—
I wanted to make some gesture to comfort her then, but that wouldn’t have looked right.
I wanted to tell the guys not to push too hard, that I believed in her, but that wasn’t protocol, either. I wanted to rewind the tape of my life to that night at the Farm. I should have stood up and started running then and not turned back.
* * *
—
I was raging not only at the polygraph but also at being in that suite with no honeymoon and no girl and no prospect of either or even a way to think about how to get from where I was then to what acquiring those other things entailed. I was raging and the value of rage in those situations is equal to the value of anger at dirt.
* * *
—
“How much do you know about the polygraph process?” the technician asked.
“She’s read the literature,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “the literature,” he got the joke, he understood. He placed the straps around her wrists. She was looking out the window, at the boats and the blue.
There is a new spectrum of discretion now, Anna, Instagram infamy on one end and solitary confinement on the other. You can’t have it both ways. Our generation, we have to choose. And our generation can’t choose solitary confinement. Your father could move through the world undetected, and it’s possible he made allegiances that weren’t always black and white. Gray doesn’t sell well on a poly. Ironically, when spies discuss their personal lives they tend to be extremely candid. When discussing work, they will lie to your face. Or they will say something polite, which forces a pivot. On the poly, you find people speak at length about the most personal things, sex, religion, addictions. It’s as if they want to spill the truth out in advance of what will inevitably be a necessary lie. Talking too much before the poly starts is a tell, in a way, the guys know to pick up on it.
* * *
—
“Have you ever committed espionage against the American government?” the technician asked her, and he was smiling as he asked it and she was smiling as she looked at me.
“No,” she said. She asked for a glass of the orange juice. I could see that the lines on the poly were even, she had passed, it was over. We waited a full minute then I nodded to the technician and he flipped the switch, the machine was off.
* * *
—
“Nice work if you can get it,” he said to no one in particular.
He was one of the good ones.
I gave him the caviar on his way out.
Playing Through.
In the last chapter of the video, “Christmas,” there is a field covered in snow. There are two boys, brothers, wrestling in the snow, and the snow is still falling. The boys aren’t dressed properly, either; one is in only a T-shirt, the other is wearing a bathrobe. And the snow is starting to fall harder, a blizzard in infancy. The boys look like they can’t feel the cold, the threat of illness, the risk. They have no sense of danger yet. You don’t have a sense of danger until you’ve experienced loss. Until you’ve experienced loss you have a sense of invincibility.
Yes there is a God. And in the room for joy there is a wide glass trellis that reaches all the way to Heaven, and woven on its levels are garlands of flowers, bougainvillea and wild rose and impatiens. Joy needs her space. Joy needs her space, darling.
Anna played the snow scene over and over. It reminded her of her own childhood, of taking fiberglass gray sleighs and red plastic saucers to Central Park. She would pull the sleigh or saucer up the high main hill, the almost quarter-mile of open slope where everyone seemed to be. She was fearless. Other girls clung to their mothers while their mothers prayed their sons would return to them intact. Anna wanted to go faster than the boys. She wanted to be first to touch the rail of the fence on the far end of the field.
Only later, thinking back on those days while rain fell against the high windows of the loft where she lived with her husband, later, as the rain fell slant against the hotel room windows, only then did it occur to Anna that perhaps she hadn’t been all that fierce. She simply hadn’t experienced the loss that raises our tolerance for risk.
Do you love your daughter.
Of course I love my daughter.
Did you participate in the unauthorized exfiltration of an asset because she reminded you of your daughter?
Lulu’s father had a diplomatic job at the American Embassy in Paris. Her mother ended up an editor at Paris Match, journalism once having been a more viable hedge against shaky financial foundations. The money was tied up then, in locked trusts for future generations and with cash-flow requirements for prior ones. Anna’s great-grandparents had lived in a world defined by silver and staff and removal, by racing silks and Spanish trainers and summer trips to Saratoga, a world as foreign to Anna as Oz. And, in ways, as foreign to Lulu. Lulu’s parents understood the imagery of it all but they’d left the horse farms and plantations and gone out into the world, refugees from the American aristocracy in its twilight. Lulu’s parents wanted their children to speak languages. They wanted to take them to places where people didn’t care where they were from. Lulu spent summers in Spain and Greece and Christmases in Istanbul and Cairo. At nineteen she was an American girl who never felt American, a Southerner who didn’t understand the South, a girl who, when you asked her where home was, might have said, “I don’t know,” and meant it. And then one day she met a boy in a barn in Louisville and decided on the spot he was the one. He was a poet. He was a rider. His name came from his birthday, December 25. He didn’t have a dime.
* * *
—
It took a long time to conceive, and when Lulu finally did, the pregnancy was not easy. “There will only be one, I think,” she told Noel in her thirty-fourth week. A day later she was rushed to the hospital for an emergency caesarean. “He will be perfect,” Noel told her, on the phone, with Anglican certainty. They started the IV, then the doctor hung the curtain up below her waist as the anesthesiologist placed a mask over her mouth and nose. Later, she told Noel the experience reminded her of a hunting trip they’d taken. They’d shot roe deer, and she’d watched while the men gutted them. “I think I know how the deer feel now,” she told him.
* * *
—
Anna arrived weighing four pounds, ten ounces.
“Maybe she’ll fight for justice,” said Lulu, later, in the nursery.
“Maybe she’ll just be happy,” said Noel.
He was home from his trip. And he had changed.
* * *
—
The two boys in the video keep wrestling. The snow keeps falling. The scene runs almost three minutes. As Anna watched it, she suddenly could feel her husband come up behind her. She stopped the video. Whenever she heard the boy talking of the rooms, she heard Noel describing them.
And there is a room where you can find the people you have lost, it’s a room for stories. In this room you can listen or you can tell a story of your own. Do you want to tell a story, Anna? Do you want to listen to a story of mine?
* * *
—
“We’re late, love,” her husband said. He was wearing black tie. Sometimes Anna forgot how handsome he was, sometimes familiarity doesn’t breed contempt it simply breeds blindness. He knelt down and put his head in her lap. He asked her to put her fingers through his hair. “I don’t want to go out,” he said, though he didn’t really mean it.
“God, let’s not.”
“Duty calls.”
“Can’t we tell duty we’re not available?”
He pulled her mouth down onto his. This was his way of saying, No, we can’t. The kiss meant, One doesn’t talk back to duty. Another fundraiser, another new set of views on tax brackets or the balance between security and civil liberties, civil liberties being what one of her husband’s new friends called “terrorists�
� rights.” There were a lot of new friends and they spoke a new language. Her husband now said things like, “A balance of civil liberty and security exists, but isn’t weighted.” He had taken on new habits, too, had cut his hair short. Anna understood from him that “everyone” was in a panic about November as there was no viable candidate for a critical Senate seat. She understood viable to mean someone the party was excited about. The old incumbent wasn’t planning to run. The only challenger was riddled with flaws.
Who was everyone? Everyone included almost no one from his prior life. Everyone wasn’t the artists. Everyone didn’t live downtown in lofts or walk red carpets. Everyone was discreet and refined. Everyone watched the Sunday shows. Everyone, his new crew. And everyone would be there tonight.
* * *
—
“There is a room for stories,” Noel would say. “And in this room you offer words to the angels and they tell stories using those words. What word would you like to offer tonight, Anna?” And if she couldn’t think of one, he always had something ready.
* * *
—
Her husband looked at the open laptop, the frozen frame. “It won’t bring him back,” he said gently. He took her hand and ran it along his chin. His worry about her was spiking again. When his own father passed away he’d never read any of the condolence letters.
Anna hadn’t told him she’d met the boy, the man, in the video. And she hadn’t told him she knew the video was coming before it arrived. She never told him about Noel’s vision of Heaven. When she was little, Noel told her stories about his childhood, her grandparents, his in-laws, history. Lulu’s mother had a walled garden on Centre Island; Lulu and Noel were married there under a grape-laden pergola. He told Anna how her grandparents hid lollipops in that garden on holidays. They tasked the children with finding them so they could have time. “Alone,” he told her. “They were always looking for how to be alone, they never tired of each other,” he told her. Somehow that seemed an apt definition of love, one Noel never achieved.
Everyone is vulnerable.
I am not a spy. Because that is the question, isn’t it?
Everyone is vulnerable.
And as she walked across the room to the closet, aware of her husband’s eyes on her back, it occurred to Anna that her mother had likely played through scenes like this, too, scenes in a marriage where you don’t say what you feel or reveal all the facts, where the withholding is a part of the love, a way to keep peace. Playing through, like in golf, which can be construed as an act of aggression on the part of one team or an act of grace on the part of the other.
“I love you,” she said.
“What,” he called out, still from the floor.
“I said ‘garden,’ ” she said, and he laughed. And he looked at the laptop and told himself that whatever she was going through would pass.
Q.
A.
The intelligence community has been frustrated recently about all this media attention so they’ve performed hundreds of polygraphs trying to link employees to members of the media. This is a problem. You can learn a lot from journalists. And as the powers that be increasingly restrict who you can spend time with, the powers that be are harming the mission. China, Russia, the Islamic State—now we’re going to add The New York Times to the enemies list? Yes, Anna, we are. Because the definition of an enemy is someone from whom we have something to fear. And they are afraid of the media. The new precautions, we all knew, were only going to trip up good, innocent people. One of the reasons things turned against your father was his relationship with the press. If you’re skilled you can manipulate a journalist, and he did, both when he was in and after he got out. He could read an article and match its sources to its disclosures like a child matches an image of a cow to an image of a pitcher of milk. It was always completely clear to him who had talked, who had leaked, when and where and why. He was an aficionado of the art of betrayal. It was a gift. Until.
To define an enemy broadly, fine—but what about the definition of insanity? No one tells you in this business when you’re at risk of going insane, so you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different response. If that’s not insanity, it’s masochism.
Rain.
How had Anna met her husband. She’d asked her father to help her find a job. It seemed the best and worst option at the time. She’d missed the Princeton interviews for consulting and banking. She had no excuse for this aside from not having been interested in consulting and banking. Around April of her senior year she’d toyed with the idea of travel—an Asian grand tour followed by something ruthlessly serious and unassailable, like medical school. Only she hadn’t done pre-med. She hadn’t done pre-anything. Her mother said, “Just pick up and go, you’ll find what you love,” which sounded risky, so when her father said, “Let’s have lunch at the Ford Foundation,” she said yes. “You’re perfect for us,” said the chairman of the board, and hired her before the coffees came.
* * *
—
Anna would place all her Russian and Chinese to the side, for the time. She would wear something other than jeans. She would stay at her desk late most nights, considering water shortages in Mali or creative expression as a means to map and change poverty near Victoria Falls. She spent hours exchanging emails with a Zimbabwean woman who believed peanut-based energy shakes could help solve child starvation. Over time she would gravitate west and north, to Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and—in particular—Sierra Leone, working with local activists to push political and cultural change. The men and women she met repeatedly astonished her, reframed her sense of her place in the world through the lens of their extraordinary experiences. “I don’t think you do this because you want to end African suffering,” Lulu said once, typically cynical, if not frank. “I think you do it to understand how people in situations of extreme pain process emotions, which is fair, which is perhaps an effective strategy.” Anna’s boss, Innocent, told Anna she had a rare talent. “You listen,” he told her, “and listening is empathy and empathy is everything.”
All this seemed vital and relevant. The work made her feel alive. She forgot about her love of literature and about the boy on the West Coast and the girl she’d wanted to be while lying in his bed. Once, she had missed him. Once, she’d regretted her choice not to follow him to LA. And more than once she’d conceded he’d probably been the love of her life. Then it all became too painful and indulgent. She would elect to focus on what was in front of her. Water shortages, corruption, drought, and famine, the kinds of things that tend to take the edge off a broken heart. The kinds of things that tend to open a heart over time.
* * *
—
The foundation’s front doors opened onto its celebrated atrium, twelve stories of trees lined by glass, a jungle in the center of a skyscraper in the center of a city. Anna ate lunch alone most days looking up at all that green, considering grad school as a viable escape from bad dates and indecision. Alone, until the day he came and sat beside her.
“What do you do?” Jeans, cashmere blazer, hair like an angel. Anna thought about Lulu and Noel in the stable. God, what is this, she thought.
“I work upstairs,” she said, suddenly embarrassed by her egg salad sandwich, her thick glasses.
“It’s like eating in a rain forest,” he said. “Only quieter. No wild beasts.”
In all her years of working there, no one had once said anything about the atrium. No one had expressed joy or wonder. People who work in the Vatican probably don’t talk about the Sistine Chapel all day, either had been her rationale. His knee knocked hers.
“Are there any beasts upstairs?” he asked, looking up.
“Lots. What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m just trying to change the world.”
“Ambitious.”
“I’m trying to get music to parts of
the world that don’t have it yet.”
“Like rain forests?”
“Exactly. Though rain forests have their own music, don’t they.”
He held out his hand and said his name, “Jake.”
“Anna.”
“Anna in the rain forest, nice to meet you.”
And he turned and took the stairs two at a time.
Game, set, match.
* * *
—
Anna had never felt anything like what she felt then. She tried to will it away, like a flu arriving at an inconvenient time. She didn’t want to meet the love of her life yet. She wasn’t ready. Even after all that rushing, she wasn’t ready. It didn’t matter. He would somehow find her number and he would call her that night and ask her out.
Q.
A.
The Agency was born just before the Cold War. Russia was our main enemy. Leaders at that time asked themselves questions like, Will the Soviets exert their power over the world? Or, What does the Soviets’ development of nuclear weapons mean for us? Most sophisticated thinkers today, when asked what is our greatest threat or who is our greatest strategic adversary—say China. Only the thing is, Americans are very bad at long-term planning, and China is a long-term problem. Americans rarely plan past five years, this is politics but it is also human nature. Darwin might have called the American stance on security “survival,” but I prefer the phrase “news cycle.”
* * *
—
The Chinese don’t have this problem. They plan ahead. It’s absolutely obvious to them that they will be the next superpower. They don’t believe Islamic terrorists will be around in fifty years, let alone a century. As Noel would say, Why stick around when all those virgins are waiting? As Noel would say, The phrase “secure the building” depends on your point of view.
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