The Long-Lost Jules

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  “But then why did Kali fall apart in high school?”

  “Because Kali and Kelley were in different classes. Kelley was in honors and AP sections, and Kali wasn’t. So, for the first time in her life, she was doing her own schoolwork. And when she started to screw up, her parents just thought it was part of general teenage idiocy rather than a genuine problem.” He sighed. “Too bad for Kali.”

  I couldn’t believe Kali had confided in Leo about all this—and that he had seen her so much more clearly than I had.

  “She’s certainly not dumb,” I said slowly, thinking of her skill in negotiating with Leo and me.

  “No,” he agreed. “Anyone who can blackmail you and extort money from me is quite . . . clever.”

  I was oddly pleased to discover our minds working along the same lines.

  And suddenly, just like that, my decision was made. It was time. I needed to know for sure.

  So I made an excuse to Leo about buying some pottery for myself and slipped away from the café before he could voice his surprise. From a street vendor, I bought one of those burner phones that feature prominently on Homeland and Covert Affairs and every other spy show on TV. There’s a reason why they’re so popular; they’re quite effective at avoiding detection.

  Then I walked up a few blocks from the seafront and bought a SIM card at another store. I slipped into the rank alleyway behind the store, careful not to breathe in too deeply, and delicately used tweezers to extract the SIM card from my new phone. I crushed the fragile card under my boot, as I had been taught, and then inserted the new SIM card. Glancing around one more time and seeing nothing but mice and spiders all around, I punched in the number, a code, and then another number.

  “Line zero seven seven two,” a brisk voice said.

  I swallowed and metaphorically squared my shoulders. “Rivka?” I said. “This is Jules Seymour. From CIA.”

  Chapter 34

  “Yes?” she said cautiously.

  “You remember me? We worked together on the Chechnya operation in—”

  “Yes, of course I remember you.” Her Hebrew accent was much heavier than Leo’s, and much less delightful.

  Forgetting my milieu, I drew in a deep breath and coughed as the filthy odor hit my lungs. “I’m sorry for this, Rivka, but I have to ask you about one of your agents. At least, I think he’s one of yours. Leo Schlumberger.”

  There was a long pause. She said, “And what exactly are you asking me?”

  I hesitated too. I had hoped she would make this easier, but Rivka Rivlin (God knows what her real name was), the deputy chief of overseas operations for Mossad, never made anything easy.

  I said simply, “Is he one of yours?”

  There was an even longer silence while Rivka deliberated. I held my breath. At last she said, “No, he is not.”

  I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. “What? Are you sure?”

  She laughed; Rivka Rivlin actually knew how to laugh. “Of course I’m sure, Jules.”

  “Well, then whose is he? Don’t tell me he works for the Jords. MI6?” It wouldn’t be so bad if he were a Jordanian agent. They were terrifically cooperative, but everyone hated MI6.

  “No and no,” Rivka said. “You misunderstand me. Leo Schlumberger is not associated with any of our colleagues.”

  It was worse than I had thought. “So . . . he’s freelance, then? A gun for hire?”

  “You children, you see mysteries in everything,” Rivka said. “No and no again. He did very valuable, very secret undercover work during his military years, and of course we approached him multiple times after that. But he has no interest. None whatsoever.”

  I was silent, dumbfounded. That was what Leo had said too, that he had just wanted to bury himself in historical research after his scarring military years. So Leo was just who he said he was? I couldn’t believe it.

  “Actually,” Rivka said, suddenly loquacious, “it’s probably for the best. He’s too much of a free agent for us.”

  Maybe it was even true; I didn’t think that Rivka would lie to me. It seemed that Leo was just who he said he was: a historian who was obsessed with Tudor queens and saving Sudeley Castle.

  Still shocked, I thanked Rivka and said goodbye and then automatically crushed the burner phone under my boot and scattered its bits among trash cans in several different alleys. I began a slow, meandering path back to the café, thinking furiously. I had been so certain that Leo was Mossad. He fit the part perfectly. Rivka herself had said they’d “approached” him multiple times. I could only imagine what form those approaches had taken.

  Me, I had rushed into the arms of the CIA as soon as I had recovered from the seismic blow of my father’s death. I wanted nothing more than to race into the profession my father and grandfather had embraced, to return to our nomadic, sometimes dangerous, often heart-pounding lives in the service of the agency. I was an agency princess, daughter and granddaughter of agency legends, and got every assignment I wanted. But I had run straight into the red mist in Chechnya, and the powers that be (i.e., Bob the Bear and his cronies) had put me out to pasture at a desk in London. My cover job at Atlantic Bank, they insisted, put me in the ideal position to trace terrorist money back to its sources.

  And I had been sure—absolutely, positively sure!—that Leo Schlumberger fit into this puzzle in some way. Mossad was deeply suspicious of other intelligence groups, including the CIA, so it often “forgot” to identify its undercover agents to us. By the same token, only a few people outside the CIA knew me. Rivka was a rare exception because of our joint operation in Chechnya. And Rivka never talked.

  My spirits plummeted, and my steps began to drag. But that was the problem: If I allowed Leo to identify me publicly as Jules Seymour, my cover would be forever lost. I would have to work as an “overt” CIA employee, which meant at a desk in Washington, not even London. I would spend the rest of my career sitting at a computer, watching the adrenaline-soaked exploits of field agents from a safe distance. I would never be Amy Schumann or Marina Ostrova or Anna Petrova again. Just Jules.

  It struck me then that I was actually disappointed that Leo was just a civilian, someone who would never understand my life. I thought again of the shattered marriages between agency nonofficial cover officers like me—NOCs—and nonagency spouses, and of the impossibility of making something work with a civilian.

  But I could never abandon this life for a man. Deep down, where I rarely ventured, I knew that at first it had been all about following in my father’s footsteps; it was the family business, after all. But now it was about more than my father, even; it was about protecting all of the innocents of the world—Kali, Élodie, the children, even Audrey and the PYTs—from the very worst that humanity had to offer. I had never chosen this life; it had chosen me, and, I thought wryly, I was stuck with it now.

  I could never share it with Leo.

  It didn’t bear thinking about. In a silent funk, I rejoined Leo and Kali, and we got into the car and drove away from the serene beauty of Cadaqués.

  Leo dropped off the Queen Mary at the Barcelona airport, where he planned to catch a flight to Paris. I was heading to London, and Kali was taking a puddle jumper back to Antibes and Élodie and the children. I envied her. I was returning to a silent apartment in London, and I didn’t know when—or if—I would see Leo again. He hadn’t said anything about his reasons for going to Paris rather than London, and I was afraid it was because he didn’t want to be trapped in the seat next to me for the entire flight.

  As we walked into the terminal, I told myself that when my Señor Moscardo mountain landscape arrived, it would warm up my flat slightly. I hugged Kali goodbye, and she whispered in my ear, “Don’t let Leo go! Whatever the problem is, you can fix it!”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Her pretty mouth set grimly. Turning to Leo, she said sharply, “Please take care of Jules. She’s my sister, after all.”

  Leo’s face, for once, was easy to
read. Shock and pleasure and then rage washed across it in fleeting waves. I said, “Kali!” but she was already running toward her gate.

  Slowly, Leo turned to face me. “Hey, Jules,” he said.

  Chapter 35

  “So, when were you going to tell me?” he asked. We were sitting on a concrete barrier outside the airport, where I could be sure that no one would overhear us. The air between us was fraught with tension and betrayal and anger.

  “Never, hopefully,” I said. “The only people who know, outside my family and a few higher-ups at the agency, are my ‘IDC’ friends.” I used finger quotes around the name.

  “I wondered about that,” he said. “A CIA front company?”

  I nodded. “And a couple of others, because of a joint operation in Chechnya. That’s it.”

  “Then why on earth does Kali know?”

  “The agency’s changed; now they insist that your immediate family know, so that you’re less isolated and less likely to crack up. Also so that if you’re killed in action, it’s less shocking. I told my mother, and she told Kali and Kelley two years ago, when I joined Atlantic Bank. Anyway, I had to explain my name change.”

  Leo was dumbfounded. “I thought no one was ever supposed to know about undercover agents.”

  That was how Mossad worked. Again I wondered if Rivka had told me the truth.

  “We never knew about my father until he died, and my mother didn’t want history to repeat.”

  “It’s remarkable that Kali didn’t slip earlier,” he said, clearly thinking back.

  “I paid her a hundred pounds a week not to.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That would explain it. She should have asked for two hundred.”

  “She did. We settled on one hundred.”

  “Ah,” he said again. “Do go on.”

  I shrugged. “What else is there to say?”

  He started to speak but then closed his mouth and looked at his watch instead. “Delightful as this has been,” he said coolly, “I’m afraid I have to go catch my plane.”

  I stared at him. “You’re leaving? Just like that?”

  “I do have a life that doesn’t include you, you know.”

  That stung. Looking at him more closely, I realized he was angry. His mouth was tightly compressed, and his eyes were black with fury. I hugged myself and shivered, as the day had turned gloomy and gray.

  “What . . . why are you going back to Paris?” I asked, hating myself for sounding clingy.

  “I have to catch a flight to Dubai.”

  That caught me by surprise. “Why?”

  “My dear little spy, I am speaking at a conference of medieval and Renaissance scholars at the Dubai Atlantis. Nothing to interest you.”

  I swallowed, and he stood up, shouldering his bag. “To be continued,” he said. “I suppose.”

  I shrugged, just beginning to understand how deeply he felt betrayed. What was there to continue? I couldn’t break my cover and be chained to a desk for the rest of my life. Sudeley Castle would become a high-end condo project, and I would always be the woman who had lied to Leo and refused to help him when I could have saved Sudeley.

  He nodded briskly at me and strode off.

  I rarely cried. But if I had been so inclined, this certainly would have been the moment for a tear or two. Instead, I threw my bag over my shoulder with much less ease and grace than Leo and headed back into the teeming terminal. I couldn’t believe he had actually left. Didn’t he have a lot more questions for me? Wasn’t he curious about my life in the CIA? Couldn’t he understand, just a little bit, the depth of my commitment to that life and the impossibility of destroying it for a heap of stone walls?

  Staring out the window as the plane lifted off, I swore to myself I would never get entangled in such an intense relationship again. This was why I had remained single and fancy-free for all these years; I had held all of my other lovers at a very careful arm’s length, even Scott. The only CIA marriages that had a chance were those between two officers, who understood each other’s work and were comfortable with secrets.

  I was actually disappointed that Leo wasn’t one of us. Then, I thought, he would have gotten it; then we might have had a chance. But an undercover officer and a civilian? Never.

  After all, look at my parents.

  The moment the wheels touched the tarmac in London, I eagerly switched my phone back on and waited while it loaded a few messages. Kali, apologizing for outing me at the airport; Dorcas, reporting that she was back in London and suggesting lunch . . .

  No Leo.

  Then another message appeared, from Yvette at Atlantic Bank. It was brief, almost grudging:

  Amy,

  You have been reinstated and may return to work on Monday. Please remember that Tuesday is Christmas Team Day, so we will be at the office in the morning and the climbing walls in Westway in the afternoon.

  Y

  Game on, I thought, silently blessing Bob or Henry or whoever had engineered my return. But couldn’t they have waited until after Christmas Team Day?

  Monday was mostly silent at the office. I got polite nods and smiles from my coworkers, while Audrey glanced at me as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. I wondered what leverage had been used on her. I got all warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about how annoyed she must have been at being strong-armed into taking me back.

  In the afternoon, though, the PYTs all started chattering about the following day’s Christmas Team Day. (I noted that no one even bothered with the American, PC “holiday” fig leaf here. Jake S. and Matt S., who were Jewish, didn’t seem to mind.) Kristen R. confessed she’d been practicing her climbing at Westway for the last month, Kristen the Younger proclaimed her barre classes were strengthening her core, and Kristen T. trumped that with her strength-training classes.

  I couldn’t help smiling to myself. I had zero interest in organized sports or aerobics classes. They produced about as much of an adrenaline rush as safe, boring London. But give me a sheer cliff face to climb with the right shoes, with the right equipment, or some rapids to raft, and I was brilliant.

  I reminded myself that I would have to hide my skills, however frustrating that would be, and appear as inexperienced and incompetent as they all expected me to be. If necessary, I could fall off the wall.

  Chapter 36

  Christmas Team Day started at the office, though, and we all gathered around the big conference table promptly at nine with our skinny lattes and no-whip, no-cream soy drinks. I was the only one with a scone, and Kristen the Younger eyed me with a slight smile. “Carbo-loading for this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Yup,” I said, forcing myself to look embarrassed. “I’ll need something to keep up with all of you guys.” I longed to whip out a picture of me at the top of Denali or at Everest Base Camp in a howling white blaze of wind and cold, but my cover was rock solid. Kristen the Younger exchanged amused glances with Kristen R., and one of them murmured, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  You bet your ass I will, I thought.

  Audrey tripped in and cooed, “So wonderful to be with all my peeps today! Pia will be joining us at Westway this after-noon . . .”

  A chorus of delight arose from her peeps, and I winced, remembering how Audrey’s daughter, Pia, had somehow managed to “win” every competition at Field Day. When I wasn’t feeling sorry for her, I found her intensely annoying.

  “But this morning I have a special surprise for you! I’ve brought in a consultant to conduct a Myers-Briggs assessment of the team, and I’m sure it will be a very special time of bonding for all of us!”

  The PYTs applauded enthusiastically, burbling about how much fun this would be. I scowled slightly, trying to dig up what I knew about Myers-Briggs. It was a method of determining personality type, I thought.

  “I’ve always wanted to do Myers-Briggs,” Matt B. enthused.

  Matt S. said, “Audrey, you always have the best ideas!”

  Audrey dimpled. “An
d this,” she said, “is our ringmaster for the morning.”

  A tall, gaunt woman came into the room, and everyone applauded again. I joined in, a little dubiously. The woman looked as if she hadn’t enjoyed a meal in forty years. She wore free-spirity clothes, draped in various organic linen and cotton fabrics and tunics and scarves, but the tight set to her mouth belied the warm and fuzzy impression that her clothing was intended to make. I disliked her on sight.

  She was named Nola, and I immediately set myself to speculating on what her mother had actually named her at birth. Shirley? Maude? Ludmilla?

  Nola handed out the personality tests, and I amused myself by filling in everything as the bland, boring Amy would while tabulating in my head what Jules Seymour would say.

  “After a stressful day, I need some time alone to relax.” Amy fervently agreed; Jules, I thought, would rather have a raucous night at the pub with her mates (but then go home alone).

  “It takes people a while to get to know me.” Well, that was something Amy and Jules could actually agree on. Strongly agree, I wrote, thinking of Leo.

  “I would rather be called practical than inventive.” Amy agreed; Jules disagreed.

  “I prefer to go with my gut.” A thousand times yes! Jules cried. No, Amy inscribed dutifully.

  “I find it difficult to meet new people.” Yes, shy Amy murmured. Not at all, Jules said.

  “Sometimes I feel very vulnerable.” God, yes, Amy whispered. God, no, Jules roared.

  “I enjoy being spontaneous.” Absolutely, Jules said. In fact, why don’t we ditch this whole stupid thing and go out for a drink?; No, Amy said.

  “I don’t let my emotions cloud my judgment.” Amy strongly agreed. Hmm, Jules said, thinking once more of Leo.

  “I avoid confrontation because I don’t like hurting others’ feelings.” Oh, yes, Amy said earnestly. Jules laughed.

  “I like to be engaged in an active and fast-paced job.” Not really, Amy said. Yes and yes and yes! Jules shouted.