Spy Mom (23 page)

As I sat meditating on my failure, I noticed a small stairway leading up to another deck above the main viewing area. How had I missed it? Slowly, I climbed the stairs. I had no idea what I would do if it turned out he was actually there on the roof.

About halfway around the deck, there he was, admiring the view. In his left hand, Blackford held a small aluminum briefcase. Then, almost as if he could smell me in the breeze, he turned. And smiled.

“Sally Sin,” he said, “you remembered. I wasn't sure if you would.”

Seeing him standing there, relaxed, taking in the sights, made me so mad I almost couldn't speak.

“Do you know how many people died in Beijing?” I asked. “They were regular people, minding their own business. Going to work. Going to school. How do you sleep at night?”

“Fine. Thanks for asking. Don't take it so personally, Sally. I don't.”

How badly I wanted to push him off the edge of the building was written all over my face. He laughed.

“I know what you are thinking. But it won't work. Why don't you shoot me?” He moved closer so that we stood a mere foot apart.

“The building is surrounded,” I said. “You'll never get out alive.” This really seemed to crack him up.

“Sally, you're good at a lot of things, but lying to me isn't one of them. The USAWMD never surrounds anything. And they never ever ask another agency for help in surrounding anything. So the chances of this place being surrounded and me being, well, shit out of luck, are pretty slim. Not that I was planning on the elevator anyway. So go on, do it. Shoot me. Imagine what a hero you would be if you came back with my head on a stick. What a triumph.” Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to run away, but there was nowhere to go but down.

“Tell me where the cargo container is and I'll let you go.”

“Don't negotiate, Sally. Stand your ground. Don't be intimidated. Pull out your gun and fire.” Both of my hands were jammed in my pockets. I wondered if I could get away with strangling him. “Oh, wait a minute. You don't have a gun, do you? Dumped it to get up here. Oh well. Lost opportunity.”

“Goddamn you, Blackford,” I hissed. “Why do you do this? People die, people who are just living their pathetic happy lives. Why do you make everything such a big fucking mess? The world doesn't need more chaos. It needed you to help. Why did you give up?” I hoped to see regret in Blackford's crazy eyes. But there was nothing.

“Saving the world gets tedious once you realize you can't win.”

I wanted to stomp my foot like a child and demand a real answer, but that wasn't going to happen. While I stood alongside him, helpless to do anything, he hoisted a backpack over his shoulders and fastened a series of buckles.

“There is no cargo container, Sally. That was a diversion, something to keep you folks busy. And clearly it worked beyond my wildest expectations if we are both standing here right now.” Blackford kept at the buckles, pulling, adjusting, shrugging his shoulders to get everything right, comfortable.

“A diversion from what?”

“Business of another sort altogether. I was visiting with an old friend in California. We had a lot to talk about, big plans for the future, and I wanted to make sure none of you government types got in my way.” He pulled out a pair of goggles. “And this part,” he gestures to the harness, “this part is about having fun. You should try it some time.”

“What are you talking about? Hey, what are you doing? You are not … you can't … you are not jumping off of this building, are you? You owe me some answers!”

“I don't owe you a thing,” he laughed, holding up the briefcase. “I believe it is you who owes me.”

“What the hell is in that briefcase?” I shouted, but it was too late.

In a flash he was over the side. I ran to the ledge in time to see him pull the rip cord on his parachute. A security guard ran up next to me.

“Did he just …?”

“Yes! He jumped.” The guard started shouting into his radio. I pushed my way into a departing elevator and headed down. The lobby was buzzing with the news that someone had jumped off the Top of the Rock. How did he get through the barriers? How did he get up there with a parachute? How could this happen? Easy, I wanted to shout. He's Ian Blackford and the world appears to bend to his whim.

Out on the street, a small crowd had gathered. Several uniformed police officers chattered into their handsets. I scanned the sky, but there was nothing. The whine of cruiser sirens drew closer. Wherever Blackford had intended to land, it wasn't nearby. The wind blew from the west to the east. He had taken off in the direction of the Empire State Building. I took a deep breath and started running toward the East River. Traffic chugged slowly along beside me. A man in a cab looked at me curiously as we moved forward at about the same pace. I pulled off my jacket and let it fall to the ground. I kept looking for a purple and yellow parachute, but there were only blue skies.

Seconds from collapsing, I found myself at the edge of the FDR Drive. The traffic was at a standstill even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

“God, I love New York,” I said, my lungs on fire, wheezing. I ducked under the congested highway and kept running toward the ferry terminal. The only practical way out of this city was by water or by air. Boats were heading in and out with purpose; nothing looked out of place. About fifty yards from shore, there was a small private yacht, remarkable only for how it gleamed white in the sun. On the deck, standing beside the captain, was Blackford. I doubled over, so out of breath I thought I might pass out and topple into the river, never to be heard from again.

“Nice try, Sally!” Blackford yelled, as the boat pulled out into the river. “You must really want this.” I looked up in time to see him hurl the aluminum briefcase in my direction. It landed a few yards shy of shore. The last thing I saw Blackford do was shrug as if to say,
Sorry, I tried
. Without giving it a second thought, I dove in. The water was cold and brown, and the current was moving faster than I expected. The ferry passengers started to get excited. I didn't have much time. I grabbed the case and hauled it and myself back to shore, clawing my way out on an old concrete piling, all that remained of a dock lost long ago. The minute I was upright, I opened the briefcase. Inside was a foam inset designed to carry five four-inch vials of something liquid, something delicate, something precious. But the vials were gone. In their place were five bullets, clean and unexploded.
I believe the Blind Monk meant these for you
, the note said. I could almost hear him laughing.

“Goddamn it!” I put my head down and almost cried, exhausted and wet, stranded on a hunk of concrete in the East River.

Simon wasn't happy about the bullets in the briefcase and the nonexistent cargo container.

“What was he doing in California?” he asked, during the lengthy debriefing where I began to feel like a criminal myself.

“I don't know. He didn't tell me that part. He said he was out on the coast. Visiting wine country maybe?”

“Sally,” Simon said through clenched teeth. “They found traces of some plant life on the foam in that briefcase. Is he changing professions? Opening a flower shop in the East Village?”

“I don't know.” But I was thinking about Cambodia, the jungle, those lilies. “Maybe it has something to do with the botanist?”

“Shut up, Sally. Do not mention Cambodia to me right now or I might actually kill you. I need facts, not theories.”

“I don't know,” I said again.

“Don't know? Or don't want to tell us?”

I was about to remind him that he wanted facts, not theories, but I remembered that he was going to kill me and decided to keep quiet.

“Blackford has done a lot of things since leaving the Agency. He's done unspeakable things. But this … this is different. This is plain rude. So somebody better figure out what the hell he was up to out there today or heads are going to roll. And I don't mean that in a nice way. Got it?”

I nodded. Add it to the list of disasters.

I saw him once more in Hanoi. Two months after that, word came that Blackford was dead.

An hour after I return from mugging Barry the grad student, Theo and I are ensconced at the playground with Avery and Sam and a host of others. I still have Barry's keys in my pocket. Their weight is somehow comforting.

“I still wish you'd teach me to knock out yoga instructors with such finesse,” Sam says with a smile. “I'm a quick study.”

I can see Claire the ex-investment banker's ears perk up. “Who knocked out a yoga instructor? Wouldn't that lead to, like, one hundred years of bad karma?”

Just what I need.

“Forget it,” I say. “Forget the whole incident.”

“What incident?” Belinda asks, licking the leftover applesauce off her sleeve and dusting the sand off her flowery skirt.

“Apparently Lucy beat up her yoga instructor last night,” Claire offers.

Belinda's eyes open a little too wide for my liking.

“Why? Did he hurt you? We can sue him for professional misconduct, you know. Just because someone claims to be spiritual doesn't mean he's a nice guy.”

“No, nothing like that. He was trying to adjust her triangle pose and … BAM … he was flat on the floor,” Sam explains.

“Kind of like this,” adds Avery, using Sam to simulate my brutal attack on poor Conrad.

“Then I was worried that yoga man put a hit out on you on account of the weird guy in the hat hanging around your car that night,” Sam continues, “but at least I'm pretty sure you can take care of yourself.”

Simon, you idiot
, I think. I play dumb.

“Really? Probably someone thinking about stealing it. Lots of car theft going on lately.”

“Especially your kind of car,” Sam says.

We lock eyes, Sam and I, and in his expression I read disbelief. There are too many weird little pieces for him, and he wants to put them together. He wants to make sense out of all this random information. I cast my eyes down toward my feet. He knows I am lying, but as much as I'd like to tell him the whole sordid tale, I cannot. Fortunately, my crew here spends so much time with two- and three-year-olds that they are very easily distracted. Suddenly, Belinda brings up the annual sale at our local children's clothing store. I join in with great enthusiasm and force Sam back into his role as lone male voice screaming in a gale of hyped-up women with nothing better to do than shop.

Speaking of being easily distracted, it is possible to become obsessed with one's nemesis to the point of distraction, and that is what happened to me. After Blackford kidnapped me the second time, I felt compelled to understand him and how he became the way he was. Simon reminded me that my job wasn't to explore the troubled childhood and resulting psychosis of Ian Blackford, but rather “to catch the bastard or, at the very least, kill him.” Neither option was all that appealing, and when I told Simon that, he also reminded me that finding my assignments appealing was completely irrelevant and I should stop thinking like a girl. If I wanted appealing, he said, I could go and work for the State Department. I didn't really understand why working at the State Department would be better, but the look on his face did not encourage further discussion. I dropped the subject with Simon, but made a point of bringing it up with the Old Timers.

The Old Timers were an invaluable resource to the Agency—men who'd been there since its inception, who acted as the Greek chorus, the living archive, the moral compass for those of us running around in the field. There were three of them. There used to be four, but nobody was willing to say what happened to the fourth one. The Old Timers were indistinguishable from one another, and they spent their days camped out in the cafeteria, drinking bad coffee and talking about baseball. It was understood that an active agent could pick their collective brain regarding Agency history and they would be forthcoming. It was why they were still on the payroll. Well, that and the fact that they had the ear of the Director. Word was that they had all worked together in the past. They were tight. Like family.

I had never talked to them before, being a relative newbie with the Agency, but they knew all about me.

“Sally Sin!” the fat one bellowed as I approached their table.

“Scored higher than anyone in the history of the Agency on that silly test,” the bald one added.

“And has a truly unique gift for languages,” the short one with wiry eyebrows continued. “Better than our Simon even.”

I didn't know that I'd done better than anyone on that test, but I kept my face neutral. No need for them to know I was clueless.

“Sally has never come to the table and we are now wondering what deep, probing questions she intends to ask,” Fatty, clearly the ringleader, barked. He pulled out an empty chair and pointed to it. I sat down.

“Sally has achieved fame for being snatched multiple times by none other than our own black sheep ex–Agent Blackford,” Baldy said. They sounded like sports broadcasters, and it was all I could do not to flat-out hate them. Shorty poured me a cup of black sludge from the carafe on the table.

“Drink,” he said, pushing the mug toward me. The coffee was the consistency of motor oil, barely moving in the cup as I raised it to my lips. An initiation of sorts. They watched me intently.

“Sally Sin is going to do it black, straight up, down the hatch, no sugar, no cream,” Shorty whispered. I took a sip of the black goo. It required all of my resources not to spit it back out on the table. I swallowed, kept my face steady, and placed the mug back down on the table.

“You know,” I said, “that coffee is not very good.”

“No,” the three men chimed in unison, “it's bloody awful! We save it for you new kids.” With that, they burst out laughing.