathrooms. There are some things they don’t pay us enough to watch. But everywhere else, we’re going to be watching you. And what we want to know is: Do you make the grade?”

  Stan smoked. He was the only other smoker in our class.

  We had a full week of introductory briefings. At the end of the second day, I realized that I was out of cigarettes. I checked all my pockets but found nothing. The Farm’s little commissary was already closed. I walked out of my room, prepared to drive all the way to the 7-Eleven, a good twenty miles away. It was raining and already dark.

  Stan’s room was down the corridor from mine, and I nearly walked into him as he opened his door. He was very large, with a pale, doughy face, and his thick, brushy hair stood straight up. “Hey, you!” he said, beaming cheerfully.

  “Hey yourself,” I answered, and then remembered that he smoked. “Stan! You wouldn’t have any cigarettes on you, would you?”

  “Of course I do,” he replied. “Come on in.” He held the door open for me and extended his arm as if flourishing a cape. I walked into his room. It was extremely tidy. I went out to his balcony, because it was against federal regulations to smoke indoors. He followed, and offered me a Balkan Sobranie from a sleek silver case.

  “You know, I’ve never really talked to you before,” he said, lighting my cigarette with a matching filigreed-silver lighter.

  “Now’s your chance.”

  “I’ve been curious about you. This kind of work doesn’t usually attract Sanskritists. How did you end up here?”

  “The alternative was the tenure track at Mongeheela State University. I just couldn’t face it.”

  An intelligent understanding sparkled across his face and he chuckled. I liked that. I’d explained that to another classmate, the one who made noises when he chewed. He’d looked confused, then said, “Mongeheela’s a pretty good school, isn’t it? I think one of my sister’s friends goes there.”

  We bantered a bit and finished our cigarettes, and I thanked him. “Anytime,” he said. “It’s always good to have a partner in vice.”

  The class began with lectures about the proper format for intelligence reports. The subject was dull, but like tax code, the details were critical and getting them wrong could land you in a heap of hurt. Reports had to be slugged so that they reached all and only those with a need to know, but determining who precisely comprised this set was as much art as science. If you sent the report to too many people, you increased the risk to your source; if you sent it to too few, it could be missed by the one person who fully understood its significance.

  Wally, the lecturer that first week, was a nervous public speaker, and the class was cruel to her. On the fifth day, some of the students made bingo squares out of her pet phrases: I cannot stress this enough, or, You really need to be detail-oriented, guys and gals. They marked their cards covertly every time she used one of these locutions, and the student who filled his card first had to lift his hand and use the word bingo in a question. “Wally, excuse me for a moment, I’m not sure I understand. Let’s say you have a report already in dissemination, but the next day your asset shows up and—bingo—he tells you that some part of the information he gave you was inaccurate. Do you have to issue the whole report again, or can you just issue a correction?” I think Wally figured out what was going on, and her feelings were hurt. I felt bad for her.

  I started borrowing cigarettes from Stan at the breaks and smoking with him in his room after class. “Don’t worry about it,” he said when I wondered whether we’d get in trouble for smoking indoors. “It’s cold out. The housekeeper won’t rat on us—I’ve got things arranged with her.”

  “You do? How?” />
  “We’ve just got an understanding.”

  Stan’s room was identical to mine, but his was more appealing: It was orderly and fresh. He lit scented candles to keep the air from smelling like smoke. He had arranged his crisply pleated clothes into neat stacks on his shelves and organized them by color. A burnished wooden box on his dresser contained two small, perfectly symmetrical pyramids of imported cigarettes. On his bedside table, water murmured over the smooth pebbles of a feng shui fountain. He had brought a portable CD player to the Farm, along with a few collections of piano sonatas. When I knocked on his door, his room was always calm, and he always seemed happy to see me.

  As we smoked, we talked about the same thing everyone there talked about—everyone else. Stan was dismissive of Joe, the vigorous Green Beret I’d admired during paramilitary training. “Sure, he’s good at jumping out of planes,” he said. “That’s great. Except that our job isn’t to jump out of planes, it’s to recruit assets. And if you want to get up close and personal with some Palestinian terrorist, jumping out of planes won’t help you much, will it. I’d much rather use someone who, say, speaks Arabic. Or maybe someone who’s read the Koran. Or any book your target might have read. Or, hell, any book. And I’d really like someone who knows something about the history and the culture of the Middle East. Frankly, I’d prefer a guy who doesn’t have a jar haircut that screams ‘Duck for cover! I’m CIA!’ Nine-tenths of the people we’d want to recruit would be terrified if they met someone like that. Joe’s a relic. He’s CIA circa 1961. He’s Bay of Pigs. He has no subtlety.”

  A few days later, I asked Stan if he regretted having missed the paramilitary training. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, I’m sorry I failed the fitness test. That was embarrassing. I used to be in great shape, in college, when I fenced, but—” He shrugged and gestured vaguely at his paunch, as if it were just something he happened to carry around, like an umbrella. “I have other priorities now. I just don’t have the time to spend hours in the gym. And not going to the Farm over the summer was a good thing for me. A very good thing.”

  “Why?”

  “I was working on some pretty interesting stuff back at Headquarters.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Can’t talk about it.”

  “Oh,” I said, since there was nothing else I could say. I finished my cigarette, and we rose to go back to the auditorium.

  “Let’s say you were kidnapped by terrorists,” Stan said that evening when I came over again. “They’ve got you blindfolded and tied to a chair. They’ve got a gun to your head. One of the people in our class is going to negotiate your release. Which one would you want it to be?” Stan loved gaming out espionage scenarios, and he loved sizing up our classmates.

  I thought through the group. Nathan would tell them they could keep me, I supposed. I imagined Iris and had a swift vision of her calling her interlocutor a camelfucker and punching him in the nose. What about Kirk, who had been assigned to the seat next to mine in the auditorium? Kirk had been a Marine before joining the Agency. Wiry and pockmarked, he still wore his hair shorn to his skull; he walked with the tense, erect posture of a professional soldier. He kept a wad of tobacco between his teeth and gums, and spoke out of one side of his mouth so the juice didn’t run down his chin. When he sat down, he splayed his legs far apart. I once heard him talk about the safest way to meet an asset who might cause trouble: “You put the guy in the front seat. You sit in the back, so you can pop him if he gets squirrelly. Make sure you put plastic on the seat or it’ll get ruined when his sphincter goes.”

  “Kirk,” I answered.

  “What? Why the hell would you put your life in the hands of that psycho?”

  “Because he looks mean as hell, and I want them to believe that we might just be crazy enough to drop the Big One on them.”

  Stan shook his head as if he were disappointed. “Why, who would you choose?” I asked.

  “Marcia.”

  “Marcia?” Marcia seemed like a sweet girl. Youngish, a little younger than everyone else. I didn’t know her well. She had slim legs and an ample bosom and an unassuming face. Paul had put the moves on her once; she’d turned him down.

  “Marcia. I don’t know if anyone here could do it right, but at least Marcia’s charming. She wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do, and she’d admit it. So she might try asking politely. And that might have a hope of working.”

  I had no idea whether he was right. I’d have never thought of Marcia. I was chagrined that he’d thought so little of my answer. “Maybe,” I said, and wondered whether Stan was more cunning than I, or Marcia more charming.

  We had been at the Farm for two weeks. Wally finished her lessons on reporting formats, and an instructor named Bill took over, lecturing on defectors. Make sure you offer him a beverage, Bill stressed. See if he needs a hot meal. He’s a human being. He’s just made the biggest decision of his life, and he doesn’t know if it was a good idea. He’s frightened. People in trouble are like baby ducks. They imprint on the first thing they see. He’ll be looking at you and wondering, “Are you my mommy?”

  In the afternoons and evenings, we had exercises in writing cables and reports, which came back from the instructors the next day covered in red ink. We began studying dead drops—places to leave money and messages for our agents, who in turn would leave the secrets we were purchasing. The instructors told us to drive out to the countryside to look for suitable sites, warning that we might be under surveillance and had better not look like spies casing the area.

  After class one day, Stan offered to help me. “I heard you had a few problems back at Headquarters,” he said tactfully. “I could go out with you, sit in the passenger side, see if maybe I can give you some pointers. I’ve taught a couple of people how to drive. I’m pretty good at it.”

  Everyone knew I had failed surveillance detection, but only Stan had ever offered to lend me a hand. I accepted his offer gratefully. He started giving me lessons late in the evenings. We drove the back roads of the Virginia countryside, bleak and forlorn in the dead of winter. Every road seemed to lead to a strip mall, each one a featureless checkerboard of giant Kmarts and Tastee-Freezes, Denny’s and Fashion Bugs, International Houses of Pancakes. Clumps of dirty snow were piled up by the sides of the parking lots. Treading gingerly over the ice, Stan and I searched for places to leave our packages, sketching sites in our notebooks. We practiced spotting vehicles that might be surveillance. He told me what to look for, giving me tips. “See the way that car is parked there? The way its nose is pointed out? Why would it be parked that way when no one else is?”

  “I guess to make it easier to pull out in a hurry?”

  “Exactly. Excellent. See, you can do this. Keep an eye on that car.” Sure enough, the evil thing slipped out behind us, holding steady in our wake. “Gotcha, Ratface,” he said, glancing in the side mirror, moving his eyes but not his head.

  Then he looked in mirror again and muttered, “Damn, it’s YWP-7182.”

  “Pardon?”

  “YWP-7182. Just saw him again. We saw him up on the freeway. And by the Taco Bell.”

  “You were memorizing license plate numbers on the freeway?”

  “I wasn’t memorizing them—I just remember them.”

  “You mean you were just looking at license plate numbers and you happened to recognize this one from the hundreds of license plates we saw before? I mean, thousands?”

  “Don’t you do that too?”

  “Are you kidding me? Of course I don’t.”

  “How do you know when you’re being followed, then?”

  “Let me get this straight: You just remember thousands of license plate numbers? You don’t write them down or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t look: What’s the license plate of the car three cars behind us, in the right lane?”

  “YYT-9688.”

  Oh my God. He’s right. He has a memory like Deep Blue.

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nbsp; I was intimidated, and impressed.

  Stan had been a corporate lawyer before he joined the Agency. His specialty was class-action suits—not filing them, but beating them. “You wouldn’t believe,” he said, “how much time and money my clients had to spend to defend themselves from people so dumb they don’t even check to see whether the burger is hot before they put it in their mouths.” Even in casual conversation, he often spoke as if he were closing a case before a jury, stacking articles of evidence one upon the other, marshaling his arguments to a vigorous conclusion. “The map says we should take the next exit,” he said to me once, “but that’s only dispositive.”

  Oddly, though, as soon as he began to plead his case before that imaginary jury, his voice would become high and thin, a strange counterpoint to his fluency and an even stranger contrast to his stout physique. One expected a rich, stentorian bass to emerge from that barrel chest, but instead his voice was reedy and compressed, almost womanish. It was unattractive. I noticed this with guilt. I wanted to consider his appearance charitably, but I couldn’t. He was tall and huge, but his limbs were disproportionately short; his forearms were stumpy like flippers. He had a double chin and a broad bottom. His eyes were close and beady; his nose and mouth were too small for his large, fleshy head; his skin was pale and freckled and his hair stood straight up in a brushy orange tuft. He had a determined, stout man’s short-legged stride. He was often out of breath.

  He dressed very seriously. At Headquarters, Stan had worn a dark suit and tie to work every day, even though the CIA had a casual-dress policy. “This is the CIA,” he told me, “not some Silicon Valley start-up. It’s not a casual job.” When we had visitors at the Farm from Headquarters, Stan put on a suit. He matched his good silk ties with his muted argyle socks and a display handkerchief, securing his French cuffs with the heavy gold cuff links he’d acquired on his litigator’s salary. His casual wear was strictly prep school: crisply ironed khaki trousers and polo shirts, Ray-Ban sunglasses tied around his neck by a cord. I asked if he might be more comfortable if he wore jeans and a sweater to class like everyone else; he looked at me doubtfully.