sigh of despair. “Where are your loyalties, Eric? I’m not talking about love or sex or even myself. I’m curious. About you. What claims your soul?”
A snort. “You think I’ve got one?”
She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.
He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family’s name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.
“You can’t do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says. “You can’t be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative—not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”
“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit. Country is an excuse for wanting to die.”
He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpectedforce that she’s winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric’s weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.
“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won’t betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you’re tired of country. A long time ago I said I’d never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it’s my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected—but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I’ve chosen.”
“Which is?”
“Making the world a safer place.”
She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her.
“You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I’m not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it’s just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it’s for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It’s all I’ve got, Caroline—this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”
Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her—but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.
You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you. Only she hadn’t stopped. She’d been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he’d never bothered to tell her he was alive.
Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?
What exactly am I supposed to believe?
EIGHT
Langley, 11:53 A.M.
C AROLINE’S STRONGEST IMPULSE upon quitting the women’s room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean, the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room. She had researched the lives of the men—and they were all men—who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency’s biographic profiles.
These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty and informative, riddled with small detail and the occasional sweeping judgment. Text was punctuated with Intelligence controls— U for Unclassified, C for Confidential, S for Secret. The most heated debates flared over the use of
A snort. “You think I’ve got one?”
She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.
He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family’s name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.
“You can’t do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says. “You can’t be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative—not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”
“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit. Country is an excuse for wanting to die.”
He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpectedforce that she’s winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric’s weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.
“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won’t betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you’re tired of country. A long time ago I said I’d never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it’s my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected—but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I’ve chosen.”
“Which is?”
“Making the world a safer place.”
She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her.
“You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I’m not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it’s just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it’s for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It’s all I’ve got, Caroline—this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”
Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her—but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.
You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you. Only she hadn’t stopped. She’d been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he’d never bothered to tell her he was alive.
Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?
What exactly am I supposed to believe?
EIGHT
Langley, 11:53 A.M.
C AROLINE’S STRONGEST IMPULSE upon quitting the women’s room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean, the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room. She had researched the lives of the men—and they were all men—who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency’s biographic profiles.
These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty and informative, riddled with small detail and the occasional sweeping judgment. Text was punctuated with Intelligence controls— U for Unclassified, C for Confidential, S for Secret. The most heated debates flared over the use of
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