TWO WEEKS LATER, JAY AND I had dinner in Brooklyn. It was a candlelit pizza place, with a garden and vintage advertising signs tucked between the foliage. I decided it would be the night I would tell him about Jane. He knew I was working on something to do with Harvard in the ’60s, but he would let me leave it at that. I didn’t feel like Jane was someone I could just bring up casually at a party, to leverage her like an anecdote meant to impress. But I hated living in this world alone.
Jay listened patiently. I told him how scared the Stine hiking tragedy made me. That I was worried I was getting myself in deep with something I could only see the tip of. That I found it all too easy to imagine there really was a conspiracy to keep Jane’s story quiet. That even the most far-fetched of my speculations—that the dig at Tepe Yahya offered the US government an ear to the ground the decade before the Iranian Revolution—could not be immediately dismissed. Karl would later refute the idea of a Tepe Yahya government connection, and add, “I never worked for the US government.” But the CIA was the only agency that, in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests, refused to either confirm or deny the existence of records related to either Jane Britton or Tepe Yahya.
Jay wasn’t convinced by my line of thinking, but he could see how real it had become for me. He held my hand and, with the other, picked up his pizza knife and molded my palm around it. Then, moving me by the wrist, he showed me how best to stab someone, as he had learned in the tactical training for his intelligence work.
Stabbing the air, scanning for exits, discussing the contents of a go-bag, agreeing on code words: I was stunned by how right it felt for us to have fallen into the role of co-conspirators. It was less lonely inside Jane’s story with Jay for company. What surprised me, though, was how being enveloped together within her story also made me feel less lonely with him.