Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assure her. “Now, to be clear, this is the most important assignment of your life. Don’t let me catch you treating it otherwise.” In the back of my mind, I am already formulating a plan on how to test this new agent. Does Simon think he can send me someone still wet behind the ears and that will be it? He’s slipping.

  Theo picks this moment to come parading into the kitchen dragging his favorite mangled teddy bear. He climbs up on my lap and settles Teddy on the table before demanding juice. Agent Nanny jumps into action. “The apple juice is in the fridge,” I instruct her. “Pour it into that sippy cup.”

  “Who is she?” Theo asks.

  “This is …” I pause, realizing I have no idea what Agent Nanny’s name is.

  “Pauline,” she supplies. “I’m Pauline.” I know that’s not her real name. She still has a problem saying it.

  “Pauline is going to play with you for a few days while Mommy does some … work. How does that sound?”

  Theo shrugs, noncommittal. “Will she play trucks?” he asks.

  “I’m sure she will play trucks, if you ask her nicely and show her how,” I say, seeing the fear in Agent Nanny Pauline’s eyes. This assignment may drive her into early retirement.

  “Why don’t you go and get a few to show her?” I suggest. Theo slides to the floor, clutching his juice, and wanders off to find some trucks.

  “Now, it’s very easy,” I say to a terrified Pauline. “All you have to do is play with him. You will do all your playing here in the house or in the backyard until I say differently. Don’t let him out of your sight even for a second. I’ve made a list of his schedule, what to feed him, etc. Follow his lead and you will be fine.”

  Pauline is pale. She sees her whole career going down the toilet because of a bratty three-year-old and an inability to understand the concept of playing trucks. I search for something reassuring.

  “This should all be wrapped up in a few days,” I say, sounding far more confident than I am. “After which you can go back to things that are really scary.”

  She smiles halfheartedly, turning toward the noise that is Theo dragging a half dozen toy trucks down the hallway. He dumps them with enthusiasm on the kitchen floor, squats down, and gets busy with the playing. After a few seconds, he glances up at Agent Nanny Pauline and says, “Well, come on. Play trucks.” Agents are good at taking orders, and Pauline does as she’s told, assuming a cross-legged position on the floor next to my darling and bossy boy.

  “I’m going to be upstairs in the office,” I say, refilling my coffee cup. “Don’t forget to remind him to pee every once in a while. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Okay,” they say in unison. I shake my head at the weirdness of the blazer-wearing Pauline on the floor playing trucks and go upstairs.

  My first order of business is to orient myself. I don’t know who this professor is or why everyone seems so interested in him all of a sudden. I don’t know what he does. I don’t know how he knows Ian Blackford. It seems I don’t know anything anymore except how to make banana bread with whole wheat flour and raisins that Will insists reminds him of a brick. And speaking of Will, there is the little issue of telling him why Agent Nanny is down in my kitchen at this very moment. I could tell the truth but that won’t work. I could say I’m doing a bit of freelancing, but having not mentioned work in any real capacity throughout our relationship, the timing seems bad. After careful consideration, I decide to deal with it when Theo announces to his daddy that he had fun with his new friend today and his daddy turns to me for explanation and I don’t have one. Sounds like a plan.

  Once upon a time in a jungle I can still not bring myself to mention by name, Simon Still, delirious from malaria, was ranting about the government of Pakistan. Because it was not good for our life expectancies to have the supposed Frenchman howling in English about extremists hidden in the mountains, plotting our downfall, I lay down next to him on his grass mat and tried to soothe him. I stroked his sweaty hair back from his forehead and sang verse after verse of “Oh My Darling Clementine” in French, which he seemed to like very much. After a while, he felt cool and limp in my arms. But as I tried to slide my arm out from under his shoulders and escape back to my own scratchy mat, he reached up and grabbed me, panicked.

  “Stay,” he whispered, his eyes clouded with an unknown terror.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. I’ll sing. Calm down. Go to sleep.”

  “No, Sally,” he said, squeezing me tighter. “The passwords are secure. They are. I just add another number on to the sequence every month. Is that good enough? You must tell me.”

  I am not normally an opportunist, but this seemed like due compensation for having to stay up all night singing.

  “What’s the sequence, Simon?” I asked. “I’ll keep it safe.”

  “The day it all began,” he said, as if I should have known. “The day I signed my life over to them. I like to remind myself of the time that has passed.”

  Why he wanted to torture himself like that I would never know, because before I could ask he passed out cold. I wriggled out from under him and crawled back to my own mat. As I dug through the layers of mosquito netting to find the opening, I repeated Simon’s password to myself a few times. Not that I was at any risk of forgetting it.

  In my head, I count off the number of months I have been gone from the Agency. I add those to 415288, the month and day that Simon began service to his country followed by the number of months he’d been at it when I left, and I’m in. It shouldn’t be so easy. If I liked Simon better right now, I might even point that out to him.

  I remind myself that accessing the network is a small victory. The USAWMD was not known for its commitment to an electronic universe. The most important information, the things that would make the average American cringe with distaste and perhaps be moved to rail against our methods of democracy, those things were loosely bound together by rubber bands, stashed in cryptically labeled boxes, and stored in the belly of an undisclosed mountain. They were also written in a code so irritatingly complex that I used to make things up to see if anyone bothered to really read them. My conclusion was no.

  But background information, dossiers on individuals of interest to the Agency, sometimes showed up on the network. And today I just got lucky.

  Professor Albert Malcolm is sixty-eight years old, unmarried, no children. He lives alone in a small house near the University. The attached photos indicate that the house has a perfectly manicured front lawn with a row of rosebushes along one side. Professor Malcolm has owned the same car for thirty years, a white Volkswagen Beetle. Hailing originally from Minnesota, Malcolm is considered a genius in his field of analytical chemistry. And because he is considered a genius, his obvious insanity is dismissed as eccentricity. Isn’t it cute that he wears the same clothes for twenty days in a row, not coming out of the lab except to use the toilet? Can someone please go in there and clear out the pizza boxes before we lose a student? Yes, we would, except no one knows the code for entry and the nutty professor is not about to answer a knock at the door. After a while, he would emerge but refuse to say what he was doing in the lab. His logs would be blank and his eyes would be spinning like saucers in his head.

  His students hate him, at least those who have had the honor of actually having met the guy. Professor Malcolm believes teaching is for idiots. And I’m not drawing conclusions here. According to the writer, he actually said as much. “Teaching,” he pronounced in an academic journal, “is for idiots with nothing better to do with their time. If the university wanted a teacher, they should perhaps hire one of these idiots I’m speaking of and be done with it.”

  Shortly thereafter, the university issued an apology to teachers everywhere on behalf of the professor. Of course, he was not involved with the apology; no one expected he would be. So Professor Malcolm’s teaching assistants conduct his classes while he hides out in the lab. And the university looks the other way, thinking t
hat it’s probably safer for everyone involved if he stays away from the fresh young minds of the students.

  Which is not to say that Malcolm doesn’t have his followers. There is a group of students who appear to worship at his lab door. He is deeply critical and insulting of these particular students, which only fuels their desire to please him. Impressionable youth. I smile. It will make it far easier for me to scare the shit out of them and get some actual, usable information.

  I lean back in the desk chair as far as I can without falling over. What I really want to know is how Blackford met Professor Malcolm. I want to know about the very first time they laid eyes on one another. Did Malcolm find Blackford or the other way around? How long have they been working on this little project together and, most importantly, when is it going to be done? But I somehow doubt the answers to any of these questions are going to show up in Albert Malcolm’s file. And that can mean only one thing: I have to go on a field trip.

  Downstairs, Agent Nanny Pauline has shed her blazer, rolled up her sleeves, and kicked off her shoes. Theo is busy showing her the proper way to set up the Thomas the Train tracks so there is a jump for the train to sail off. Pauline has obviously accepted her beta role and is nodding her head agreeably. She looks almost happy.

  “Hi, kids,” I say. They both startle.

  “Hi, Mommy,” Theo says. “Pauline is helping build jumps for Thomas.”

  “Yes,” I say, “I can see that. Do you mind if Mommy goes out for a little while and you stay here and play with Pauline?”

  “Nope, I’ll stay here and play with Pauline,” he says, as if struck by a brilliant idea. “When you come back, we go to the park.”

  “Deal,” I say. “I’ll be gone two hours at the most. Don’t be scared.” But that does little to chase away the look of fear on Pauline’s face. “You’ll be fine. My cell number is on the table. Call me if you need anything or if anything happens. Okay? Okay. Good. I’ll be back.”

  I grab my bag off the table and realize it is not actually necessary to lug twenty pounds of wipes, toys, sippy cups, crackers, and other kid paraphernalia with me on my student-stalking mission. Feeling oddly liberated, I pull out my wallet, stick my cell phone in my pocket, and head out the door.

  Now, a normal person living a normal life would secure the necessary references from a new babysitter and call each and every one. A normal person would ask a series of carefully crafted questions designed to uncover relevant information, such as whether the babysitter in question was a practicing ax murderer in her spare time. A normal person living in my city probably would go the extra mile and have a proper professional background check conducted as well. But no. Not me. I have my own approach.

  Instead of hopping in my car and heading across the bridge for a rendezvous with Professor Malcolm, I creep around the house and slip into the kitchen through the back door. Nanny Pauline appears ten seconds later, a toy train in her hand, ready to cudgel me to death with it.

  I tap my watch. “Ten seconds. Too long. What if I had a gun? You have Thomas the Train. Not really an equal fight.”

  Nanny Pauline looks crestfallen. “I was told not to carry my weapon on the assignment.”

  “And that is as it should be. But pick up something heavier.” I gesture to the cast-iron frying pan, still dirty, on the stove. “Like that.”

  Pauline nods. “Yes. That would be better.” In comes Theo.

  “Mommy? I thought you were leaving.”

  “I am, sweetheart. Right now. See you soon.” I kiss his blond head. Then I look at Pauline and again tap the face of my watch. “Too long.”

  She trudges out of the kitchen after Theo, looking like a puppy who has just been scolded for peeing on the floor.

  This time, as I actually get in my car and drive toward the bridge, I try very hard to think about Professor Malcolm. But it’s not easy. My heart is beating too fast, the rushing blood echoing in my ears. My hands grip the steering wheel so tightly my fingers are white. I can feel the wheel growing slick with sweat. Theo is out of my sight. I try counting backward from one hundred, but that does nothing to alleviate my panic attack. Finally, I dial Simon.

  “Listen,” I bark into the phone. “She better be the very, very, very best thing the Agency has produced in a decade because if anything happens to Theo it’s your head. And I mean the part about the head.”

  “Calm down there, Sally. It’s not as if I sent you someone fresh out of school. She’s done some things. I have great hopes for her.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I say.

  “Am I?”

  “I meant the thing about the head.”

  “I know. I heard you the first time. Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “But you are in the car.”

  “So what? Information is on a need-to-know basis,” I say and hang up on him. He dials me back several times, but I’ve tossed the phone into the backseat, where I won’t be tempted to answer it. I practice my deep yoga breathing for a few minutes. After what seems like forever, my pulse begins to slow and steady. This will be fine. It has to be. I will accept no alternative.

  And now, back to Albert Malcolm. He publishes when he must, but mostly he hides out in his lab like a mad scientist. People give him the benefit of the doubt because he has been labeled a genius. But why do we assume that because someone is a genius they are up to something lifesaving or revolutionary, such as inventing a cure for cancer? Why don’t we assume that the reason the professor keeps his door locked is because behind it he is messing with unspeakable evil?

  The campus is beautiful, landscaped, and blooming. It looks exactly like it does in the brochure. I think about the cold gray of my own college experience and wonder why it never occurred to me to transfer somewhere warm with beaches and palm trees. I mean, chemistry 101 is still chemistry 101 even if it is 75 degrees outside with blue skies and sunshine, right?

  I park my car in a visitor lot and head toward a campus café known as a science major hangout. How do I know this? I thank my anonymous USAWMD writer for giving me at least one useful tidbit of information. The place is mobbed with students chugging double lattes and scarfing trans fat in the guise of donuts and pastries. Caffeine and sugar. Who needs drugs? I work my way up to the counter and order a single decaf, much to the shock and horror of my barista.

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “Decaf?”

  “Yes,” I say, “and hurry. I’m feeling light-headed.” Coffee in hand, I find an empty seat and watch the college kids move in and out. I try to decide who is who. Who are the cool kids? The geeks? Who is most likely to be in Professor Malcolm’s inner circle? Being as I don’t actually know the professor, this is harder than it might appear. Using my master sleuthing techniques, honed over years of hard-won experience, I turn to the guy next to me and say, “Do you happen to know anyone who studies with Professor Malcolm?” The kid, no older than twenty, lifts his head from his textbook for a mere second and points to a table in the corner of the café. “The Disciples,” he says, “they usually sit over there.” He returns his head to the book.

  “Thank you,” I say, but he has already forgotten I exist.

  The table in the corner has eight seats pulled up around it and they are all full. The students range in age from maybe twenty to at least twenty-five or -six. The Disciples appear to be grad students. They are not a particularly noteworthy bunch. One boy has on white socks and black shoes. The two girls look hipper, although one of them is so thin a strong gust of wind might carry her away. She reminds me of a whippet. Nervous and jumpy. She is my student of choice. I sit and wait for her to leave or to be left alone.

  About a half hour later, she gets up, gives a kiss to one of the older guys at the table, collects her bag, and heads out of the café. I keep an even five paces behind her, and right before she enters the library, I pounce. Catching her by the arm, I spin her toward me with no effort at all. She is so tiny and frail, I worry my light grip will leave a br
uise.

  “Hey,” I say. She looks surprised to find a strange woman holding her arm.

  “Hi,” she says. I let go. “Do I know you?”

  “No, but can you tell me where I can find Professor Malcolm? I have an appointment with him and I’m lost.” I shrug. “Don’t like to keep the man waiting.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “he hates that. So rigid when it comes to his own schedule and nice and loose when it comes to other people’s.” She rolls her eyes. Perfect. This woman is in the Malcolm circle because the guy she likes is in the Malcolm circle, not because of any personal loyalty to the man.

  “I know,” I say, lying to keep the conversation going. “I was here to interview him once before and he didn’t even show up.”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “Freelance.”

  She nods as if that explains it all. “I wish I understood everyone’s fascination with the old guy. Barry, my boyfriend, is obsessed with him, says he’s on the verge of being able to program us all to act like zombies or something, which he thinks is totally cool. Not that I’m supposed to mention it. He’d kill me if he knew.” More eye rolling.

  “You don’t study with Professor Malcolm?”

  “Me? Are you kidding? No way. I’m premed. Not even close to being smart enough to hang with the professor. He only lets a couple of people into his lab and if he suddenly decides he doesn’t like you anymore, well, then you’re out on your ass. Barry is one of his boys. Listen, I have to go. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Where is the Professor’s office?”

  “Jade Hall, second floor,” she says. “I’m Chloe, by the way. Good luck with your article. I hope he shows up.” With that she turns and heads into the library.

  I find Jade Hall at the end of a tulip-lined flagstone path. It is an old building, planted oddly in front of a new state-of-the art research building named for the rich alumnae who made it all possible. I wonder why they bothered keeping the old building at all? Sentimentality? I check the directory for Malcolm and find him, indeed, on the second floor. There is a secretary guarding the entrance to five different offices. She informs me that Professor Malcolm is in the lab for the duration of the day and she doesn’t expect to be seeing him tomorrow either.