Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  At the base of the path he held his arms out. And when she got to him they walked to rocky steps that led down to the ocean. You could dive right from the rocks, if you were brave enough. Anna looked out at the blue.

  “Not provincial,” she said, and dove in.

  The water was cold. She wanted to see how far she could go underwater without needing to come up for air. She kept swimming until she could feel her lungs constrict, then pushed to the surface. She expected to turn and see him back at the shore. He hadn’t struck her as someone who could keep up with her. Yet when she turned, he was right there, not even ten feet away. He’d been swimming alongside her the entire time.

  “Jesus, you’re quiet,” she said.

  “Practice.”

  Q.

  A.

  There was a girl in my class from California, all into the environment, who used to brag about how she took a bus to Langley, and I always felt like saying, What kind of real spy takes the bus? But you can’t get into people’s politics. You can’t stand up and express your views, not at that level, not at the start. Your thoughts must be exclusively focused on only one thing: CIA über alles. Which is to say, not the ozone layer. Pick your battles.

  * * *

  —

  CIA 101 is a weeklong introduction to the Agency, where they read you in. On the first day you get your top-secret clearances. One, called Keyhole, is named for satellites, the view from space. You’re given a pseudonym, and the protocols around using the pseudo are explained, like how on email the last names of pseudos are always shown in caps so you can easily know when you’re communicating with someone under cover. Tony Q. HAWK, say, or Barack H. OBAMA. In that class there were future officers, analysts, lawyers. It’s important to befriend the lawyers; you will need them later. The various directorates come and give lectures. Years ago this was all done at the Farm but at some point someone realized not everyone needs the Farm. Lawyers don’t need to know how to jump out of planes. Case officers don’t need to know, either.

  * * *

  —

  On breaks I would wander around the in-house museum. My favorite piece in the collection is a large wooden plaque that was given to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow by a group of Russian schoolchildren. He hung it right over his desk at the embassy where it stayed for several years until someone suggested it be examined. It contained a sophisticated listening device. The Russians had kept transcripts of everything said in that office. After that, no one said very much in embassy offices.

  * * *

  —

  I was assigned to an office in China Operations. China and Russia are the most restricted parts of the Agency because of the counterespionage risk. Most doors at Langley don’t require locks or codes, but to enter the China division I had to ring a buzzer and wait. Someone eventually opened the door and said, Yes? So I told them, Yes, hello, I work here, may I please come in, and they shut the door. When the door reopened it was Noel. I was told he had once been a branch chief within China Ops, an outlier, a cowboy. He had long before stopped working there but came around. I wouldn’t learn how to be a case officer at the Farm. I would learn from him.

  Lobster.

  Have you ever told a lie? That was what Anna asked him.

  In response he had laughed and said, I’ve literally lied to every single person I’ve ever met.

  They were swimming slowly back to shore. She was thinking about acts of omission. She was thinking about how she would describe her afternoon, if asked about it. Perhaps it was simply a swim.

  As they walked up the hill to the hotel he told her a story.

  “Bill Donovan founded the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. He was so excited about the development of the silencer he took a twenty-two into the Oval Office.”

  “A gun?”

  “And Roosevelt was there alone, on the phone. He didn’t look up when Donovan entered. He didn’t look up when Donovan said his name. So Donovan said his name again, and when the president didn’t look up a second time, Donovan fired the gun.”

  “At Roosevelt?”

  “At the wall. He only wanted Roosevelt’s attention.”

  “I should try that sometime,” Anna said, thinking about levels of distraction, about attention she had needed at different times.

  “Well, don’t try with a silencer.”

  “What happened to the wall?”

  “Eventually, it was repaired.”

  Eventually everything is repaired.

  They said goodbye, Anna thanked him for the olives and the stories and the swim, and he thanked her for the company. She went up to her room and slipped out of her suit, then crawled into bed for a nap. When her husband woke her, he did so gently. It was already dark, and they spent some time together before dinner as she thought about the hole in the Oval Office and silencers, and he thought about how blessed he was to have this beautiful girl. He was committed to helping her find peace.

  * * *

  —

  They went for dinner late. Her husband had insisted on Champagne so she’d had just a sip. Champagne reminded her of her mother, who stocked the icebox with six-packs of miniature Perrier-Jouëts. She drank it on ice, claiming it sped the metabolism.

  After oysters Anna excused herself to wash her hands but walked past the WC out into the night. The sky was filled with stars. And there he was, smoking.

  “Hey, Roosevelt,” he said. And then, “I’m trying to get your attention.” The sly tone was ironic, and disarming.

  “I liked that story,” she said. She watched him take his cigarette and flick it out over the garden, sending an arc of orange light into the sky.

  “I should go,” she said, after a few minutes, after a few things had been said. She held out her hand, as we all do when saying goodbye, and he took it in both of his, briefly, before letting go.

  Her husband had started on the lobsters without her. A side plate was already piled with cracked shells. Lemons had been squeezed and crushed into a bowl. As she sat down he looked up, barely registering she’d been gone. He was cradling his phone on his shoulder, though on seeing her he put it down on the table, leaving the call running on mute. He held his hands out, as if to welcome her, as if to indicate he wanted her right then. She looked at his hands and thought about the hands that had just held on to hers.

  She leaned in for a kiss. She looked at the shells.

  “I am sorry, I couldn’t wait,” he said, like a child.

  She forgave him. She always forgave him.

  Q.

  A.

  On my first trip, to Africa, I was accompanied by an older female ops officer. I was shy and wouldn’t have started a conversation, but as we took off she turned to me and started talking. She had a whole theory about espionage and why people go into it. Her theory was that only broken people want to spend their lives avoiding deep emotional commitments with loved ones while establishing deep emotional commitments with people they will eventually betray.

  * * *

  —

  She told me there’s a fine line between flirting and not flirting, and that minding the line was critical to career advancement. She said in her view men are simple and that you need to know only two things about a man to understand him: who he’s in love with and what his Achilles’ heel is, what he needs and what he fears. I asked her what happens when what you need and what you fear are the same thing. Well, then you’re fucked, she said.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually she told me, in a very calm and even voice, that her husband was leaving her. She said it as if she were reading the weather report. And then, maybe in exchange for my empathy, she proceeded to deliver a detailed character analysis of every single officer, every chief, current and former, in China Ops. I learned that your father recruited his most gifted asset through a friend whose
daughter was living with her at Harvard. Her code name was a digraph, FX, tacked onto the word veritas, the Harvard motto, Latin for “truth.” She was, at that time, a kind of chimera in China Ops; everyone knew of her existence but there were layers of coded, classified architecture around her, who she really was, where she lived. All I knew at the time was that Beijing listened to Veritas and Langley listened to Beijing.

  * * *

  —

  One night we were eating at this gorgeous café on the water, in an East African country, waiting. Suddenly people started getting up from tables and walking quickly away from the shore, as if taking part in a choreographed exodus. I hadn’t heard a bomb go off. I had no idea what was happening. In excellent, accentless French, my colleague asked the waitress, who said, casually, “They know to be home before dark.” We paid the bill and got up and started moving fast, too. We reached our hotel minutes before they shut the doors. One week later, that officer would resign after being placed under investigation for an interrogation she’d overseen. That trip taught me about the difference between emotional and literal chaos. Something can look quite still and be in a state of total chaos, as she was. Something can look chaotic when in fact it is absolutely controlled, like the running in the streets.

  Christo.

  They’d flown home early from France. He had no choice, he said, and she understood, it was work and a good wife doesn’t argue with work. At home, she tried telling herself it was fall, time for new things, time to let go of last winter and of the girl she had been since then, time to participate in the ritual of starting over, as one does in September. She told herself all of this. Then ruthlessly rejected her own advice.

  * * *

  —

  And also there is a room.

  The boy in the video who describes the rooms in Heaven looked basically the same age that Anna had been when Lulu left. A child of six is capable of expansive thoughts.

  And also there is a room.

  * * *

  —

  At first, when Lulu left, Noel told people she’d gone to Europe, and Anna remembered him telling people how she had moved from Paris to Berlin. Anna had still never been to Berlin, but she’d always wanted to go ever since reading about how Christo wrapped the Reichstag. She remembered there had been a debate in the Bundestag surrounding whether or not an artist should be allowed to do this, and was it art. Should an artist be allowed to wrap Germany’s iconic Parliament building in aluminum and ropes? And if it was art, what was it trying to say. Was it saying something about hiding, or revealing, or about the political position of the empire, the newly unified nation. Was it a lark. “The children will love it,” one of the politicians said, during the debate. She was reading the article only because any reference to Berlin reminded her of her mother.

  Later, seeing the extraordinary silvery image on the front of The New York Times, she thought that the building looked like a ship. Maybe it wasn’t a statement on politics at all but rather a statement on seeing, on how we cease to see things we are accustomed to. For every German who spent decades walking daily by the Reichstag, the Reichstag, in effect, had disappeared. Perhaps it was a statement on how things we see all the time often cease to be seen.

  She had called her father to discuss this. When she called him at the office he always played cool, as if he were having yet another dull day, though later she often would learn that some crisis had been rising at the time, the price of gold imploding, an IPO gone awry.

  “Things don’t cease to be seen if they matter,” he had told her. “Art that makes the Reichstag invisible poses the question of whether the Reichstag matters. It’s a statement on paying attention. We pay attention to the things we care about,” he said. “Paying attention is the cardinal sign of love.”

  * * *

  —

  Her father had always insisted on skiing off-piste, that was part of the lure of those mountains. He’d always preferred to ski alone, claiming it was his time to think. So the fact that he’d gone alone with his skins and hiked to an altitude prohibitive to someone half his age wouldn’t otherwise have drawn attention. Snow had been predicted, though. When it snows hard, one can get disoriented.

  Speaking of patterns of seeing.

  * * *

  —

  It hadn’t been her idea to marry in the mountains. It wouldn’t have been her preference to plan a memorial at the moment most girls plan a pregnancy. One day, there were two glimmering rings and a party planned in Manhattan. One day, her father held her shoulders and professed his belief, knelt to check the length of her hem. That was Noel, focused on precision and detail in moments of emotion. The seamstress, at the fitting, told Noel she’d never fitted a bride with her father before, to which he’d replied, “I’m her something old.” One day, there was only expectation.

  Later, there was a reckoning, not with what would be but with what would not. There would be no walk down any aisle, no something old or new or blue, no bouquet. There would be only Anna in jeans, and the local minister who married them in front of the fire. When the fire wouldn’t light, Anna knelt down and started ripping pages from the local Alpine paper to place under the wood. Eventually her husband gently pulled her to her feet.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I don’t want to wear the dress,” she said.

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Later, in bed, he said, “No one will ever love you like he did.” He was trying to be kind, to acknowledge the new absence in their lives. She hadn’t heard kindness, though; she had heard a confession. And unconsciously she would try, for a time, to see that he lived up to the crime.

  * * *

  —

  October wouldn’t be any easier. Especially after the arrival of the video, which she initially considered a kind of post-scriptural gift from the guy at the bar, on the swim, and later interpreted as a sign from her father for her to empathize and understand, and ultimately understood as a kind of map and lesson. Anna didn’t want her last image of Noel to be in that room, though, or even on that mountain. She liked to think about him in Heaven, returning to poetry, flirting with angels.

  In the video, after he identifies the photograph of the Chinese girl, after he looks at the camera and says, “Veritas,” Noel is asked about espionage’s limits, or perhaps about his own limits, depending on your view of the question, the questioner.

  Noel is looking at the camera, breathing very slowly.

  I don’t understand the question.

  Is anyone off-limits for exploitation. In your opinion.

  Exploitation?

  Recruitment.

  In my opinion?

  Yes.

  Noel thought about this for a moment. And then he looks up and right into the camera.

  Angels.

  Angels?

  Angels are off-limits.

  Anna wondered whether patterns of seeing existed in Heaven. Could one, even in Paradise, cease to see a thing. She decided yes, even an angel might cease to be seen.

  Q.

  A.

  Fireside chat isn’t only a phrase we know from FDR, it’s also a spy thing. A fireside chat occurs when a senior case officer reads an asset’s file and arranges to have the asset flown somewhere in order to “chat” with them. It’s usually somewhere quite beautiful, like Bali. The chat takes place after the asset has been producing and is well known. The senior officer flies to Bali and they will sit for several hours, sometimes days, talking. During the interrogation, which is in fact the right word, the officer hits on issues that bothered him while reading the asset’s file. They call these “fireside chats” because they’re meant not to sound hostile. They’re meant to sound cozy. Bali’s not a black site.

  * * *

  —

  Occasionally polygraphers are present at the chats, which is not cozy. You were just sw
imming the Madura Strait; now here comes the Spanish Inquisition. Assets rarely think about polygraphs so most are surprised when they have to submit to one. You, of course, are always thinking about them. Technology frightens people. You know that, despite the fact that you might have distributed millions of dollars over the last eighteen months, there will be that one cab ride that comes up in the poly and they will nail you if you misreport its fare.

  The true mission of the Office of Security is to answer one question: Are you a spy? But there should be a level of respect. The person being polygraphed should be allowed his dignity. A polygraph is the opposite of dignity. The beginning of a very long poly is Did you sleep with her?

  * * *

  —

  When Ames was being hunted and when Hanssen was being hunted, the Office of Security was focused on a third man. That third man underwent months of polygraphs, and through it all, he maintained his innocence. He was cleared only after both Ames and Hanssen were proven guilty. You see, the real mission is to make you crack. Making an asset who is acting as a double agent crack is one thing; making a loyal servant crack is another. This is what they did to your father, Anna. Though they argue they were simply trying to get at the truth.

  * * *

  —

  Truth is a spectrum. Understanding this is a matter of emotional intelligence, which can slip in the presence of stress. Or in the presence of overconfidence. If you think you possess the magic lasso of truth, you might err on the side of overconfidence, you might lose that most essential human instinct, a will to empathize. Absent empathy, there is no understanding, no intimacy. Absent empathy, are you even a man?