Siro

by David Ignatius

  “You’re out of order.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said you’re out of order. This organization has rules, and you’ve violated them by coming to see me. The Barnes case is being handled by authorized people. You must leave it to them, and to me. That’s all I have to say on the subject.” He looked at his watch. “Your five minutes are almost up.”

  “Director,” said Margaret. “I should warn you. I’m going to pursue this. If you won’t listen to me, I’ll find someone who will. As you know, I have that right under Executive Order 12333.”

  “What right?”

  “Look it up in the rule book. The section on congressional oversight.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.”

  “Fat chance!” he said, which struck Margaret as an inappropriate response under the circumstances, but somehow typical of Hinkle.

  Margaret waited a few days to see if her threat accomplished anything. In truth, she felt uncomfortable with the idea of going to a member of Congress. It seemed like ratting to the teacher. But when the grapevine reported no movement on the Barnes case, she concluded that Hinkle must have thought she was bluffing. So she reluctantly made an appointment to see the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whom, as luck had it, she had met at a wedding in East Hampton the previous summer. He agreed to see her the next evening in his office at six-thirty, and when she arrived, he had already poured himself a tall glass of whiskey. Perhaps he had remembered her from East Hampton as a younger woman.

  She began summarizing the details of the case, shyly at first, for she was unaccustomed to discussing such things with anyone outside the charmed circle. She explained that a young woman case officer—a constituent of the senator’s, as it happened—was in prison in the Soviet Union because of blunders made by agency officials back home. The senator nodded. He seemed to know the vague outlines of the case, but no more.

  “I thought Hinkle was handling all that,” he said.

  “No. He’s not doing anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the case is a can of worms, and he doesn’t want to open it.”

  “What’s inside?” asked the senator with a sly look. Like so many of his colleagues, he harbored the secret conviction that he—not the incumbent—should rightfully occupy the White House, and therefore took special pleasure in making life difficult for the executive branch.

  Margaret told him the story, every sordid detail, as she had pieced it together. She spun the tale of Stone’s plotting so artfully that by the end the senator believed he had glimpsed the outline of a conspiracy at the very heart of the CIA, one that had cruelly manipulated a young woman—a constituent!—and left her to rot in a Moscow prison.

  “Promise me one thing,” said Margaret when she was done. “You must conduct your investigation in secret, within the Intelligence Committee. If you go public, Anna will never get out.”

  The senator, chivalrous and courtly and very drunk, put one hand on his heart and the other on Margaret’s shoulder and promised that he would not rest until Anna was safely back home.

  A week later, the CIA station chief in Moscow called his KGB liaison and requested an urgent meeting. At that hour in New York, he said, the FBI was arresting a Soviet citizen who worked for Aeroflot in New York. The man would be charged with espionage, the station chief advised, and since he lacked diplomatic immunity, he would be tried in federal court—unless the Soviets were prepared to negotiate a swap. It took just three days to work out the details. The Soviets were eager to strike a deal. The Barnes case was a nuisance, even for them.

  Anna Barnes was released in February 1980. Her case received no further publicity in the Soviet press. The State Department issued a short statement noting that the American woman—still unnamed—who had been accused of border violations in November had been released. In the continuing commotion over Iran, the press ignored the story. It rated one paragraph in the “World News” roundup in The Washington Post.

  Anna returned home to Washington via Frankfurt. A DDO officer met the plane there and accompanied her back to Dulles, and from there to another crummy motel room in the Washington suburbs for debriefing. The motel was only marginally better than Anna’s prison cell in the Moscow suburbs. It had a telephone, but Anna assumed it was tapped and didn’t call anyone. She ordered fattening food from room service, drank all the little bottles in the mini-bar, and, her second night there, picked up a nineteen-year-old college student who was working as a bellhop and sent him home exhausted early the next morning.

  The debriefing was desultory, as if the agency didn’t really want to know the details. It became evident to Anna that her case was an embarrassment. That was fine with her. She had no interest in reliving it. They asked whether she had disclosed classified information to the Soviets during the interrogation. When she said no, they nodded and smiled. She was a woman. Of course she had cracked. A senior DDO officer arrived at the last session and presented her with a medal. Actually, he only showed it to her—a fat bronze medallion, embossed with the CIA eagle, encased in a rosewood box.

  “We can’t let you keep the medal,” apologized the DDO man. It might reveal to unauthorized persons that she had been a CIA officer under non-official cover, he explained. So they would keep the medal for her in a box at Langley, and if she ever wanted to see it, all she had to do was send a letter to a postal box in Arlington asking for an appointment.

  The DDO man then turned to the awkward question of Anna’s career, or what was left of it. She was no longer useful as an operations officer overseas, he said, since her cover had been blown to the Soviets. The Office of Personnel could try to arrange something for her in the Domestic Contacts Division, in a pleasant spot like Boston or San Francisco, if she wanted to stay in the clandestine service. Or perhaps Anna would like to work as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. That could also be arranged. But if she was prepared to leave the agency immediately, a special one-time settlement would be provided, augmented by a generous contribution from the director’s contingency fund. All she would have to do was sign a quitclaim, promising never to sue the agency or any of its officials, along with a supplementary secrecy agreement and various other waivers and indemnities.

  Anna signed the paperwork. It had never occurred to her to stay on with the agency. Her plan for the moment, she said, was to go back to Harvard and finish her dissertation. The DDO bureaucrat opened the rosewood box to give her one last peek at her medal, and then departed. Anna checked out of the motel an hour later and caught the first shuttle to Boston.

  47

  Anna’s days began as before, with a slow climb up the steps of Widener Library. Little seemed to have changed in the two years she had been away. The course catalogue was virtually identical. “The Bildungsroman: The Novel of Education, from Fielding to Joyce.” “The Theory of Interpersonal Relations.” “The Making of Modern Europe.” That was the virtue of places like Harvard, and also the curse. They were impervious to the passage of time.

  The stone steps up to the reading room still passed beneath the same bizarre mural, commemorating the death of the benefactor’s son, Harry Elkins Widener, during World War I. The mural showed an impossibly voluptuous woman sticking her breast in the face of a dead soldier. “Happy those who with a glowing faith, In one embrace clasped death and victory,” said the inscription underneath. Anna had read those words several thousand times, trudging to and from the stacks in the old days, without ever being clear what they meant. She had a faint notion now, when she thought of Aram in Kiarki, of what the epigrammist must have had in mind. But it still seemed like nonsense. The dead weren’t happy. They were simply dead.

  The Director of Library Services, one Joseph S. Mellanzana, assigned Anna a new stall, this time on 4E, near Numismatics, Heraldry and Graphology. Her desk looked out through a small window at Harvard Yard, and she could watch the undergraduates throwing Frisbees and dry-h
umping their girlfriends on the grass. It was early summer by the time she settled in, and the stacks were sweltering. Anna cracked open her small window, but it made no difference. Even the books seemed to be sweating in their bindings. She filled up her shelves with the same tomes as before. Jon Turklerin Siyasi Fikrleri 1895–1908. Turkiye Tarih Yayinlari Bibliografyasi, 1729–1955. Al-Arab wal-Turk fi al-Ahd al-Dustur al-Uthmani, 1908–1914. Deutschland und der Islam. Mr. Mellanzana sent her the same timely reminders: Handle older books carefully, lest you break the spines. Contact the Office of Library Services if you wish to renew stall privileges for the fall term. Anna didn’t mind any of it. She was on autopilot.

  Anna’s old department chairman asked her to teach a section of his survey course on Near Eastern history in the fall. It seemed easier to say yes than no, so Anna accepted. The course work bored her, but she found some of the young men attractive. They were neater than she remembered, shorter hair and better dressed, and also more frightened of women. She slept with several of them that first term and enjoyed it, in a recreational sort of way. They were so eager and clumsy, and she was tired of proficient men. She didn’t take offense when one of the undergraduates confided, after a frantic few minutes of passion, that he thought older women were sexy. He was right. Older women were sexy.

  Taylor called in October. He had sent several letters before, via the agency. Anna had recognized his handwriting and thrown them away, unopened. When Taylor finally reached her on the phone, she wasn’t surprised, even though the number was unlisted. Taylor was good at things like that.

  “How are you anyway?” he asked in his rough-and-ready, how-ya-doin’ voice.

  “Fine,” said Anna.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Teaching. Getting my doctorate. Taking it easy. Starting over.”

  “Me, too.”

  Anna didn’t say anything. She wasn’t especially curious what Taylor was doing.

  “Really,” he said. “I’m starting over. I quit. Moved to California, bought a place in Santa Monica. Nice spot. You should see it.”

  “How are you paying the mortgage?”

  “The movie business. An old college friend of mine is a vice president at one of the studios. He likes listening to my spy stories, so he signed me up to write a script.”

  “You’re a screenwriter?” asked Anna. She laughed aloud. “That’s perfect.”

  “Why fight it? It’s the eighties.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Listen,” said Taylor. “I’d like to see you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t you get my letters?”

  “I didn’t open them. I threw them away. What did they say?”

  “That I feel bad about what happened. Not just the end. The whole thing.”

  “You shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I love you.”

  “Come off it.”

  “Seriously. Maybe I really do love you.”

  “So what? That’s nice of you to say, but it doesn’t matter. We’re starting over. You said so yourself.”

  “You sound pissed off. And sad.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to be honest.”

  “Do you want to see me?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  Anna shook her head. It’s a little late, she thought. But at least he wants to connect. That was something.

  “No,” she said. “I feel sorry for you. You’re an overgrown kid.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I should have warned you about Stone. I knew he was out of control, but I couldn’t do anything about it. It was my fault.”

  Anna was sick of the call. He was shameless, even in his apologies. She wanted to hang up, but she was still too polite for that.

  “What is your problem, Alan?” she said at last. “You’ve got some part missing, but I still don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m a neggo. That’s my problem.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. It’s prep school slang. Forget it.”

  “I have to go,” said Anna.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to see me?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. Thanks for calling. It was a nice thing to do. But don’t call me again.”

  Taylor took a deep breath. He was about to say something.

  “Goodbye,” said Anna. She hung up the phone. Taylor had it wrong, again. It wasn’t anger that she felt. He was part of a life that was dead. Cold. The fire had gone out. What was there to say?

  The presidential election was held in November. The winner was the Republican candidate, an amiable conservative who promised, among other things, to restore the CIA to its former glory. Anna read an article in the newspaper several weeks later about the “transition team.” In agate type, among the people listed as advising the President-elect on how to revitalize the agency, was one “Edward Stone, retired intelligence officer.”

  Anna corresponded regularly with Margaret Houghton, and tried very hard to sound cheery when they talked on the telephone. But Margaret was no fool. She sensed that all was not well and in December, a week before Christmas, she made a surprise visit to Cambridge. She invited Anna to dinner at Locke-Ober’s, her favorite restaurant in Boston and a place, she confided, where two different men had proposed marriage to her, in two different decades.

  Margaret looked more refined and birdlike than usual, her hair sprayed precisely in place, her nails lacquered and buffed. She was a picture of elegance, frozen in a perpetual late middle age. Anna, in contrast, had the look of a slightly shopworn graduate student. She had let her hair grow long, wore no makeup, and was wearing a simple white dress. She was no longer dressed to kill, or even to wound. Most worrisome of all, to Margaret, was that when the waiter arrived to take orders for cocktails, Anna requested a club soda.

  “Outrageous,” interjected Margaret. “I won’t hear of it. This is Locke-Ober’s, for heaven’s sake, not Tommy’s Lunch. A bottle of champagne, please. The best you have.”

  “A half bottle,” corrected Anna. “I’m not going to drink much.”

  Anna politely sipped the champagne when it arrived and, despite Margaret’s urging, ordered grilled trout and a salad for dinner. She made conversation amiably enough, but it was like a verbal meringue. Mostly air, with nothing solid or substantial inside.

  “What’s come over you?” Margaret asked eventually. “You seem to have lost your edge.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Anna, ever pleasant and agreeable. “I think I have lost my edge. I don’t have anything to prove to anyone, which is fine with me. I like it this way.”

  “Well, I don’t. I’m worried about you. You seem to have lost your appetite for life.”

  “Maybe I’m not hungry.”

  “Fiddlesticks. You’re not the anorexic type. The problem with you before was that you were voracious. You threw yourself into things, and you believed too much what other people told you. Now you don’t believe in anything, so far as I can tell.”

  “Yes, I do. I believe in myself.”

  “In my book, that’s the same as not believing in anything. It’s mere selfishness. I had expected better from you, my dear.”

  Anna was stung. However little she cared about the opinion of most of the world, she wanted to maintain Margaret’s respect.

  “That’s not fair!” she said. Without thinking about it, she reached for her champagne glass and took a healthy swig.

  “Do you like graduate school?” queried Margaret.

  “Not particularly. It’s the same as before.”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “Because it helps pass the time. And for the moment, I can’t think what else to do.”

  “That’s pathetic, my dear, if I may say so.”

  “Why? Most people feel that way about their jobs. Why should I be any different?”

>   “Because you’re not most people. You have special gifts, and therefore special obligations.”

  “Whatever you say.” Anna said it with a tone bordering on indifference.

  “Stop feeling so sorry for yourself!” Margaret said sharply. “You’re not the first person in our line of work who ever had a rough break, and you’re certainly not the first to have been manipulated by Stone and the old boys. The corridors at Langley are full of people like you. But at least they have the gumption to stick it out.”

  “He’s dangerous, Margaret. I’ve had it with him.”

  “Of course he is. I tried to tell you that a year ago, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you think you’ve invented the wheel.”

  “He’s more dangerous than you realize.”

  “Possibly. But do you know something?”

  “What?”

  “Our old friend Edward is also right, in his way.”

  Anna sat up straight in her chair. With this remark, Margaret had gone too far.

  “Are you crazy? What could Stone possibly be right about?”

  “About the Soviets. He’s right to think that for all their bullying, they’re terribly weak under the surface, and he’s right to think that we should give them a good hard shove, rather than accommodate them forever. And he is especially right about Afghanistan. If it weren’t for him, the mujaheddin would still be on their horses, batting around a sheep’s head.”

  “Maybe so. But he’s also a liar and a shit. I don’t want anything more to do with him, or any of them. No matter how right they may be, they’re still wrong.”

  “My goodness, dearie. You’ve become an undergraduate again.”

  “I have not.” Anna drained her glass and poured another.

  “Yes, you have. You want everything to go in one direction, and when it doesn’t, you decide to check out. In the real world, you’ll discover that much of the time, good people do bad things and bad people do good things. That makes moral choices rather more difficult.”

  “You’ve been in the business too long.”

  “No, my dear. The problem is that you haven’t been in it long enough. Which brings me to my point.”