Spy Mom (45 page)

I used to take sleep for granted. It was something that happened on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes it was in my nice comfy bed and sometimes it was under a tangle of vines in the jungle, but at least it happened. Now, my sleep is as thin as a wedding veil. If Theo so much as rolls over, I'm awake, fighting the urge to get up and check on him one more time. Just to be sure.

I come downstairs to find Theo in the playroom surrounded by
Star Wars
LEGO people. Their square little bodies are lined up in preparation for what can only be an epic battle. They wear a random assortment of tiny helmets and carry little plastic weapons of moderate destruction. Theo whispers to them. I pause for a second to see if they answer him, but he notices me loitering in the doorway and stops.

“Hi, Mommy,” he says. “Daddy went to his meeting. He kissed me good-bye twice. One was for you.”

Daddy's phoning it in a little bit more than usual these days.

“That's nice,” I say.

Theo spends a minute trying to bring me up to speed on the reasons behind the impending LEGO man war but I ask too many questions about motivation and he soon dismisses me, kindly suggesting I go away.

I wander into the kitchen and make an attempt to clean up after Will's pancake project. I wipe down the countertops, start another pot of coffee, and glance through today's headlines. I even go so far as to check the dryer for clothes in need of folding. But it's empty and I think that must be a sign of something because it has never happened before. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, twirling a strand of hair around my finger. But it's no use. I have the willpower of your average street-corner junkie.

I take the stairs on tiptoe, afraid that if Theo hears me trying to escape, he'll forget he sent me away in the first place and demand I return immediately and create a replica of the Chrysler building out of microscopic LEGO pieces. To scale.

Sitting down at Will's desk, I power up his computer. As I wait, I work on convincing myself I'm here for only one reason and that is the voice that keeps nagging at me to do something. Maybe if I figure out why Righteous Liberty wants me, and only me, to trade Richard Yoder for Director Gray, I can confidently tell the voice to shut up and leave me alone.

So far, the only logical reason I can come up with for their request is that the name Sally Sin is not the kind of name you quickly forget. It sticks to the memory like old chewing gum. Clearly, I would've been better served by being Jane Rogers or something equally bland, but how was I supposed to know it would matter? Had I known, I might have stayed holed up in my dorm room smoking cigarettes rather than trudging out in the snow to volunteer with the psychology grad students and answering a bunch of weird questions that turned out to have nothing to do with a Ph.D. thesis and everything to do with an Agency recruiting exercise. One of the tests asked for a nickname and I gave them one. I even remember being amused by my own wit. All these years later, I'm still embarrassed for my younger self.

Right now, when I really should be downstairs monitoring LEGO World War III instead of sneaking around in Will's office, I'm simply unwilling to accept the possibility of an alternative reason for Righteous Liberty's request. The list of things I'm obligated to be stressed over is long and includes where to send Theo to kindergarten and how to explain to him that telling his friends it's okay to jump from the play structure to the roof at school is, well, not okay. The list doesn't include kidnapping, conspiracy, and possible bodily harm. I'm too busy for that.

Glancing over my shoulder to make sure I'm alone, an old habit I cannot seem to kill, I type in an address consisting of twenty-seven letters and numbers, humming the ABCs tune as I go. As soon as I hit Enter, the computer screen goes black, a single green cursor flashing in the upper left-hand corner. Normally, this would be cause for concern, but now, it's exactly what I want. I enter a password stolen from Simon Still while he suffered from malaria-induced hallucinations in an inhospitable jungle years ago, hit Enter again, and wait.

ACCESS DENIED
flashes across the screen in red letters. I half expect a skull and crossbones to appear underneath the words.

“What? You've got to be kidding me,” I say, reentering the password.

“
ACCESS DENIED—PLEASE CEASE ALL ATTEMPTS TO ENTER HERE OR YOU WILL BE DETAINED FOR QUESTIONING.
”

This is very inconvenient but calling up tech support and lodging a service complaint will not improve my situation any and might even get me “detained for questioning.” I continue to tell myself that the more I know about Yoder, the more evidence I'll have in support of my theory that Righteous Liberty could have asked for any agent, but they just happened to ask for me. And the only place to get information on Yoder is from the USAWMD network.

I need to know what they know. However, when it comes to computers, I'm a realist. While I can perform a mean Google search, anything beyond that requires professional intervention.

“Mom, are you looking at pictures?” Theo stands in the office door, trying to summon up his angry face. I jump as if I just got caught watching porno at the office. “Because you said I could look with you the next time.”

One of the problems of not letting my child watch too much television is that whenever he can get in front of a screen of any sort for any reason, he will. He claims his favorite place on the planet is Times Square at night even though the last time he was there it was broad daylight and we were heading to see
Mary Poppins
. He climbs up onto my lap.

“I promise you I'm not looking at pictures,” I say.

“Well, then what are you doing?”

Sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. Not following the rules. Not being a very useful engine.

“I'm looking for something,” I say.

“This is boring.”

“If it's so boring, why don't you go back downstairs and play? I'll be done in a minute.” He looks at me as if I have lost my mind.

“No way. I'm staying.” Theo is a firm believer in miracles happening. He snuggles down in my lap, ever hopeful that my fingers will accidentally pull up an episode of
Scooby-Doo
or
SpongeBob SquarePants
. I shift him a little bit to the left, trying to reach the keyboard.

“Theo,” I say, “I can't move.” “Okay.” He pulls himself up on the arm of the chair and balances precariously, a bird on a wire. A large bird.

“What does that say?” he asks, pointing to the flashing message.

“It says ‘Go away,'” I explain. “Where are all the pictures and movies and stuff?” He grabs the mouse and starts racing it around. The cursor looks like a passenger on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I pull it from his hand.

“There aren't any,” I say. “This is a network for grown-ups. For big people.”

“You mean old people?” he asks. “Like you, Mom?”

Gee, honey, thanks for that. “Yes. Kind of like me.” He pops up on his knees and starts combing through my hair, doing his best impression of a momma gorilla searching for nits.

“What are you doing?” “Finding more of those white hairs. I can pull them out like you do.”

That's it. Even
I
have my limits. I gather him up and toss him onto the floor.

“Go find something to do,” I instruct.

“This is boring anyway,” he says, stalking off. I hit Escape and enter “Richard Yoder” into Google. My search generates thousands of hits and none of them seem useful. I search for “Righteous Liberty” and come up with the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which are lovely but not much help.

In my old world, if I wanted to indulge in a little technological espionage, I would escape the USAWMD Underground, the affectionate name for our subterranean office space, and head up into the daylight. I'd walk out of my building, down the street about two blocks, and into another big brick building that resembled an old-fashioned mental hospital. There, I would negotiate my way through security as if my life depended on it, travel to the fourteenth floor, wind my way through a maze of cubicles, and eventually end up in front of a converted conference room with blacked-out windows and a keypad entry system designed to keep the riffraff out. I was not privileged enough to know the code, so I would just bang on the door until Elliot opened it.

Elliot was malnourished to the point of resembling a skeleton covered in masking tape and worked for another agency, although he was less than forthcoming about which one that was. He wore a black T-shirt and black jeans that his skinny little hips could do nothing with. His eyes, behind thick plastic glasses, were always bloodshot. If I handed him a large Starbucks Frappuccino with whipped cream and a generous caramel swirl, he would let me in. If I came empty-handed, I was more likely to secure an audience with the Queen of England than gain entry to Elliot's conference room. We had our own technical experts at the USAWMD, but everyone knew Elliot was better.

But I have no Elliot now. The closest thing I have is Leonard the pot-smoking barista at the Java Luv. I lean back in the desk chair and stretch my arms above my head, kind of wishing Will hadn't convinced me that aluminum-containing deodorant was going to kill me and possibly poison all the groundwater in California. I put my arms back down. Theo reappears in the doorway.

“Are you done yet?” he whines. “I am
soooo
bored.”

“Do you even know what ‘bored' means?” I ask. Bored is riding on a Nepali bus full of angry roosters and burning incense for fifteen hours and covering barely one hundred kilometers in that time. That's bored.

“No. Yes. It means that you won't play.”

“Okay,” I relent. “I'll play.” Perhaps a round of
Star Wars
or BIONICLE or NERF guns will help distract me.

I push Theo out of the office and toward the stairs and again a whiff of hibiscus floats up from his hair. I really have to get this kid a different shampoo. I'm not sure how much more I can take because here my mind goes once more, right back to Nepal.

On my hard mattress at the Hotel Kathmandu, Ayushi continued to play with my hair and hum a tune that sounded like an off-key “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Suddenly, she stopped singing and stared at me with her huge brown eyes.

“You should go now,” she said.

The hotel was two stories high, but they were uneven stories, and the side of the building my room happened to be on was a little lower than a normal second story would be. Which was a good thing because I was about to jump out the window.

“Ayushi, thank you,” I said, clutching her face between my hands and kissing the top of her head. “I owe you one.” She gave me a smile and a gentle curtsy, sitting back down on my bed to watch what would happen next. A weird little kid but as long as she was on my side, I was just fine with that. I pulled on my backpack, thinking for a second how nice a shower would have been, and climbed up on the windowsill. The cheap wood splintered under my shoes as I positioned myself to take the leap. Down below was nothing but dirt. Not even a shrub to cushion my fall. Oh, well. Broken was better than dead.

I hit the ground, not altogether gracefully, and rolled in an attempt to absorb the impact, stopping only when I bumped into a pair of worn flip-flops attached to a pair of legs belonging to Min, my tour guide.

“Come on,” he whispered, pulling me to my feet. I groaned and began to sink back toward the ground.

“Let's go,” he said again, tugging at my shirt. “This is not the time for slacking.”

“Are you accusing me of being a slacker?” I asked, my mouth full of dust, my body feeling great sympathy for the street in Pamplona after the running of the bulls. Min gave me a disgusted look and more or less dragged me to his waiting car. There, I gamely climbed into the backseat of the disintegrating Toyota, thinking I should probably figure out which side Min was on before we went very far.

“Who are they?” I asked. “The guys back at the hotel?”

“They work for the king. Secret police. But they are more like a goon squad, if you ask me.”

Min turned to face me, driving with one hand and no eyes on the road.

“I was determining a plan to come in and get you when you jumped,” he said.

Sure you were.

“Do you know why they want to kill you, my friend?”

The list of possible reasons was long but distinguished. “I don't know,” I said, folding my feet up under me to keep them from being ripped off by the road flying by where the floor mats should have been. I'd only been in the country for about four hours and yet I'd totally lost control of things already. I wondered how much of this I could keep from Simon and not get caught. With my luck, he was videotaping the whole affair from a polite distance and smirking all the while.

“Well, you must have done something. But I am no friend of the new king. In my mind he is nothing more than a murderer. So I'll help you. For my country. For my true king.”

“Thank you. Can you look at the road now?” I said. Min swiveled his head back around and faced the road.

“What is your name, friend?”

“Allison,” I said, although I couldn't be 100 percent sure without checking my passport. As I stared out the window at the dust cloud being kicked up by the Toyota, I couldn't puzzle out how they knew I was coming. Later, after many more unexpected greeting parties in every corner of the world, I started to believe I was cursed. But in Kathmandu, it was still an isolated incident, something I could attribute to bad information or bad informants and not necessarily to my own personal cloud of bad karma.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To catch a plane to Lukla and start walking. You still want to go to Namche for your pictures?” Boy, things must have been tough in the tour guide business for him to willingly accept a client from hell, as I was turning out to be.