Spy Mom (55 page)

“Don't you want to know why you're here?” I ask Yoder, quietly so the people around me don't stand a chance of hearing. Yoder shovels a fistful of popcorn into his mouth and squints in my direction.

“Probably not because you had an extra ticket,” he says, little bits of popcorn spraying every which way.

“If I hadn't shown up when I did, you'd be en route to D.C. right now with a black sack over your head and no chance of an in-flight meal. I kind of did you a favor.”

“That's your interpretation.”

“Righteous Liberty wants to trade Charles Gray for you,” I say. “Does that surprise you?”

Yoder gazes out at the bay. “What does it matter?” he says without emotion.

How come in the movies rogue agents are always sexy and always right, no matter the methods they employ to see justice done? In real life, being a rogue agent isn't turning out to be all that much fun.

We watch a few more swings. Nobody seems to be able to hit the ball. If I were making forty million dollars a year, I would try harder to hit the ball.

“This guy stinks,” I say as the batter swings wildly at a terrible pitch.

“Well, not according to the numbers,” Yoder says, his popcorn bag resting on the closed baseball program in his lap, his half-eaten corn dog poised in midair. “In 470 at bats this season, he has 148 hits, of which 32 were doubles, 3 were triples, and 27 were home runs. In fact, he has a batting average of .315 and an on-base percentage of .381. He's actually had quite a regular season. The opposing pitcher, on the other hand, is quite formidable. Over 33 games and a total of 212 innings pitched, he has thrown 231 strikeouts—more than 1 per inning—and permitted only 81 earned runs for an earned run average of 3.43. Although he has given up 92 walks. Perhaps the batter should stop swinging and hope for the best.”

I suddenly remember what source number two, in the USAWMD's report on Yoder, claimed happened in the bathroom. Yoder alone with the little black book for four minutes. Four whole minutes. We stare at each other over Yoder's half-empty popcorn bag. Yoder's eyes shine. Finally, he shrugs.

“Maybe he does stink. What do I know about baseball?”

Without warning, a fly ball comes falling out of the sky right on top of us. Yoder sticks out a hand and the ball sails right into it as if attracted by a very powerful magnet. Immediately all the kids pile on top of Yoder, wanting to see the ball, to touch it, to beg to take it home. Underneath the mountain of little bodies, Yoder flashes a brief smile and for a moment he seems utterly regular. This kind of day is as American as apple pie for certain socioeconomic groups. However, to enjoy it you must embrace the illusion that we are all the same, heads down, striving for the dream. And that is just not the case.

It is a good thing your average citizen of the world goes around with blinders on. People are quite skilled at seeing what they want to see rather than what is right in front of them. Over the years, I've successfully masqueraded as a number of different people and I'm fully aware of the fact that if anyone had bothered to take a closer look, I would have been dead in a ditch long ago. Simon Still is the master of misdirection. He can look you in the eyes and lie with the greatest of ease. I was never as good as he is but that doesn't mean I couldn't get by.

Take me being here chaperoning a ball game with a surly twenty-something sitting beside me, stuffing his face with everything on the concession menu. If you really examined the details, you would see it was off. Or better yet, take the burglar.

We live in a relatively safe San Francisco neighborhood. It's easy to believe that crime doesn't exist here, that it only happens in other neighborhoods where there are fewer golden retrievers and thousand-dollar strollers cluttering up the sidewalk. Such belief creates a nice bubble of complacency that's quite comfortable if you can manage not to pop it.

It was winter and the rain pounded down on our roof with a vengeance. A few months into married life, I was in the peculiar position of trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Will encouraged me to take as much time as I needed but it was turning out not to be such an easy question to answer. So, rather than waste valuable time focused on an unpleasant task, I took to reading magazines.

Oh, what I had missed while racing around the world trying to catch bad guys. There were party dresses to consider and accessories and skirt lengths and the hair question, of course. There were quizzes to help determine if I was a nymphomaniac or a wallflower or a Type-A bitch. There were diets and exercise regimens designed to make me sweat off ten pounds by summer! Eating whatever I want! Taking these pills the FDA swore would grow me a nice bushy tail in no time at all! There was decorating advice to help me achieve a successful living room, whatever that was. There were recipes with spices that could only be obtained in the jungles of Burma or from the mountaintops of Peru or, in a pinch, at the Whole Foods one neighborhood over.

I devoured it all, the meaningless noise that helps us to ignore the chaos outside our collective window. If you can concentrate on the perfect golden highlights, the kind that make your blue eyes pop and enhance your not-quite-defined-enough cheekbones, well then, who gives a shit about bombs?

I was most of the way through an issue of
Cosmopolitan
that promised the secret to a happy marriage was frequent blow jobs and nipple-exposing lingerie when I heard a sound coming from the front door that I was fairly certain wasn't the rain.

It's important to note that our house, while utterly charming, had as many security holes as a wheel of Swiss cheese. I realized that to bring it up to what I considered a most basic standard would raise some eyebrows, so I was trying to be Zen about it and relax in my non-secure environment. I even thought the experience might help me grow into a better person, someone able to live in a house with a single deadbolt on the wooden front door. However, I was having a hard time getting over the glass panels in that same front door. Glass. In a door. With a lock. How did people live like this?

Sitting at my kitchen table, I heard the distinct sound of wood splintering, followed by the creak of hinges. The front door was opened and then closed.

The man, dressed in dark clothes and soaking wet, was in my living room, busily making a pile of Will's coveted electronics.

“You're dripping on my floor,” I said. “It's sustainably farmed bamboo and apparently harder than diamond, but still, it's rude. Plus, who breaks into a house in the middle of the day? Aren't you at least supposed to commit these sorts of crimes in the dead of night?”

The man slowly stood up. I wondered for a brief moment if he had a gun and, if so, what exactly I would do with that information.

“You're not supposed to be home,” he said in as menacing a voice as he could manage. “Turn around and I'll forget I ever saw you.”

He had a point. San Francisco was hardly doable on one income. Every able-bodied person needed to work to keep the whole thing afloat. The only people ever at home during the days were the nannies and the babies.

“The last time I checked, this was my house,” I said. “Maybe you should leave. Or better yet, maybe you should plug all that stuff back in first. Do you know how complicated it is to set up a sound system these days? It practically takes a Ph.D. Do you have one of those?”

The man looked confused.

“A what?”

“An engineering degree. Because I don't want to spend the rest of my day putting this all back together. I was reading. It was nice.”

In his eyes, there was the first flicker of realization that this was not going as planned.

“You can't keep doing this,” I said. “There's no future in crime.”

The man stood up, took a few steps toward me. His fists were clenched.

“What are you going to do about it, lady?”

“I haven't decided yet,” I said. “I would consider letting you go, but you'd have to promise me you'd reform your ways.”

The man started to laugh and drew closer to me.

“It's hard out there, man,” he said. “This is the only way.”

“There are always options,” I said, planting my feet.

“Not for people like me,” he said. It was a little sad but he had broken into my house and that was not allowed.

He never considered, even for a moment, that a person like me could be dangerous. In his eyes, I was just some girl blocking the door. He'd already accepted the fact that he wasn't getting out of here with his haul but he was certain he was getting out of here, and tomorrow he'd just try again down the block. This was too good a neighborhood for wide screen TVs and electronics and laptops to move on.

He thought he'd punch me and that would be plenty. But I caught his fist mid-flight and twisted his arm around behind him. As he spun, I clamped my arm around his neck and squeezed. With both hands, he clawed at my arm and his feet ran in place on the wet floor as if he were a gerbil on one of those wheels. He was heavy and I felt the weight of him dragging me to my knees. Resting on the coffee table was a Steuben glass globe a little bigger than a baseball. It fit comfortably in my hand and didn't seem to sustain any damage when I clocked my burglar in the head with it. He immediately slumped into a boneless heap at my feet.

At the Agency, I would have called for a clean-up crew and eventually a few men I had never seen before would show up and take the person in question, mostly alive, away to be debriefed. I wasn't usually privy to where they ended up. I didn't do interrogation. That job belonged to people even more shadowy than myself. But this was my living room and I was unsure as to the protocol, so I called my newly minted husband for advice.

“So I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine,” I began, “and some guy broke into our house.”

There was silence. Perhaps my approach was too casual?

“He didn't get away with anything,” I continued, hoping to reassure Will, “but he did unplug a bunch of stuff.”

“Lucy, hang up the phone and call the police.” Will's voice was measured and still within his control, but it teetered right on the edge. “Do it now. I'm on my way.”

“I'm not in any danger,” I said. “The guy is unconscious on the floor. I hope his wet coat doesn't stain the wood.”

That was it. Will lost it. “Lucy,” he screamed. “Why are you still in there? Get out of the house! Get out right now!” I was touched that he cared. It was sweet.

“It's okay. Really,” I said.

“Hang. Up. The. Phone. Call. The. Police,” he said, obviously taking deep breaths in an effort not to sound hysterical. No one likes a hysterical man. I could hear him out on the street. I thought he must really love me because he was hailing a cab and Will never takes cabs. He thinks they're a symbol of wasteful human consumption. We have feet. We have public transportation. We have bicycles. Ergo we ought not to have taxis. Or something along those lines.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I'm doing it now. I'm going outside. Just let me grab an umbrella.”

The police detectives arrived round about the same time as Will. Martinez was a short stocky guy. He looked profoundly uncomfortable in his clothes, the shirt under his sport coat straining across his broad chest. His partner, Walters, a tall stringy woman, had the opposite problem. She was a human clothes hanger and her shapeless suit hung accordingly. They made an odd couple and for some reason that made me smile. I wondered who got to drive the cruiser. Did they rock-paper-scissors every time they got in? Will wrapped his arms around me.

“Jesus, Lucy,” he whispered. “You just scared the shit out of me. Please don't do that again.” Walters poked at the damp criminal on my floor with a gloved hand.

“Better call for an ambulance,” she said. “Ma'am, can you explain to us what exactly happened?”

It was then that I realized the rules I was used to playing by didn't apply in the so-called civilized world in which I now lived. My story, however supported by the evidence, was not going to be well received by this audience.

“Well, I was in the kitchen when I heard a sound, like the splintering of the front door lock, so I came to see what was happening and, well, this guy was in the house trying to take, you know, things. I guess I startled him because he slipped on the wet floor and knocked himself out. Isn't that lucky?”

The silence was so loud I swear they heard it down at police headquarters.

“That's your story?” Martinez asked.

Yes. Is there something wrong with it?

“Are you saying you don't believe me?” I asked, putting an incredulous look on my face.

Walters tapped her pencil on her open notepad.

“Most people would be, let me see, how should I put it here? Upset? Yes, maybe that's the word. Most people would be upset to find a guy like this in their living room. But you seem fairly relaxed.”

I shrugged. “I do a lot of yoga and practice intense biofeedback when confronted with stressful situations.” Translation: I'm just another kooky San Franciscan and no matter how hard you try to understand me, I will never make any sense to you.

I was saved by the arrival of the ambulance and several medics rushing in to deal with the guy on the floor.

“We aren't done asking questions,” Martinez said, although he did not sound completely committed to that position. “There has been a rash of burglaries in this neighborhood. If this turns out to be the guy, we'll need you to testify.”

“Regardless,” Walters interrupted. “We'll be expecting you down at headquarters sometime tomorrow. To chat.” She handed me a card with her number. As I studied it, I could feel her watching me. I knew that look. Her radar was up.

It's a good thing that most of the world's terror is perpetrated by men. In general, men aren't as observant as women. They're much more focused on great shows of strength and violence than on the subtler approach that subterfuge provides. And it's this very focus that makes bringing them to their knees even a possibility. When we start to have a surplus of female bad guys, then we're in serious trouble. There will be no stopping that tide.