Marcus had never been particularly friendly with Alice’s sister and now, in the wake of her diagnosis, their relationship had entered a zone of borderline hostility. With Alice in his study and Janie and her husband in the guest bedroom, he felt like a stranger in his own house. After a restless night with a bottle of Scotch on his bedside table, Marcus found himself alone with Janie in the kitchen. Alice was sleeping late, Bill was off jogging around their Reston, Virginia, neighborhood.
“It’s not true, is it?” she asked as he installed a new coffee filter.
“What’s not true?”
“That you’re going back to France.”
“Just for a short while.”
“How long is a short while?”
“A month, tops.”
Her arms were folded across her chest so tightly, it looked like she was wearing a straitjacket. “She’s got terminal cancer, Marcus.”
“I’m acutely aware of that. I’ve got some urgent business to tidy up. When I’m done, I’ll be asking for an extended leave.”
“The chemo’s going to make her sick. Bill and I can only stay another week. We’ve got jobs.”
“I’m going to arrange for her to have a nurse who’ll stay with her if it’s necessary. She’s got a lot of friends in Reston who’ve been calling to help.”
The woman couldn’t contain her fury. “Your vows, Marcus. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
“I remember them.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, Janie, I do. I’m sure you mean well, but you’re an outside observer trying to figure out another couple’s marriage.”
“I’ve had a bird’s-eye view for over twenty years. Alice has told me everything. Everything. Your drinking. Your affairs. Your emotional abuse. Everything.”
He listened while watching the coffee drip into the pot. “Then you know about her affairs too, right?”
“What did you expect her to do? She was looking for some comfort in the face of a barren relationship.”
“I guess we were both looking for something.”
“Why didn’t you just bugger off? Go off and do whatever you do and let her find herself?”
“I don’t know, Janie, I just didn’t. You’d have to ask Alice that question too.”
“I have. She was in love with you, the poor thing. She still is.”
*
His study smelled like a sick room—a sick room with cigarettes. She stuck with her vow to keep smoking and he didn’t give her any grief about it. The night before his departure, he pulled his desk chair up to her bedside and sipped a Scotch. They shared a cigarette. The chemo was making her weak and she’d been puking her guts out. The first visiting nurse scolded her so much about the smoking that they had to get the agency to send a more tolerant one. Janie and Bill had left for Tennessee, timing their departure to a slot when Marcus was out shopping. He counted it as a win-win.
“This is important, right?” she asked. “What you’re doing.”
“It’s important.”
“Preventing the world from ending important? Or America’s going to kick Russia’s ass important?”
“The latter.”
“Do we still need to kick their ass?”
“Beats me,” he said. “I’m not a policy guy.”
She accidentally blew smoke toward him and used her hand to dissipate the cloud. “Maybe we should stop trying to kick each other’s asses,” she said.
“A damn fine idea.”
“If I survive this thing—”
“You’ll beat it.”
“I appreciate the sentiment. If I survive it, then I was thinking, maybe we can try to make a go of it. For the sake of the water under the bridge.”
There was a lot of water under the bridge. They had met at Georgetown when he was getting his master’s in political science. She was only a freshman, a literature major. He’d already been contacted by a recruiter when they met, so it was fair to say that their entire life together was overshadowed by the Agency. He did his training at Camp Peary, the infamous CIA Farm, while she was still an undergraduate. There, he took a fair bit of stick for his name. “So, what are you, born to the fucking job, Handler? Going to be a spy Handler? Good thing your name wasn’t Asswiper.”
His first assignment was to Langley as a counterintelligence analyst and he rode a desk until Alice graduated. As soon as she was relocatable, he got a transfer to the National Clandestine Service. His initial posting was to the US Embassy in Ankara where he got his feet wet in tradecraft and playing possum with the Soviets. Alice was fluent in Spanish and French and she got jobs in Turkey as a freelance translator for American publishers. Thus, they began their lives, shuttling back and forth between foreign and domestic appointments. During one extended stretch at Langley, they bought their house in Reston and Alice landed an editorial job at a publishing company based in Washington. She was well liked and they let her work remotely when she returned to foreign postings with Marcus—Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Bonn.
Three years earlier, she’d balked at Paris. She just couldn’t do another one, at least, not with him. They didn’t call it a separation. They didn’t call it anything. He went and she stayed. He started seeing a woman, a neighbor in his building. He assumed Alice was seeing someone at her company. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
“Yeah, for the sake of the water,” he said. “Definitely.”
“You’ll come back? Permanently?”
“Why not?” he said. “Time to let the younger guys save the world.”
“Will they let you?”
“I’m not a slave. I’ll leave if they don’t. Must be someone out there who’ll hire me to do something.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“Yeah, I promise. Can I ask you something?”
“That’s a silly question. I hope your real question is better.”
“Why’d you stay married to me?”
“I thought about it. You know I did. Every time I got close, I pulled back from the edge.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered the way we were together in the early days. We were good. And I always said to myself, Alice, maybe we can be good again. Also, I didn’t have the energy to plan another wedding.”
He snorted half a laugh, half a cry.
“We should have had kids,” she said.
“You think?”
She lit a new cigarette from the dying stub of the last one.
“It makes me sad,” she said, “Who’s going to worry about you when I’m gone?”
*
Marcus liked Jim Alicante better than any of the station chiefs he’d worked for. He was a guy’s guy who didn’t act like most of the stick-up-the-ass preppy types who got promoted to management jobs. He was blunt, a little rough around the edges, and he had a wicked sense of humor. And he wasn’t the least bit ashamed of letting his blue-collar roots show. Marcus found it refreshing. When he was younger, he hadn’t been as comfortable with his own less-than exalted pedigree. His father had been an accountant at a small, strip-mall tax firm, his mother a kindergarten teacher. He always resented the rich kids at Georgetown, and at CIA he despised the Ivy-League types who pranced around the director’s suite on the seventh floor at Langley like they were the chosen ones.
The Chancery of the US Embassy in Paris was a neoclassical fortress on the Avenue Gabriel. From his fourth-floor office, Alicante had a good view over the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. The sunlight that morning was impossibly bright. Others might have adjusted the blinds or pulled the curtains. Not Alicante. He put on his sunglasses and said, “Nice day for a defection.”
“That it is,” Marcus agreed.
“Run me through the logistics.”
“I’ll be leaving in two hours for the Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal. As per usual, I’ll be picking up a car nearby and I’ll drive to the designated meet point. We’ll have two follow teams. When Burakov leaves the meet house with me, Team One will take both of us to the safe house in Montreuil. Team Two will pick up his wife and kids at the Galeries Lafayette where they’ll be shopping. Once everyone’s assembled in Montreuil, we’ll move out to 123 Airbase Orléans-Bricy, where a Learjet is fueled and ready.
Alicante grinned. “If I asked you what could possibly go wrong, would you have time to get to the meet?”
“We’d still be talking at midnight.”
“Figured as much. You flying out with him?”
“That’s the plan.”
“One-way ticket?”
Marcus nodded.
“I’ll miss you. All I’ll have left are the guys with positive attitudes.”
“You know I’ve got to go.”
“How’s she doing?”
“The chemo’s a rough ride. I should have left a week ago.”
“She’s not on her own, is she?”
“Her sister’s there again.”
“Well, Godspeed, man. I’ll light a candle for you and one for her.”
*
He needed a clear head, but one lousy Scotch on the rocks wasn’t going to be clouding anything. Before settling into the hotel bar, he checked out the lobby men’s room and saw three stalls. He resisted the urge to search all of them for the envelope, and simply splashed his face with cold water. While he waited, he got a text from Janie. Alice had a fever and she was taking her to George Washington Hospital. She finished with: When the hell are you going to be here? He texted back: Tomorrow. For good.
The wait was longer than usual and he broke down and ordered a second drink. A youngish fellow in a dark suit flashed by and dropped two coins onto his table. He paid the tab and retrieved the envelope from the second stall.
It was a new meet house in Saclay, about twenty kilometers from the hotel, near the University of Paris-Saclay. He parked the car on the periphery of the university and found the property hidden by a high hedge, a modest post-war house on a narrow residential road.
Burakov answered the door, dressed casually in a cardigan and dark slacks. He seemed too relaxed. If the shoe were on the other foot, he’d be amped up.
“Marcus, did you hit much traffic? I wondered where you were.”
“The traffic was ridiculous. It took twice as long as I thought.”
“Come, come, it’s not the nicest house we’ve had, but it’s well stocked. My colleagues made sure to put in your favorite Scotch. You want one?”
Marcus looked around the living room for the cameras. He didn’t spot any right away, but they were there.
“Yeah, just a small one.”
“A small one!” Burakov laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you want tea instead.”
“I hate tea.”
Burakov poured two drinks, both of them large, and settled onto the sofa next to him.
“I have something to show you,” he said.
“What’s that?” Marcus asked.
“Have a look.” He pointed to a blue folder on the coffee table.
Marcus opened it and pulled out the single sheet. He read the text quickly, then read it again, letting it sink in.
It was a day-old wire-transfer confirmation to a numbered account in a Geneva-based bank for six million dollars.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A down payment.”
“You’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“It’s a down payment on your new life.”
He had to play it for the cameras, for Burakov’s masters. “That’s very generous, Vasily. I’m still working through some things before I can definitively commit.”
“Your wife.”
“Yeah, my wife.”
“How is she?”
“Not well.”
“I’m sorry. But look, Marcus, I’m authorized to tell you that a further six million will be transferred in six months’ time, subject to satisfactory progress. We’ll immediately enter into a debriefing mode wherein you’ll meet with me under the guise of continuing to attempt to turn me. You’ll tell your people that I had cold feet, but I was still in play. We require what’s in your head, Marcus. We will be extremely judicious about document requests. This is how people get burned. Going forward, as long as you remain an employee or a critical consultant to the CIA, you will be paid one million per annum. Should you be discovered, we will use our best efforts to get you to Moscow where, I can assure you, you’ll be set for life. If you’re caught and imprisoned by the US government, we will do our utmost to trade.”
While Burakov talked, Marcus tried to signal his puzzlement with a curl of the lip, a wrinkling of his brow. He understood that this was their critical last meeting on French soil, but the level of specificity of the offer was curious.
Burakov must have picked up on his confusion because he said, “The game is over, my friend. You’ve been working me and I’ve been working you, but I was never going to jump. My wife would never go for it. We have enormous families back home and to us, family is everything. And Moscow treats me well. You, on the other hand, are more untethered—your family ties are limited, you don’t have close friends, and quite frankly, Langley has never afforded you the respect and position you deserve. If you had to come live in Moscow, you wouldn’t have big problems making the adjustment.”
Marcus put his drink down. He found himself searching in earnest for the cameras. It wasn’t really important; it was something to do to quench the fire in his brain. He thought he spotted one in a bookcase, peeking out above a row of old encyclopedias.
“I know what you’re thinking, Marcus,” Burakov said gently. “There won’t be any exfils today. My wife and sons aren’t at the Galeries Lafayette today, which is saving me a lot of money. We have eyes on both your follow teams. You’ll signal to them that the operation today is aborted. For now, relax. Finish your drink. Have another. Keep the wire-transfer document or commit the account number to memory. Whatever suits you best. I very much look forward to working with you in the months and years to come. I think we can be more than colleagues. I think we can be friends.”
There was a vibration in Marcus’s pocket. Wordlessly, he pulled out his phone and saw he had a text from his sister-in-law. He read it. It was short, only three words.
Alice is dead.
Burakov read his face and asked what the matter was. Marcus showed him the phone.
“I’m so very sorry,” Burakov said.
It started as a whisper. “You’re sorry.” Every time Marcus repeated it, he got louder, until he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
Burakov stood up and tried to calm him to no avail.
“You fucking bastard!” Marcus yelled. “I left her! For you! I wasn’t there when she died because you fucked me!”
His hands found Burakov’s neck. He was stronger than the Russian who put up surprisingly little resistance. Marcus’s face turned red, Burakov’s blue.
Suddenly there was a thunder of footsteps coming down the stairs and two sets of strong arms pulled Marcus away.
Burakov’s security team forced Marcus back down onto his chair and urged him to calm down.
“Get a sedative,” Burakov said, panting and rubbing his neck. “He’s had a shock.”
“I don’t want a fucking sedative,” Marcus said. “I want to kill you.”