Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  She arrived at the house as three men were leaving.

  They walked past her without introducing themselves, then one of them turned and, utterly affectless, said, “You have blood on your face.”

  Q.

  A.

  If things go wrong, wherever you are in the world, cash is the sine qua non of contingency. If things go wrong it will always cost you, Anna, and so you will want access to cash. At the start of running new assets you set up what’s called a pledge account for them, the parachute they use in case of—

  * * *

  —

  You arrange these accounts often enough for assets that eventually it occurs to you, Why not set one up for myself? You’re only human. Your asset needs a parachute in case the plane’s engines explode; don’t you deserve one, too?

  * * *

  —

  You will hear your father created a sophisticated pledge account for her, which was fine. And you will hear he created one for himself, too. You will hear his entire business was a kind of vast pledge account, built on the backs of trades he made through his Asian relationships, all spokes leading to the center, which was Veritas. When you hear all this, Anna, what will you believe? Does it even matter what you believe if you loved him?

  Mylar.

  She’d approved the purchase of two thousand Mylar balloons—red, white, blue. Mylar is kind of frightening, she thought, observing all the young aides entering Astor Hall. One was so thin and holding so many balloons Anna thought he might float away. So much shine. There was something about it that seemed ostentatious, “too expensive,” as Edmund had said, about the dresses. Couldn’t they have simple old-school balloons? The campaign manager ran them all on short leashes now and had made most of the choices about this morning. He had instincts, and had become someone on whom even Anna relied. Edmund had started calling him Ice, short for “Ice to Eskimos,” also short for “In Case of Emergency.” In case, he could clean up a mess. He had navigated the presence of government interrogators in his candidate’s suite and later he had navigated their removal. He handled death threats as if he were ordering takeout, never getting emotional, never irrational, always clear. “End zone, end zone, end zone,” was his mantra. He was about getting everyone down the field. That day, when she arrived wearing the dress he had chosen for her, he took one look and issued his assessment: “Touchdown.”

  Everything was football, everything was winning, everything was forward momentum. His aides feared him, and though Anna had feared him once, too, he had grown on her and she had learned from him. “Red for you,” she said. “For America!” he replied, though he was being ironic, he wasn’t an idiot. He had his own cynicisms about this process and this country. When the candidate arrived, they gave each other high fives, like schoolboys. But the campaign manager was no boy, he was Machiavelli, as capable of philosophical quip as he was of casual slaughter. He was the one who had pulled Jake aside after an appearance on MSNBC where the candidate referred to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about second acts in American lives. “Fitzgerald didn’t mean it like that,” he scolded. And he explained that the novelist was referring to the classical theater’s three-act structure, where the first act established the players and the second act developed the ideas and the third and final act brought the crisis and resolution. “Americans skip the second act, Americans have lost the value of ideas.” He let that sink in before adding, “Which is why you have entered this race, and why you will win.” And the candidate thought that was brilliant. Anna found it equally seductive and alarming.

  * * *

  —

  It was her husband’s choice to deliver the acceptance speech at the New York Public Library. He felt the choice communicated an air of elegance but also of democracy—“elitish, not elitist,” as he put it. He had asked Anna to consider speaking, too, but she’d declined. He’d enlisted the help of friends; there would be a pop star singing, a Harlem children’s choir backed up by the artists he’d signed for the label he’d sold to finance this campaign. And in his speech he would talk about the power of music. He would quote Dylan and end with the Billie Holiday line people don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it and the people would love that, immediately understanding he was describing himself. They would love everything about him, this man who had committed sins but was now devout—not about God but about them, about committing to their needs, about bringing back some dignity to politics. They would love his wife, love the glamour of her money, which was old, and the equal and opposing glamour of his, which was new, and love the note of intrigue, as it had leaked to the papers just that morning that Anna had been interrogated by members of the intelligence community. Scandal lent her new complexity and, given the current environment, any infiltration of government into personal life elicited sympathy. One headline was SHE’S NOT THAT BORING AFTER ALL.

  * * *

  —

  In his speech her husband would talk about his love of America and his love of his wife and his ambition to change the world. The absence of children onstage would be an elephant in the room. And when Mylar rained down on them, he would whisper in Anna’s ear, “You’re free to go now.” It would occur to her that that was exactly what you’re told once you know you can never leave.

  Q.

  A.

  They say the true mark of a fine case officer is an asset who continues to provide excellent intelligence after that case officer is gone. This is why we raise up our baby assets into fully formed adults, ideally no longer dependent on us. Assets are needy, though. Assets are only human. They trust not only you but also the idea that you will place them in the hands of someone after you who will take care of them. When your father gave her to me he gave me very clear instructions, too, Anna. And so, even as it was against the rules, whatever that means, I never made noise when he would want to be in touch with her. Everyone colors outside the lines at some point. And for years I didn’t lose sleep over any moral ambiguity involved in it all. For years, I didn’t feel. When you feel, it’s all over. When you feel, you don’t line up phones on the table; you smash them into the wall.

  Celebration.

  Back at the hotel it was close to three a.m.

  “Like old times,” her husband said, winking at his watch, which he held up for her to see. Though old times didn’t include the security detail stationed outside their suite. Old times didn’t include suites.

  He hadn’t touched her in weeks. There hadn’t been time is how he would have put it, and meant it. He believed there had not been time. There hadn’t been desire is how she would have. As they entered their rooms, they were not yet alone. The campaign manager embraced her awkwardly. He started saying something about statistics. “Fuck luck” was his philosophy, a way to counter the prevailing view, which was that in addition to skill there had been a holy load of luck and chance. The donors who’d given that early dinner, the one where she’d hidden in the powder room, arrived. They brought magnums of Dom Perignon wrapped in fitted glass-bead-covers. Waiters placed them on ice alongside Frisbee-size tins of caviar. My man of the people, she thought.

  Her husband was trying to make it clear that the night was over, that he wanted privacy. He was trying to be firm but the others weren’t having it. No one wanted to exit his orbit. He had become one of his artists. His art was ideas.

  Anna retreated to the bedroom. She thought about her father, her mother, lollipops in the children’s garden, and lobsters at the Cap, about other nights in her life that had qualified as celebratory. She thought about the former Agency director and the story he’d told her. She thought about her husband’s view of God and Noel’s view of Heaven and its rooms. What would he say of the room she stood in now? Was this the room for mercy? This is the room for victory and ambition, she thought to herself, and she wondered if those things were meaningful to Noel; he had ne
ver seemed to care, but now she was seeing him differently.

  As she washed her face she could hear doors close, the others exiting. She could hear her husband moving to the bedroom. She was needy now. Intimacy would be a relief. Only when she walked back into the bedroom, she found him lying on his back, eyes closed, two tumblers of Champagne untouched on the table. CNN was on and they were talking about him, a phenomenon she’d ceased experiencing as surreal. The speed with which the press had accepted him amused her. They didn’t know about yachts in New York Harbor or maybe the yachts didn’t matter anymore. His team had successfully walled off his valorous qualities from all the excess. And she knew him so well and she was, and was not, surprised to be in this place. She was, and was not, surprised to hear him touted as a “future president of the United States.” The future president was exhausted.

  She turned off the television. She drank down one of the glasses. She sat next to him, eating ice cubes from the ice tray and watching him as he slept. She removed his tie and unbuttoned his collar. She placed her hand on his chest. She could feel his heartbeat. She knew now he was playing with her, and she knew her role. She leaned over and gently pressed a slice of ice into his mouth with her tongue. He opened his eyes. And they celebrated.

  Q.

  A.

  The finest assets are not actually the vulnerable ones, the ideologues, the ones who believe they are working in the service of their nation against corruption. The finest assets are the ones who say, Wire my bank. They’re businesspeople. Noel understood this. He was a businessman, too. And when he introduced me to her, the first thing he told me was that she was a businessperson. She looked the part. She wore the suits and had the degrees, she spoke seven languages. She was centrally set up in the most elite Asian social and political circles, easily Google-able via her institutional affiliations, all the right clubs, touch points. She was a covert weapon hiding in plain sight.

  Noel had met her when she was only a girl, earnest, intellectual, unsophisticated. By the time we met in a bar in Beijing, a decade later, she’d grown up. She’d seen some very dark things.

  In China Ops, it’s forbidden to ask after assets once you turn them over. Noel knew a part of her was attracted to the powerful, narcissistic men she spent time with—for us. The men who told her things. The men who would eat her alive and leave her bones on the plate, if they knew. He was right to worry about the choice to recruit her; if it went wrong, it would go very wrong. And so when the time came he was right to help.

  Mac Bundy.

  It’s hard to name a thing. Sometimes we don’t call a thing what it is in order to protect it. An emotion. Or an idea.

  “Oh, it was just Mac Bundy,” Lulu would say. She would say this whenever something came up that was cryptic, something that people didn’t want to discuss or name, like an illicit affair or yet another Wall Street scandal. “It was just Mac Bundy” meant “That conversation is closed” or “We don’t have to talk about it anymore.” It meant “The answers to these questions are above our pay grades and a matter of national security.”

  It was also an inside joke, as Lulu knew Mac Bundy and Noel had worked for him. It was Bundy who Noel looked up to, wanted to be like. Noel’s own father was never remarkable in Noel’s eyes, though he had been a kind man and had worked his entire adult life in the same small local library. Noel had developed his love of literature from his father. His father was the opposite of being out in the world, but he knew the world well from what he’d read. Noel never wanted to work at the local library, though. Noel wanted to be a Wise Man. He wanted to focus on the big decisions. Noel envied Bundy’s place whispering into the ears of presidents, his role in rooms where questions of national security were determined. Mac Bundy had once run the Ford Foundation.

  Lulu would tease men she met in government or national security about how they were always finding new names for what they did. When asked what her husband did for a living during those years, Lulu would say, “Oh, I can never keep track.” Or she would say, “Oh, something to do with Mac Bundy.” She would point out that one of the places Noel worked was simply called the Group, then later called the 303 Committee before being reanointed the Special Group and then evolving into the 40 Committee, the Operations Advisory Group, then the NSC Special Coordination Committee. Reagan replaced that with “National Security Planning Group,” which stuck.

  “ ‘National Security Planning Group’ actually sounds like what it is,” Lulu would say. “Can you imagine taking over thirty years to sound like what you actually are?” All Lulu ever wanted was clarity.

  It’s hard to name a thing.

  The person she wanted clarity from the most was Noel. And he never gave it to her. Not long after Anna was born, Noel shut down to his wife. Without explanation, he let his heart simply close up to her. And in the process of trying to find an opening, Lulu bored holes.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Anna was born, the language surrounding intelligence operations had become positively Soviet in its structure and sound, and that wasn’t an acceptable irony anymore. You could imagine a historical moment when it became clear, a moment where everyone knew what was going on, knew that their government had evolved a sophisticated apparatus for covert action and that we, the American people, needed to accept that there were things we would know and things we wouldn’t. We would also need to accept a third category of things: things we didn’t want to know.

  “Oh, bless and release,” Lulu would say, when questions arose about where Noel was and what he was up to. “Mac Bundy,” she would say.

  Anna never experienced her mother’s increasing sadness. Little girls track the grander themes—Mommy and Daddy are together, or they aren’t; we live in a house, or on a farm; I have a dog, or a pony. Anna never internalized the tensions between her parents. She only experienced her mother as being there one day, then not there the next. Her mother had left her, but she would be all right, she would be loved, she still had those cracked eggs, those rolled-up sleeves, those visits to the Met and the White House, Toblerones and teddy bears. She had a father who was present and adoring. She was blessed. Anna’s gratitude eclipsed her fear, which was that one day she might lose something else.

  * * *

  —

  Anna hadn’t thought about Mac Bundy in a long time when she received an email the morning after the election. They hadn’t slept much, and her husband’s head was resting on her chest. “Play with my hair,” he asked, and she did with one hand while scrolling emails with the other. He often slept like that, curled in a ball and leaning on her. And there it was, between at least a dozen other subject lines that read “Congratulations,” one that read, “It’s Your Mother.” It was an announcement of arrival, and it was all in caps, like she was shouting. I AM SO HAPPY FOR YOU. HOW ABOUT I COME FOR CHRISTMAS.

  Anna had to laugh.

  She put down the phone. She ran her hands over his face, tracing the lines of his nose and mouth. “He’s my Achilles’ heel,” she’d told The Wall Street Journal in a joint interview they’d done for its Magazine. The journalist asked Anna why she’d been willing to accept the campaign, a public life. “Because he’s my Achilles’ heel.” And her husband had leaned over and said, “How about just Achilles.” In that moment, he could have asked her anything and she would have given it. She sometimes wondered if he felt the same way, if the power of that fit took two.

  “Question,” he said, and raised his hand. He was awake.

  “What’s that, Senator?”

  “Was it all a dream?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And now my mother is coming for Christmas.”

  “Is she bringing Mac Bundy?”

  He always knew just what to say.

  Q.

  A.

  An exfiltration is when you covertly sneak someone out of a country, Anna. An exfiltration is a last resort
. It’s when your chief of station says, Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

  Every station has what’s called an “exfil referent,” the point person on those operations. The job of the exfil referent is to prepare the plan, the If Things Go to Hell, Then What to Do list. This person analyzes how we will get an asset out of a place, and you can imagine that pending the complexity of the place, the political environment, pending any travel or weather restrictions—it’s a complex task. It’s a little like those men who imagine life in the wake of a nuclear bomb. Their data shows the likelihood of a nuclear attack is low, but you still need a plan.

  What’s it like to be the point person on disaster? It’s lonely. If the rest of the station had to spend time considering what-ifs with any seriousness, they would go mad. Who wants to think about worst-case scenarios all day long? You have enough going on. You’re saving the world from global jihad, tracking assets, trying to recall your last bar tab.

  A failed exfiltration is a stain on the station. Remember what John Kerry said, how no one wants to be the last man to die for a mistake. A failed exfiltration is considered a serious mistake.

  Orchids.

  Back at the loft, there were flowers everywhere. Black lacquered pots sat on her pine floors in long, neat lines, a nod at new order. The loft was the place Anna always would call home. It was the place they had fallen in love, after all. What better definition is there for home? She begged him not to sell it and, for a while, he complied. It was understood and accepted among the press that this was her place and that this was where she liked to spend her days as the evolution of their lives sped up. Someone had said something to the paper about her love for orchids, and suddenly they were living under a prolonged tsunami of cymbidiums, dendrobiums, phalaenopsis. Her husband teased her about having a verbal Midas touch. “Can you tell the Times we like French wines?” he said. Or, “Please let the Post know I need a new longboard.” She felt the pots looked funereal. The black struck her as severe, but lacquer was the rage. All those orchids needed water, so much water.