by Mark Henshaw
She didn’t bother unfolding the paper after sitting down. “Thank you for talking to me,” she said.
“My lawyer said I shouldn’t,” Hadfield told her.
“Then why—”
“They offered me a deal,” Hadfield said, cutting her off. “Cooperate and they won’t put me in Supermax. I’m going to take it.”
Kyra tossed that answer around in her head for a minute. “You won’t have any leverage at sentencing if you tell me everything.”
“They’ll make sure I’m in prison until I’m dead no matter what I do. The only question is which prison I end up in,” Hadfield told her. He shrugged. “The Agency will want to interview me eventually anyway . . . one of those counterintelligence studies to see what they could’ve done to prevent me from committing treason.”
“So what could they have done?” Kyra asked.
Hadfield looked down at the table. He smiled, a dark grin that Kyra found morose. “Tried to save Sam, for starters. They don’t care about right and wrong up there on the Seventh Floor,” he said.
“They didn’t know that the man leading the search had a conflict of interest in her being found. There are good people up there, on the Seventh Floor. I know several of them. But we have our share of sociopaths, the same as every other agency.” She stared at him. “You’re not one of them. You’re a good man.”
“You don’t have kids.”
“No.”
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“Episcopalian, in theory.”
He sighed. “Sitting in that hospital, month after month . . . we saw other people’s kids die. Little girls and boys eaten up by cancer. But we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t going to happen to our boy. He was special, he was going to make it. Then he didn’t. Watching your child die like that . . . it cleans up your priorities. You know what really matters? Life. That’s it. Every single person on this planet is alive, and that makes them infinitely valuable, and when they’re dead, we can’t get them back.” The man finally looked up. “You saw my personnel file.”
Kyra nodded. “I did.”
“Do you know how many times anyone called me after Aric went into the hospital, to ask how he was doing? How I was doing or my family? Not once. I never heard from anyone at the Agency. My first day back, I walked into my chief’s office. You know what he said? ‘Oh, where have you been?’ ” Hadfield looked up at the camera in the corner, silent, running the memories through his mind. “They completely forgot about me . . . about Sam and our son. Sam tried to deal with all of it by cutting me out of her life and disappearing back onto the street. Me? They stuck me in a storage closet, like they didn’t want to see me so they wouldn’t have to be reminded of how they dropped us when Aric got sick.”
Kyra kept her face still, but she could taste the disgust rising in her chest. Hadfield had already served a prison sentence of a kind.
“So I had time on my hands to think in there.” He was talking to the wall now. “They don’t care about us . . . managers, any of ’em, all the way up to the Seventh Floor. They don’t care about us or the people in the field or our assets. They don’t even care about defending the country really. Doesn’t matter if they don’t get the job done, as long as they don’t screw something up. They just care about protecting their little empires so they can move up to take over another one that’s a little bigger than the last one. You have to leave for a while because your kid gets cancer, and they just forget about you because you’re not doing anything to make them look good. You get sent on some mission and go missing, well, they’ll just cover that up, never mind actually trying to save you.” Hadfield shifted in his chair and finally looked at Kyra again.
Kyra stared at him, amazed, her mind trying to sort through the implications of his admission. “You never cared about Israel.”
“I care the same as everyone else,” Hadfield said. “But I would’ve talked to some other foreign intel agency if it would’ve done the job.”
“That’s cold.”
“I know,” the man said, surprising Kyra. “I didn’t see another way. Maybe it was the wrong thing for the right reason, but the Agency wasn’t going to do the right thing for the right reason. Tell me if you think I’m wrong.”
She wasn’t sure that he was. Kyra let the silence settle for almost a minute. “You knew the Bureau was going to find you eventually,” she protested.
“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “But you know what kept going through my mind? That, at some point, Sam must’ve realized she wasn’t going to see home again. She wasn’t going to see her family again. Do you know what that feels like, when you finally give up hope?”
“No,” Kyra admitted.
Hadfield nodded, approving of her honest answer. “I do. I got a taste of it when the doctors told me Aric was going to die. They knew a week before it happened.” Hadfield shook his head. “But Sam? One person, unique in all the universe, and they let her die, all alone. I sat there wondering how long she held on before she gave up hope.” He looked down. “Someone had to make it right.”
Kyra considered that for a moment, pushed herself away from the table, and stood up. “I’ll be in the courtroom tomorrow, if you want me there.”
“That would be very nice, thank you,” Hadfield said. “Would you tell Sam’s family what happened to her?”
“That decision hasn’t been made, but I think they will be told,” Kyra offered. “I know Director Barron. He’s a good man. I think he’ll approve it.”
“Will you do something for me?”
“If I can.”
“Tell Sam’s family what I did for her.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Kyra replied.
“Whatever details you can share,” Hadfield pleaded. “Let them know that I loved her.”
Kyra pressed her lips together and considered the request. “I’ll find a way,” she promised.
Mossad Headquarters
Tel Aviv, Israel
“You have done our country the highest service,” Ronen announced. Salem and her team stood in his office at formal attention. “Two of your team gave their lives. Two others are in the hospital and do not stand with you today. We will honor them all very soon. But all of Israel thanks you.”
“Thank you, sir,” the senior Ayin replied.
“Have you anything to ask me?” Ronen offered. “In this life, we often must act on orders without knowing why. I think you have earned the right now to ask for the reasons behind your mission.”
No one spoke for several seconds. Finally, the Ayin broke the silence. “We do not need to ask that.”
“Very good,” Ronen replied. “Our thanks to you all. I ask you all to join me at the hospital tomorrow when I go to meet with your injured teammates.”
“We will be there,” the Ayin confirmed.
Ronen nodded and the team began to file out of the room. “Salem, a moment,” he said.
She stopped and waited for the rest of her teammates to leave the room. “Sir,” she said.
“What do you think of this team?”
She waited a moment to answer. “I have not been with them long enough to speak with authority, sir . . . but I will be very surprised if there is a better unit.”
“That is a good answer,” Ronen told her. “Loyalty and humility are both traits we value here. Would you like to stay with that unit?”
“If they will have me,” Salem agreed.
“I will talk to them tomorrow.”
“Sir, about your offer earlier . . . may I ask a question?”
“Yes,” Ronen assured the woman.
“The explosion at Qom that buried the RTGs . . . was that one of our teams?”
“Teams? No. It was one man,” Ronen told her.
“I was not aware that we had any officers acting alone in Iran,” Salem said, confused.
Ronen smiled. “He was someone who stayed behind there, a long time ago. So long that I had thought he had forgotten us.”
“If he ever wants to come home, I would like to volunteer for the operation to bring him out,” Salem offered. “It would be a privilege to perform that service for such a man.”
Ronen nodded. “He will never ask that, I am sure. But we will have need of other services from you, Salem.”
“At your convenience, ramsad,” Salem said.
Appomattox, Virginia
It had taken the convoy over three hours to drive this far from Langley. The director’s SUV, armored and flanked by two others filled with security officers carrying heavy arms, rolled west on Route 360, having left Richmond more than an hour before. Kyra knew they were following the path that Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had marched during their last week before Grant had finally caught them. They had passed Five Forks, then Burkeville, Saylor’s Creek, High Bridge, and Farmville, all sites Kyra had read about many times in the Civil War books that filled the bookshelves in her apartment up north, but she had never come to see them. She would have to correct that now. History was not meant to stay only on the printed page.
The surrender site was only a few miles ahead, a lonely little village, on the way to nowhere. This had been tobacco country once, farms worked by slaves who outnumbered their masters. The slavery was long gone, but change still came slowly to this part of Virginia. Most of the countryside was filled with cornfields, dead stalks marking the harvest just finished, and enormous pine forests that looked almost the same as when General Lee and his troops, clad in butternut rags and dying of exhaustion and lack of food, had passed through.
Kyra could imagine why Samantha Todd’s mother had settled here after her daughter had gone missing. The CIA officer had grown up less than thirty miles away and she knew what the people were like here. They would be friendly, helpful when Sarah Todd needed help, but no one would pry into her life. When someone finally did figure out who she was, the locals would give her a respectful distance, never asking her to talk about what happened more than she wanted. When she did finally open up, she would encounter nothing but Southern compassion, endless hospitality, and more people sharing her disgust for Washington than she could have imagined. The opinion that the locals held of the federal government hadn’t improved much since Lee’s surrender.
Kyra smiled. She wondered how many Yankee tourists even noticed that the cannons on display in front of the local courthouses in Virginia still always pointed north.
Kathy and Jon were sitting in the seat behind her, holding hands, saying nothing. Jon had always been comfortable keeping company only with his thoughts, which trait he seemed to have passed to his wife, who was looking out the windows at the farms and small businesses along the roadside.
Barron was sitting next to Kyra in the seat behind the driver. He would be the Agency director for a few weeks longer, and she wondered who would replace him. Not William Fallon, she thought. Matthew Hadfield was a traitor, but he had done his Agency a service. He got what he wanted, she thought. It just cost him what little he had left.
“You look disturbed,” Barron said, and she turned toward him. She had thought he was reviewing papers. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed him put them away.
“Thinking about Matt Hadfield,” Kyra said.
“What about him?”
“He was a traitor, but he wasn’t wrong.” Kyra looked over at the man. “When we recruit foreign assets, we’re always hoping we get that one who does it because he sees his government is corrupt or dangerous and wants to fix it. It hurts when we’re the corrupt ones.”
Barron nodded. “Yeah, it does. You read the history of the Agency and heaven knows some of our people have gone off the reservation over the years. And it’ll happen again.”
“How do we stop it?”
“You can’t,” Kathy said. Kyra turned toward the backseat. “People forget that honor is earned by the way we do things as much as by the things we try to do. You remember Edward Snowden?”
“Yes.”
“When I was the director, a reporter asked me one time whether I considered Snowden a patriot or a traitor. Of course, she expected me to say that he was a traitor. So she was surprised when I told her that he could be both.”
Kyra furrowed her brow. “How is that possible?”
“Assuming that Snowden was telling the truth about his motives, his goal of exposing systems that were violating civil liberties wasn’t a bad one. The intelligence community has a responsibility to obey the law. So in that sense, he was a patriot. He saw something wrong and he thought someone should act,” Kathy said. “Where he went wrong was in how he chose to act. He grabbed a mountain of classified information, fled the country, and began spewing it across the Internet. He decided that his cause was just, so anything he did to achieve it was also just. He decided the ends justified the means. He ended up endangering a lot of people and compromising a lot of programs that weren’t violating anyone’s liberties.” Kathy sighed. “So he’s a traitor. Maybe his goal was righteous, but his actions in pursuit of it did an astonishing amount of damage. Was the damage he caused worth reaching his goal? That’s the question, and that’s why he needs to come home and stand trial. He can argue yes, we can argue no, and let a judge decide who’s right.”
Barron nodded. “Hadfield was in the same position. The Agency is better off without people like Fallon, but Hadfield helped Mossad wage a covert war on Iran. They killed Iranian scientists, terrorized an ally, murdered a man who was helping the Brits keep an eye on Iran’s nuclear program—”
“I think Gavi Ronen would say that Israel is better off for it,” Jon observed.
“It might be,” Kathy admitted. “But Hadfield’s loyalty isn’t supposed to be to Israel. It’s supposed to be to the United States. So the only time he gets to decide whether the US should be helping Mossad is when he votes in November. If he doesn’t like that, he’s free to give up his citizenship and emigrate.”
“Don’t you think what he did is partly the Agency’s fault?” Kyra asked. “The way his managers treated him after his son died? I can’t blame him for deciding that no one cared, and once he reached that conclusion, it wasn’t much of a jump for him to decide that the Agency had left Sam Todd to rot on purpose. I can’t help but think that he wouldn’t have followed that path if someone had tried to connect with him after his son died.”
“I think that’s probably right,” Barron agreed. “No question, a lot of people failed him. No doubt, he needed some PTSD counseling that he didn’t get, but in the end, he took the same oath everyone else did, and that oath doesn’t make exceptions for when our leaders treat us badly or even when we have emotional problems. We’re all responsible for our own decisions, no matter what happens to us personally. If we think we’ve come to a place where we can’t keep the oath, it’s our duty to walk away. Hadfield didn’t. The rest of his story might mean he deserves a lighter sentence than someone who committed treason for money, and he’ll get counseling and meds in prison. But in the end, he made the wrong choice and he needs to answer for it.”
The SUV turned off the main road onto a winding driveway, unpaved, the solid rubber tires kicking up loose rocks. Through the trees, Kyra could see a house, colonial design, remarkably modern for this rural county. “And now,” Barron said, “we get to answer to Mrs. Todd.” He turned to the other passengers in the vehicle. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thank you for asking me to come,” Kathy told her successor. “I wish we’d been able to do this years ago.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to do it without you,” Barron replied.
Sarah Todd stepped out of the front door onto her porch and stood watching the convoy of black vehicles rumble down her driveway. She was an old woman, her hair entirely white now, looking far older than the woman Kyra had seen in the newspaper. Standing behind her were two others, a man and a woman, both of them her children.
“They have to know why we’re here,” Kyra said.
Barron nodded. “Yeah. But the
re’s still something about having someone come and deliver the news in person. It’s terrible and wonderful at the same time. It hurts to let go.”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve done this,” Kyra realized. She looked back at Jon’s wife. Kathy said nothing, but the look on her face was one of complete understanding. Not her first time either.
“No, it’s not,” Barron confirmed. “Probably my last.”
The cars rolled to a stop. Barron didn’t wait for the security escort to open his door. He pushed his way out, then helped Kathy from the SUV. Jon followed, resting his weight on his cane as he found his footing. Kathy took his hand in hers and they began to walk toward the porch as Kyra dismounted and followed behind them.
“Mrs. Sarah Todd?” Barron asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Clark Barron. I’m the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This is Kathryn Cooke, my predecessor.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Barron. And we’ve met, haven’t we, Miss Cooke?”
“Yes, we have,” Kathy agreed.
“You’re here to talk to me about Samantha,” the old woman said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, ma’am, we are.” Barron gestured toward the analysts in the group. “This is Jonathan Burke and Kyra Stryker, two of our officers. They took on your daughter’s case recently and they found out what happened to her.”