Though there is another way of seeing it. A falcon in a desert is not an outlier, after all, it’s an experience. A falcon in the desert is not a clue. A child with a vision of Heaven that aligns with the vision her father described to her, that’s an outlier, that’s a clue. And seeing it that way, Anna realized that what she was watching was not the story of where one boy ended up but rather a story of where he started out. The video was a way to let her see someone first and foremost as that little boy, a way to humanize him, to help her understand what came after, the things he did and saw, the choices he made. The video was a request to be seen not as he was at the bar or on the beach or that night outside the restaurant, but as he once was, before he grew up into the role Noel prepared him for. Anna envied that little boy. She didn’t envy the simplicity of snowball fights or the splendor of a falcon. She envied his belief. Everything about him led back to his view of those rooms, the belief that they existed. Or maybe he simply sent the video so she could see her father answer questions that would come up.
Did the officer overseeing Veritas ever commit espionage against the United States of America?
Not to my knowledge.
Noel looks very, very tired.
May I have some water, please?
Did you train an officer in how to commit espionage against the United States of America?
May I have some water, please.
Are you now or have you ever committed espionage against the United States of America?
No.
The time stamp on the video read 4.56, four hours, fifty-six minutes. Under that was one word, TRIPOLI.
The video was the case officer’s way of telling Anna his story, and allowing Noel to tell his, too, before someone else arrived with a different version.
It was his way of cultivating her trust, though she didn’t know that, or experience it that way, at the time.
Q.
A.
She was an outlier, also, a cowboy in her way. After she soared through Harvard and LSE she’d returned to China and needed money, or so she claimed. She was in active rebellion against her rich family, one known for breeding rebels. By the time we met, she had reconciled with her father. That peace was critical to national security. A false peace, entirely illusory and built upon lies, received in the station with popped corks and steaks, a peace that would change my life, and hers. A peace brokered by Noel.
She was the perfect asset, entirely unremarkable. The fact that she looked like a child was part of her power, though she was approaching forty when we met. That agelessness aligned with an ability to fold herself into fables about who she was and where she came from.
Your father didn’t develop her in the traditional sense, Anna, but you see he took the long view. He had met her when she was seventeen, in Adams House, on Bow Street in Cambridge. He would predict, then orchestrate, the next three decades of her life. He would select her crypt—Veritas.
I have often wondered how much of my life he also orchestrated.
Noel could quote the Four Noble Truths and within an hour refer to church as “the magic show.” Somehow, he was at once fascinated by belief and devoutly atheist. Eventually I understood that enlightenment for him was being at peace with internal conflict.
If you’re not comfortable with hypocrisy, you can leave the room right now.
Drones.
Do things happen for a reason or don’t they. One must choose what to believe. Anna believed reason takes its place behind emotion. A girl meets a boy in an atrium entirely by accident, falls in love, and later marries him. Reason or emotion—or both. A girl meets a man for a swim on her honeymoon, hears his story, and elects to help. Reason, emotion, call it a draw. A video of your dead father arrives in the mail, you are moved by it, you make choices. Emotion. What is our responsibility to things that happen to us. What is our responsibility to reason.
A part of Anna wanted to throw the video out, make it disappear. Only we can’t throw things out anymore, can we. Everything is virtual now, forever present. She could delete it off her home screen, or whatever it was called, but it wasn’t going anywhere. And in truth, part of her wanted to throw it out but another part of her wanted to post it on YouTube, an invitation to the man who’d sent it to come back into her life and finish what he’d started. A part of her wanted to break the shell of her situation, see what she could make from what was inside.
And anyhow she didn’t know how to post something on YouTube. She didn’t know how to post something, period. She hadn’t yet tested out social media; it all seemed equally rabid and casual, this obsession with documenting every breath, lick, bruise. Who cares about what you did last night. Anna felt it was tawdry, a view that amused her husband, who, despite three phones and myriad email accounts, had hired a social-media adviser to tweet and post and like things in his name all day long.
“Whither privacy,” she said, observing him at his desk late one night, scrolling Instagram while listening to a conference call on mute. The call was about the upcoming elections.
“What’s whither,” he said, popping an earpiece out of one ear. He was teasing her.
“It’s all just too much,” she said, nodding at the screens laid out in a line like children: iPad, iPod, some other thing she didn’t even recognize, a tiny silver globe emanating blue light. She pointed at it. “What’s that, a drone?”
“It’s a speaker,” he said, laughing. He could play all these toys like a piano. He was cooking up something new, though she didn’t know what. His contract required he stay on as CEO for a year, though it was clear he was now running two things—the company and the launch of a new iteration of himself. She worried he wasn’t getting enough rest, though rest had never been his thing.
“Come to bed,” she said.
When he finally came into the bedroom, she was almost asleep, willing dreams of peaceful things, clouds and gardens, per her doctor’s orders. The chief of obstetrics had said stress works against the body’s ability to make babies. He’d said her stress levels were too high. He’d encouraged acupuncture and meditation, though she’d failed to find time for either. Thinking happy thoughts before bed she could do. Clouds and gardens were simpler than needles in the spine. And so she was starting to think about summer planting on the island, maybe peonies, when her husband entered the bedroom. He was holding her laptop and it was open. The video of Noel was playing. He tapped the volume key.
—ever commit espionage against the United States of America?
No.
He pressed pause.
“What’s this,” he said, calmly, “a drone?”
Do things happen for a reason? Anna believed they did.
Q.
A.
In order to interrogate someone effectively, you have to have patience. You need the ability to listen for long periods of time when nothing is being said, knowing eventually something will out. You try to frame interrogations as conversations even as everyone in the room knows what’s what. One thing that comes out of the Farm experience is a weird ease with being observed. Eventually, you’ve spent so much time with these people you really don’t care who sees what anymore. And that ease translates into a certain confidence, which is the inverse of anxiety. You simply can’t get worked up about surveillance, surveillance is part of life, that’s how it is. Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, they used to say. Well, not until gentlemen are up against an enemy who flicks her wrist and shuts the lights off at the Super Bowl.
There’s an inflection point in training after which no one rips out the smoke alarms. The inflection point is when you make the choice: The absence of privacy is a price you’re willing to pay to do the work you need to do. Which, of course, when you’re starting out, you describe as saving the free world. You look at that smoke alarm and think, Saving the free world, motherfucker.
What you learn at the Farm is basically how to decouple patience and anxiety, how to listen in complex situations and remain calm. Look an asset in the eyes and deny you’re CIA, and feel calm. Listen while a prisoner tells you when the bomb will go off, or where the enriched uranium is, and feel calm. Threaten someone’s life, and mean it, and feel calm.
Secret.
“Tell me a secret,” he’d said on their swim that day at the Cap. And so Anna had asked him what the definition of a secret was. They were far out, farther than she would have gone alone. The weather was turning and the water was freezing. And though she was a fine swimmer, she’d never loved the open ocean.
She had simply followed him. She wanted to seem brave though she didn’t know why, she didn’t know this person, why should she care what he thought? He had led her so far that when she looked back, the palm trees were visible only as tiny dots. They were treading water. She was tired.
“A secret is something only two people know, and then mutually elect to keep private,” he said.
“That sounds so serious,” she said.
“Well, it is.”
“And what if a third person enters the picture?” she asked.
“Well, then it’s no longer a secret. Then it becomes intelligence.” He was laughing, and it was affecting his tread.
Anna took a deep breath and let herself go under for a moment. In school she could swim the length of an Olympic pool without coming up for air. She’d been arrogant about her ability until she met a big-wave surfer. Some surfers can hold their breath for four minutes, the time it takes waves to complete a set.
She couldn’t see the bottom clearly but she could make out shapes. She tried to dive farther down but could feel her lungs under pressure. When she came back up he was still treading water.
“I have a secret,” she said, eventually, blinking water out of her eyes. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the palm trees. She was thinking about her husband.
“I have one, too,” he said. And then, “You first.”
“I’m pregnant.”
And she looked at him, and for the first time she saw he was disarmed.
Q.
A.
Toward the end of your time in training, patience wanes and your last day is absolutely barbaric. You’re shepherded into this pink auditorium and told to wait quietly while in an adjacent room instructors make their choices. You can sit there for an entire day. Eventually, an instructor enters the auditorium. She will go to certain people and tap them on the shoulder. The tap means you’re done, you’re out. At Yale they have a tapping tradition also associated with spies. Being tapped means you’ve been chosen to be in one of the secret societies. It means welcome, Welcome to Skull and Bones, James Madison the Sixth. After everyone tapped has left, the instructors say, Congratulations. That’s it. It’s over.
The director flew down for graduation in a Black Hawk helicopter. As we were all undercover, when he calls you up onstage he uses only your first name. You are presented with a simple framed certificate. You walk across the stage and there is a woman holding out her hand to take the certificate back. She places it in a box and you will never see it again. You held it in your hand for less than a minute. That was your moment of recognition. When the woman takes the certificate you are reminded that from here on out you will no longer be yourself.
This erasure of self is seductive to a certain temperament. There is a kind of person who experiences the drop of a certificate into that black box as fascinating. It’s a complex trick, to tell yourself a black box leads to a calm, normal life. Though the other way to see it is that they’re upending ideas about graduating. This isn’t Goldman Sachs. This is the Central Intelligence Agency. You don’t need a certificate.
After the ceremony, I walked outside. Your father was there, at the edge of the woods. I hadn’t seen him at the ceremony. I hadn’t seen him in some time. He didn’t put his hand out, he simply nodded at me and said, “Tempus fugit, sumus hic.” Time flies, we’re here. Or said another way, There is no turning back now. There is only moving forward.
Supermodels.
He never knew.
Anna never told her husband about the first time. He had been so busy with the sale. With all they had on that fall, there hadn’t been time for clouds and gardens or acupuncture. She’d lost him at eleven weeks, barely a month after the end of the honeymoon. She’d told herself a baby lost at eleven weeks was not a tragedy to define her but rather an experience to be managed privately. Still, she took it out on herself, retreated into herself. By Halloween, she felt better. They’d been invited out and her husband had dressed as Henry VIII, early Henry, slim Henry. He’d suggested she could be Jane Seymour.
“She’s the sexy one, the one he loved,” he put it.
“Yes, the one who died,” Anna said.
“Oh, but he loved her so much before all that,” he said, adjusting his paper crown. “Let’s pretend she was the first wife, then he never would have gotten fat and they would have lived happily ever after.”
Happiness. His happiness set point was stratospheric. It would almost make him freakish if it didn’t make him so winning. That set point had seduced the artists he’d signed and likely also seduced the buyers for the company, a consortium including an Asian financier planning expansion into China. Jake didn’t go little, when he went, Henry VIII, of course. Excess absolutely exhilarated him.
Jane Seymour wasn’t for sale, though, so Anna went with her default option, a black cat, which required only a mask. The party was held in an old fire station two sugar heirs had blown open and renovated into a sleek steel loft. There was barely any furniture, or perhaps it had been removed for the occasion. Everything was beige. Even the circular staircase was beige stone and tile with a polished brass banister. “It’s from France and it’s fake and I love it,” said the wife, of a statue in the front hall. She had a Ph.D. from Penn and was dressed as a Robert Palmer girl.
Anna’s husband was very protective of her that night. She suspected he knew something. She had recently pulled away in bed, not that that meant miscarriage, but still it was a signal. Even on their hardest days they always found each other physically. After France she’d seen the doctor for the first time and he’d told her not to rush back to sex, and she’d ignored him. When she returned a second time she told the doctor she was fine, that she had moved on, she didn’t mention the bleeding and the fact that she still felt pain.
Her husband kept telling everyone at the party that night about Henry VIII’s favorite cat, implying that that was Anna’s real costume. “They had a mouse keeper just to fatten the mice for her,” he told their host, who was dressed as Richie from The Royal Tenenbaums, in tennis whites and aviators.
One of the artists from his label arrived, she’d been central to the sale. She was there at his request having promised to sing a little, “bring the sparkle,” as he liked to say. The artist reminded Anna of an alien, all smooth and silent. An alien, adept at climbing up on things, pianos, other women’s husbands’ laps. She wasn’t wearing a costume and Anna envied the confidence it took to not wear a costume to a costume party. When she arrived she announced loudly, “Christ, guys, I’m playing for the president!”
“The American president?” said Anna’s husband.
“And I am not going to fit into anything,” she said, prompting the question and inspiring the reply, “Yes, fourteen weeks,” which resulted in a loud round of congratulations. “I think a white beaded tent will fit,” she went on, everyone chiming in about how well she looked.
Anna suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Everything around her suddenly felt fleeting and light—proximity to pop stars, imported French stone stairs, name-dropping the leader of the free world. Like cotton candy, certain experiences evaporate the minute you taste them. She took off her mask. She asked her hus
band to take her home. In the cab he held on to her.
“I promise you will have one, too, soon,” he said. He’d almost read her mind. But he couldn’t read her future.
At home, she felt ill again.
The body knows. The body never lies.
* * *
—
At Thanksgiving, he flew to Hong Kong for work. At Christmas, it was Shanghai. He always offered to take her but Anna always declined. She responded to the next set of pregnancy tests with grace, and wore her rage in private. A baby will come, is what she told herself. And a baby will change things. Her husband’s success had recently shifted the math of which one of them needed the other more. A baby would come and a baby would need her. A baby would have no one else.
After the second miscarriage, only weeks before Valentine’s Day and before her birthday, weeks before the anniversary of the avalanche, Anna announced that she didn’t want to work anymore. She had finally told him about the baby, and when she did, she had also told him about what had happened in the fall.
“Maybe you felt if you told me it would make it real,” he said gently.
“Yes, maybe.”
“I think working reduces stress,” he said. “I think you should keep working.”
He was balancing worry with charm.
“Yes, stress,” she said.
He didn’t mean to say something to speed the shifting math. She had been filling a glass bowl with chocolate hearts and she suddenly stopped.
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