“No. They want to bring her home and lobby for her to stand trial for treason.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes.”
“And if the administration refuses their offer?”
“Then it’ll be open season. It’s election year. You know what that means.”
“I do.”
“The president is less than happy.”
“Understandably.”
“If this comes out even he’ll never escape the blast radius.”
“What are you going to do?” Town asked.
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You’re going to take your little dog and pony show on the road.”
Town shook his head. “I’m out of this.”
“I don’t think so.” Golding rubbed his jaw and his beard rasped. “You’re going to take your girl to Syria. She will be shown to the media, fresh from the clutches of Islamic State. But it has to end there, of course. She can never be subjected to further scrutiny.”
Town stood. “I’m walking away.”
“Sit.”
“I’ll have no part of this.”
“We know about your wife and Arkady Andropov. Do this and Ann’s little dip into the Soviet pond stays secret.”
Town absorbed this, quelled a sick feeling, and said, “You’re reaching.”
“Am I?”
“Come on. Something that happened thirty years ago? She was a kid. A dilettante. Passing on anecdotal stuff that was being reported in the media, anyway. It has no legs.”
“Two nights ago she met with Andropov at MoMA. I think that speaks of a continuing association,” Golding said.
“You have zero and you know it.”
“You’re right. We’d probably get nowhere going after your wife.”
“Then we have nothing more to discuss,” Town said.
“You, however, are a different story.”
“Me?”
“CIA case officer knowingly marries Soviet spy and hides her secret. Now that has the ring of a lede, doesn’t it?”
Town lowered himself to the seat beside Golding.
“You always had that ready to level at me, didn’t you? If I’d refused back in Brooklyn you would have used it?”
Golding shrugged. “I was pleased that we were able to keep it cordial, that you were so eager to be back at the table.” He looked at Town. “We’ll make this stick, Pete. You know the consequences.”
Town sat slumped with his hands dangling between his knees. He felt very old and very tired.
“Do this thing,” Golding said.
“There’s no other way with the girl?” Town said.
“No, there’s no other way,” Golding said. “It ends in Syria.”
SIX
Kirby Chance couldn’t escape Catherine Finch.
She knew that even if she unplugged her TV she would weaken and boot up her tablet and watch the news, or, on the pretext of looking for non-existent messages on her smartphone, she’d end up surfing the news channels.
So she quit her apartment, leaving her iPad and her phone behind, and went down into the street. As she walked toward Hollywood Boulevard she passed an appliance store, the windows stacked with digital TVs, all of them showing Catherine Finch.
Of course it wasn’t Catherine Finch, she had to remind herself. It was her. But the clip, pimped with the garish graphics and the headline crawl, was lent an authority and an authenticity that removed it very far from that motel room.
And from her.
Kirby was hungry, but knew that the TV in her favorite diner would be tuned to CNN, so she headed toward a Chevron station with a food mart. She saw a guy in tennis clothes gassing up a lemon-yellow convertible while he stared at the news on a screen mounted above the pump.
Was that even a thing? Gas station TV?
She hurried on, and pushed her way into the food mart. There was a giant screen above the cash register, but it was showing sports highlights, so she grabbed a few bags of nuts and a bottle of water and went to pay.
As she was handing over her money the sports gave way to headline news, and there they were again, Kirby and Catherine—for that’s how she’d now come to think of them, as a pair, as close as she could get to ownership—up on the screen.
The clip ended and the Botoxed anchor turned to a big guy with a shaved head and asked him how he responded to people saying the video was a fake.
He laughed and said, “And the moon landing was shot on a Hollywood sound stage, right? Yes, except no. It’s her. It’s Catherine Finch.”
Kirby took her change and hurried out into the street. A metro bus came to a halt beside the gas station and, on impulse, she climbed aboard, not concerned about its destination. She would sit and eat her nuts and watch the city pass by and vague out.
But the bus was full and she had to strap hang, her face uncomfortably close to a TV monitor, attached by a bracket to the underside of the bus’s luggage rack. The screen was split. One image of her and Catherine saying: “The truth is that the United States perpetrates war crimes,” the other of Richard Finch dying in the Valley.
A toothy brunette appeared on camera saying, “Catherine Finch bad-mouthing America in Syria and Richard Finch shot dead while trying to blow up cops in Los Angeles. Wow! What a couple! Talk about pushing up the blood pressure of America’s TV anger!”
The bus halted and the doors sneezed open and Kirby stepped down into a street of pastel bungalows with fleshy poinsettia and pink and yellow hibiscus profuse in their unfenced gardens.
She had no idea where she was and stood a moment in the sun, panicked, tapping into a freight of submerged dread. She had to fight down an impulse to run blindly until, realizing Echo Park was nearby, she turned and walked down to the lake.
Sitting on a crumbling stone bench in the shadow of the statue of Lady of the Lake Kirby felt calmer, nibbling nuts and sipping her water. Ducks paddled in the shallows. Joggers floated by. A shirtless man threw a tennis ball into the lake and his dog swam out to retrieve it, barking and snapping at the fountain’s spray. An old couple walked slowly past, hand in hand. A pair of young hipsters sat on the bank on a square of cardboard drinking beer and eating cheese.
Kirby looked at them and realized that she was spending too much time alone. That most of her conversations were with herself. But even if she had friends and family, had people to talk to, how could she talk to them of what she had done?
How could she tell them how it felt to see herself as Catherine Finch wherever she looked?
But there was no one she could tell. The man with the limp was gone. Richard Finch was dead. The skinny video guy had disappeared into wherever.
This was not one for the resume.
Kirby closed her eyes and fell asleep and was woken by the blade slap of a police helicopter flying low cross the park, and then dipping away and disappearing. The anxiety was back. The idyllic setting, aglow with lambent afternoon light, was like a photograph with a dark, curling edge.
She had the sudden intuition that by doing what she had done, by impersonating the dead woman, she had unleashed something occult in her life. That she had done something that could not be undone. Despite the sunlight she shivered and she wished that she had walked away from the gray-haired man that day in the diner.
Kirby heard her mother’s jeering voice: “Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You made your bed, missy, now you damn well lay in it.”
Her mother had always said “lay”, and when Kirby’d tried to correct her she’d become angry, saying, “Lay! It’s lay! Lie is what liars do.”
Kirby stood and left the park and found a cab and stared blankly out the window as it took her home.
It was getting dark by the time she reached her building, and she ran up the stairs and unlocked her apartment, bolted the door after her, and switched on the lights in all the rooms.
She found herself standing with her back to the living room wall, hands clenched at her sides, staring o
ut the window at the sudden darkness.
The sound of her buzzer almost got her screaming, and her heart drummed against her ribs.
She crept toward the front door, holding her breath, and inched her eye toward the peephole. A figure loomed outside, distorted by the lens. It took her a moment to recognize the gray-haired man with the limp.
She stood frozen, unsure of what to do.
He rang the buzzer again and, before she could stop herself, Kirby opened the door a crack.
The man stood staring at her, looking gaunt and tired and old, before he said, “My name is Pete Town.”
Kirby hesitated for a moment and then she stepped back and allowed him in.
SEVEN
Kip Littlefield prayed. And not in some ironic, New Agey way. He got down on bended knee in his room at the President Hotel in Kiev and spoke directly to his God.
The only thing that the orphanage had given him was an unwavering belief in an interventionist God. And an equally unwavering belief that if you petitioned that God persistently, intently and relentlessly, you were likely to get what you wanted.
And wasn’t he living proof of this?
His prayer that evening was vaguer than his usual ones, which were more in the style of a shopping list. Like when he had prayed for a new family, his requests had been explicit.
“Dear Lord,” he had petitioned, “please send me a blonde wife and a girl child. But let the woman be pliant and docile and eager to please and willing to serve me.”
And had that prayer not been answered?
But his prayer today was sketchier, as if he were grasping for something, trying to put a form to something that as yet eluded him. So he asked for direction. He asked for a clear indication of a path forward that would be to his advantage.
As he finished his prayer his iPhone purred and he crossed to it and saw that he received a communication via the messaging app Telegram, the one the liar Richard Finch had said he’d used to talk to his captive wife.
Littlefield opened an attachment and saw a photograph of a severely injured woman with a newspaper held to her chest. Using his thumb and index fingers as pincers he swiped the screen and zoomed in and held his breath. He was looking at Catherine Finch.
And not the counterfeit Catherine Finch, with her rather fetching head-bandage, who had been all over the news. He panned down and saw that the newspaper was today’s Turkish Posta tabloid.
Finch swiped upward and scrutinized the face, and said, “Thank you, God.”
As he stared at the image it disappeared, faded from his view and the memory of his iPhone like breath on a mirror.
Littlefield stood holding the phone, feeling his pulse race.
Had he seen that photograph? Or was this some religious hallucination, the digital equivalent of a Shroud of Turin? Or—more ominously—was he suffering from some early-onset dementia that had caused the manifestation of that image? He had sudden flashes of a future of CT scans and solemn-faced doctors and hospice care.
Then the phone whirred again and, shaking, clumsy, almost dropping the device, he opened another attachment: the photograph of a man’s hand—none too clean, the grooves black with filth—holding a pile of blondish human hair in its palm. As Littlefield peered at the image, trying to understand its import, it too faded away.
He sat down on the bed and held the phone.
Another purr.
Another attachment: the scan of a lab report. His eye caught an address in Ankara. This was a DNA test, comparing new hair samples to those obtained years before by the FBI from Catherine Finch’s home in Kansas. They were a match.
Again the image faded away and Littlefield’s mind was a brushfire of notions. If this woman, this badly injured very un-camera-ready woman, had somehow survived that drone attack, then where was she?
The phone whirred again. A short message: She is for sale. Come to Amman to bid.
Littlefield stood and, already gathering together his belongings with his free hand, speed-dialed one of his minions stationed at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv International Airport and said, “Get the plane ready. We’re going to Jordan.”
EIGHT
Ann let the darkness claim her. She lay on the air mattress in what had become her bedroom. A room that had been cleared of detritus, that stank more of disinfectant than mold or worse. She could have reached across and ignited the battery-powered lamp that gave off such a cold, morgue-like light that she’d covered it with a shred of red curtain fabric that warmed its color temperature to something less deathly.
But she didn’t. She just lay there in the dark, alone.
Pete was gone.
He’d returned from his meeting at around sunset, the room filled with a rosy, whimsical light that had been at odds with his somber expression as he’d said, “I’m going to have to go away for a few days.”
“Go where?” she’d asked.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Jesus, Pete.”
“I can’t tell you where I’m going, but I can tell you why I’m going.”
“Okay. Tell me then.”
“The people who drew me into this—”
“The presidency?”
“If you like. They know about you. Know about what you did for Arkady Andropov.”
She felt a kind of bilious dread. “And?”
“I called them on it. Said it’s bullshit. That you were just a naive kid playing at being the radical, that the so-called intel you provided was low-value gossip.”
“True, sadly.” She saw his face. “But?”
“But they know that I knew.”
“Knew about me?”
“Yes.”
“And if you don’t take this trip they’ll go after you?”
“Yes.”
“How serious is it.”
“Serious enough.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. It’s of my own making.” He walked over to the window and looked out at the orange and green dusk and the endless grid of lights flickering below.
“You didn’t make me some half-assed fellow traveler,” she said, standing beside him.
“No, I didn’t do that. But I allowed their gaze to settle on us again.”
“What guarantees do you have that they won’t go after you, anyway? Even if you do what they want you to do?”
“None. But they’re driven by expedience rather than vindictiveness, so I tend to believe that they’ll keep their word.”
“What they want you to do…”
“Yes?”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not for me, no.”
He turned and clicked on the battery light and began collecting the few clothes he had unpacked, his shadow thrown over the peeling walls and stained ceiling.
“Don’t go,” Ann said.
“I have to.”
“You can fight this.”
“I can’t.”
“Jesus, Pete, you’re not without resources and influence. Why are you folding so easily?”
“You have to trust me on this.” He put his Dopp kit inside his wheelie suitcase.
“How can I? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Ann. Stop.”
He turned his back on her and closed the zipper of the case.
The tension of the last days, the residue of fear that still sluiced her blood took hold of her and she did the unthinkable: she struck him. Struck him with the flat of her fist, hard, between his shoulder blades.
He spun on her and she saw first the disbelief and then the anger in his eyes. He visibly composed himself, shutting down his fury until his gaze was neutral.
Which enraged her even more.
“Fucking talk to me,” she said.
“Annie.”
“Don’t Annie me! I’ve always hated that. I’m not some fucking Broadway musical.”
His eyes narrowed and knew she had hurt him. The endearment—that, in truth, she adored—was an emblem of his affectio
n for her.
“Jesus, Pete, who is your loyalty to? Them or me?”
“It’s not like that.”
“It is, Pete. That’s exactly what it’s like.”
Ann shook her head and walked out into the corridor and entered one of the other destroyed rooms, standing in the gloom, hugging herself.
She’d hoped Pete would come in after her and make it right. But he hadn’t and a minute later she’d heard the van start and the whine of its engine as it left the grounds and disappeared down switchbacking Mulholland Drive.
NINE
Town sat on the Gulfstream across from Kirby Chance who was asleep under a blanket. They were flying to Ankara. From there they would be transported south by helicopter.
They were alone in the cabin. Before takeoff they’d been given bags of snacks and drinks and then left to themselves. Kirby had retreated behind headphones and slept.
For Town there was no such refuge.
Their passports said they were journalists, both accredited to Reuters. Town was William Kinney. Kirby was Mary Beth Baumgartner. Paul Golding had been so sure of his hold over Town that he’d already had documents prepared, handing them over at the bus shelter on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Earlier that night, in her heartbreakingly Spartan apartment, Kirby had flipped open the passport Town had given her and said, “Baumgartner. That’s clever.”
“Why?” Town said.
“Well, it has to be a real name, right? I mean nobody would choose that name.”
He laughed.
She tapped the passport. “This is my picture. Where did you get it?”
He shrugged. “My associates…”
“In the State Department?”
Town lifted his palms to the ceiling.
“This sounds really Jason Bourne,” she said, “but are you, like, CIA?”
Town’s impulse had been to lie, but since he was leading her into what he was leading her into, he’d resolved to be honest. Honest about all but what awaited her on the Syrian-Turkish border.
“I used to be,” he said.
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