Spy Mom (41 page)

“Theo's father was a drama major in college,” I say. “He does a lot of role-playing with Theo.” Interesting. The human sacrifice doesn't feel so bad. Maybe I'd feel worse about it if Will were the one covered in snot and magic marker all the time. “The stories can be fairly elaborate.” I keep eye contact, willing her to overlook the bad kid and the bad parents and buy my story.

And after a moment, she does.

“In that case, I'd ask Mr. Hamilton to tone it down a bit,” Teacher Wendy says. “These young minds are so malleable at this stage.”

She flips open the folder in front of her, flashing me a bright smile meant to indicate that we have concluded with the serious business and will now move on to something more fun. From the folder she pulls a drawing done in crayon and slides it in front of me.

“I really had to take a second and show you this,” she says. “Theo's turning out to be a wonderful artist. His use of color and landscape is exceptional, not to mention his rendering of the human figure. All very advanced. The weapons and bombs and things you see here are age appropriate for boys at this stage so we really try to see beyond them to the ideas I just mentioned.”

But I'm no longer listening to her speech because while Theo convincing his friends it's fun to leap tall buildings in a single bound is indeed problematic what I'm now looking at is much more so.

A rudimentary bridge is strung between two uprights. There is a yellow sun and clouds and down below what looks to be a duck bobbing on the blue ocean. On the bridge are several men with guns.

Time begins to do that thing it does sometimes, to slow down to the point of almost stopping completely. Because even as a stick figure, even with an oversized purple head and skinny, oddly proportioned arms and legs, the very sight of Ian Blackford makes me tremble. I try to keep my face as neutral as possible knowing I can't very well tell Teacher Wendy about Blackford. But now is probably a good time to tell you.

There are very few things I am afraid of. I'll admit I got a little claustrophobic in those caves in Afghanistan and once I had a panic attack after jumping out of an airplane, when I discovered my parachute was sort of tangled up, but those were isolated incidents. Ian Blackford, international illegal arms dealer and the bane of my existence, inspired real fear in me, the first time I saw him and every time that followed.

It was my privilege to meet a whole slew of demented characters during my nine years serving the USAWMD and very few of them actually scared me. So what made Blackford different? Why was it that the mere mention of him was enough to make my heart race, my armpits sweat, and my skin turn all clammy?

The answer is simple. It was all in the eyes. Those icy blues told you that Blackford played by his own rules and they changed to suit the situation. What you knew to be true yesterday might have no bearing on today. Most criminals are easy to understand. Find their motivation, whether it be financial, ideological, or psychological, and you have the key to bringing them down. But Blackford did not fit neatly into any of those categories. The money was nice but secondary; he was not a religious fanatic or a kook living in a hut, writing anthrax-laced letters to the IRS. Sometimes he played the revenge angle but that was usually reserved for special circumstances, like when he discovered the identity of his father, who had abandoned him as a child. That was complicated for everyone involved, including me.

No. For the most part, Blackford seemed to do it for fun. And that terrified me.

What made Blackford unique in the fraternity of international illegal arms dealers was that he was once a superstar agent of the USAWMD. He was the guy you sent when the situation seemed hopeless or impossible or downright suicidal. No one ever agreed on anything at the Agency but all concurred Blackford was the best. There was nothing he could not do.

Except resist the lure of the dark side, I suppose. One day he went from being with us, the so-called good guys depending on the day of the week and your particular political leanings, to being one of the bad guys.

And just to rub salt in the wound, Blackford specialized in weapons of mass destruction. Cargo containers of AK-47s? Planeloads of grenade-launchers? He left that stuff for the amateurs. The real money was to be found in the very WMDs the rest of us back at the Agency were risking our lives to take out of circulation. Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear, if you had a need and a pile of money, Blackford was your guy. Simon Still found this beyond insulting, as you can well imagine. Of course, this was all before I arrived at the Agency, but that didn't seem to matter to Simon.

“Who the hell does Blackford think he is?” Simon would shout from behind his closed door. Immediately, I'd hear three or four other office doors slam shut and lock. These were the seasoned agents. They knew when to hunker down and ride out the storm. It was a lesson I too would learn, eventually.

Ten seconds later, Simon would appear in front of my desk, red-faced, waving a piece of paper containing intelligence on whatever new nasty business Blackford was up to.

“I don't know who he thinks he is, sir,” I'd say. “Why don't you know, Sally?” he'd say. “If you're so smart, why don't you know?”

“I don't know, sir,” I'd say again, which was clearly not the right answer.

“Well, goddamn it,” he'd shout, “find out!” And with that he'd charge back down the hallway, muttering all sorts of obscenities. Whether they were directed at Blackford or me I couldn't say, but they were not flattering in either case.

Unfortunately for us at the Agency, Blackford was really good at being really bad. Remember those incidents in Beijing and in Rio, the ones that the twenty-four-hour cable news networks couldn't get enough of? Well, the part they didn't tell you was that it was all Blackford, efficiently moving the goods, collecting the money, and not losing any sleep about his wake of Armageddon.

So to say that Simon was put out when Blackford started kidnapping me from time to time would be a bit of an understatement. Actually, to say it was from time to time might also be a bit of an understatement. At my last count, we were up to about twelve kidnappings. I was new to my job, not willing to claim any expertise in anything and certainly not in spying, and it wouldn't have mattered if I did. Blackford was better than anyone. There was no point in resisting. It would only leave you feeling inadequate.

In the beginning, he would usually manage to slip some drug into my cocktail, the result of which would be me collapsed in a heap, at his feet and at his mercy. Eventually, whatever narcotic I'd ingested would wear off and I'd wake up in a drafty apartment or random hotel room with a thoughtful Blackford standing nearby, watching me for signs of life.

I came to think of Blackford as my nemesis, but with a slight variation. He didn't seem all that eager to kill me, as a proper nemesis would, but rather preferred to torture me with unexpected changes of plan.

So you can better understand how these kidnappings usually went down and my resulting professional mortification, let me tell you about the third time I met Ian Blackford.

I was in Budapest, sent on a mission to follow a woman named Katrina Renoir who was suspected of working for a Chinese terrorist organization. My intelligence report indicated she liked to visit the Gellert Baths on a daily basis and soak in the thermal pools. My job was to watch her and see whom she met.

So there I sat, up to my chin in a lovely warm pool of water, trying my best to stay focused. The steam drifted up and around my face, making me a witness to the world through a veil of breezy gauze. On the far end of the pool, I caught sight of Katrina Renoir. She was somewhere in her forties but if there was ever a case for taking the baths in Budapest, she was it. She glided down the stairs, a life-sized Tinker Bell in a tiny bikini, and settled in on one of the underwater benches. With her eyes closed and her head back, she looked thoroughly content, not a care in the world she was helping to blow up.

How come she looked so relaxed and beautiful and I had the look of yesterday's roadkill? Did the weight of the moral high ground actually cause wrinkles? What a cruel irony.

As I was lost in this deepest of thoughts, I felt a hand grasp my thigh under the water, followed by a sharp prick, as if I had been poked with a pin. A tiny cloud of blood floated toward the surface of the water.

“I suppose I should tell management on the way out about the blood. They may want to drain the pool.” And there was Blackford, sitting not ten inches from me, an amused look on his face. “Although you don't look like you are carrying any communicable diseases. Are you?”

“Am I what?” I started to ask but in reality I had already moved on to the question that always popped into my apparently pea-sized brain whenever I saw him, and that was, would this be easier if Blackford didn't look so good? But before I could fall head-first down that bottomless pit, my world went black and I slipped under the water.

When I woke up, I was in a pint-sized studio apartment. The bathing suit I'd been wearing was draped neatly over a windowsill, drying in the sun. In its place, I wore an oversized button-down shirt and khaki pants that could have fit a whole other person in them. I was on the floor, my neck kinked from the way Blackford had dumped me there. It seemed strange he would take such care to hang up my wet bathing suit to dry but drop me down as if I were nothing more than a pile of dirty laundry.

I sat up slowly, afraid any quick movement would cause my pounding head to explode. Blackford appeared by the open window.

“Dry,” he said, tossing the suit at me. Was I supposed to say thank you? What was the protocol here? Would it be wrong if I just started to scream for help?

“Sorry about the baths,” he said, “but Katrina is off-limits to you and your friends. She works for me.”

I nodded, giving him a half smile. I could see them together, Tinker Bell and the evil James Bond. They were the perfect fit.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. I wondered how he would do it. Quickly with a bullet to the head or would he want to make it last, choosing instead to torture me in new and creative ways?

At least he had the decency to think about my question for a moment. As always, Blackford seemed surrounded by a hazy aura of invincibility. Under his T-shirt, his body rippled with muscles that did not come from a gym. His ice-blue eyes held mine fast.

“Not today,” he said finally. “But you tell Simon that if I see him move on Katrina, you'll be the first to go.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, nodding my head vigorously so he knew I got the message and was in complete agreement with him about this and most everything else, and not considering some wily plan of escape, such as jumping out the window. Speaking of escape, I chided myself, you should be formulating a plan for making one soon. You should be doing
something
. But instead I just kept nodding my head as if my IQ had dropped to somewhere in the low sixties.

“We will stay away from Katrina,” I said, agreeing to something totally outside of my jurisdiction. If Simon wanted to kill Katrina, he was certainly not going to ask my permission to do so. As my brain pondered this reality, my mouth took off on its own adventure.

“Did you see me naked?” I blurted. Immediately, I wanted to kick myself. Blackford didn't say a word, just continued to stare at me. Generally speaking, I consider myself a lucky person. I am, after all, still alive. But something about being held tightly in Blackford's cold gaze always made me think my number was just about to come up.

“No,” Blackford said in a tone that made it clear he had about as much regard for me as he did for the average flea. “A bunch of mermaids dressed you. You can go now. Don't forget what we talked about.”

Stumbling like a toddler in my oversized pants, I fled the room, grateful for the chance to fuck up another day.

Simon didn't like the message and told me I had better watch myself or he was going to transfer me to the State Department, which in his mind was the worst fate that could befall a person. I left out the part about the bathing suit. The humiliation was more than I could reasonably be expected to bear.

It went on like this for a number of years until Blackford turned up dead, killed by angry militiamen in Sudan. And that should have been it, the end of the terrible and tragic saga of Ian Blackford.

But Blackford would never just die. That would be too pedestrian for him. No. Instead, two years ago he was reborn right back into my living room, making a mess of my carefully constructed life and ending us all up on that bridge so brilliantly sketched by Theo, my budding Picasso. But that's a different story that you might want to get to at another time.

I trace the outline of Theo's drawing with my finger. Teacher Wendy continues to smile as if Theo's advanced doodling skills are a product of her own design.

“He does a nice job with the colors,” I say, my chair creaking ominously beneath me.

“He has a flair,” she says, “so creative.” How long would it take for Teacher Wendy to call Child Protective Services if I were to tell her that creativity had very little to do with it?

“Now, should we chat a little about your kindergarten goals before we run out of time?”

No. I don't want to talk about kindergarten or goals or how my kid likes to throw himself onto the roof of the school building or what a genius he is with a green crayon. What I really want to do is go back to bed and wake up when Theo safely graduates from college and enters a nice mundane profession, such as accounting or dentistry, and takes responsibility for his own life, if kids even do that anymore.

But we can't talk about that or anything else right now because right now I have to go and meet Simon Still and I suspect that is going to make me long for Teacher Wendy, evil stick figures, and little purple chairs.