Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  Well, forget all that stuff. After I accepted Simon Still’s invitation to become a spy and save the world, I went back to sitting in my cubicle, reading documents, and making summaries. I wanted to ask when the spying thing started or, at the very least, when the training began. But already I was developing the acutely paranoid view of the world that is necessary for a spy to stay alive. I wanted to ask what was going on, but didn’t trust anyone to know what I knew or needed to know. A few weeks passed in that fashion, my anxiety level pushing slowly up into the red zone. Did I dream the conversation with Simon? Was I having some sort of mental breakdown? When I was this close to having myself checked out by a psychiatrist, Simon appeared at my desk—the first time I’d seen him since our talk on the Mall.

  “Come with me,” he said. I scrambled up from my desk and followed at his heels like a well-behaved golden retriever.

  “Got any plans?” he asked in the elevator, which was delivering us into the bowels of the building.

  “For right now? Or do you mean, like, plans for the future?” I asked.

  Simon gave me a look, one intended to make me wither on the vine. Suddenly, I felt about twelve inches tall.

  “No,” I said softly. “No plans.”

  We got off our elevator and walked down a long, white corridor to another elevator. There Simon punched in a series of codes and placed his palm on a sensor for a fingerprint scan. After a moment, the elevator opened its black jaws and in we went. Our journey continued downward. I said nothing. Simon said nothing. Finally, after one more elevator and three more long, empty hallways, we entered a circular lobby with several closed doors off of it, like petals on a daisy.

  “Welcome to the USAWMD Underground,” Simon said. He opened one of the doors and invited me to step inside. I expected an office, something with burgundy leather club chairs and deep, rich carpets, with decanters of good whisky on a polished cherry sideboard. What I saw was quite the opposite. Simon’s office consisted of several beat-up metal file cabinets and a folding card table serving as a desk. The walls were bare, the phone unplugged from its jack. The carpet was gray industrial, but slightly gritty-looking, as if it had never been vacuumed. There was an empty, obviously old, coffee cup on the floor near the trash can. The fluorescents hummed overhead, bathing everything in a sickly green light.

  “Nice,” I commented.

  “We prefer our agents to be out in the world doing something useful rather than sitting around at home picking their noses. So we make it unpleasant to sit, if you get my meaning.”

  Suddenly I missed my cubicle upstairs with at least a distant view of the outside world.

  “What’s through that door?” I asked, pointing to another door opposite where we stood. Simon opened it to reveal yet another daisy.

  “That one is yours,” he said, pointing to one of the closed doors. “Don’t look so excited.”

  On my new desk was a packet of information containing a passport with a strange name but my face and some details about a guy named Peter Bradley in Auckland, New Zealand, who, I was told, was suspected of being part of the Blind Monk’s network.

  “Your job here is to follow Peter to the best of your ability. Record his activities. Plain and simple. Under no circumstances are you to interact with him. Understood?”

  “Yes,” I said, starting to sweat a little, “but is that it?”

  “What did you expect?” Simon said. “The Director likes to say you’re either born with it or not. This is the fastest way to find out. Maybe later we’ll teach you how to kill someone. Your flight leaves tonight. Don’t miss it. And don’t call me. I don’t want to hear from you until you are back.”

  “What if I get in trouble?”

  Simon gave me the withering look again. And all that was left of my bravado, which wasn’t much, seeped right through the soles of my shoes, sucked up by the greedy gray carpet.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Now, why don’t I show you the way out so you don’t end up lost down here for the next one hundred years?”

  “Wait!” I blurted. “One more question.”

  “What?” Simon Still was already leaving.

  “Who is the Blind Monk?”

  Simon sighed. “Hasn’t anyone taught you anything?” I guessed not.

  The Agency had been looking for the Blind Monk for years by the time I showed up at the USAWMD Underground. Of course, the man in question wasn’t blind and he wasn’t a monk, but he did use both blind and monk for cover on occasion. He was, in reality, a high-level, illegal arms dealer hailing, we believed, from Tibet. His focus was purchasing all the component parts for a nuclear device and selling it as a do-it-yourself bomb product. Kind of like paint-by-numbers for the mass-destruction set. And he was pretty good at it. We’d collected several of the bombs he’d been instrumental in providing and they were the real deal. As a result, the Blind Monk was toward the top of the Agency’s Most Wanted list, which existed mostly in Simon Still’s head.

  The Blind Monk was also not a very nice man, which was particularly insulting when he was playing the part of a deeply religious person. It has to be a little shocking to be strangled by a man wearing the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk. You would never expect it. Also, to give credit where credit is due, he was highly creative when it came to dispatching people he found annoying. In addition to the aforementioned strangling, his methods of choice might include drowning, shooting, decapitating, burning, tossing off the rooftops of very high buildings, backing over in cars—both big and small (the cars, that is)—and neck-breaking. And when he grew bored, he would experiment with something different like leaving his victim in a freezer unit until the unfortunate soul attained Popsicle status. Rumor had it that the Blind Monk had started out as a front for a far more sinister terrorist than himself but he soon grew tired of taking orders and buried his mentor alive somewhere deep in the Himalaya.

  And as it turned out, he was the perfect foil for a new and cocky Agent Ian Blackford. Word was that the minute Blackford showed up down in the daisy, the Blind Monk was all his. Sometimes timing is everything. Blackford chased the Blind Monk around the globe dozens of times, but never quite managed to close the deal. Which really fed the rumor mill. Ian Blackford was supposed to be invincible. It was generally accepted that he knew everything. So why was it he never got it together enough to shoot the Blind Monk and call it good? That remained a fine, and unanswered, question.

  I grabbed the file off of what was now my desk and quickly followed after Simon, thinking he might be right about me wandering around this sub-basement circle of hell forever.

  To say I was scared would be an understatement. I was moving one degree closer to this Blind Monk character and I didn’t want to end up dead before I even really started. But I also felt a buzz in that fear, an adrenaline rush I’d never experienced before. Having less than three hours until my plane took off, I raced back to my empty apartment to throw some things in a knapsack and head off into professional oblivion. Only when I was zipping my toothbrush into a plastic bag did I notice that my hands were shaking.

  “Am I going to die?” I asked my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Is this it?” I stared at my face. There was something new there, something twitchy and alert. As scared as I was of Peter Bradley and the Blind Monk, of the Agency and Simon Still and everything I didn’t know and hadn’t learned, one thing was clear as a bell. I liked it.

  I found out later that I was not supposed to be sent to New Zealand to follow Peter Bradley, a notorious gunrunner known for his generally psychotic behavior in addition to his connection to the Blind Monk. It was supposed to be a guy named Thomas Kin. But I never met Thomas because he was dead at the time and I was the only agent around to fill in. It took me a few years to work up some good old-fashioned resentment at having been thrown to the wolves in that fashion. But I survived. And I guess in the long run that was the only thing that mattered.

  8

  Theo is playing on the floor. He’s removed
all the cushions from the living room couch and has assembled a makeshift fort from which he announces he plans to attack me.

  “If you attack me, who is going to make your dinner?” I ask. I am met with silence.

  So instead, I ask if I’m allowed into the complex with my lowly security clearance. After giving my request some consideration, he pushes one of the pillows away and clears a path for my entry.

  “This is a very nice fort,” I comment, folding myself up like a pretzel to fit inside.

  “Is that man with no hair gone?”

  “Tom? He’s our neighbor. And yes, he’s gone.”

  “Good.”

  “Why? You don’t like him?”

  “I want to play,” he pouts.

  “Well, he’s gone now. What do you want to play?”

  “Fort.” I’m not sure how one goes about playing fort exactly, so I sit in my knot and wait for my charming son to give me some direction. He seems to have forgotten I’m there, suddenly intent on pushing all his Matchbox cars through one of the cracks in his fortress. I study his profile, his little snub nose, blue eyes, broad straight forehead, and pursed lips as he concentrates on the cars. Such a life this kid leads. So protected. Everyone loves him. Even his grandparents, despite the fact that they find me confusing.

  A short while after my arrival in San Francisco, Will decided it was time for me to meet his parents. He looked about as excited by this prospect as one might get when facing a root canal.

  “I have to warn you up front, they are kind of hard to handle. They think my career change is a delayed rebellion, that everything in my life must be, somehow, a reaction to them. Can you believe that shit? They are that self-centered.”

  “I think I can handle it,” I said.

  “I haven’t even seen them in over a year. My own parents.”

  “It can happen.”

  When we pulled up to the gates of their palatial Hollywood Hills estate, Will turned a strange shade of gray and it went steadily downhill from there. They were expecting a woman named Laura, the girlfriend whose tenure ended with my arrival in San Francisco.

  Laura was a somebody, a graduate of Stanford Law, a partner at Morrison & Foerster. She was tall, thin, blonde, knew what shoes to wear and what handbag to carry, as well as the best places to vacation if you wanted to be seen but not bothered. She came from Greenwich, Connecticut, and made sure you knew it, even if that fact was meaningless to you.

  I was most definitely not Laura. And there were lots of furrowed brows and sidelong glances as Rose Marie Wales Hamilton and William Wilton Hamilton II got used to that idea. They were halfway home when Will announced we were planning on getting married and, well, let me tell you, that very quickly put them in full retreat. Will and I were home in time for breakfast on Saturday morning.

  On our second attempt to connect with the elder Hamiltons, I quietly retired to the stone infinity pool to admire the spectacular view and generally stay out of harm’s way. I was reading a magazine, sipping tart lemonade served by a nameless uniformed housekeeper, and trying not to listen to the conversation going on in the living room behind me.

  “I checked her out, William,” William II said, “and it’s like she almost doesn’t exist. There are years of tax returns from some low-level government job but nothing else. Not a thing. She never went out to dinner on a credit card or bought a pair of jeans or had a bank account. Nothing. And everyone leaves a paper trail, son. Everyone.”

  There was a brief pause as this news sank in. I shrank down in my chair, not all that excited for what would come next.

  “You did what? You hired Marty to investigate my fiancée? Have you lost your mind?”

  “No. I have your best interests at heart.”

  “Bullshit, you do. She doesn’t fit into your wet dream of what a daughter-in-law should be and it drives you crazy.”

  “Now William, no need to be vulgar,” Rose Marie chimed in. “We simply expected something a little different. A person from … somewhere. What ever happened to that nice girl you were with before?” Her voice, like nails on a chalkboard, made me involuntarily cover my ears.

  “You guys,” Will practically hissed, “you sit up here on your hill, with your Cadillac Escalade and your heated pool and your beef flown in from Japan, and you think you can judge me and my choices? You are destroying the planet. I’m just getting married.”

  With that Will stormed out of the kitchen, grabbed me by the arm, and stuffed me into the rental car. Three hours later we were back in San Francisco. The abrupt departure was becoming a habit.

  “Sorry about all of that,” Will said as our plane touched down lightly in the San Francisco fog.

  “Not a problem,” I said, “I think I understand.”

  Will turned pale. “Did you hear?”

  I nodded. “I really liked the part about the Caddy.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t doing this to piss them off?” It seemed like something I had to ask.

  “You?”

  “Yes. Am I the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to your parents?”

  Will was so mad that I would suggest such a thing that he didn’t speak to me until after dinner. But sometimes I still wonder if his attraction was due partly to the fact that I was the worst thing his parents could imagine. A person from nowhere.

  Needless to say, we didn’t see Rose Marie or William II until our wedding, a hot, dry day in Napa Valley. Held at the winery of Will’s college roommate, it was everything a girl could dream of, had a girl been dreaming of such things, of course. I wanted a quick trip down to City Hall, maybe a nice meal out, and twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sex, but Will had different ideas. He wanted to give me the whole enchilada, even if I hadn’t asked for it.

  “I want you to have the fairy tale,” he said. “I want you to have everything you want, now and forever.”

  It was hard to say no. So I plotted and planned a wedding, which included one hundred fifty of Will’s closest friends and exactly none of mine.

  Now, even if Will was marrying me to stick it to his parents, it was impossible for him to ignore what his father had suggested. It led to some strange conversations, such as:

  “So you lived off the grid?” he’d ask.

  “What? Grid?”

  “You know. You didn’t use credit cards, you kept your cash in a safe-deposit box, didn’t own a car or property or anything.”

  “I had a really nice bicycle.”

  “Was it because you worked for the government? You probably saw some scary things.”

  Yes. Some.

  “Well, I think it takes a lot of guts to live like that,” he’d continue.

  “Sure,” I’d say. “So gutsy.” Now at the time, in my mind, I hadn’t actually lied. I had simply said nothing. Bit by bit, Will filled in my backstory with little or no input from me.

  Add to the mix my dead parents, and some compassion gene in Will magically turned on and he felt terrible that I’d had this little orphan Annie childhood and he wanted to make it all better. Thus the princess wedding.

  Maybe in the end it’s nothing more than another example of love and denial, twisted up together like a pretzel. Not all that unusual if you consider the human condition.

  So then, what is the real story? Everyone must come from somewhere and I am no exception to this rule. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York, surrounded by acres of corn and milk cows named Bessie and Moo. It was an idyllic existence in the beginning. During the summer, I’d roll out of bed in my nightgown and bare feet, grab a few still-warm biscuits and a glass of fresh milk from the kitchen table, and go sit on the porch. Watching the farm hustle and move all around me, I’d plot my day. Maybe I’d get Luke from next door and we’d fish for trout in the river with our dime-store poles. Or go swimming in Black Lake. Or ride our bikes down the endless dirt road that seemed to go nowhere. Or go searching for fossils in the dried-out streambed that ran by Luke’s farm. The possibiliti
es were endless. As I was only eight years old, I was not called upon to help on the farm. And because we lived in the middle of nowhere, I was allowed to run amok, unquestioned. I had the long, endless days of childhood summer all to myself and everything was a wonder to behold.

  I would come flying into the house in the early evening, hair a mess, damp from swimming, covered in dirt and mud, a huge grin on my face, and throw myself into my chair at the big, oak dining room table. My parents would look at me and shake their heads. What are we raising here, a wild animal? I’d dig into my food—meat, potatoes, vegetables, and bread straight out of the oven—as if I hadn’t eaten in a month. After dinner, I’d help clean up the kitchen, we’d play cards or watch TV, and I’d go to bed. The next day I’d wake up and do it all over again.

  The winters in upstate New York are another situation entirely—long, cold, and gray. It is safe to say nothing good ever happened in an upstate New York winter. I like to believe it was the bleakness that made the annual winter visits from the man in the dark blue overcoat stand out in my memory. Or maybe it was the fact that he was the only person ever invited into our house.

  The first time he came I opened the door despite my mother yelling that she’d get it. I flung it open and there he stood, tall, slightly stooped, a thick wool cap on his head, and the overcoat, much too fancy for our neck of the woods. He was covered with new snowflakes that were quickly melting into shiny little spots on the blue wool. I stepped back to let him in but he didn’t move, staring at me, a slight twitch evident at the corner of his mouth.