Mistress

Chapter 112

I thought I was prepared for what I would see when I turned the corner, when the guard pointed to the chair and told me I had thirty minutes and that my conversation would be monitored. But I’m not.

Diana Hotchkiss is dressed in a shapeless orange jumpsuit, as I knew she’d be. Her once silky hair is now a flat mop on her head. Her face is pale, void of any color from makeup or the sun. All this I expected.

What I didn’t expect was her eyes, looking at me through steel bars, hooded and dark and glassy, revealing nothing. She is neither happy nor sad to see me. There is no hope in her expression, no life whatsoever. All emotion has been washed away. Diana is utterly and irrevocably broken.

I shrug my shoulders, unsure of where to possibly begin.

“Were we even friends?” I ask. “Was anything real?”

I hate myself for asking. I don’t want to care about the answer. But I do.

Diana is standing, leaning her back against the wall in her solitary cell, so that I see her in profile. She chews a fingernail that, from the looks of it, has been reduced to a nub already.

“Everybody plays everybody,” she says. “Everybody lies to themselves and others. Everybody uses everybody else.”

That’s what she needs to tell herself. What she did was wrong, but it was just a variation on what everybody else does. A pretty big variation, though. She was helping another country blackmail the United States of America.

“So why am I here, Diana? Why did you ask me to come?”

She takes a moment before answering. “I wanted to apologize,” she says. “I’m sorry I ever got you mixed up with this. I didn’t mean for you, or Nina, or Randy-”

With that, her expression breaks, her composure crumbles, and she is sobbing into her hand. Her cheeks have probably absorbed countless tears over the last weeks, as her life disintegrated before her eyes. I don’t know what she expected to happen. Did she really think this was going to have a happy ending?

Probably not. They’ll probably teach a course on her at Quantico, a case study in self-destructive behavior.

I feel myself pitying her, but then a sudden anger emerges. “What you did to Nina Jacobs was unconscionable,” I say. “Unforgivable.”

Diana’s sobbing escalates to uncontrollable spasms, overcome by the magnitude of her disgrace, her shame, her lack of a future-take your pick. She slides to the floor and cries for the better part of ten minutes.

When it finally abates, she says through her hand, “The week that Nina stayed at my apartment…was the week that…everything happened.”

“The week you gave the video of you and the First Lady to the Russians,” I say. “And the week they showed it to Craig Carney.”

“Yes.” She takes a deep breath. “I wanted a head start. I knew Kutuzov’s people were keeping tabs on me. I wanted them to think I was staying at my apartment.”

“So as they watched your apartment from a distance, they’d see someone who looked like you and wore your clothes going in and out of your apartment, sleeping there, feeding the cat-and they’d think you were still around town. When in fact you had left the country. Someplace warm, I assume. Someplace without an extradition treaty with the United States.”

She nods again. The CIA probably used its considerable resources to relocate her and decided that they didn’t care one bit about an extradition treaty. I picture an acquisition team dropping out of a black helicopter, arresting her on a beach or something, and then whisking her back to Quantico.

“And why call me to install the surveillance?” I ask. “You just felt like embroiling me in an international conspiracy? Misery loves company?”

“Because you were the only person I could trust,” she says.

I don’t respond. Inside, I am fighting the temptation to believe what she’s saying. She’s fooled me enough for one lifetime.

“I realized the Russians might try to kill me once they had the video and I was no longer any use to them,” she explains. “And if they tried to kill me, I wanted them on video inside my apartment.” Diana looks up at me. “Ben, I swear to you, I didn’t know they’d move so quickly. Nina was going to leave the next day. I didn’t think they’d come after me that night. I…I didn’t want her to die. I didn’t. I swear.”

I don’t know if I believe her or not. But either way, she was being awfully reckless with someone else’s life.

“And who covered up Nina’s death?” I ask. “The CIA?”

She looks at me like the answer’s obvious. “Of course. By then they knew everything. They might have even known that the Russians were coming for me. They made a decision that they wanted everyone to believe I was dead.”

And it worked. For a while, at least. Until I got curious.

But now it’s over. Diana checked her morals at the door, made an admittedly bold and daring attempt at scoring a huge payday, and lost as badly as someone can lose. Now she will spend the rest of her life in a cell.

I loved this woman. You can’t just turn off that kind of feeling. But I loved a person who didn’t exist. I loved someone Diana was pretending to be. Maybe the signs were there, but I refused to see them. Maybe I didn’t want to see them.

The guard approaches and tells me that my time’s up. I take a deep breath and look at Diana.

I place my hand gently on the bars of the cell and look at Diana one last time. “There’s still good in your life,” I say. “It’s going to be harder to find it. But it’s there, Diana. Don’t stop looking for it.”

Then I walk away, wondering if I should start taking some of my own advice.