Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  And just to rub salt in the wound, Blackford specialized in weapons of mass destruction. Cargo containers of AK-47s? Planeloads of grenade-launchers? He left that stuff for the amateurs. The real money was to be found in the very WMDs the rest of us back at the Agency were risking our lives to take out of circulation. Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear, if you had a need and a pile of money, Blackford was your guy. Simon Still found this beyond insulting, as you can well imagine. Of course, this was all before I arrived at the Agency, but that didn’t seem to matter to Simon.

  “Who the hell does Blackford think he is?” Simon would shout from behind his closed door. Immediately, I’d hear three or four other office doors slam shut and lock. These were the seasoned agents. They knew when to hunker down and ride out the storm. It was a lesson I too would learn, eventually.

  Ten seconds later, Simon would appear in front of my desk, red-faced, waving a piece of paper containing intelligence on whatever new nasty business Blackford was up to.

  “I don’t know who he thinks he is, sir,” I’d say. “Why don’t you know, Sally?” he’d say. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I’d say again, which was clearly not the right answer.

  “Well, goddamn it,” he’d shout, “find out!” And with that he’d charge back down the hallway, muttering all sorts of obscenities. Whether they were directed at Blackford or me I couldn’t say, but they were not flattering in either case.

  Unfortunately for us at the Agency, Blackford was really good at being really bad. Remember those incidents in Beijing and in Rio, the ones that the twenty-four-hour cable news networks couldn’t get enough of? Well, the part they didn’t tell you was that it was all Blackford, efficiently moving the goods, collecting the money, and not losing any sleep about his wake of Armageddon.

  So to say that Simon was put out when Blackford started kidnapping me from time to time would be a bit of an understatement. Actually, to say it was from time to time might also be a bit of an understatement. At my last count, we were up to about twelve kidnappings. I was new to my job, not willing to claim any expertise in anything and certainly not in spying, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Blackford was better than anyone. There was no point in resisting. It would only leave you feeling inadequate.

  In the beginning, he would usually manage to slip some drug into my cocktail, the result of which would be me collapsed in a heap, at his feet and at his mercy. Eventually, whatever narcotic I’d ingested would wear off and I’d wake up in a drafty apartment or random hotel room with a thoughtful Blackford standing nearby, watching me for signs of life.

  I came to think of Blackford as my nemesis, but with a slight variation. He didn’t seem all that eager to kill me, as a proper nemesis would, but rather preferred to torture me with unexpected changes of plan.

  So you can better understand how these kidnappings usually went down and my resulting professional mortification, let me tell you about the third time I met Ian Blackford.

  I was in Budapest, sent on a mission to follow a woman named Katrina Renoir who was suspected of working for a Chinese terrorist organization. My intelligence report indicated she liked to visit the Gellert Baths on a daily basis and soak in the thermal pools. My job was to watch her and see whom she met.

  So there I sat, up to my chin in a lovely warm pool of water, trying my best to stay focused. The steam drifted up and around my face, making me a witness to the world through a veil of breezy gauze. On the far end of the pool, I caught sight of Katrina Renoir. She was somewhere in her forties but if there was ever a case for taking the baths in Budapest, she was it. She glided down the stairs, a life-sized Tinker Bell in a tiny bikini, and settled in on one of the underwater benches. With her eyes closed and her head back, she looked thoroughly content, not a care in the world she was helping to blow up.

  How come she looked so relaxed and beautiful and I had the look of yesterday’s roadkill? Did the weight of the moral high ground actually cause wrinkles? What a cruel irony.

  As I was lost in this deepest of thoughts, I felt a hand grasp my thigh under the water, followed by a sharp prick, as if I had been poked with a pin. A tiny cloud of blood floated toward the surface of the water.

  “I suppose I should tell management on the way out about the blood. They may want to drain the pool.” And there was Blackford, sitting not ten inches from me, an amused look on his face. “Although you don’t look like you are carrying any communicable diseases. Are you?”

  “Am I what?” I started to ask but in reality I had already moved on to the question that always popped into my apparently pea-sized brain whenever I saw him, and that was, would this be easier if Blackford didn’t look so good? But before I could fall head-first down that bottomless pit, my world went black and I slipped under the water.

  When I woke up, I was in a pint-sized studio apartment. The bathing suit I’d been wearing was draped neatly over a windowsill, drying in the sun. In its place, I wore an oversized button-down shirt and khaki pants that could have fit a whole other person in them. I was on the floor, my neck kinked from the way Blackford had dumped me there. It seemed strange he would take such care to hang up my wet bathing suit to dry but drop me down as if I were nothing more than a pile of dirty laundry.

  I sat up slowly, afraid any quick movement would cause my pounding head to explode. Blackford appeared by the open window.

  “Dry,” he said, tossing the suit at me. Was I supposed to say thank you? What was the protocol here? Would it be wrong if I just started to scream for help?

  “Sorry about the baths,” he said, “but Katrina is off-limits to you and your friends. She works for me.”

  I nodded, giving him a half smile. I could see them together, Tinker Bell and the evil James Bond. They were the perfect fit.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked. I wondered how he would do it. Quickly with a bullet to the head or would he want to make it last, choosing instead to torture me in new and creative ways?

  At least he had the decency to think about my question for a moment. As always, Blackford seemed surrounded by a hazy aura of invincibility. Under his T-shirt, his body rippled with muscles that did not come from a gym. His ice-blue eyes held mine fast.

  “Not today,” he said finally. “But you tell Simon that if I see him move on Katrina, you’ll be the first to go.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, nodding my head vigorously so he knew I got the message and was in complete agreement with him about this and most everything else, and not considering some wily plan of escape, such as jumping out the window. Speaking of escape, I chided myself, you should be formulating a plan for making one soon. You should be doing something. But instead I just kept nodding my head as if my IQ had dropped to somewhere in the low sixties.

  “We will stay away from Katrina,” I said, agreeing to something totally outside of my jurisdiction. If Simon wanted to kill Katrina, he was certainly not going to ask my permission to do so. As my brain pondered this reality, my mouth took off on its own adventure.

  “Did you see me naked?” I blurted. Immediately, I wanted to kick myself. Blackford didn’t say a word, just continued to stare at me. Generally speaking, I consider myself a lucky person. I am, after all, still alive. But something about being held tightly in Blackford’s cold gaze always made me think my number was just about to come up.

  “No,” Blackford said in a tone that made it clear he had about as much regard for me as he did for the average flea. “A bunch of mermaids dressed you. You can go now. Don’t forget what we talked about.”

  Stumbling like a toddler in my oversized pants, I fled the room, grateful for the chance to fuck up another day.

  Simon didn’t like the message and told me I had better watch myself or he was going to transfer me to the State Department, which in his mind was the worst fate that could befall a person. I left out the part about the bathing suit. The humiliation was more than I could reas
onably be expected to bear.

  It went on like this for a number of years until Blackford turned up dead, killed by angry militiamen in Sudan. And that should have been it, the end of the terrible and tragic saga of Ian Blackford.

  But Blackford would never just die. That would be too pedestrian for him. No. Instead, two years ago he was reborn right back into my living room, making a mess of my carefully constructed life and ending us all up on that bridge so brilliantly sketched by Theo, my budding Picasso. But that’s a different story that you might want to get to at another time.

  I trace the outline of Theo’s drawing with my finger. Teacher Wendy continues to smile as if Theo’s advanced doodling skills are a product of her own design.

  “He does a nice job with the colors,” I say, my chair creaking ominously beneath me.

  “He has a flair,” she says, “so creative.” How long would it take for Teacher Wendy to call Child Protective Services if I were to tell her that creativity had very little to do with it?

  “Now, should we chat a little about your kindergarten goals before we run out of time?”

  No. I don’t want to talk about kindergarten or goals or how my kid likes to throw himself onto the roof of the school building or what a genius he is with a green crayon. What I really want to do is go back to bed and wake up when Theo safely graduates from college and enters a nice mundane profession, such as accounting or dentistry, and takes responsibility for his own life, if kids even do that anymore.

  But we can’t talk about that or anything else right now because right now I have to go and meet Simon Still and I suspect that is going to make me long for Teacher Wendy, evil stick figures, and little purple chairs.

  6

  Still wondering if running away is feasible, I peer in the window of the Java Luv. Simon Still sits at my usual table with his sunglasses on and his hat pulled down low on his forehead. He fiddles unconsciously with the buttons on his jacket. He looks thinner than he did the last time we saw each other on that bridge in Theo’s picture, but otherwise the same, as if David Bowie were tragically lost in the new millennium.

  As I pull open the door, the smell of coffee and slow-burning incense hits me hard in the stomach. I bury my nose in the elbow of my jacket, like Theo does when he needs to sneeze, and gulp at the air. Behind the sunglasses, I am acutely aware of Simon watching my every move.

  “Buy me something with a lot of sugar,” he says as I approach the table. “I’ll watch the yellow door.” I want to punch him right in his smirking mouth, but people don’t do that in regular life. Instead, I go to the counter and order him a mocha with whipped cream. Leonard hands me my usual espresso shot.

  “You actually have company today, Lucy?” he says. “Is the world tilted off its axis or what?”

  I wonder if Leonard would think less of me if I asked him to add a teaspoon of rat poison from the back storage room to Simon’s drink. It wouldn’t kill him but it might make him froth at the mouth a little, which I would certainly enjoy watching right about now.

  I carry the cups back to the table.

  “What’s with your pants?” Simon asks, finally removing his sunglasses. His eyes are bloodshot as if he has been up nights with a colicky newborn.

  I look down to see two purple magic marker streaks across the right thigh of my jeans and a stain that could be anything. There is also sand in my shoes but Simon doesn’t need to know that.

  “Marker is better than bodily fluids,” I say. Simon makes a face.

  “How can you stand this?” he asks. “Aren’t you bored?”

  Yes! I want to scream. Sometimes I’m so bored I want to scratch my own eyes out. But Theo is why I am here. Theo is the reason I get up in the morning. He is one of two people I would willingly die for. It’s a short list. I take it seriously.

  “No,” I say. “Motherhood is very fulfilling.”

  “Ha. And we’re the good guys.”

  “Aren’t we?” I ask.

  “These days,” Simon says with a sigh, “it probably depends on who you ask.”

  I toss back the espresso. It leaves a nice scalding trail down my throat.

  “I have to make some decisions about kindergarten,” I say. “It’s not as easy as you might think. I need to tour eight public schools and two privates. Do you know how much time is involved in touring schools? Plus, Theo is drawing pictures of Ian Blackford during art time.”

  Simon glares at me over the frothy rim of his coffee. “And your point is?”

  Naturally, I don’t have one. Simon cannot understand what any of this means. He is tied to no one.

  “Tell me what you know,” I say. My calm voice belies my frantic need for information of any kind, facts to replace the fantastic scenarios I’ve been spinning all morning in my head.

  But Simon will draw this out, torturing me just a little bit more. He takes a long, leisurely sip of his drink. He sticks a finger in the whipped cream topping and licks it off. I come very close to pulling out my hand sanitizer and forcing him to hold his palms out, face up.

  “Two days ago,” Simon begins, “Director Gray disappeared from his home in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “The man was like a ghost.” I sometimes envied his ability to seemingly not exist for months at a time.

  “Not everyone got to know his whereabouts,” Simon says. “You had to earn a place at the Director’s table, Sally.”

  I consider mounting a defense of the much-maligned kiddie table but immediately think better of it. If I set Simon up to take another shot at me, he will aim at the burgeoning spare tire around my middle and that might be more than I can handle on only a single espresso shot.

  “Would you care to hear the rest of the story?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Good,” Simon says. “Let’s move on. Director Gray has never pulled a walkabout before but we all agree he’s getting older. Maybe he turned off his cell phone and went wine-tasting in Napa or skipped out to St. Barts for a long weekend. We give him twenty-four hours to materialize.”

  “But he doesn’t,” I say.

  “Nice to see you are still on top of your game, Sal,” Simon says. “We are almost past the twenty-four-hour mark when the phone call comes.”

  He sticks his fingers back in the whipped cream.

  “Did you wash your hands?” I can’t help myself, it seems. “Do you have any idea how many germs can be on your fingers just from opening the door to get in here?”

  Simon’s hand, the one with the whipped cream on it, lingers in the air, kind of floating there as if it’s no longer attached to his arm. Then he wipes the whipped cream on a napkin.

  “Is that better?”

  “Yes. Go on. The phone call.”

  “The phone call came to my office. We are Righteous Liberty, they said. We stand for blah, blah, blah. Fill in the latest ideological bullshit and you get the picture. We have Gray and we want to talk to Sally Sin.” Just having to say that last part makes his jaw clench in such a way as to foreshadow extensive dental work. “So I told them you were dead and they had better tell me what they wanted. To which they responded we had twenty-four hours to produce you or Gray would die. But the United States government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Everyone knows that.” He glances at his watch. “It’s been about fifteen hours since that call.”

  My insides turn over, the coffee making me suddenly nauseous. I am this close to puking all over the mosaic-tiled bistro table.

  “Sally, you look green.”

  I close my eyes and slowly the feeling passes.

  “Who did we outsource it to?” I ask. Because while it is true that the United States government does not negotiate with terrorists, they are more than willing to let private organizations that specialize in complicated human extractions do so when no one is looking. For their efforts, these organizations get heaping piles of money and access to a smorgasbord of government officials and secret information. In return, the
government gets to stand by its policy of not negotiating with terrorists and keep its nose clean. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing doesn’t stink.

  “The regulars,” Simon says, with a malignant flash in his eyes. It’s enough to tell me this is an unsanctioned visit, that whatever Simon is up to, it falls somewhere outside the lines of proper. For a second, I think it might even be personal but then I remind myself that Simon doesn’t do personal, so that would be impossible.

  “How much did you tell the extraction specialists?” I ask. Leonard, if he’s not too stoned and can eavesdrop properly, might assume we’re talking about the dentist.

  “Enough to get them started,” Simon says dismissively. As second in command of the USAWMD, his orders were almost certainly to go about business as usual and make sure this event did not indicate to the outside world that the United States had taken its hands off the wheel. But asking Simon to forget that Righteous Liberty asked specifically to speak to me is akin to asking him to put on a tutu and dance the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. It’s just not going to happen.

  “So tell me, what do they want with you, Sally?” he says. “What makes you so special?”

  I think about the envelope Blackford handed me two years ago, the one now safely hidden in my underwear drawer. In the envelope is a faded Polaroid of a young Director Gray and my parents, arms draped around one another like good friends, tan skin glistening in the summer sun. The photo was strange for a number of reasons. First, Director Gray was smiling and if you ever met him you would understand smiling was something Gray did not do. Secondly, he never once acknowledged having known my parents. And while coincidence can account for a lot in life, I had the sense it didn’t apply here.

  As soon as I saw the photo, I knew it was the first step down a path Blackford meant for me to follow to its inevitable end. But I read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a child and I know better than to wander into the deep, dark woods, following bread crumbs. Consciously or not, I didn’t take the bait. Instead I went back to burning the pancakes and driving car pool. Blackford had underestimated my well-honed ability to compartmentalize my past and this made me feel good about myself. I’d show him who was more stubborn.