An American Spy

1

He sat across from George Erasmus Butler, the director’s assistant-his “iron gut”-in a windowless room in the bowels of Langley. Irwin had said, Remember that the operational flaws were in place before you even took over. Remind them of that. However, he knew that such words would be wasted on someone like Butler.

So he cleared his head and stared across the table, wondering at what level in an organization’s hierarchy a member’s position began to change him physically. One expected it of Butler’s boss, CIA Director Quentin Ascot, but under these fluorescent lights, he noticed the sheen to Butler’s flesh, as if he were gradually becoming shrink-wrapped for the cameras. The politicization of the soul.

He was wandering again. Focus!

Butler leaned back in his chair, tapping an open file with his knobby forefinger. “Now, listen, Alan. Usually when something like this happens the conversation is essentially genial. Mistakes occur, but they’re mistakes of flawed procedure, and our aim becomes fixing procedure. Here, though,” he said, looking down at the papers and shaking his head, feigning exasperation. “Now, here it looks like we had the wrong man at the helm. Shoddy security. Opening your files to a goddamned mole. Instigating a contact procedure so rigid that even when you realized the Chinese were running every one of your people there was nothing you could do about it. I mean… hey, look at me. I’m not the enemy here. The enemy is yourself. Two months at the helm of a ship that’s sailed for sixty years, and you run her right into the reef. You sunk it, man. You know how much we’ve spent on your unlikely little department over the years? Boggles the mind. The perks-the limitless credit cards, the first-class flights, the fucking clothing — it’s just staggering how much you guys ate up. And this?” He lifted a single sheet of paper. “An art heist to add to the departmental coffers?”

“That was before I came on.”

“Sure, that’s convenient. However, it speaks more to the kind of operation you guys had going on West Thirty-first, doesn’t it? I mean, here at Langley we’ve got to sign in triplicate for a new box of pens. See what I mean? Your cowboy bullshit has never gone over well with us simple desk commanders. We work for a living. We fly only when we have to. And as for shopping on the Company dime,” Butler said, a smile flashing across his face as he lifted another sheet of paper showing a credit card statement with a balance of $22,927.58. He read, “One afternoon’s shopping in Paris: Dior, Prada, Louis Vuitton. I mean, am I just an old fogey here? Or have you people been living like kings off the Company’s tit?”

Like plastic, he thought. I can almost see myself in the man’s cheek.

The twinkle of lights, computerized. Red shimmers into blue. With each change the rumble of something in his stomach, growing sharper. Four lights, and it’s like the point of a pencil trying to squirm its way out. Ten, and it’s a pickax.

“What is it?” Penelope asked when he woke.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, dear. I’m not one of your empty-headed bimbos.”

The smile he gave her wasn’t humor so much as the recognition of humor. She deserved at least that. In fact, she deserved a lot more, and he couldn’t help thinking that their marriage, in sum, had been a little less than she’d hoped for.

Sensing that his trip to Langley was going to be a disaster, she had already reserved them four nights at a cottage in Croton-on-Hudson, close to the river, and they’d spent their days reading books and their evenings at expensive restaurants. He wasn’t up for it, though. She knew better than to ask for details, but her patience was running out. “You know I can’t.”

“They canned you, Alan. You don’t owe them anything anymore.”

“I owe them everything,” he said after a moment, because he sometimes did that. He would take a seemingly rational statement, then reverse it completely to test its validity. The surprising thing was that it worked. “They put me in charge of something important. It might not be my fault that it failed, but if I’d been paying attention I might have avoided the disaster.”

“What do you mean, ‘disaster’?”

He’d said too much, he realized, and leaned over to kiss her. She pulled back. “Come on. Out with it.”

She really was beautiful, and the intensity of her stare only magnified her exceptional features. He said, “Give me some advice.”

“Not that you’ll take it.”

“I will. Really, I will.”

“Okay, then.”

He wondered how to phrase it, then settled on “In my work, I came across something that was dangerous to America, and-”

“To America?”

“Yes. Not possibly dangerous but actually dangerous. It’s already caused destruction… disaster.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Now, even though it’s no longer my job, I think I can figure out how to neutralize it. It would take a lot of effort on my part, and require a little skullduggery, but I think it could be done-with proper planning.”

She waited.

“Well?”

“Oh! You want me to tell you if you should do it or not.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, is it dangerous? For you.”

“No,” he said, the lie coming out before he had a chance to wrestle with it.

“Then, yes. I mean, if it’s about saving America, you know I’m all about that,” she said, grinning. “Is that the answer you wanted?”

He leaned forward to kiss her again, and this time she didn’t pull away.

He’d known Dorothy Collingwood for three years; they’d met through his in-laws. Penelope’s family had always gotten a rush mingling with America’s power brokers, and with Democratic members of the Senate and the House to its credit, the Collingwood clan qualified. Dorothy, however, had chosen a different path from her relatives, using their connections to get herself placed within intelligence. When they first met, she’d been working in the support staff of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. She had higher ambitions, though, and once she realized that she could trust Alan, she promised that he would be part of her rise. “You’re a smart guy, Alan. Solid. And you don’t speak Beltway. Besides, your wife shows well at social functions.” When she did move up, becoming an NCS staff operations officer, planning and running global counterintelligence and intelligence collection operations, she found herself faced with a new world-“a parallel world,” she called it over drinks. “You wouldn’t believe it, Alan.”

“Of course I would,” he’d said, for he had always played the unflappable war veteran with her. When she told him that there was an opening for the directorship of a hush-hush department on the fringe of the Langley beast, he’d tried not to show excitement. “What happened to the previous director?”

“Right now Senator Nathan Irwin’s got one of his puppets in place, but he can’t make that stick.”

“The one before that, I mean.”

“He was killed by one of his own men.” She’d raised a brow. “Sound interesting?”

She hadn’t been in the room when he’d been eviscerated by Butler, nor had she come to his defense, and when he told her he wanted to spearhead a retaliation against Xin Zhu he pointed out that she owed him this. She admitted that she did owe him something but said, “It shouldn’t be seen to come from me, so take this to Irwin. We both know it’s personal for him, so he’ll go for it. Tell him to bring in Stuart Jackson.”

“Who?”

“He’s the old me. My predecessor. Retired, but still very much in touch. He’s got China locked up, and you won’t get far without him. He also knows the whole Tourism fiasco. Get them on board, and take it to my boss. They bring it in, and I lobby for it.”

He marveled at how quickly she’d put the scheme together. “And that’s it?”

“Essentially. But you have to bring in Stuart Jackson. He knows we can make this work on different levels, and he knows that in my position I have some helpful connections, because he’s the one who set up those connections. If I’m right-and, as you know, I always am-it’ll end up a joint project between myself, Stuart, and Nathan.”

“What different levels are you talking about?”

She placed a hand on his arm. “You worry about your level, and I’ll worry about mine.”

Dorothy was never truly wrong, and so it was no real surprise when he found himself sitting with her, Nathan, and Stuart Jackson. The surprise was that they were sitting in a dusty safe house rather than some clean office in Langley, and then he learned the reason: Dorothy’s superior had nixed the operation. “Then what are we doing here?” he asked the three of them, noting that there was no anxiety in any of their faces.

“We’re going to make it happen anyway,” Irwin said.

Dorothy said, “We’ve got access to funds, and you can contact your remaining Tourists. I’ll have access to current intelligence.”

Stunned, Alan said, “So no one’s worried about losing their jobs over this?”

“I’m self-employed,” said Stuart Jackson.

Nathan rocked his head noncommittally, and Dorothy said, “You know how ambitious I am, but ambition is empty without the ability to take risks. This is a large risk, but its rewards could be immeasurable.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, for no one ever got a promotion over revenge.

“Remember what I said, Alan. We stick to our own levels, and we’ll all be fine.”

They largely agreed to his tactic of distraction, but when it came to the actual attack there was dispute. Alan, after toying with psychological warfare, had come to the conclusion that wet work was the best way to deal with Xin Zhu. “We know where he lives. Better yet, we know where his office is. We can wire the building and bring it down. A rocket launcher should do the job. Blame it on the Turkestan revolutionaries-they’re already making overt threats. Ideally, we do this during the Olympic Games, when security will be focused on the venues, not on Xin Zhu’s office. Zhu is eradicated, we disrupt the Games, and we also send a clear message to the Chinese Central Committee.”

A week later, Alan was in Slovenia, taking a clean, modern train from Ljubljana, east to Sevnica, eyeing the cool, stylish Slovenians all around him. He’d mistakenly thought this would be a walk in the park. After all, he’d known Afghanistan, and when you left Afghanistan you left with the confidence that the rest of the world was a walk in the park. However, the impossibility of places had less to do with the places themselves than with what you were carrying in yourself; it had to do with the measure of your guilt. The guilt he was once able to measure with a yardstick now seemed to require a milestick-thirty-three of them.

There was no need for worry, though. The SOVA had no interest in someone who was no longer employed by the American government, and Tran Hoang had done his job well, piloting his plane from Budapest, flying low across the nighttime border to the landing field at Cerklje ob Krki. He’d driven himself and his drugged package in a waiting car north along the Sava River and just past Sevnica to a cabin in the foothills of Gavzna Gora.

When he arrived at Sevnica’s small, provincial train station, Alan walked through the lobby and crossed the bustling morning street to reach, around a corner, a small pharmacy. Tran Hoang’s ten-year-old Yugo idled at the curb, and it was a sign of the man’s skills that pedestrians didn’t even notice that a Cambodian man was in their midst, one who’d spent a time in Sri Lanka as he was being nurtured and then recruited by the Department of Tourism. Alan got in on the passenger’s side, and Hoang put the car in gear. He drove west, toward the bridge that crossed the Sava. “How’s our guest?” Alan asked.

Hoang rocked his head. He was chewing on gum.

“I suppose that means he’s still alive?”

“Sure.”

Of all the Tourists Alan had met, Hoang was the mutest. Talking to him was like dealing with someone who only had ten words left in him and had better uses for them than communicating with you. “Have you started the questions?”

Hoang shook his head.

“Why not?”

“We flew in last night,” said Hoang, making no effort to hide his irritation.

“Is there something wrong?”

His jaw worked on the gum. He shook his head.

It took a half hour to reach the gravel road that snaked through the forest, and the temperature dropped as their elevation rose. The cabin, which Hector Garza, a.k.a. Jose Santiago, had tracked down, was a two-room affair, nestled against a boulder and surrounded by trees. A thin stream of smoke rose from a tin chimney. Hoang parked and led him into an empty room with a dirty kitchenette in the corner. The air was stuffy-someone had been smoking. They took off their coats. Against the far wall, beside a collection of faded, curling pornographic centerfolds, was a door. “In there?” Alan asked.

Hoang nodded.

Alan went to the door, took a breath, and opened it-another empty room, with the exception of a low cot. Henry Gray, American expat journalist, was sleeping on it, his right wrist cuffed to the bed frame. On the left side of his face was a purple bruise. Alan stepped back and went to Hoang, who was lighting the stove. “Why’d you hit him?”

“Fought back.”

“Did you tell him you just wanted to ask some questions?”

No answer.

“Of course he fought back, you idiot. He’s scared. Did you even read his file?”

Hoang gave him a look, just a look, but it was enough to stop his complaints.

Henry Gray woke up two hours later, and Alan handed him a chipped mug of coffee. Gray took it hesitantly. “Sorry about the face,” Alan said. “He tells me you fought back.”

“I tried to leave,” said Gray. His voice was brittle from dehydration.

“Anyway, I’m sorry. I just need to have a talk with you, and I had to be sure that no one else knew where you were.”

“When you say no one else, who do you mean? The Hungarians?”

“No, Henry. I mean the Chinese.”

Gray nodded slowly but said nothing.

“I’m here to talk to you about Rick.”

“Rick.”

“You spent a month with this man, and I’d like to know him as well as you do.”

“I thought this was over.”

“Did you really? A journalist of your stature?”

Henry Gray’s face looked pained, and Alan wondered if he’d taken that statement for sarcasm. Gray’s stature only meant something to conspiracy theorists, and Alan expected the man to begin a rant against international corporations and the CIA, with liberal doses of the military-industrial complex. Still, Gray had already been through more than most could handle. He had changed.

“I just want to go home,” he said finally. “Ask me your damned questions.”

“You worry too much,” said Leticia. “I’m in, I do some shopping, I leave.”

“But they’ll spot you. Sooner or later, they’ll spot you.”

“I’ll make sure it’s later. Really, baby, you need to get some sleep. It’s a good plan.”

They were at a Mexican restaurant in North Bergen. She was done with her first margarita, while Alan hadn’t touched his. The lunch crowd was just starting to arrive. He leaned closer. “What’s Collingwood been telling you?”

She, too, leaned forward. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure.”

“She agrees it’s a good plan. So do the others.” Leticia reached over to grab his hand, her bright red nails reflecting the ceiling lamps. “You’re the master of deception. That fat Chinaman is going to get vertigo trying to figure it out. And it all starts here. I go in. I tickle his fear.”

His frown deepened, but what she said was true. It was a good plan. A series of distractions to overwhelm him as the pressures within his own government grew against him. Either he panicked and made a mistake, weakening him further, or he followed clues until he was standing in the wrong corner of the room when the door opened and they rushed in to kill him.

Leticia’s face became serious. “You’re really committed to this, aren’t you?”

“It’s the only thing I have left.”

“That’s not true. You’ve got a marriage.”

“I won’t for long if I don’t take care of this. I’m fucking it up.”

She pursed her lips. “It wasn’t your fault, you know. Not really.”

“Milo tells me that, too.”

“Did you convince him to join the great cause?”

Alan shook his head.

“See? He’s got his priorities straight. People like you and me, we don’t know what’s what.”

“You’re not listening to me, Alan. I can see it in your face. Just take a breath, cool off, and listen to what I’m saying.”

“I can hear everything,” he said.

They were sitting in the Georgetown safe house-a funny name for a house they knew the Guoanbu was watching-and he had been through two cigarettes. Dorothy had come alone, claiming the other two were busy, but he knew she just didn’t want a scene. She didn’t want them to think she didn’t have control over him. She said, “Levels. At your level, this makes no sense. At my level, it’s the only option. Things have changed.”

“The whole point of this operation was to bring him down. Or was I missing something?”

“You know better than that, Alan. We never do anything simply to bring someone down. Not in politics, not in intelligence. Everything we do is to strengthen our position. Previously, the best way to do that looked like burying Xin Zhu. Kill him-then frame him. Now, the situation has changed.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Dorothy. You know how much I’ve poured into this. You know how much it means to me.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask for things you know I can’t give. You’re not in anymore. You’re a private contractor. I’m your client.” She leaned back, grabbing at her Evian. “Do you follow?”

“Then I’ll sever our contract.”

“And lose the few Tourists you still have? You’d be dead in the water, Alan. You wouldn’t be able to do a thing.”

“I’ll bring in Milo Weaver.”

“Weaver?” She laughed. “He’s over the hill. He’s got a bullet hole in his gut. He’s useless. And he wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.”

“He could be brought into it easily enough.”

She stared at him a moment, then set down her bottle. “This is academic. You’re not going solo, because in the end you’re a patriot. So leave Milo Weaver alone. You’ll just get him killed.”

She was right, of course, but that was when he began to ask himself questions. Could he bring in Milo? And, if so, could he protect him? Probably not, but he could protect Tina and Stephanie, and that, in the end, was all that would matter to Milo.

“So the plan’s changed,” he said finally, because there was no other option. “We frame… what’s his name again?”

“I didn’t tell you his name.”

“And you can’t tell me how that gets us Xin Zhu.”

“I’m sorry, Alan.” She stared at him a moment. “It’s what happens when you bring politicians in on your conspiracies; they take over.”

“This is Irwin’s doing?”

“We’re all politicians, Alan.”

He stared at her passive, political face. “If you think you can make a deal with Xin Zhu, then he’ll humiliate you in the end.”

“Please, Alan. It’s not about deals, and it’s not about making Xin Zhu’s life any easier than we’d planned. He will go down, but not the way we originally planned.”

Alan flashed on lights, red lights turning blue. “There’s only one way to take care of a man like that.”

She leaned back, still staring, and furrowed her brow. “If you’re not going to be on board, or if you’re going to kick and scream the whole way, then tell me now. It’ll save us a lot of trouble down the road.”

“No,” he said, and only afterward realized he was lying. “I just needed to get it out of my system. I’m on board.”

She was shopping. The video feed was grainy, a little wobbly, but he could make out the shelves and the particular overabundance of Dean amp; Deluca in SoHo. What even the poor-quality picture couldn’t hide was that she looked miserable. They’d fought that morning over… he couldn’t even remember what had set it off. Not that it mattered. The reason for all their fights these days was him, and the shitty moods he brought home, the ones he took to the bathroom when he feared they would lead to outbursts, or worse. She could smell it on him, the misery and the secrecy and the raw hatred that ran his life now. She could see that he’d become a different Alan Drummond, one that was closer to the marine who’d been stupid with his courage in Afghanistan, the Alan Drummond she’d never known.

He was sitting in his home office, staring at the monitor, and in the phone pressed to his ear, Xin Zhu said, “I’m not an unreasonable man, Mr. Drummond. Far from it. Like you, I only try to protect myself and my family. People like you and me, we understand that the safety of our country pales in comparison to the safety of our wives and children.”

“Your dead son,” said Alan.

“Exactly,” said Xin Zhu. “What I ask is nothing so great. You’ll describe the conspiracy to me, and keep me updated at regular intervals. I don’t ask you to sabotage anything, not yet at least. I simply want to know.”

It was his chance, he realized. He could undermine the others so that the only option remaining would be the full-scale war he had wanted in the first place. Yet there is Pen, right there in front of me. Or he could help them with a lie right now. He could tell Xin Zhu his own plans for a load of explosives to shatter his bones and organs, and let the others have their plot. Right there, so close they can touch her. Because Penelope was standing in front of one of Xin Zhu’s men, he spoke the truth. “They’re not telling me.”

“They’re not telling you?”

“That’s right. They’re giving the orders.”

“Sounds like a step down, Mr. Drummond. I hope that the things I did had no hand in your decline. None of it was your fault, you know.”

So this was how the Chinese gloated.

“You’re serious,” said Dorothy.

“Unbelievably so. This changes everything.”

“Why?”

She’d asked that with a face full of innocence, the Evian halfway to her mouth. “He’s onto us,” Alan explained, as if to a child. “It’s one thing if he’s aware of Leticia, but another thing if he’s moved up the ladder.”

“We knew he would do this, Alan. As soon as she got back from China, we knew they would track her to the safe house.”

“But he’s threatening my wife.”

“Don’t think I don’t understand that, Alan. I’m worried as hell about it-remember, I’ve known Pen longer than you have. But slow down. This is bigger than either of us now.”

“What does that even mean?”

She shook her head, set down her water, and rubbed her forehead in a way that suggested she was posing for a camera hidden somewhere in this dusty safe house. “What it means is that things are already in motion. We’re not shutting it down. We can’t. Lives depend on everything moving forward.”

“ Lives? ” he repeated, his mouth dry. His exasperation was getting to him, making him lose the half-assed argument he’d marched in here wielding. “My wife’s life depends on me making sure she stays protected.”

“Then send her away, Alan. We can help with that.”

Had she made the offer immediately, or if it hadn’t taken argument to bring her to that point, he might have taken it. However, like Milo Weaver weeks later, he no longer believed that, in a pinch, these people could guarantee Penelope’s safety. Why would they? Why, in their position, would he?

He shook his head. “I can take care of her.”

“Good,” she said, crossing her forearms on the table, gripping her elbows as she leaned closer. “Now, about you. You realize that this is a stroke of luck.”

“Because you can play me back to him,” he said in monotone.

“It’s his biggest mistake, and he’s walking into this. Why he thought you wouldn’t bring this to us is a mystery for the ages.”

“It’s because he wouldn’t bring it to his people. He knows better.”

She smiled at that, then rocked her head. “Must be a holy terror working in their system.”

“It must be,” Alan said.

Two days later, he talked to them. Though he hadn’t been around when the company was in regular contact with the Youth League, he had come across the old contact procedure in the Tourism files long before his life in that office ended. An ad in the New York Post, which was monitored by a Chinese exile living in the Bronx, then a rendezvous on the 9:15 ferry to Staten Island, leaving from Whitehall Terminal, with a volume of Charles Bukowski poems in hand.

Bukowski?

The things one does to be unheard.