Sean’s resurrection was a seven-day wonder. We decided to tell everyone that he’d been on a confidential mission and that I’d been given misinformation about his death; it was just a big interagency screwup. It was a testament to how many people in Washington had spent time either doing secret stuff or pulling their hair out communicating between agencies that people accepted it as true.
Jim couldn’t seem to stop slapping Sean on the back. June couldn’t bear to see him with an empty plate. We spent several nights, the three of us, sleeping in their guest room bed before moving into a furnished apartment. There, we waited for the insurance company to settle the claim on the house while we tried to get used to the new universe in which we were living.
As I was emptying the dishwasher one night, my phone rang. The old one.
I fished it out of my pocket. “Georgia Brennan speaking.”
“Georgie? Hey. It’s Ted.”
“Ted.” Ted? It took me a moment to place him. Ted. My boss. From work. “Hi.”
“Hey. Yeah. Well, we’ve got it all figured out.”
“All what figured out?”
“How to cover you. We straightened it out. We can put you on another contract for a while. Yeah. So I was hoping you could come back in next Monday. Start up again.”
Come back? Start up again? “No.”
“What?”
“No. I said no. I can’t.” In that former lifetime, when I used to work for Ted, I would have added, “Sorry.” But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I hung up instead.
I’d been putting out some feelers in the world of quantum science. It was a small community, so it didn’t take long for word to get out that I was looking for a job. I wanted to work with people who were willing to look at things with clear eyes and challenge their assumptions. I needed to be with people who pursued truth with the same passion that Washington pursued power.
As the story hit the news, Russia insisted that Hoffman was a rogue operative and that he was not, and never had been at any time ever, acting as a government agent. To their credit, cable TV news analysts were nearly unanimous in decrying that statement as false.
Hoffman started to talk. He was a longtime Russian plant. They’d created an East German cover story for him, allowing him to “escape” through the Berlin Wall in order to set him up as a sleeper agent in the West. He’d run my father for years.
He revealed the locations of the dead drops my father used to pass information back to him and the part my mother had played in passing those messages. I had been the bridge between them, but she had provided the signal. Key words in her Instagram posts let Hoffman know when my father had a message for him. Key words in the comments Hoffman left, under a false name, on her blog let them know when he had information for them.
The gray cars I’d been noticing had been both FBI tails and objects of my paranoia. It turns out 20 percent of cars in the US are silver or gray. The fact that the car the Russians drove, the one that had killed Edgars, and the one I had seen on the way to Mr. Wallace’s were also gray? Pure coincidence.
My mother’s relations in Mobile quietly began to put it around that what my mother had done just proved her ancestry. Why else would she have killed her own husband? Everyone knew her branch of the family was slightly odd. It went back to the beginning, to the family’s colonial roots. The French had been there way back when, so was it really any wonder? Everybody knew you could never trust the French.
She would have hated knowing they were saying that.
I had told the FBI to look into deaths associated with the veterans of my father’s old units. Eventually the news got out that there had been a purge of personnel who had served under him, and a web-based conspiracy began to gather steam. The claim was that a third party had been bumping people off in order to smear my father’s reputation. The false-flag theory became a rallying cry for crazies and crackpots across the nation that winter. They thought it incomprehensible that my father would have done all those things people were whispering about. And on top of that, it just didn’t make any sense to them. He was General JB Slater, for goodness’ sake!
In spite of everything, I wanted to feel bad for my mom and dad. I thought I should feel bad for them. They were my parents, after all. And the only grandparents Sam had ever known. But I was never really their daughter. I’d been a prop, a useful tool in their espionage toolkit. And they’d stood by while the Russians tried to kill my husband, hurt my son, and silence me.
I settled instead on pity. And disgust.
I rebuffed all requests for interviews. A few extra-zealous reporters tracked me down, but I stopped answering my cell phone and refused to open the door to anyone. And after a while, people went back to the familiar comfort of believing what they wanted and left me alone.
The army offered Sean his old job, but he declined. He’d decided to write a book on my parents instead. He wrangled with the government over his security clearance, but considering that he wasn’t really dead and that his clearance hadn’t yet expired, he was allowed to keep it. That meant he could include much of what we’d discovered, although the book would have to be vetted by the appropriate authorities. Though the finer details of my parents’ actions hadn’t yet been released, enough clickbait was circulating—“Beauty Queen Killer!” “Hometown Boy Gone Bad!”—that it was generating buzz. Though the book wouldn’t be published until summer, it was already breaking records for advance sales.
At one point he asked me what I thought had happened. How a four-star general, the quintessential boy next door from Arkansas, could have become one of the worst spies our nation had ever known. I told him that my father had gotten lost one dark and stormy night in Iraq and he’d never managed to find his way home.
Chris must have been good for his word, because in January the Senate Intelligence Committee asked me to testify, offering immunity in return. Several lawyers with high-powered Washington reputations reached out to offer their services. I interviewed them all and chose the one who laughed when I made a joke about the theory of relativity.
As I got dressed the morning of the first day of the hearing, I chose my clothes with care. I needed to dress in order to elicit the response I hoped for. If I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed to look like I took myself seriously.
My mother had taught me that.
For all intents and purposes, I was the sole survivor of the JB Slater family. I was the one entrusted with my father’s legacy. In some respects, he’d been a good father. In all respects, he’d been a bad patriot. He used to tell me that you only offer an excuse if you’ve failed at your duty. That’s how I looked on his justifications for collaborating with Hoffman: they were all excuses.
* * *
I’d only visited Jenn at work once or twice during all the years she’d spent on the Hill, so the maze of corridors in the Senate building was incomprehensible. As I walked deeper into the building, the bursts of camera flashes and the number of microphones shoved toward my face increased. My lawyer and her assistant played defense, clearing a path for me.
The hearing room was rife with cameras. As I sat behind a table at the front, most of them turned toward me. Though we’d asked for a closed hearing, the committee had denied the request.
Jenn’s senator held a seat on the committee. His prematurely silver hair and those intensely blue eyes were instantly recognizable from the years he’d spent in government. As the chairwoman pulled the microphone toward her chest and began speaking, he looked at me.
I met Senator Rydel’s eyes. Smiled.
A look of confusion marred his famously rugged features for a moment, as if he was wondering whether he knew me.
I was remembering the conversation I’d had with Jenn the night she was killed. After Rydel had read the information I’d provided, her father and mine had been in the same situation. The Russians had been able to blackmail them from one side and Jenn’s senator from the other. But one thing had never been clear: Who was going to play that role, apply that pressure, to the senator? I hadn’t yet mentioned his name to the FBI. With Jenn gone, he must have been thinking he was free and clear.
The chairwoman called the room to order and then introduced me to the committee.
As I scanned the senators sitting before me, incredibly, Jenn’s senator winked at me.
“Ms. Brennan.” The chairwoman smiled. “Don’t worry. We don’t plan to keep you long. Please rise and raise your right hand.”
I stood.
“Do you affirm that the testimony you’re about to give this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
Did I ever.