“Maybe I should thank you,” she said, suddenly serious.
“Have you enjoyed it at all?”
“Yes.” And then she said, “But don’t tell.”
They were both thinking the same thing, which had very little to do with the senator, or politics, the race, or the candidate’s future. The election really hadn’t been central for either one of them but neither one of them was ready to address what had been. It was too soon.
“Public service can be exhilarating,” Edmund said, doubling down on denial.
“Yes, Jackie loved it, didn’t she,” Anna added cooly, knowing the exact opposite to be true.
* * *
—
What is warm?
* * *
—
“Warm” is the word for the temperature of the sea along the French Riviera in June. Anna decided the choice of that word was also a play on the idea of “getting warmer,” close to a solution. The French say réchauffer when discussing the proper preparation of a dish. It means “heat it up.”
“I really think he could go all the way,” Edmund said. He was looking down at his bowl. He scraped his bread against its edge to catch the sauce.
“Yes, he probably could. He has it all, right?”
“When you got engaged I told Noel I thought he was a criminal. A very charming criminal.”
* * *
—
Noel, Noel, Noel.
* * *
—
“You didn’t like the drugs.”
Edmund put down his fork, cleaned his mouth. He took a sip of water. He looked out the window.
“What is it?” Anna said. “Tell me.”
“They found him.”
“What do you mean, they found him.”
“You never heard from him again, right?”
Anna didn’t answer.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore. They found him, they had a talk with him, they got what they wanted. It’s over.”
Anna wondered if the word “talk” was a euphemism.
“Where is he now,” she said, thinking about the koans and the things that can’t be said.
Edmund looked at her, this girl who had suffered enough, in his view, who had effectively lost her mother and later buried her father, who had given up a career for her husband and who had been unable to have a child. Under all the privilege, she had fought wars, too. He reached down and opened his briefcase. He handed her a manuscript. On the cover was the letter A.
“What’s this,” she said.
“Homework. Or perhaps, history.”
Edmund had read it. He had left it almost intact. He had edited out only one page, the answer to a question about Noel’s dying friend, in that hospital in that city the night Anna was born. The answer detailed Noel’s ambivalence about becoming a father, and implied this was the real reason he wasn’t home that night, how even the most complex work pales in complexity when up against intimacy. Thrill, mission, and risk were also what Noel once wanted. Edmund didn’t see his decision as a sin of omission, he saw it as a mercy blow. Sometimes you don’t want the whole story, was his view. Like Increase Mather, he was entitled to one.
“These are only answers,” she said, flipping pages. “Where are the questions.”
“Homework,” he repeated, quietly.
She read the first sentence out loud.
“ ‘Espionage is not a math problem.’ What does it mean.”
He paused and set his eyes on hers then said, “It means you’re old enough now.”
The most powerful interrogation is the one we perform on ourselves.
Q.
A.
Noel was an artist underneath it all, Anna, you know that. You knew the poet before you knew the rest. We all knew the poet, too. And we accepted the rest. We looked at Noel as an eccentric and a rebel, immune to rule, often infuriatingly iconoclastic. But he was our eccentric, our rebel, a bridge to the magic past of China Ops but never prisoner to all that, the guy who got out, who walked away from the mission when the mission no longer had meaning for him. Noel was open to wonder and doubt. In the end he would visit infrequently. We would talk about imminent threats or local upcoming elections and Noel would quote Martin Rees, the British cosmologist. He would remind the young guys that Rees had honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Toronto, Durham, Trinity College, and then he would tell us how Rees didn’t write about imminent threats or upcoming elections, he wrote about the viability of life on other planets. “There is a lot more life out there than we could ever detect,” was a line Noel loved. It was his way of reminding us we would never wrap our minds around it all, his way of reminding us to remember higher things, the big decisions, not the little ones. We were in London, at a bar, when I told him what I was going to do with Veritas. He took a long pause then said, “Hey, there is a lot more life out there.” This response was his way of saying he understood. He was giving me permission—and forgiveness. I guess in the end I needed it after all.
Sweet Virginia.
End of June, Anna flew to Nice. Air France, a window seat, the business-class ticket a gift from the senator. She hadn’t flown alone in years and it made her nervous, no hand to hold on taking off, no one to fall into with exhaustion on arrival. Nothing is happening here, she told herself. Nothing is changing, nothing is at risk. All that was happening on that plane was that a woman was taking three days away from her life to figure something out. The fact that she might be taking three days to live her life never occurred to her.
The answers told the story of a life in a certain line of work at one point in time. Anna read them and she now knew what had happened that day in Switzerland and she understood what had happened before. She’d shared the answers with her husband and he had said, “You have to go and find him.” She’d offered to share them with her mother but her mother didn’t want to read them. In the end Lulu didn’t really want clarity about Noel. She had made her choices, he would never be a hero in her eyes.
As the plane descended, the man next to Anna leaned over to lift the blind. The sky was clear. “Bienvenue,” he said. She was thinking, Are you waiting for Sweet Virginia? Yes, my name is Ron Wood.
Q.
A.
A thousand tourists can’t really reconstruct a beach, Anna. You can collect ten million grains of sand, but by the time you’ve excavated the beach, there’s a new beach in its place. The idea behind the thousand-grains-of-sand philosophy isn’t about some special attention to detail. The idea is about people. That’s China’s true comparative advantage—people. When you consider human beings an unlimited resource, you might begin to underestimate the value of one life.
Collecting intelligence is the art of letting go. Espionage is blind faith.
Not long after we met, Noel and I ended up at a funeral. I stayed after the service to pray and when I turned to leave, the chapel had emptied out and only Noel stood at the back, waiting for me. He was fascinated to learn that I was religious. He asked if I believed in Heaven, and that was when I told him about the rooms, this idea I’d had as a little boy. I don’t even know where it came from, maybe a photograph, maybe a book, maybe an ad on TV. Later, he told me he shared it with you, “that it was just too good,” he said. Though typically, he made it better. He made it brighter. He told me about the glass trellis and the courtyard, about joy. The care he took with the image of Heaven’s rooms was the care he took with everything, Anna. Your father took a vision and made it his own.
Now when I think about Noel, I see him in those rooms. I see him walking that courtyard, and admiring that flowered glass trellis. I imagine him directing the angels as to where they need to take more care, I imagine him calling in the landscape architects and the English gardeners, the specialists for old edifices in need of repair. For him there are mountains in those rooms, too, pea
ks to make the Matterhorn blush, fresh tracks for days. Close your eyes and see if you can see him like this. See if you can see your father in a place where they are no longer watching or listening, where there is no more pressure to perform. They were always watching, Anna. Noel knew there would be one day when some old friend walked through the door and asked him to answer for a choice he’d once made, maybe in that jail, maybe later, maybe in the little white house at Langley or on Park Avenue or Bond Street or in Shanghai or Zurich. I believe whatever happened on that mountain other than the intersection of weather and human error, of chance and probability, doesn’t matter. I believe in the moment it happened he didn’t fight it.
There is one room I never told him about. It’s not one I envisioned as a boy.
It’s the room for forgiveness.
In this room, they wash you clean. In this room, they understand means and ends, theory and practice, good and evil. In this room you can know finally and with certainty that there is a God. The room for forgiveness is the room for belief.
Belief isn’t a coin flip at the circus, Anna. It’s a feeling.
The body knows, the body never lies.
You can feel belief like you can feel the sun.
I see it all so clearly now.
Yes, it’s extraordinary.
Yes, it’s true.
Heaven.
This.
blue
What’s blind about blind faith?
That’s what Anna was thinking as she hit the water.
If faith is defined as belief in the absence of proof, isn’t all faith blind?
* * *
—
When she dove into the sea it was cold. A quarter-mile from shore there’s a line of white buoys to mark the limits of the lifeguards’ view. Anna swam past the buoys, and kept on. She was thinking about the universal meeting place. Places. Bali, Beijing, Jakarta. Rome, Saigon, Damascus. Manhattan, TriBeCa, Moore Street, Number Nine. Past the lacquered pots, through the kitchen, in the bedroom. Your only goal is to arrive and be patient and believe the other person will arrive, too.
There is a blind faith in that.
“This is a fine universal meeting place,” was what he’d said that afternoon, standing on the rocks before that first swim, before she said “provincial” and dove in.
“ ‘Universal meeting place’ sounds cultish,” she told him.
“Yes, cult, exactly. The idea was developed in a kind of cult.”
* * *
*
An elevated heartbeat skews a poly.
And even an expert can cause an avalanche.
* * *
—
When the polygraphers traveled to the house in the Alps, despite the existence of an embassy in town, Noel was solicitous, his specialty. He even went to collect them himself from the plane. There were two technicians and there was also the deputy director of operations, an old friend, perhaps sent along to smooth things. As the men drove up in altitude, the temperature dropped. Noel told stories. He shared how he had once spent a holiday there as a child. He pointed out the steep, central couloir and said, “We ski it with torches, New Year’s Eve.” He told the men he found the air, and the women, to be more beautiful there than anywhere in the world. Out their windows they saw stands of fresh strawberries, yes even in winter. Noel insisted they stop and try some. The polygraphers had never been treated like this and seemed disarmed.
At the chalet, Noel showed them around and led them out to a wide, wood porch. It was covered with ice. “Don’t slip,” he said. He offered an early lunch and more stories before directing the technicians into a small study. He took the third man into an adjacent bedroom and suggested, perhaps ironically, a nap, before looking right at him and saying, “I knew it’d be you.” Noel noted that his soon-to-be-son-in-law was expected home soon; that he’d gone into Geneva to get the rings, that his daughter would be married the next day. Though Noel well knew these men were not there to discuss rings or weather conditions. They were not there to hear his happy memories. They had not come all the way from northern Virginia for fresh strawberries, for sliced figs and raclette. They were there to ask about the young case officer. The one who had been ordered home a year before after conducting an enhanced interrogation somewhere in Indonesia, but who instead of coming home had then participated in the exfiltration of an asset he’d inherited from Noel.
Noel knew all this. And so before the machine was even turned on, as they were preparing, he told the men the person they’d come to discuss was a good man. He said that to lose such a man and the knowledge he’d accrued in Asia was not acceptable. He told them about first meeting the officer in the little white house at Langley. He told them how everyone had been struck by this kid of Scotch-German descent who spoke perfect Russian and Chinese, who was devoutly religious and also very witty, and kind. And who was unmarried, and seemed uninterested in love. “Which of course is the ultimate defense,” he told them as they prepared the machine. “It’s not a pen dipped in poison that protects us, is it. It’s emotional control.” He said that losing a man like that would pose a risk to national security.
* * *
—
This was the second pistol in a way. Inciting fear about risks to national security was philosophical insurance. When you incite fear about national security you insure your point of view. “He’s not a spy,” Noel told them, re-laying the first pistol as he had in myriad conversations throughout preceding days. Now he would be tested on that view. Now he would tell it to the machine. “He did nothing wrong,” he told them, convincing himself even as he said it, like Anna placing her hand on her heart.
* * *
—
And yet the needle had skipped on Noel’s answer. Despite his training in how to control his breath. Despite the stories and the charm. Despite his conviction he would sail through this formality and emerge having saved another life. When the needle skipped, the more senior of the two technicians said simply, “Would you like to try again?”
* * *
—
He was one of the Agency’s finest. His technical skills and emotional intelligence exceeded the stereotypes he himself acknowledged as often true of people in his line of work. He hadn’t swallowed Noel’s charm or his stories or the strawberries or the view. All that grandeur, if anything, appalled him. The tradition he knew Noel represented. And what especially appalled him was what he understood of why he was there. People had been placed at risk for one young officer’s whim. He believed that young officer had committed crimes even before the exfiltration. He believed most case officers were morally unmoored, that they got high off preying on the weak. He believed rogues and elitists required slaps on their wrists. He had flown all this way to perform his job and had an idea of the ideal outcome. So he made a remark, casually, right before turning on the machine. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was throwing Noel off his game. The remark was about the Chinese girl.
An elevated heartbeat skews a poly.
Even an expert—
* * *
—
Would you like to try again?
* * *
—
That was when Noel stood up, tore off the wires. That was when he walked out of the room, went downstairs to strap on his skins and take his skis. There was still time for last runs, the sun wouldn’t set for hours, lifts were open, snow was fresh.
The deputy director of operations later told the technicians to pack up their things, that they would drive to Geneva the next day and do it properly, at the embassy.
And they would have, but the next day Noel was dead.
* * *
—
The last thing he did before he headed up the mountain was load the pistol, a tiny Sig he kept locked in the top drawer of his desk. The Swiss rescue would find it later, in the
snow, the chamber empty. Noel hadn’t taken the pistol for protection, or suicide; that was never the plan. Was the plan to fire rounds in the air, speed the shifting of the snow? Though what if the shots fired didn’t make a sound? The rescue team also found a state-of-the-art silencer, one that fit the pistol perfectly. Typically Swiss, they reported this all to the police, who reported it to the embassy, which is to say to the Agency. The ambassador assured Anna the cause of death was asphyxiation. “Doesn’t hurt a bit,” he said. He was half-Austrian and had lost his own father in an avalanche in St. Anton. Surfeit of honey, surfeit of snow.
* * *
*
There exists, however, a God.
* * *
—
As Anna swam out, she was waiting for the water to feel warm, her cue to return. She knew he would be there for her. They would tell stories about her father and she would not ask about interrogations or asset exfiltrations, about the rise of China or elements of tradecraft; she would ask about God’s rooms, about the compass and the falcon, about the safe-house keeper. This would be her closure, a bell to end the mourning; it was time to end it. And yet as she thought about that bell and about what she would ask—wait, what?—something suddenly made no sense. She had met him before, of course. She had seen the video and she had been shown, by the interrogators, the photograph of him in the hospital, the one they’d placed on the table in the hotel. She would know him immediately. Why had he given her the parole? Why did she need to know about Sweet Virginia?
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