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The Unexpected Spy

Page 17

by Tracy Walder


  Ben and Scott did clean up while Gina and I sat on the couch and looked through her photo albums. I could see that her married life was divided into two parts. Part One was Gina as a working mother in America, who felt productive and purposeful in her life. She had friends. Her child had friends whose parents were a part of her life. She had a community. Part Two was Gina as Scott’s wife overseas. She had no friends. She didn’t speak the language and was having trouble picking up even the most basic words. Her child had few friends. Gina felt like an outsider with no community to wrap around herself and her family.

  “Everyone in the agency here is divorced or single,” Gina said. “They don’t want to do dinners in with spaghetti and the noise of kids. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, the only good thing I have going here is the noise of my kid and my husband in the rare times he’s home.”

  “He doesn’t seem very happy either,” I said.

  “He’s miserable,” Gina said. “I mean, it would be one thing if I were sacrificing everything I worked toward and want in life so that he could have some ultimate experience or do great work—”

  “But this is great work.” I chose not to point out that Scott didn’t seem to be doing the work that needed to be done. That he had, in fact, made my job more difficult in so many ways—the least of which was that the local intelligence officers appeared to assume that all Americans were like Scott and so far didn’t seem to trust, or like, me or Ben.

  “Do you love the work?” Gina asked. No one had ever put this question to me. Probably because no one, outside of those already in the agency, knew what I did.

  “I do,” I said. “I love the people. I love the agency. I believe in what we’re doing. We’re saving lives. Or trying to.”

  “Yeah, but you’re all alone.” She quickly covered her mouth as if she’d said something wrong. I just smiled, but her words clanged around inside me.

  In the cab on the way back to the hotel, Ben told me he was warming up to Scott. He felt bad for the guy, an American homebody, stuck overseas.

  “He’s misplaced,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, I guess.” I was off in my head, thinking about Gina and her before-and-after lives. Thinking about her child, who had demanded snuggle time and a kiss goodnight from both parents at bedtime. Thinking about how she saw her family as a tight little tribe where everyone counted on everyone else. Together, they had created their own lifeboat.

  I realized then that I wanted to feel enclosed by something more intimate than the agency. I was alone. And a family one day sounded wonderful. But if I had that family, I’d want us all to live in a solid home where we didn’t need a safe room or a driver. None of that would be easy to achieve while working for the CIA.

  With Gina’s words, the seeds of a different future life had been planted in my mind. I could feel it in me. What had previously been unnamed and unrecognized was now letting itself be known. And imagined. Still, I couldn’t fathom giving up the fight against terrorists. I’d have to find a way to do it from the States. I could become an analyst for the CIA, but that was not my style. I had to move, take action. The FBI, I thought. They fight terrorism in the homeland. I’d encountered a few FBI agents in Langley, and they didn’t seem so bad.

  As if there were a file in my brain, I took my thoughts of the FBI and slotted them away. For now, there was work to do. I only had the names of three of the people on the money trail we’d been following, and no one’s whereabouts yet. If Gina wanted to be sure she could kiss her child goodnight every single evening, I needed to find the rest of that deadly crew soon. Because, it seemed to me, Scott had other things on his mind.

  * * *

  It’s funny how quickly the unusual becomes routine. Putting on my bathing suit to shower was second nature now, as if that was how I’d done it my whole life. The Barbie commentary came and went as Ben and I spent our first of four planned weeks simply getting to know the local intelligence operatives, building relationships with them, showing them we could be trusted, and sussing out who among the agents we could trust. It was a hard week to start work with them as they were trying to identify the recent bombers and bring down the al-Qaeda cell behind that attack. But we knew it was bigger than that. That attack was only one item on al-Qaeda’s lengthy agenda, and though we wanted to close up and seal that case as much as local intelligence did, we also wanted to look further out into the future, out into the radiating arms of al-Qaeda, and stop all potential oncoming attacks.

  Over the next few days, with David back in Langley triangulating our intel, we located one of the people we’d been searching for: a terrorist named H. Currently he was living outside Africa and applying for the equivalent of a green card in a European capital. Like what had happened in London with the police and the ricin plot, we’d seen all the evidence of his plan, but none of what we’d seen—before it was combined to make poison—was illegal. Still, there was no imaginable circumstance in which H would have this stuff and not be making WMDs. Think of it this way: if you came home and found the KitchenAid mixer, a bag of flour, a stick of butter, two eggs, brown and white sugars, a bottle of vanilla, a shaker of salt, a box of baking soda, and a bag of Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet Morsels on the counter, you’d be pretty darned sure someone was about to make chocolate chip cookies. If the baker then walked in the kitchen and denied they were making cookies, or anything even remotely like cookies, if they accused you of jumping to conclusions, you … well, you’d assume they were lying. As certain as you’d be that cookies were about to be baked, we were certain that WMDs were being built. On top of all that, we’d identified H earlier at an al-Qaeda training camp, so we were sure of what his ideological beliefs were and how he intended to spread those beliefs (from al-Qaeda’s written materials I’d read, “the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun”).

  What we didn’t know was who was helping H with this plot, who would deploy the poison; we also weren’t sure exactly when and where he planned to have it deployed. If H were arrested and we could talk to him, we’d break down this plot before it moved any further than production in his grubby apartment. But it was up to the people in the country where he was currently residing to arrest him.

  Unfortunately, no one there was willing to do that. The only thing official records showed was that H was so committed to the values of the West that he was completing all the paperwork to legally work and go to school there. His application was fully in process, and none of the evidence we handed over could convince anyone to stop it.

  He was still, however, a citizen of the African nation where we were staying. He could be extradited back to Africa where we could speak to him, or he could speak to the local intelligence and then we would speak to them.

  Our difficulties in getting H were multisided; I felt like I was in a room with the walls slowly closing in on me. There were Scott and his boss, who appeared to have no interest in al-Qaeda even after the recent bombing in the country where they now lived. They were not officially banned, but no other word better describes how unwelcome they were at the local intelligence offices. And the local men we’d met were not about to do any favors for those two, or implore their countrymen to extradite a guy we—the Americans—wanted to speak with. Ben and I had managed to get a few of them to warm up to us, but even though they liked us, they didn’t like the idea of identifying a terrorist from their country. In spite of what had recently gone down, they maintained the line that there were no African terrorists. Only Middle Easterners. It was like an intense college football rivalry to the death: the USC Trojans vs. the UCLA Bruins. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Trojan who didn’t want to call the Bruins for a penalty on every play. And vice versa. These men saw themselves as the modern good guys. They liked to depict other countries as barbaric breeding grounds for terrorists. Neither one of those generalizations was true, of course.

  In under two weeks, Ben and I had helped identify every
single detached head, and everyone associated with that attack. With the rest of that crew taken in or under surveillance, we could get more people to focus on our current crises at hand: H, the money he had backing him, and the plan he was brewing. We called a meeting at the local intelligence office. Ben even brought in some pastries.

  “We’ve now conclusively identified every terrorist in the recent coordinated bombings,” I said. “And every single one was from your country. Are you still maintaining that you have no terrorists?” I looked directly at the man who had first dubbed me Malibu Barbie. I was daring him to say those words now that he’d seen how serious I was about this work, and how much I could accomplish in relatively little time.

  “They are…” he paused. “Rare.” He pulled a crumpled unfiltered cigarette from his breast pocket, smoothed it out with his thick fingers, then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. I scooted my chair back so I wouldn’t have to breathe in the smoke I knew he’d blow toward me.

  “Well, yes,” Ben said. “Islamic extremism when measured against the millions of Muslims in the world is very rare. But that’s our job. We’re here to find the rare extremists. It only takes one of them to blow up a building, or spray ricin powder in a movie theater.”

  There were mumblings and gesticulations from the men in the room. They spoke in a dialect I couldn’t understand, with some English words thrown in.

  “You need to look at the Middle East!” the smoking agent said. I imagined he was translating all they were saying into one pithy sentence.

  “H is a citizen of your country.” I was stating the obvious. They already knew this. But it was as if they believed that if they didn’t pick up H and bring him in, he wouldn’t exist, and they could carry on thinking that the men we’d identified who were responsible for the recent attack were the very last of their country’s rare terrorists.

  “We will think about this.” Little clouds of smoke puffed from the agent’s mouth with each word.

  There was silence for a moment. And those damn floating heads appeared, taunting me; compelling me to work faster, harder. Until my mind was so full, there was no room for them.

  * * *

  When they weren’t calling me Malibu Barbie, the local operatives were calling me ma’am, which was fine by me. To be ma’am in this country made me feel grown-up, in control of my life, like someone who would never have been called Zidiot while in school. Ma’am would definitely never endure more than 30 hours of travel to stand in the wedding of someone who wasn’t really her friend.

  But Tracy Schandler, aka Zidiot, did.

  The bride and I had started out as friends at the age of three. By the time we were in third grade she was one of the ringleaders of a gang of girls who bullied me at school. This went on to such an extent that I retreated into my head; I became quiet, an observer, and utterly friendless until high school. The first month of ninth grade, the bullying future bride called me at her mother’s insistence. She apologized for the years of schoolyard terror and asked if I would be her pal. We both were interested in dance, so we knew we’d be placed together often in high school. Though I’d acclimated to my internal life by then, I was still a kid and desperate to hang out with other people. I said yes, and we were friends through high school. To a degree. I had never felt safe enough to open up and reveal to my former torturer the person I’d developed into during my years of solitude. She got a very flimsy version of me, an outer layer that didn’t resemble the person I felt I was inside.

  I landed at Dulles Airport after two days of travel, and then took a cab directly to the CIA headquarters. I wouldn’t be using that passport or those ID cards in California and didn’t want to have them on me or in my bags.

  Afterward, I grabbed a Starbucks coffee (the usual) and got in a cab to return to Dulles for the last leg of this marathon voyage. With the half-full cup in my hand, I fell asleep in the back of the cab and was awoken when my head bonked against the window. The coffee didn’t spill but my consciousness did, and I began to wonder why I was making this effort for someone whom I didn’t genuinely know. And who absolutely didn’t know me. Or appreciate me.

  Thirty minutes later, I skirted through the airport again, shadowing my face behind hanging hair. I didn’t want to be recognized by anyone in airport security as the woman who had just disembarked from a flight that had originated in a country to which Americans don’t normally travel. I was an American on American soil, though, so a bureaucratic SNAFU—being questioned—would be the worst that could happen.

  It wasn’t until I was standing on the flattened carpet of a Los Angeles hotel ballroom, wearing a poufy blue dress that I’d donate to the Salvation Army the next day, that I had total clarity. I understood then that I’d made this ridiculously exhausting effort to be in the wedding only so I could have a do-over from childhood. I’d wanted people to see that Tracy Schandler, the girl they’d called Zidiot, had been included. Was a bridesmaid even! Was no longer their victim.

  But for whom, exactly, did I make all that effort? The people who weren’t my friends now any more than they’d been back then? The people who didn’t matter in my life? The people who had nothing to do with me currently and nothing to do with all the ways in which my life was rewarding and thrilling?

  It was as if I’d added water to an old, shriveled plant hoping it would spring to life all over again as a bushy, flowering shrub.

  The only person who was bullying me now was me. I was the one who had compelled myself to dart halfway across the globe for people with whom my single point of connection was the fact that they had been my tormentors.

  The bride was fabulously happy.

  I was not.

  My parents, too, were invited to this wedding but were seated at a different table during dinner. Instead of catching up with them, I was stuck between a man who spoke while chewing his food and a woman who turned her face away from me. Never again, I thought as I picked at a piece of chicken. I realized I didn’t need these people to like me. I didn’t need to be included. Yes, as Gina had pointed out, I was alone. But just then, I was complete in my aloneness. My needs had nothing to do with anyone at that wedding and couldn’t be satisfied by anyone there. My needs could only be met by me.

  Driving away from the wedding, I sat in the backseat of my parents’ car as if I were a little kid again. It was warm, and the sun was beating in through the sunroof. My mother started talking about the goings-on in her circle of friends, people I’d known most of my life. Her voice was comforting, calming, so much so that I looked out the window at the ocean along the freeway and for once didn’t see the untethered heads. Without those tattered faces, I was free to think about other things. Like how wide that expanse of water was. I floated above the sea in my head and zoomed out until I could see the Pacific glimmering all the way to Japan. From there, I followed the water through the Philippine Sea, into the Indian Ocean, and then into the Arabian Sea. I drifted up the Red Sea, with Africa on one side of me and the Middle East on the other.

  That was where my mind was. That was where my purpose was. The shy girl with braces and acne hiding by her locker was still inside me. But she was no longer afraid. Not of any bullies anywhere in the world.

  ELEVEN

  BANG, BANG, BOOM!

  War Zone, Middle East 2003

  Before I flew off to the office in the Middle East for a five-month stay, I downloaded an application for the FBI. I wasn’t sure if I’d fill it out and send it in or not. But I’d printed it. I loved the CIA so much that I couldn’t imagine leaving. In my mind, I tried to reframe going into the FBI as a transfer rather than a change. I’d continue tracking terrorists, but from a single home base. I left the blank application in my apartment in the States and decided I’d deal with it, or not, when I returned.

  Once I was in the war zone, I forgot about the FBI. I forgot about everything outside my work. I didn’t even have a photo or memento from home on my desk in my shared office. We worked in what was once a hotel;
it was the same space where we took our meals. My office was a former hotel room, exactly that size, but where a bathroom used to be was open, rusted plumbing and a half-chipped-away mosaic marble floor.

  Time in the war zone moved differently than time anywhere else. Because we were all living where we were working, there was no sense of a break or even a rest. It was like a continuous, cluttered, noisy symphony where the notes go on and on and on. You might change from the horns to the strings, but the music never stops playing. Even when I lay in the relative calm and peacefulness of my trailer, I knew there was a war happening not far from me. I couldn’t forget that while I slept, bombs were going off, missiles were being fired, IEDs were being planted beside rocks in the dirt roads, and terrorists were plotting their next move.

  While I slept, people were dying.

  Each morning, the moment I woke up, I already felt like I had fallen behind.

  The office psychologist, a woman who lived in the trailer beside mine, appeared to be slowly losing her spirit, her optimism. I sat with her at breakfast one morning and watched as she stared down at her plate. I was having my usual, a PowerBar brought from home and black coffee. She was eating scrambled eggs that kept falling off the fork she held in her limp hand. At around forty, she seemed like a person whom I had expected could and would handle anything. Yet there she was, clearly depressed. Between the Navy SEALs, the CIA, and the terrorists, she was dealing with three sides of a brutally acute, blade-edged triangle.

  “I’m just … I’m just not sure how much more I can take,” she said, re-forking the same jiggly wad of egg she’d already dropped once. I felt bad for her, but I also worried a little for myself. If she’s feeling undone by all this, I thought, then there’s a chance I could become unraveled by it, too. I decided then that I better do everything I could to maintain optimum mental health.

 

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