Spy Mom (24 page)

“Now, what can we do for you, missy?” Fatty asked. “Because we're pretty sure you didn't come down here for the coffee.” Another round of hysterical laughter.

Oh, God, I thought, watching them convulse, is this going to be me? Am I going to be sitting here with Simon Still in thirty years, wallowing in the glory days that never really existed? I started to sweat. Somehow, that troubled me more than being known as the girl who kept getting kidnapped.

“Ian Blackford,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “I'd like to know why you think he flipped.”

“Oh, well,” Baldy said, “that's a pretty big question, one that we've been pondering for quite some time now. Might help to have a pastry or two to get us focused.”

I trudged dutifully to the cafeteria counter, picked out several pastries that looked more like hockey pucks than food, and returned to the table.

“Ah, the apple fritter goes a long way toward loosening the lips. Okay, Ian Blackford.”

“Bad seed.”

“Rotten apple.”

“A real Darth Vader, if you get my meaning. Couldn't resist the lure of the money, the power, the high life.”

“Wanted the glory, couldn't stand being anonymous, wanted everyone to know he was a hero.”

“He was from nowhere. No roots. No connections. Moving through this universe untethered.”

Something about those words, the idea that a person could really be from nowhere, made me squirm. I was sure all three men noticed my discomfort.

“Simon found him,” Baldy said. “He was teaching karate to kids in Ohio or North Dakota or something.”

“What's the difference? Ohio or North Dakota? Who cares?” The laughter started again. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but I forced myself to smile right along with them.

“But really, we all know what it was about,” Fatty said, “the reason he flipped.”

Baldy nodded aggressively in agreement. “Yes. It's always about the girl, isn't it?”

“The girl?” I asked.

“Of course. Love lost. The most motivating emotion to be encountered by man.”

“Or woman,” Fatty tossed out with a wink. Jokester.

“The Czech girl. Or Bulgarian girl. Who can remember? Anyway, he loved her and she was dead. The Blind Monk did it. At least that was the word put out on the street.”

“Put out on the street? So the Blind Monk didn't do it?” They were losing me.

“Well, you never can tell in this business.”

“And it didn't really matter because Blackford thought it was the Blind Monk. That was what was important.”

“But it was already too late. He was gone.” They sat in silence for a few moments.

“So he is out there trying to avenge his lost love?” I had never considered, even for a moment, an emotional component.

“Hard to say. Maybe he just likes being bad.” They laughed again.

“Well, thank you, gentlemen,” I said. As I pushed away from the table, Fatty suddenly took both of my hands in his. His grip was strong. I slowly sank back into my seat.

“You should know,” he said, eyes boring into me, “that Blackford is a psychopath. Regardless of what turned him, remember he has no capacity for love, no ability to feel empathy. He is, at the end of the day, a very dangerous man. Go carefully, Sally Sin, go very carefully in the direction of Ian Blackford.”

And I saw a glimpse, at that moment, of the agent this man used to be. A small shiver shot down my spine.

I found out from an illegal pilfering of personnel records that Ian Blackford had no family, had grown up in a series of foster homes, some of which had been particularly ugly. He was a gifted athlete with a keen interest in the martial arts. He was the only Agent on record that did not finish college. There was a note in his file that this made him insecure. He compensated by embracing the physical parts of sleuthing. When it came to things like hand-to-hand combat, guns, blowing things up, breaking into buildings, setting traps, or generally causing mayhem, no one was better than Blackford.

There was no mention of a girl, dead or alive.

He was an odd choice for the USAWMD, an agency that tended to favor people who preferred to fly under the radar. Blackford was flamboyant, too loud, calling attention to himself more often than not. But he always delivered the goods, so his behavior was tolerated at the highest level. When he flipped, those same higher-ups looked around for someone to blame, but there was no one. They knew it was ultimately their own fault. After his defection, the Agency tightened up. By the time I came on board, the place could only be described as gray.

“What are you doing tonight, Lucy?” Avery asks. “Do you and your boys want to come over for dinner? Jonathan is out of town and we could use some company.”

I come reeling back to the present. Tonight my plans include getting my husband very drunk, sneaking out of the house, and breaking into the lab of one Professor Albert Malcolm. But I can't exactly say that.

“Can we take a raincheck? Will's got some thing going on.”

“Sure.”

After an hour or so, Theo is tired and we head home. I keep checking my rearview mirror for Ian Blackford, sure that one of these times he's going to be there. I almost expect to find him sitting at my kitchen table waiting for me.

As soon as we are in the house, Will calls and tells me he has to jump on a plane for Washington this afternoon.

“They want me to give testimony at a hearing on alternative energy. An honest dialogue at the highest levels of government. Isn't that great?”

“Fabulous,” I say. I don't have the heart to tell him that he should never use the word “honest” and “government” in the same sentence. It will only hurt his feelings. As he hangs up, I hear him yelling to his assistant to go out and buy him a clean shirt and a tie and see if his suit is still at the cleaners. I wonder if he remembers how to tie a tie? Oh well, I'm sure some lobbyist will be more than happy to help if he doesn't. They like to have their hands around your neck.

I miss Will when he's gone, even for a night. I miss the warmth of his body. After so many years of sleeping alone, I have grown accustomed to the comfort of another person in my bed. However, tonight this will work perfectly. I call Agent Nanny Pauline.

“I need you here tonight around ten
P.M
. Don't be late,” I say and hang up. Tonight I will figure out what the professor is up to and maybe that will help me understand what all this fuss is about.

For dinner, Theo demands macaroni and cheese, not from a box but conjured from the mystery that is my refrigerator. We grate a pile of cheese, melt it with the macaroni, and call it good. Theo could not be happier. He digs in, insisting on feeding me every other bite.

“Mommy,” he asks, cheese smeared across his cheek and in his hair, “what's your job?”

Of all possible dinner conversation topics, I will admit this is not one I was expecting.

“Taking care of you,” I say.

“That's not a real job.”

I wipe some cheese from his eyebrow. He pushes me away as he always does when I try to touch his face with a napkin.

“It feels like a real job to me.” Some days more than others. Where is this coming from? “Why don't you think it's a real job?”

He shrugs. “Dunno. Harry's mom drives an airplane.”

That may be true, but has she ever jumped out of one into a war zone at night in the rain? I add some more pasta to his bowl, suddenly hostile toward Harry's mom, who is nothing short of lovely. All my playground friends have answers to these types of questions. They can fall back on doctor or lawyer or investment banker or marketing executive or whatever. And sitting here, elbow deep in fake macaroni and cheese, I'm equally jealous of their normalcy and bothered that Theo will go through life thinking that in my heyday I was nothing more than a government analyst sitting in the dark, pondering the end of the world.

This is the one about the girl.

She was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. A gypsy. Perhaps Romanian or Hungarian, although which I can't say for sure. She was beautiful. Tall and lithe, with long dark hair and violet eyes. She seemed almost incandescent, somehow lit from within, and she was said to have long, delicate fingers that fluttered around when she was nervous. She would sit on the street in Prague or Sofia, near nice hotels and restaurants, offering to read the fortunes of the passing tourists. She could not have been more than twenty-two years old but seemed to have wisdom beyond her years. For some Eastern Europeans, the fall of the Soviets came like a spring rain, refreshing their hope in life. For others, it began only another phase of hardship. She was destined for the latter, but desperately wanted to believe life could improve. When Blackford saw her, sitting behind her little table, a deck of tarot cards laid out before her, it's said he was so taken with her beauty, he could not restrain himself. He offered her a pile of money for a private reading, and she returned to his hotel with him. This was not the first time she had provided such a private reading.

But Blackford was half in love with her by the time they arrived at his room and could no sooner take advantage of her offered services than he could shoot himself in the foot. They sat up all night on the balcony of his shabby communist hotel, looking out over the city lights, talking about the future, mostly hers. He told her he was an entrepreneur and could maybe use her help in gathering information. He could pay her a small salary, enough to keep her off the streets. He said he would visit her from time to time, and she seemed pleased by that prospect.

As the sun rose and the wine ran dry, he leaned in close and gently kissed her full, red lips. She pressed her hips to his and wrapped her long arms around his neck. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest and the dampness of his palms as they slid under her shirt.

Did he fall in love with her because she was beautiful or desperate or delicate? Did he want to save her? To save something real? I can only imagine.

Some say they made love that morning, with the balcony door open, on the squeaky old bed, and afterward watched the sun rise high in the cloudless blue sky. Others say it was raining, and that with the dawn of a gray morning, Blackford did nothing more than kiss her and promise her the world, or at least as much of it as he could deliver.

They also say the girl was a spy for the other side, sent to kill Blackford. But there seems to be no consensus on this point.

Blackford used her as an errand girl, to deliver packages and messages to the middlemen of the cartel he was trying to infiltrate. These middlemen, fat and lazy, came to anticipate with excitement visits from Blackford's girl.

The details on how they spent the intervening months is anybody's guess. Some say Blackford would take her on picnics in the country. He'd take her boating out on the river, to museums, to cocktail parties, shopping. He even got her a passport and took her to Paris. I can see them together, bodies intertwined, looking down on the city from the Eiffel Tower. I can see them holding hands, stopping to share a kiss in the Tuileries. I imagine they must have laughed, too, in that way new lovers do, as if no one else in the world exists. But I can't actually get that mental image to come up. I've tried, but it won't stick. Blackford never laughed. At least not really.

Someone once told me that they suspected he might have even been happy during that time. And maybe he was.

But happiness at the Agency was not an asset. It just gave you something else to lose.

They'd been together for about a year when she turned up dead, strangled, in the apartment they shared. She'd been there for a few days when Blackford finally found her. It was summer, and some say the heat had not been especially kind.

Simon Still pulled him from the case, replacing him with a new agent whose name I can't remember. And Blackford came home. No one asked about what happened. Quietly and carefully, as if they were walking on eggshells, everyone went back to work. A few weeks later, Blackford was shipped out to South Africa. Although Blackford's behavior never betrayed any distress, Simon said a few months in the nice weather might be good for him.

And it was hard not to notice his eyes. Once lively, they were now dead, like a shark's eyes.

After Blackford started kidnapping me, there were whispers, conversations that would stop awkwardly when I came around the corner. Finally, annoyed, I announced that yes, I had been abducted against my will by the notorious Ian Blackford, but was quite certain it wouldn't happen again. And I thought that put an end to it.

Our holiday parties at the Agency were always sad little affairs. Whoever was home and not celebrating in some cave in Pakistan would gather at a local watering hole and get falling-down drunk. The agent seated next to me was old by Agency standards. He would be forced out soon, only to discover most of his life was over and he had nothing to show for it, but for now he was enjoying himself. Toward the end of our mediocre Italian meal, he leaned in close, the alcohol strong on his breath.

“It wasn't the kidnapping, Sally,” he slurred. “We've all had our little humiliations. Keeps us humble.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, mock-toasting him. “It makes me feel much better.”

He gripped my wrist and pulled me toward him.

“No, it's that you remind us of her,” he slurred. “The dead girl. The spy.”

“Who killed her?” I whispered, thinking this drunk old guy might be out of it enough to give me the goods.

“We thought he might be the coldest person in the world,” the old agent said, looking right at Simon Still. “Then we realized someone had to give the order.”

After dinner, Theo and I sit together on the couch and watch an episode of
Sesame Street
. There is joy here, huddled with my son, so warm and soft. I try not to move. If I disturb the moment, if I don't respect it, it will disappear and I will never get it back. Theo plays with the ties on my sweatshirt and eventually settles in to chewing them vigorously while keeping at least one eye glued to the TV.