Langley, Virginia
December
OLIVER GREY GLANCED AT the battered 1960s-vintage Rolex Submariner on his wrist for the fifth time in as many minutes. Almost 5:00 p.m. Time to go. He removed his access card from the card reader on his desk, leaving the computer on so it could automatically update with any security patches overnight. It was a far cry from the old days of locking paper files in safes, or the more recent days of pulling hard drives and locking those in the same safes that once held the paper files. He did miss those paper files, though. So many more precautions were required now that it almost took the fun out of it. Almost.
He slid his desk chair into his cubicle and said good-bye to his section chief, a woman much younger than his fifty-eight years, almost forgetting his charcoal-gray overcoat. Virginia was cold this time of year.
The beauty of the building was completely lost on him as he wove his way through the halls past men and women walking with purpose, some just starting their day. If any of the attractive females who seemed to appear from around every corner paid him any unlikely attention, he didn’t notice.
Logging out through the security checkpoint between him and the parking lot was a mundane matter, something he had done almost every day for the past thirty years. He nodded at one of the uniformed security guards who seemed to look right through him. It didn’t bother Oliver. He was accustomed to being overlooked; his puffy white skin, plain off-the-rack suit, and comb-over hair made him essentially invisible among the younger, fitter, better-dressed staffers he passed on his way out.
Oliver didn’t have an assigned parking space, even with so much time invested with the Company, and he briefly found himself turned around in the massive lot before realizing he had parked on the other side. He trudged his way there, got into his car, and lit a pipe with a wooden match. He had started smoking a pipe because he thought it less vulgar than the cigarettes that were smoked in abundance by many of his colleagues back when he started. To the new generation, smoking was seen as a weakness rather than an activity to be enjoyed or a tool to start casual conversations that were anything but. Still, the tobacco warmed his lungs and filled the car with the aroma he so loved. Putting it in drive, he moved slowly through the parking lot of the Central Intelligence Agency and out onto George Washington Memorial Parkway.
Grey didn’t drive the 1987 VW Jetta because he couldn’t afford a newer car. He kept it because it was the only purchase he had made with his first payment as a spy for what was then the Soviet Union.
A long time ago, Grey remembered. Before the wall came down. Before the world changed.
He’d bought the car used so as not to arouse suspicion, mindful of the Jaguar that Aldrich Ames had driven before the FBI had tightened their noose. Even then, large purchases were flagged by the counterintelligence division, and though the James Angleton era had long since passed, the spy hunter’s specter still haunted the halls of his former agency.
Oliver’s great-grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Russia following the chaos of the October Revolution and settled in Penn Wynne, Pennsylvania. They insisted on always speaking Russian in the home to preserve and pass on what was left of their heritage. Oliver’s mother, Veronika, continued the tradition, albeit a bit diluted, giving her son the gift of understanding the intricacies of another language and culture. What memories Grey had of his father were now the type that made him wonder if they were real, or figments of his imagination.
As a traveling salesman, Oliver’s father was rarely home: always on the road peddling encyclopedias, kitchen utensils, laundry soap, coupon booklets, and anything else that might keep his family clothed and fed. It was while selling bath bars during one of those trips that he met a widow in Philadelphia. As his trips to the big city became more frequent, their duration increased as well, until one fall day he packed a bag and never returned. Keeping two families had turned out to be more difficult than he’d imagined, and he chose the one that did not include his son. Oliver was six years old and never saw his father again.
Isolated and alone, Oliver and his mother moved in with her parents. Veronika took a job at the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles, leaving Oliver in the care of his grandparents. Though his Russian improved under their roof, his social skills stagnated. To his classmates he was the quiet kid with no friends, and to his teachers he was the perfect student.
He found kinship, not with other kids his age, but with the camera. He was fascinated with taking photographs, snapshots of others engaging in lives he could only dream about. With his mother working to provide for them all, Oliver found himself increasingly caring for his aging grandparents. Their deaths within days of one another during his sophomore year at Penn hit him hard. Two of the three people that he cared about were gone.
Even living in the dorms as a resident advisor and working for the university as part of a Russian cultural studies scholarship program he still compiled enormous student debt, which he offset with a part-time job in a small camera shop surrounded by the Nikons, Canons, and Leicas he couldn’t afford. He sent his mother any additional money he made doing research projects and writing term papers for the students who had time only to chase girls and drink.
Grey was in his first job as an accountant at Arthur Andersen when the Agency came knocking. The nation’s intelligence agencies kept close tabs on students taking a Russian track in college, and they continued to watch Grey as he began his professional career. They were looking for Russian linguists to be case officers and thought they had struck gold with the young accountant. It was during a meeting with a new client who turned out to be a recruiter for the CIA that he saw his first glimpse of glory. No longer would he be the awkward kid from the broken home whom no one remembered. He could be James Bond, the American version, anyway.
He wasn’t even through the first set of interviews, though, when he was diverted from case officer to analyst, setting him on a different journey. The Agency was just as in need of fluent Russian desk analysts as they were of case officers, and Oliver’s evaluator placed him unambiguously in the analyst category. Dashed were his dreams of playing the main character in a spy novel. Once again, he was not picked for the varsity team.
He found the training to be easy and sailed through without a hitch. When asked about Grey on peer reviews, his classmates had nothing remarkable to say. He rarely joined them for beers after class and kept mainly to himself, going home every weekend to care for his mother, who seemed to grow increasingly frail with each visit.
In those early years, Grey had worried about his annual lifestyle polygraph tests. He didn’t think he was homosexual. In truth, he didn’t know what he was. He seemed almost asexual to his acquaintances at school and work, though he never got close enough to anyone to know anything for sure. He had a hard time deciphering his feelings and used his studies and then his occupation as an accountant to stay too busy to deal with his sexual identity or lack thereof. One drunken escapade with a girl in college had ended in embarrassment. She was nice enough about the incident and tried to leave him with a bit of his dignity. That was the last time Grey had attempted intimacy of any sort.
During his first assignment in Central America, he’d asked a coworker out on a date not because he was attracted to her but because that was what he thought he was supposed to do. It ended in humiliation when she’d indicated she was not interested with an uncomfortable “no.” While other men focused their youthful efforts pursuing their sexual desires, Grey had consumed himself with work, unaware that a master in the dark art of espionage had other plans for him.