Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

“Oh, it would be so much fun to have the boys together again next year, don’t you think?” she continues. “We could carpool.” Yoder is practically sitting in my lap now.

  “Mom, I want to go to school with Henry,” Theo says.

  “Great!” I say. “We have to go now. See you soon, Judy!” I roll up the window, forcing her to pull her head out of the way or face decapitation. I think she might still be talking to us as I pull away from the curb.

  “It’s just school,” Yoder says. “Why are you all so hung up on it?”

  “You overhear two conversations and now you’re an expert?” I snap. “Your intel is rather sparse.”

  “I had tutors,” Yoder says. “Never went to school.”

  “You see?” I say. “I don’t want my kid to turn out like you.”

  “That was mean,” he says.

  “It was,” I agree, “and I meant it to be.” I’m clearly more troubled by the idea of kindergarten choice than I’m willing to admit. I stomp on the gas and the hybrid roars to life, closing in on roughly forty miles per hour. We can almost hear the wind rushing past the rolled-up windows.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  “Hey, Theo?”

  “I feel funny.” I glance in the rearview mirror just in time to see Theo projectile vomit popcorn, illicit bites of corn dog, and something that might have been nachos all over the back of the car.

  “Oh, no,” I say, pulling over to the curb. Yoder is covering his ears and whimpering when he should really be holding his nose and praying.

  “Theo, honey,” I say, pulling him out of the backseat. “Are you okay?” I want to avoid getting vomit on me but he seems so pathetic that I pull his head to my chest. A clump of vomit jumps onto my fleece jacket. I turn my head into the fresh, cold air and take a few gulps. It will make everything worse if I end up puking on Theo’s head. Usually, I’m a pro with bodily fluids but today I’m close to coming undone.

  Theo nods, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It comes away covered with stringy slime. Seeing no reasonable alternative, he runs his hand through my hair and, just like that, it’s clean.

  “Theo!” I shout. “Please. Let me get some wipes.” But it’s going to take a whole lot more than wipes to make this right. It surprises me that Theo’s little stomach could hold this much food. I stand him on the sidewalk and strip off his jacket, turning it inside out on itself and throwing it in the trunk. I pull off his shoes and pants while he stands there in his Spiderman underwear, looking like a newborn calf. I shake out my fleece jacket and wrap it around him. If I were Yoder, I would choose now to run. But when I look up, he’s still in the front seat, hand over mouth, eyes wide with horror.

  “What?” I ask. “You’ve never seen anyone throw up before?”

  “The smell,” he says, through his fingers. “It’s awful.”

  I point a finger at him. “If you puke in my car, I will hold you prisoner until you clean it up.”

  “You’re already holding me prisoner,” he says. True. But still.

  “Mom, I’m freezing,” Theo says. His legs look skinny and pale under my long jacket.

  “Okay,” I say. “Almost there.” I peel off my long-sleeved T-shirt and put it over the soaked booster seat. It won’t do much but it gives me the impression of being in control of the situation, which counts for quite a bit at the moment.

  We drive the rest of the way home with all the windows rolled down. I now wear only a thin cotton tank top and my teeth are chattering wildly by the time we pull into the garage. I tell myself the elaborate plan I was developing to keep Simon from taking Yoder back was derailed by the puking. But who am I kidding?

  “We just leave the car like this?” Yoder asks, climbing out.

  “You want to clean it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither do I,” I say. All I really want to do is wash the vomit out of my hair.

  We file into the house. It’s cold and gloomy now and I go around and turn on all the lights because Will isn’t home to yell at me about wasting energy so I can see. Next, I crank up the heat to a pleasant 75 degrees. I pull my hair up in an elastic band and sit Yoder down at my kitchen table.

  “Do you drink coffee?” I ask. My time is limited. I know Simon meant what he said and they will be coming for Yoder soon. It’s inevitable. I have no cards to play, no way to hold Yoder for long enough to trade him for Gray without risking all of our lives.

  “Yes,” Yoder says. “Coffee would be nice.”

  Although it’s not obvious, the gears in my head have been turning, grinding up the question of why Simon wants Yoder back so badly. And sitting here with him, I catch a glimmer of the truth and I hang on.

  “How long did you need?” I ask.

  “What?” Yoder asks. There’s a scar on his forehead that turns a deep red. Unconsciously, he rubs it with his forefinger.

  “Did you even need the full four minutes, while your boss was in the john? Is it possible you would have been fine with only two minutes?”

  Yoder buries his head in his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. His shoulders are tight and up near his ears. He rocks gently in his chair. “Why are you asking me these things?”

  I stir my coffee with a spoon that has been lying on the table since breakfast. It’s coated with a thin layer of dried milk.

  “In Sudan, when you were young, Chemical Claude used you as a runner,” I say. “It was dangerous work but we both know Claude has no real respect for mortality, especially someone else’s. You were good, better than the other little boys, because you didn’t need to carry paper. It wasn’t something you ever talked about; no kid wants to be labeled a freak, does he? But the truth was you could remember everything a document said by reading it just once. There were a couple of times the so-called police caught you but they could find no evidence that you were anything other than a kid out for some dangerous fun.”

  Yoder keeps rubbing at the scar, faster and faster. I slide a piece of paper and a box of crayons in front of him.

  “Start writing,” I say.

  “Why would I do that?” he says defiantly.

  “I can’t save you if I have no leverage,” I say. How did step five of my plan become saving Yoder? What happened to step four? I want to kick myself.

  Slowly, Yoder picks up a purple crayon and positions the paper horizontally. I watch upside down as he starts to scratch out a series of seemingly unrelated words and symbols. My throat goes dry. It’s not what I was expecting but it’s very clearly what Simon was after.

  “That’s enough,” I whisper, pulling the paper from him.

  “But there’s much more,” he says.

  “Do you know what any of this means?” I ask.

  “No.”

  Well, I do, and at this moment I kind of wish I didn’t.

  There are always leaks in the intelligence business, small ones that are merely irritating and big ones that are dangerous. Sometimes they embarrass the government and other times they bring it to its knees. Simon hated leaks. He took every single one personally.

  After a few episodes in which Gray had to attend closed-door meetings at the White House, he and Simon got serious about a solution. They came up with a code that would render leaks useless, at least those originating at the USAWMD. If information is leaked in an utterly incomprehensible format, then it doesn’t really matter who sees it. It remains meaningless unless you happen to have the right Rosetta stone.

  The code was instituted during my second year at the Agency. It was meant only for the eyes of Director Gray and Simon, but to me it was just another language and easy enough to understand after a moderate amount of late-night snooping. The code was used to secure the most sensitive information, primarily an agent’s identity and all of his known assets in the field. Simon could look at a spreadsheet littered with symbols and letters and numbers and know immediately where all his people were and what they were doing. He could add and subtract and reorganize as
necessary. When someone died or disappeared, their symbol was deleted and their assets were redistributed among all the other symbols. It was a game unless you were the deleted symbol. Then it was as if you woke up dead.

  “You never told Simon Still about this?” I ask Yoder.

  Yoder casts his eyes down. “No.”

  “Even after he saved you?” I say.

  “It was not an act of kindness,” Yoder says. It’s clear he might have bared his soul to Simon if Simon had thought to skip the torture part of the daily schedule.

  “No one is ever the same after spending time with Simon Still,” I say. And I mean that on many levels.

  “You said you would save me,” Yoder says bluntly. “You don’t know me. Why would you do that?”

  I suddenly remember Simon Still berating me for being soft.

  “You’re the kind of person who takes home all the kittens from the pound to save them from being drowned,” he had said. “No one wants the fucking kittens, Sally. That’s why they’re at the pound to begin with.”

  There are probably many reasons why I feel the need to save Yoder, but the only relevant one has to do with the pound kittens and the drowning bucket. I cannot change who I am.

  “I believe in second chances,” I say. “And sometimes thirds and fourths, if absolutely necessary.” It’s only what I hope for myself.

  Yoder’s face flushes. He swirls his last bit of coffee around in his mug.

  “Three minutes,” he says. “I memorized the book in three minutes.”

  “It’s a gift,” I say.

  “No,” Yoder says, shaking his head. “Without it, Claude would have thrown me away years ago. I could have been another person.”

  Are we nothing more than the sum of our baggage? Before I can get too depressed about this idea, Theo wanders in holding the box for Connect Four.

  “Can we play?” he asks. He is bright-eyed and wearing clean clothes, smelling as fresh as a daisy while I still have puke in my hair.

  I am just about to say yes to the game when the glass in the backdoor window explodes and three men dressed entirely in black crash into the kitchen. As I throw myself on top of Theo and Connect Four, forming a protective shell, I can’t help but think this is overkill. Two of the men grab Yoder, who is screaming once again about being an American, and drag him by the armpits through the glass and out the door. The third guy jabs me in the ribs with the barrel of his M6A2 assault rifle, which is no way government issue, and whispers in my ear.

  “You weren’t invited to this party, Sally,” he says, digging the gun in deeper. “Simon says you should remember that.” He sniffs the air. “Something smells bad in here.”

  “Fuck you,” I say. More desperately than I want a shower, I want to reach up, slide my hand behind this guy’s puffy-muscle neck, and slam his head into the floor, but that would leave Theo exposed and I will not take that chance. I stay completely still, listening to his heavy combat boots crunching the broken glass as he leaves.

  I expected Simon to wait until dark, knock on my front door, and demand I turn Yoder over immediately, which I would have done now that I have what I need. Sending his goons to smash up my house and scare the shit out of my kid delivers the message that he is not playing games quite effectively. And I get it. But now I’m mad.

  Theo squirms out from underneath me, still clutching the Connect Four box, his eyes glittering with a strange sort of glee I didn’t anticipate. He should be hysterical, clinging to me out of pure terror, but he is anything but.

  “That was just like The Warriors that we play on Xbox at Andrew’s house. Totally cool, Mom! I can’t wait to tell Teacher Wendy!”

  Oh please, don’t tell Teacher Wendy. And Andrew and his house are now part of the no-fly zone as far as I’m concerned.

  Theo dances around in the glass in his Thomas the Tank Engine slippers, as if this is the most fun he’s had all day.

  “Who were those guys?” he asks, hopping on one foot. “Why didn’t they knock?”

  People with guns never knock. “They were friends of Richard’s,” I say. “Please stop jumping. The glass is flying everywhere.”

  “Boy, they must be mad at him.”

  Yes. Something like that.

  “Go in the playroom while I clean this up in here,” I say, lifting him up and beyond the glass.

  When I join him ten minutes later, he has all of his LEGO people lined up in two rows. They have tiny plastic guns and helmets and light sabers and they appear on the verge of battle. Theo provides a dialogue that is part Star Wars and part Elmo and in different circumstances I might find it creepy.

  War used to have simple rules. Soldiers would meet on a nice grassy field in the middle of nowhere, form orderly rows, and then run at one another with swords drawn. They would even bring a band and guys to hold their flags. Whoever had the most men standing at the end won the battle. It was almost civilized when you looked at it from a certain angle.

  But now everything is complicated. The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is blurry, changing moment-to-moment depending on circumstances and personal gain. There is no black and white. There is nothing but a dark place in between, where just about anyone might show up to stab you in the back.

  26

  I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that I was always on the top of my game. Spying is not that different from parenting. There are days when you kneel down next to the squabbling kids on the playground and in a calm mom voice explain why it’s not okay to hit little Susie over the head with a plastic shovel, and all the kids nod solemnly and promise to never ever perpetrate such a crime again. And when you stand back up, dusting the sand from your knees, you feel like you know what you’re doing, that the lesson you were trying to impart actually got through.

  And then there are days when you kneel down in the sand and the kids actually hit you over the head with the shovel and it’s all you can do not to hit them back. Everyone can have a bad day.

  I only needed an official rescue once, which was not really an official rescue, being as we didn’t exist. But that didn’t make it any less humiliating.

  It was the middle of the night when Simon called me. He was in Washington, sitting in front of a crackling fire with a glass of fifteen-year-old Macallan Scotch, cooking up ways to ruin my life. I was someplace I’m still not allowed to mention in casual conversation.

  “There’s a package for you at the hotel down the street,” he said. “It has instructions. Follow them.”

  “Simon, I’ve got four operations ready to go here and now. Critical operations. Am I supposed to just drop them?”

  “Yes. Disappear into the night like a bad romance,” he said. “S.K. is coming in your place.”

  “S.K. is hopeless. He can’t even speak the language. I don’t think he knows how to brush his teeth.”

  “He would be hurt to hear you say such things.”

  “How about Gunther?” I asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “What? How?”

  “Doesn’t concern you. Hit the road now, Sally. That’s an order.” I could hear the ice cubes tinkling in his glass and it made me homesick, although in a very abstract way. I had not seen an ice cube in the flesh for months. I had missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Presidents’ Day, not that they missed me.

  “Okay,” I said, already collecting my few belongings from the floor of the rented room. “I’m gone.”

  Without saying good-bye, Simon hung up. He never said good-bye. Come to think of it, he never said hello, either. It was as if we were having one continuous years-long conversation interrupted by the occasional trip to a war zone.

  As I stuffed my knapsack with a toothbrush and a T-shirt, a strange tingling started in the low of my back and slowly worked its way up to my neck. I shuddered, all the hair on my arms standing at full attention. Something was off about this situation. Simon had never pulled me out of an operation when I was this far in. But an order was an or
der. I had no choice but to march on over to that hotel, retrieve the package, and see what sort of crappy hand I’d been dealt this time.

  Two hours later, I was on a flight to Belgrade as instructed. The flight was surprisingly long and only a third full, Belgrade not being a vacation hot spot this time of year. Or any time of year, really. I stretched out across three empty seats and dreamed about Ian Blackford trying to drown me in a sea of hostile pelagic fish. In the dream, he grinned while a ten-foot-long barracuda ate my leg.

  I think the dream was an omen because before I could even take a pee at the Belgrade airport, a pair of ill-fitting handcuffs were slapped on my wrists by customs officials in faded uniforms. They barked at each other in Serbian about me being a terrorist and a bomber and possibly even a prostitute, but they couldn’t seem to decide which offense was the worst. They dragged me backward into an interrogation room that was approximately the same temperature as my refrigerator and about as comfortable.

  “I’m an American citizen,” I said, as they turned my backpack upside down, shaking the meager contents out on the rough concrete floor. The name on the passport Simon had sent me in the envelope at the hotel was drifting in and out of my mind with the consistency of a cloud. Sporting multiple identifies can be complicated at times. Who was I? Susan? Claire? Bella? Katherine?

  “Why you travel on a fake passport?” one of the officers said, throwing the document onto the steel table between us. Like a skipping stone on a flat lake, it bounced twice and landed open in front of me. Well, that answered one question. Claire Simmons.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. But even from my position, trying to sit forward and not crush my bound wrists, I could tell something was wrong with the passport. The blue was too bright and the soaring eagle imprint was not so much soaring as crashing. I mentally chastised myself for not examining my documents before trying to pass them off to customs agents.

  “Help her remember,” the guard said.

  The man who hit me wore a signet ring about the size of a quarter. It raked across my face as if he had spent the morning sharpening it on a stone. The blood oozed out of the wound and dripped down my face, little red raindrops landing on my white shirt.