The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  I told myself to get a grip. If Karim was what I had taken him to be, I was home free. But was he? I had no idea. For all I knew he had murdered and taken the place of the person I was supposed to meet. I had taken it on faith that this total stranger who showed me no credentials was who and what he did not say he was. I had taken the authenticity of the secrecy agreement and the contract on faith. I had signed the documents, I had handed myself over to I knew not what or whom.

  True, Jeffrey the venture capitalist, whom I had also taken on blind trust, had put the two of us together. But who and what was Jeffrey? It was not beyond the capability of hackers to create a Google entry for an impostor. Was he real? Who controlled him? My old professor, naive as she was, had vouched for him, but as Bill Stringfellow had asked, what was that worth? Stringfellow, friend of the family, had brusquely been cut out of the game and I had been glad to let this happen because he had cuckolded my father and I didn’t like the way he played the snob. I could hardly call him up now and ask him if he knew anyone named Karim.

  This was a full-scale fit of paranoia. I understood that, even as fear shook me like a rag doll. I had, as Bill Stringfellow might have phrased it, put a foot wrong. Even if Karim was the genuine Headquarters officer I had taken him to be, even if I had signed up with the right employer, I had behaved like a credulous fool.

  I willed myself to end this one-man wrestling match, but the anxiety would not quit.

  Doom held me in its hand.

  When in an irrational state, it helps to talk. I had no one to talk to, I never did, so I talked to myself. I gave myself a tongue-lashing. Like a Communist or a Christian gone berserk during a self-criticism session, I put myself on trial not only for the failures of the day, but also for every stupid move I had ever made, and I could remember them all.

  After all this venting, I felt somewhat better. The odds were that Karim was exactly what I had taken him to be, that the door of Father’s enemies had opened and let me in, and the game really was afoot. If so, I had a problem. I had imagined I could do what I wanted to do alone. Now I saw that this was impossible, because from now on anxiety was going to be my constant companion.

  The loner I was going to make of myself needed someone to talk to—someone to whom I could speak truth. Someone who would speak truth to me. I could not live without this—literally. But there were no candidates for the job.

  At the time I didn’t know that Luz Aguilar existed, let alone that she, too, had a father who had been destroyed by fools and a thirst for revenge that was equal to my own. But that was the moment when, consciously or unconsciously, I started to look for her.

  5

  The gray Toyota Corolla, gleaming with wax and neat as a pin inside, picked me up in front of Zorba’s at 7:29 A.M. This was a noteworthy feat of timing, considering how heavy traffic was at that hour of the morning. It was a bright day. The driver, a ruddy, gray-haired fellow who wore a blazer of Master’s Cup green, repeated the recognition phrase Karim had given me. I supplied the response.

  “Hop in,” he said. I hopped in anyway.

  Offering a meaty hand, he said, “I’m Sam. Please let me have your wallet and your cell phone.”

  I handed them over. Sam gave me a receipt, typed on plain paper and already signed with an illegible scrawl.

  He said, “Thanks. This stuff will be returned to you when you finish your mission. Meanwhile it’ll be sealed in a bag and locked in a safe. No one will have access to it. No photographs, no uploads. As the saying goes, your privacy is important to us. Do you have any other ID on your person or in your luggage? Luggage tag? Checkbook, anything?”

  “No.”

  I had very little cash in my pocket, and no way of getting any without an ATM card unless I wanted to beg for quarters outside a Metro station. For a moment I was tempted to repeat my earlier tantrum and accuse myself of being stupid, naive, docile, contemptible. I shoved the impulse back into the primitive brain. Sam put my belongings into a plastic bag, sealed it, and tossed it into the glove compartment.

  He said, “Don’t reveal your true name to anyone you meet while this lasts. Okay?”

  While what lasts?

  I said, “What alias should I use?”

  “Your choice, but something you’re sure you can remember, like the name of your best buddy in third grade. Or your worst enemy, as long as he’s not somebody we know.”

  He took his eyes off the road for an instant and flashed another white smile.

  He said, “Ridiculous, this mumbo jumbo, but it’s de rigueur. Before you know it, it’ll be second nature to you. Rigmarole is important in this business. So is trust. One reinforces the other. They’re just forms of reassurance, really. Recite the jabberwocky, get the answer you expect, and you know you’re talking to the right person. Unless, of course, the contact is an imposter who kidnapped the right person and assumed his identity after torturing the password and countersign out of him. Have you snatched anyone who looks just like you and waterboarded them lately?”

  I didn’t respond. He ran on.

  “You’d think that an organization that wants to be impenetrable would also want to be unpredictable, mix up the procedures, keep outsiders guessing, but that’s not the way it works,” he said. “You’ll live according to black etiquette from now on. It’s not complicated, but you have to stick to the formula. The alternative is pandemonium. The Brits taught us the drill, as they call tradecraft, when we were babes in the woods, back during the Second World War, and I guess the Romans trained the Brits and the Greeks the Romans, and the gods trained the Greeks, so we’re reading from a rule book written on clay tablets in cuneiform.”

  Sam went on with this banter, never silent for a moment, during the drive to a farmhouse in the mountains of western Maryland. It was his way, I supposed, of fending off questions. I was under no illusion that he was making it all up as he went along. Probably he had tried out these same quips on every novice he ever collected in his Corolla. The house came into view at last.

  Sam said, “Nous sommes arrivés.”

  The house was a puritanically plain two-story structure, square and painted white, maybe a hundred years old, with a big front porch. Rocking chairs on the stoop. Flowering shrubs. Hollyhocks and daisies in the flower beds. A swing hung from the branch of an oak, a basketball hoop missing the webbing was nailed to the barn. An old mud-splashed pickup truck was parked in the driveway. There were other outbuildings, a chicken coop, a corncrib, a barn of unpainted lumber weathered gray. Corn and potatoes and other crops grew in nearby fields. It didn’t quite have the feel of a working farm. It looked like what it was, a stage set. Whether it would have seemed that way if I hadn’t known it was a safe house was another question.

  Sam used his smart phone to turn off the alarm system and unlock the door—two dead bolts. We went inside.

  “Nobody home yet,” Sam said, as if in my untrained state I wouldn’t have noticed this without help.

  He showed me around, as if teaching me how to case a joint: decent, worn furniture, rag rugs and samplers (LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND BE A FRIEND TO MAN.) in the living and dining rooms, linoleum in the kitchen, varnished woodwork and flowered wallpaper throughout. Two bedrooms and one bath with tub but no shower upstairs, faded, mended Walmart clothes in the closets and drawers, a spare room fitted out like a home office: old desk, outdated computer with no Internet connection. No printer. A rotary dial black telephone.

  Sam said, “Don’t use the phone. Store nothing on the computer’s hard drive. The CD and flash drives are disabled. Can you cook?”

  “I can use a microwave.”

  “Good. The nearest McDonald’s is ten miles down the road, and you’ll have no wheels after the other guys go home at the end of the day, so it’s heat up this stuff or go hungry.”

  Tires crunched in the gravel drive. Sam held out a hand.

  “So long,” he said. “Have fun.”

  As the front door opened and anoth
er total stranger entered, Sam went out the back door. The newcomer, tall and lean, wore jeans and an old shirt and brand-new Converse sneakers. He, too, held out his hand. I wondered if there was a secret Headquarters grip and if I would learn it as part of my training. The newcomer was totally bald, with bushy eyebrows and an incongruous postage stamp of beard on his lower lip.

  In a hard-edged midwestern voice he said, “I’m Fred. What do you want me to call you?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You have no preference?”

  “No.”

  He said, “OK. I’ll call you ‘You.’”

  “Fine.”

  “While you’re here I’ll be your acting case officer. You know that term?”

  I didn’t answer the question.

  Eyebrows raised, Fred said, “That’s a yes?”

  “I’ve been to the movies.”

  He said, “Look, relax. I know all this must seem odd and you’re wondering if we are what we say we are and why or whether you should trust us, but we mean you no harm. Pretty soon you’ll be able to tell the difference between our ways and insanity. My function is to be with you throughout this process. While it lasts, I am your best and only friend. My function is to answer your questions, protect you from discovery and harm, vouch for the other people who come through the door, make sure you have what you need and, prime objective, make sure you have absorbed the Knowledge, capital K.”

  “Like a London cabdriver?”

  “More like Mark Twain’s riverboat captain. The practice of espionage is like the Mississippi. You want to have the whole river in your mind, know where the channel is, where it’s shallow, where the hidden sandbars are located, where and how to find the safe landings and send a message in a bottle if the need arises. But the river changes with time and the weather—sometimes very suddenly. It isn’t like a city where the streets have names and always take you to a certain destination and nowhere else. So you have to keep your eyes peeled and your wits about you every minute.”

  He sounded just as rehearsed as Sam. No doubt Fred had spoken these words to many neophytes before me, but his fluency, his command of the language, his confident manner and tone, impressed me all the same. Their lines might be memorized, but so were Shakespeare’s, and like Shakespeare they made you want to hear what was coming next. They had a belonger’s kind of humor that was all their own. This came to me as no surprise. Headquarters people, all of them, were smart—amusing when they wanted to be. Father never brought a dullard home.

  Fred said, “Any questions?”

  “Yes. What can I expect, and how long is this phase going to last?”

  “You can expect interesting stuff and a certain amount of what will seem silly stuff. Keep an open mind about both. The course will last a month, maybe six weeks, depending on what we’re instructed to teach you. You were sprung on us out of nowhere and at short notice. The syllabus is still under construction.”

  “I thought you trained people in groups.”

  “Usually we do. You’re a special case.”

  “Why?”

  Fred said, “There are quite a few becauses. You’re coming in with much more rank than is usual for a beginner. You’re going to be working on the outside, undercover, as what is called an Undoc or undocumented operative, so no one in Headquarters is supposed to know you under your true name except the people who will eventually handle you directly. That category doesn’t include me or anyone else you’ll meet in this house, so don’t tell us who you really are. The director and the rest of management don’t want to know about people like you, so they can truthfully say they’ve never heard of you should the need arise. We work in compartments in this business. Nobody outside your compartment will ever know everything about you and most will know nothing.”

  Oh. So that’s how Father’s sympathizers were managing this—by hiding me in plain sight. I was a penetration agent already and wonder of wonders, my target had made this happen. How amused, how unsurprised Father would have been.

  I said, “Are you in my compartment?”

  “For the time being, for the purpose at hand, we are together in a temporary compartment. When we’re done with the job we came to do, the compartment will cease to exist and for all intents and purposes, so will I. I have a job to do, cluing you in, and when I have done the job, that’s the end of our relationship. Forgetting faces and names is my specialty, and anyway I don’t know your true name or even your crypt and never want to know, so as a matter of self-discipline you should never let it slip. You did exactly the right thing by not telling me who you are, and you should never tell me or anyone else you meet in this house. This is the place where you learn to trust no one under any circumstances. When this is over, you’ll walk out of the house and out of my mind and never come back to visit at either place. If we meet on the street in Islamabad or hiking all alone across the Sahara Desert in opposite directions, and such things do happen, we’ll be mutually invisible. No eye contact, no smile, no nothing. Thus endeth the lesson.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we make some coffee—espresso, I understand you prefer it. We converse. Apart from your duty to remain anonymous, you have unconditional freedom of speech, and you’re expected to speak your mind no matter what the subject. This is a bedrock principle. Otherwise you’re not much good to us. I’ll show you training films and talk shop. Other people, specialists in the skills of the craft, some of which may seem laughable to you. I assure you they are anything but. Mostly, we wait for the others to show up. That may be the most useful part of the process—learning to wait, getting used to uncertainty, living with frustration. You’ll be doing a lot of all three in this business. That’s what field operatives do—wait for someone to show up, wait for someone to tell them something they want to know or ask them to do something Headquarters wants to get done. It’s important to know how to endure the ennui, how to recognize the right moment when it comes, how not to look to others like you’re desperate to take a leak, and all this without going crazy.”

  Fred had just told me a deep secret I already knew, having absorbed it by osmosis in the company of spies: secret work had its rewarding moments, but most of the time it was a drag. Fred studied my face as he spoke. He saw, I thought, that I already understood that simple fact and smiled a cynic’s half-hidden smile of approval. I liked that. I liked him. I liked my prospects. I told myself to shut off the warm feelings and remember why I was here.

  Nevertheless, despite my best efforts, a funny thing happened in the weeks that followed. Emotionally, I joined the club. I told myself this was essential to my cover. In a way I was already an honorary member. In the six weeks I spent at Moonshine Manor, as the instructors called the farmhouse, I underwent something like a homecoming. Nearly everyone I met reminded me in some way of my father and his friends. This came as no surprise. Father’s sympathizers had, after all, sent the people I met, and though they kept up the pretense of my anonymity, I detected signs that they knew exactly who I was and where I came from. A sense of belonging gradually awakened within me.

  Even if early memories had not been rekindled I would have taken pleasure in the company I was keeping. The people who came to teach me were brighter by several IQ points, or so it seemed to me, than any other group I had known before. After years in academia in the company of people whose minds were closed to everything their code forbade them to believe, these men and women were open-minded as a matter of professional necessity. They were good company—their humor, their refusal to be judgmental, the unswerving, even instinctive way in which they chose reality over delusion. The atmosphere was intoxicating—especially knowing, as I did after years and years of higher education, that no scholar I had ever encountered would believe for a nanosecond what I just got through telling you.

  Not that I wasn’t cautioned to think twice. Fred was there to confiscate the rose-colored glasses.

  “Don’t get carried away,” he said. “Everyone who comes h
ere is on his best behavior. There’s a reason for that. They’re expected to make a good impression on newcomers and stimulate exactly the reaction you seem to be having. Plus, you’re no run-of-the-mill recruit. Personages on high are interested in you. These guys are not supposed to know that, but they do. In time—who knows?—you yourself may become a personage on high. They want to please such personages. But remember where you are and what we do in this profession, and what you’re going to be doing. Espionage is not religion or politics, whose appeal derives from the contradiction of reality. In theory, at least, it is the enemy of moral certitude, the defender of proof. Proof is almost always just beyond reach, but it’s useful to know as much as it is possible to know. An intelligence service is authorized under the unspoken law to carry out its responsibilities by any means necessary. The fact is, intelligence services exist to commit crimes on foreign soil for the benefit of a government. That is their charter, their reason for being. Espionage is a criminal activity, and in every country but their own, spies are felons and worse than felons. Never forget that. What we do, what we are, deserve at least some of the skepticism this activity inspires.”

  Now he studied my face, eyes alert, smile repressed. Apparently he gleaned some fragment of my thoughts—or wanted me to think that he did. He released the smile.

  Again he said, “Thus endeth the lesson.”

  In the short time we remained together, Fred never again strayed into philosophy. My time at Moonshine Manor flew. I went forth into the world. Firearms instruction excepted, few of the clandestine techniques I learned from my teachers were of much use to me in the years that followed. They just sprayed paint on the invisible man that I was supposed to be. In time the sense of camaraderie was cooled by experience as I discovered that not everyone I met inside the Inside was all that different, after all was said and done, from the folks I knew in academia and politics.

  Mammals are mammals. They like to stay close to one another, to walk as one in a perpetual circle, mentally in step, to be the same color and size, to munch the same grass, to go back the next year to the same starting point and do it all over again, to see the genetic and other benefits of having mavericks like my father who left the herd eaten by predators.