Spy Mom (2 page)

I do laundry, separating the darks from the whites from kid clothes and using a different detergent and water temperature for each load. I make organic applesauce and fix toys and spend so much time crawling around on my knees playing cars or dinosaurs that my knees now have more calluses than skin. I go to Whole Foods and squeeze the fruits and vegetables like we're longtime lovers, spending perfectly useful minutes in the perfectly useless pursuit of the perfect melon. It is important, although I couldn't tell you exactly why. I cook healthy meals with whole grains and fish and green vegetables. The fact that I wash them down with half a bottle of expensive red wine doesn't trouble me in the least. I often find myself in conversations that seem to go like this:

“So what do you do all day?”

“I'm a stay-at-home mom. I take care of my son.”

“Oh. Well. I think I need to go and stick a needle in my eye.”

End of conversation. It's a bum rap. Being a mother is hard. And I feel like I have a few data points in the “hard” category.

I am thirty-six years old. I am fairly tall, with indistinct, brown, shoulder-length hair that could certainly benefit from a few highlights. I have blue eyes that some people say are so intense they find it unnerving. And I can still kill an adult male twice my weight with one precisely placed punch in the chest. This is not something I tell the other moms at the playground. It simply doesn't come up all that often.

“Hey, Lucy, I hear you used to be a spy. Got any extra wipes in that bag? Or maybe an AK-47 lifted off some rebel in Afghanistan? Or a small drop of poison I could slip into my husband's Manhattan because I swear he's screwing the nanny?” Like I said, it really doesn't come up too often. And in reality, this motherhood thing hasn't been so good for the old termination skills. I'm a little rusty in all areas except, it seems, paranoia. My paranoia is still largely intact.

So these are the things that I do as a stay-at-home mom. Play, clean, shop, feed, sleep, play some more, repeat. There is no denying I am a long way from where I used to be.

Places that included Cambodia, Vietnam, Budapest for a short while, Croatia, Nepal, Slovenia—but that was for a vacation with the guy who disappeared in Somalia—a number of desolate locations in Africa, Tibet, and more of China than I care to remember, and several places I'm still not at liberty to comment on but let's just say the weather was terrible. In those days, I was not Lucy Parks Hamilton, wife of William Wilton Hamilton III, mother of Theodore Hamilton. Back then I was Agent 26, aka Sally Sin, of the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The Agency, as you already know if you read the papers, is comprised of a bunch of analysts sitting around trying to figure out who has what, when they are going to use it, and on whom. And for the most part that's true. But there is a single line on page 415 of the USAWMD budget that reads, simply, Operations—Additional. And that's where we lived, a small group of spies trained to ferret out elusive information, the one missing piece of the puzzle. And on occasion we were called upon to disarm those individuals or groups who had become a little too proud of their personal stash of Armageddon. Oftentimes these folks would decide, logically of course, that blowing up all of Cleveland because the guy who cut them off in traffic had a Cleveland Cavaliers bumper sticker was perfectly reasonable. Agency policy required us to disagree, although there are plenty of people who don't see the point of Cleveland anyway. But that's another story. The covert agents of the USAWMD are out there every day trying to stop the bad things from happening by whatever means possible. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Most people remember the times when it doesn't.

There weren't twenty-six agents. I have no idea how many there were but I think it was less than twenty-six. However, my boss, Simon Still, seemed to think I looked like Agent 26.

“Hey, Sally Sin, Agent Twenty-six, I got something for you,” he'd yell through the labyrinth that comprised our office space.

“Agent who?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Who are agents one through twenty-five?”

“I'm not at liberty to disclose that information.”

“So how am I supposed to know that I'm really Agent Twenty-six?”

“You're starting to annoy me, Agent Twenty-six.”

“Sorry, sir. It won't happen again.”

And Agent 26 wasn't nearly as bad as Sally Sin, which was a joke from the computer game that started this whole mess in the first place. We'll get to that in a minute.

My husband, Will, once made a ton of money as an investment banker. But then he had a transformative experience while visiting the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. As he stood staring out over the two thousand acres of waste, he says he began to hyperventilate and not only because of the stink. He started to see himself and everyone he knew swimming through an ocean of decomposing medical waste and old toys and rotten grapefruits. It must have been quite an image because days later he quit his seven-figure job and decided he had no choice but to dedicate his life to saving the planet. And I mean that literally. He managed to come up with enough seed money to start his own investment fund to support the development of green energy. Will speaks with a certain reverence about solar cells and geothermal energy, and if he catches me absentmindedly putting a piece of paper in the garbage rather than in the recycle bin, the pain is acutely visible on his face. He is a good person and he expects me to recycle with the same enthusiasm that he does. So I try. Honestly, I do.

“Honey, this is a tree,” he says, gingerly removing the piece of newspaper from the garbage can. “It can be turned into so many other things, like egg cartons for instance. But you need to give it a chance to go on and do good in the world.”

When I first met Will I thought he might be another hippie throwback talking the talk but finding the walk part kind of inconvenient and opting instead for a quick trip to Starbucks. But not Will. As it turns out, he is the first person I have ever met who truly believes a single individual can make all the difference. It's humbling.

Despite my poor recycling habits and my inability to understand the complexities of trading carbon credits, he seems to like me anyway. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but I try not to question my good fortune too much. And, of course, Will loves Theo to pieces and buys him all sorts of exciting sustainable wooden toys. In the interest of marital harmony, we both ignore the fact that I occasionally slip the kid a Matchbox car made in China. I do try and remember to recycle the packaging, however.

We live in a modest house in San Francisco, California, with a roof covered in solar cells. The amount Will paid for the house still makes my throat dry, but Theo likes it here. He can play outside in February and rarely has to wear shoes. He is beautiful and I'm not saying that simply because I'm his mother. People approach us on the street wanting only to touch his silky blond hair. This, as you might guess, doesn't go over particularly well with me. Remember the paranoia I mentioned earlier? In addition to the blond hair, he has my blue eyes and a dimple in his chin like his dad.

My local friends want to know what it is I do when I'm not with Theo. They want to know how I spend those hours that I'm not playing cars or dinosaurs or reading
Where the Wild Things Are
for the eight thousandth time. I don't tell them about my coffee shop vigil. I don't tell them I stare at the front door of Theo's preschool waiting for bad guys to appear and mess up my perfectly happy existence. My goal in this stage of my life is to fly under the radar. Being that weird is definitely not under the radar. And how would I explain that I occasionally slip out to Donovan's Dojo, patronized exclusively by ex-cons and cops, to kick the shit out of a bunch of people who think my name is Amy and that I did time for armed robbery? Or that in a lockbox in my closet, buried under some sweaters, is a .45 caliber Colt Commander that I have used to kill people? And that sometimes I take it out and look at it to remind myself of what that was like.

So I deflect the invitations to lunch or coffee with as little fanfare as I can manage and focus on Theo. He is, after all, the reason I am here in San Francisco and not dead in the desert in Yemen or crawling around in the jungles of Myanmar. And the truth is I like it here, the clean smell of the air, the soft pink of the evening sky. It is all so peaceful and orderly. After nine years with the USAWMD, I appreciate peaceful and orderly in a way I never did before.

Part of being Agent 26 meant no one from my life—past, present, or future—could know I was Agent 26. My official story is that after I graduated from college I went to work for the government as an analyst for the USAWMD. I sat at a desk, in a row of other people sitting at similar desks, and I read documents. When I was done, I summarized what I read in five hundred words or less and passed it on down the line. I can fill in the agonizing details if pressed, but if you present it correctly no one ever asks a follow-up question. It's really too boring for the average citizen to consider. So we talk about something exciting, like the weather.

The unofficial story is more interesting. In college I was always broke. To collect enough money for the necessary survival items—beer, cigarettes, pot, what have you—I would volunteer at the graduate psychology school to take various screenings and tests, earn a few bucks, and help the struggling grads gather up enough data to come up with yet another expert conclusion, such as: If you eat too much, you may become fat. Clever.

It was my senior year, well into the deep freeze of a northeast winter, when I found myself in an overheated classroom filling out a psychological survey about fear. What made me afraid? What did I do when I was afraid? Did I feel like fear was something I could control? The second instrument, as the grads called the questionnaires, wanted to know how I felt about moral ambiguity. Was having an affair always wrong? If you kill someone for a good reason, is it still wrong? If you back over the neighbor's cat, do you confess? The third one was a series of mathematical questions where you had three seconds in which to give your answer. Even at the time, I knew it was about pressure and not math. Will the test-taker crack and run screaming out of the room? But that sort of thing never bothered me and my blood pressure stayed as level as a football field.

The final part of the study involved playing a computer game. We had to give ourselves a code name and run through a scenario, which required that the player make a lot of choices based on dubious information. I chose Sally Sin as my code name, thinking it was funny. I regret that now, but how was I to know it would actually matter?

So I got my twenty dollars and left the building, bracing myself for the freezing winds and slippery sidewalks. I made it as far as the convenience store before the man in the dark coat and sunglasses caught up to me. Even then he seemed strangely out of place. Jeez, I thought, who is this guy? An engineering professor? A tragically unhip visitor from another planet, like the South or something?

“You shouldn't smoke,” he said, suddenly standing next to me at the checkout window. I barely looked up as I dug around in my knapsack for enough loose change to cover the pack of cigarettes on the counter. Growing impatient, my new friend in the cashmere overcoat and shiny black shoes slapped a five down next to the box.

“Didn't you earn twenty bucks not ten minutes ago?” he asked.

“Yes, but I don't want to break it yet.”

The man shook his head in apparent disgust.

“Thanks,” I said, gesturing toward the five on the counter. “I'll pay you back. After I break the twenty.”

“Please, keep your pennies.”

“Nice glasses,” I said, starting to walk out of the store. The man followed closely behind. “Do you work for the FBI?” Thinking back, I'm lucky he didn't flatten me for being snotty.

Instead, the man gave a quick laugh, more like a snort really. “NSA, actually, but I'm doing a favor for USAWMD.”

“A lot of letters there,” I said. My attention was already turned to peeling the cellophane wrapper from the pack of cigarettes.

“Listen,” he said, taking my arm, “like I mentioned, I'm doing a favor so let me make it quick. We'd like to speak with you about your career plans. We think we might be able to offer you a chance to have some adventures and earn a pretty good living at the same time. If that sounds appealing, let us know. Enjoy your smokes.” He slipped a card into my pocket and disappeared out the door.

The card read “John D. Smith, Recruitment, USAWMD.” It had a phone number and a note that said to call anytime. I put the card back into the pocket of my down jacket and headed home.

I was a good student, exceptional only in the area of foreign language. After learning high school Spanish from the textbook before the teacher even figured out all of our names, I had yet to encounter a language I couldn't master with a minimum of focus and a couple of weeks. When I joined the Agency, I spoke normal languages like French, Spanish, and German. When I left, I spoke things like Mandarin, Arabic, Kurdish, Hungarian, Azerbaijani, Portuguese, Hindi, Vietnamese, Urdu, Persian, Korean, Nepali, and the list goes on.

I liked the fact that I could speak French like a Parisian and German like a Berliner, but it never occurred to me that it could be useful for anything but vacations. Four years into college and I still had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up other than get as far from the cold northeast wind as possible. I thought about being a writer but had nothing all that interesting to say. I thought about being a lawyer but didn't know any lawyers who would admit to liking it. So I resigned myself to trudging along, waiting for that
Eureka, I've found it!
moment, which showed no signs of surfacing.

Five days after graduation, packing up my tiny college apartment with no clue as to where I was going and what I was going to do when I got there, I came across the business card of John D. Smith. And so, having nothing to lose and a possible job in a troubled economy to gain, I called him. That a total stranger claiming to work for the NSA followed me into a convenience store and offered me a job didn't alarm me in the least. Not a single lightbulb went on in my fuzzy twenty-something head. It never occurred to me that this was anything but completely normal.