Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  A.

  The “it” factor in this world is so simple. It’s likability. It’s charm. It’s empathy and the ability to connect, to see another person clearly and have her truly see you. This connection creates confidence. Only the problem is that you can’t teach these things. You can’t teach a person how to convey confidence. It’s usually genetic, and by the time you’re memorizing Virginia maps, you either have it or you don’t. You can teach someone Arabic, you can teach him how to fish. At the end of the day what differentiates you in this line of work isn’t teachable. Teachables are icing, Anna. In some cases, if you’re beautiful, you get chosen. Sometimes it’s just a beauty contest.

  Wonderland.

  “We believe he assisted in the exfiltration of a Chinese double agent.”

  The news had come hard to Anna but harder to her husband, his waxing self-absorption channeling everything now through the filter of the polls. What effect would this have on the election, if it was true? What effect would this have on the baby now keeping them up nights, the new baby, which is to say, the campaign?

  “We believe he assisted in the exfiltration of a Chinese double agent and we’d like to understand why, and who helped him, and who stood to profit from his choice.”

  “Profit?” her husband didn’t understand the use of this word in this context.

  * * *

  —

  The men who came after the Bureau agents came from the Counterespionage Group at CIA. They explained to Anna that her father had worked for CIA in various capacities for almost three decades, operating under nonofficial cover. They told her how Noel had mentored a young American case officer stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. This had all come before, and then alongside, the glass office, those deal toys, the “placements” and the structured products, the end of the marriage and the cycles of new girls.

  “We have reason to believe he may have worked in the service of a foreign government.”

  Anna had seen the screens charting the status of stocks on Noel’s desk. She couldn’t recall anything about China in their lives, aside from that one state dinner. She was so little, though, it never occurred to her to ask. It rarely occurs to children to consider their parents as people, too. Anna had absolute faith in who she believed her father was. If ever a man told you who he was when you met him, it was Noel.

  “He recruited a Chinese asset and she has gone missing,” they said.

  Does she remind you of your daughter?

  “My father is dead,” Anna said.

  What is your daughter’s name?

  “He mentored a young case officer and he has also gone missing.”

  Asking him about Anna was a trick, a way to elevate his heart rate, a way to open him to saying more, to slipping up. Even an expert can trigger an avalanche.

  “Noel is dead,” she repeated.

  Would you like for me to repeat the question?

  “Has she contacted you? Has he contacted you? We believe you would be an obvious choice for—”

  They were trying to trip her up.

  “My father is dead.”

  Angels. Angels are off-limits.

  Anna asked the men to leave her alone with her husband.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you love me,” she asked; it was rhetorical but it was safe.

  “With my whole stupid heart.”

  “What should I tell them?”

  * * *

  —

  Later, one of the men placed a photograph on the table.

  “I only met him once,” Anna said. Which was not true.

  “When was that?”

  “Almost a year ago.”

  “Can you be more specific.”

  “He told me he thinks Paris is provincial.”

  In the photograph the case officer wasn’t poised to dive off rocks or looking up at stars or rolling through dunes with a little brother. He was lying on a bed in a hospital room. He looked different, though she couldn’t tell if the photo was taken yesterday or a year ago. The man tapped a finger on the photograph.

  “Don’t you want to know about him and what he did, Anna? Don’t you want to learn more about the plans your father set in motion, the man your father was?”

  And so she went, Alice down the rabbit hole.

  Q.

  A.

  Goddesses can come in many forms. Noel always told me things rarely look like what they are. He told me, “You won’t see her at first.” The image she projected was of someone who would evaporate into ether if left unprotected, someone with no impact on the world around her. And, voilà, she turned out to be sui generis. She turned out to be our Einstein, our Galileo, take your pick, the one whose intellectual gifts equaled her appetite for risk. Or for revolution. The one who comes along once in a generation and changes everything. She was our most critical source in the most critical part of the world at that time.

  * * *

  —

  The heart demands attention at the least convenient time. When we tell our heart to shut up and wait, the heart says, Saving the free world, motherfucker. And then we don’t have a chance. We will feel a thing up against all instincts not to. In these cases there is nothing intellectual. There is only emotion.

  Shiny Things.

  Maybe it began with that first visit from the Counterespionage Group, or maybe before, with the murder board brought in to assess the extent of the damage. Maybe it began with her husband’s decision to run for office, maybe when she opened the video and fell in love with the little boy and his rooms, with the idea that there is always an innocent beginning, whatever the end. Or was the start of this story when Anna fell in love in the atrium, buried her father, lost a baby. Is there ever a clear start to a story?

  * * *

  —

  There were soon other visits from other people in what everyone in DC called the IC, the intelligence community. This obsession with codes and acronyms struck Anna as not only silly but inefficient, everyone always having to explain what they were talking about and who they were “with” all the time. Everyone who came claimed to have a stake in her “story,” as they called it, though she might have preferred the word “trial.” In the absence of evidence to the contrary, a theory had emerged around Anna. The theory was that she had been the last person to see the missing case officer and that she must know where he is, that he must have told her something at that meeting, that he must have arranged to see her again and that she would be willing to believe in him because her father believed in him, too. What crimes had he committed? What promises had he made?

  Anna didn’t want to interfere with her husband’s dreams. They were her dreams, too.

  “I don’t know him,” she told one after another of her interrogators.

  “You did meet with him, though.”

  “Yes. Once. As I said.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did he make a plan to meet again?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  And Anna saw the swimsuit and the outstretched arms. She saw the cigarette flicked across the dark sky.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did he mention China?”

  * * *

  —

  There was the woman from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who seemed keener on Anna’s view of the election than on any missing case officer. There was the former deputy director of operations, who opened the minibar as they talked and proceeded to empty it over the course of their conversation, M&M’s to IPA. And then finally there was the former director of Central Intelligence. That meeting didn’t take place in a hotel room or an office. It took place at Edmund’s townhouse. They were less than two months out from the elect
ion, and the dials of discretion were rotating right. Dials of discretion or of panic, depending on your point of view.

  The former CIA director immediately put her at ease. He told her, “You’re on my watch, Anna. No one is going to hurt you. We only want to know what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said.

  “I only want to help you make the right choices.”

  He promised the current levels of intrusion into her private life would end soon. He was calm and precise and presented himself as her advocate.

  “People in my world are always chasing shiny things,” he told her. He was standing at the window. She could see the park beyond him. “Is that a Rubens?” He walked close to the mantel and admired the drawing. “Do you like art, Anna?” He wasn’t looking at her. “Your father always said the art world was just another drug war with better-looking dealers.”

  “Will I need an attorney,” she said.

  He turned around.

  “Nah,” he said. “Let me tell you a story instead.”

  Q.

  A.

  So much of what is done is classified, accessible only on a need-to-know basis. Most of the time you don’t even see what happened in cases where you were involved. Information is quarantined, and silo-ed. Eventually, the silos become impenetrable. When you’re in, you hear a lot about this or that senior guy, what he’s done. Over time you learn that so much is timing. As opposed to, say, expertise. In many cases someone was simply in the right place at the right time. Noel once met a North Korean nuclear physicist, the ultimate shiny thing, by chance. The physicist walked into a bar and Noel was there talking to a beautiful girl. The Korean wanted the girl. That’s not art; that’s accident. Noel’s opening the line to the girl evolved into recruitment. Once a Russian rang the Bern station to talk to Allen Dulles when he was a spy stationed there. Dulles had a tennis game with a pair of gorgeous Swiss sisters, and he wasn’t going to miss that, so he didn’t take the call. And so the Russian took a train to St. Petersburg to start a revolution. Espionage is the art of wise choices. You choose to talk to a girl at a bar, or not. You choose to meet that Russian, or hit balls with those Swiss sisters. Bond gets Swiss sisters and a revolutionary. But Bond is a myth.

  Metaphors.

  The story the former director told Anna was about a little boy who was stuck in one place.

  “Stuck is a metaphor,” he said. He had moved from the Rubens to the couch. He had crossed one leg over the other and was swinging a suede loafer off his foot. He wore red socks, like the pope. The story was about how an old woman sees the boy and offers him rice and a map, then leads him to a door. The little boy goes through the door to a new life and becomes a kind of king.

  “Is king a metaphor, too?” Anna asked, thinking of kings and golf, of Roosevelt and silencers.

  “The thing about being king, it kind of kills your ambition,” the director said.

  “Yes.”

  “All the boy wanted was to see the old woman and thank her.”

  “So she comes to the palace.”

  “She comes to the palace and he offers her everything and she says she alr—”

  “She already has everything she needs.”

  “Exactly. Did he tell you this story?”

  Anna thought next he would tell her the story was about her, her husband, the campaign. She was wrong.

  “The story is the story of your father, Anna.”

  “What?”

  “He was once given a bowl of rice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We only want to talk to the man you met in France.”

  “I think ‘met’ is ambitious,” Anna said.

  “He went to France to find you.”

  * * *

  —

  He told her about the arc of his own career, how he had started out in Saigon as a journalist. He told her about Tony Poe, a marine who trained Laotian tribesmen during the Vietnam War. Poe operated in Bangkok and Burma, training Tibetan Khambas and Hui Muslims for operations inside China. “He claimed he was the one who led the Dalai Lama out of Tibet.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Anna said.

  “You should assume anything you were told in France was a lie.”

  The silencers, the kings. Practice. Is it possible to trust someone you’ve met only once?

  “What’s an exfiltration?” Anna asked, without looking up. She was taking his play and running it, testing the waters of his trust. She could talk like these people. She could speak in code and riddle, too. And she had cleaned out her desk. She had nothing to hide. She had only questions, not answers, and felt entirely entitled to raise them.

  Q.

  A.

  I knew the guy who planned the exfiltration of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He was famous for never taking notes. “That’s what memory’s for,” he would say. I asked him once if he had total recall and that was when he told me the story. I remember asking your father about it. “Paper is primarily for historians,” he said. This view was of course counter to the culture of the place, the pathological reporting, over-briefing, of review, review, review. Or was it. Perhaps there were two cultures, and only one that was codifed, only one that was paper, lists, history, mineable for romantic reporters. The idea that you could plan a sophisticated op absent paper was a revelation. And a template.

  * * *

  —

  Occasionally a case becomes so sensitive that a cable goes out that says something like, We’re actually not meeting this asset anymore. It will say, in black and white, and likely right under the word “classified,” This asset has been terminated. Only this is not true at all. What is true is that the asset has become more essential than ever. The cable claiming she was terminated is called “eyewash.” Eyewash smokes out the fear and risk that renders an asset vulnerable by claiming they no longer exist. And from the time that eyewash is distributed, the case has become restricted handling.

  Money.

  A thing can be kept quiet if managed properly.

  The campaign carried on. Nothing was said about what was happening in their personal lives. Nothing was said about the fact that an investigation had been launched, that it was related to the Central Intelligence Agency, that it was related to the father of the candidate’s wife. Once, Noel had been the model citizen and a kind of happy ghost hovering over the politics. Now he was being accused of espionage. Everyone was closing ranks.

  The campaign was going well. The major papers had endorsed him, and so had two ex-governors. The mayor appeared with him in public in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. And money brought more money. “Fundraising is a self-licking ice cream cone,” one of the high-level donors said. The candidate’s gifts bloomed in the shade of acclaim. On camera, he was incandescent.

  * * *

  —

  At the hotel, the interrogations continued. Endless rounds of questions punctuated only by breaks for coffee and air. Had she known her father had worked in China on behalf of the U.S. government? Had she known her mother knew the man she had met in France, had in fact fed him meals in her home many times? Did she recall ever meeting him as a child? Had he been in touch last month, last week, this morning? Does she have an email address or a phone number? Did he carry a phone? Did he carry two? Did he give her anything?

  Saying, “I don’t know” a hundred times is tiring.

  Saying it two hundred times, you forget what it means.

  Q.

  A.

  I once had an asset who was very greedy. He flew from our meeting, in Munich, directly to dinner with the Mossad in Paris. He wanted to work for them, too. And he told me that. It’s a little like introducing the idea of polygamy into a marriage, a blow to your confidence if you’re the first wife. I had discovered him and in his way he was very valuable. I had assessed him as someone
we could trust. That’s the gold standard of being a case officer, Anna, your ability to assess others. Though CIA can assess you, they can’t assess your ability to assess others. There is a leap of faith there. In other professions the central skill set is rigorously tested—consider the banker, the sniper. CIA trains you and then sets you loose. Sometimes a very good person provides very bad intelligence. And sometimes a monster gives you exactly what you need. Noel was never afraid of the monsters. He’d take Iago over Hamlet any day.

  Joni Mitchell.

  They call them problems. The German Problem. The Russia Problem. The Islamic State Problem. And now, if there was a counterespionage problem, Anna stood at its center, increasingly spending her days in hotel suites answering questions about things she knew very little about. Her honeymoon, apparently, had been the scene of a crime. Technically, she was there of her own volition. “You’re free to go,” one of them always would say. This was said for the record as everything was recorded now, formalized; nothing was casual. Casual was from another era. “BC,” her husband called it. “Before the campaign.” As in, That was six months BC. Before campaign. Before crisis.

  * * *

  —

  The candidate was having his hair cut in their suite’s galley kitchen. Someone sent a barber from a shop on Lexington, as everything now was about saving time. “Baby,” he said, joyful, nodding at the barber-to-go. “You’re just performing your civic duty. This will all be over soon.”

  She sat on his lap and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You are only trying to keep him close, that’s what you’re doing,” he said, and she welcomed that view, whether it was forgiveness for her choice to lie, or something larger. Ambiguity and elision didn’t scare him, another trait she might have listed when considering his future as a politician.