At seventy-two years old, Charlie Cole couldn’t move like he once did. His forehand was missing its former velocity, and his left knee complained when he tried to pivot too quickly. Sprinting was now out of the question. But when Lovell whaled the ball deep near the baseline, Charlie knew exactly what to do. Cross-court backhand, nice and easy, drop it just over the net. Death and taxes and Lovell’s lousy short game. Grunting his way toward victory, Charlie thought: What I lack in vigor, I make up for in wisdom.
They stood at the edge of the court, shaded by a small green awning, drinking their water in silence. Eventually, Lovell nodded at him. “Good game,” he said graciously. “Nice backhand on that last one.”
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Charlie said, as they walked back to the clubhouse. It was just shy of 7 a.m., and the July heat wasn’t yet oppressive. The courts were busy at this hour, a chorus of rounded thwacks echoing from figures in white. The sprinklers shimmered above the emerald lawn. The flag on the flagpole flapped gently in the breeze. The country club on a summer morning was a peaceful and prosperous scene, kept that way by the gate out front and the steep initiation fees. Charlie didn’t like to admit that he had turned into one of Those People. Privately, he maintained that this wasn’t actually who he was. But he and Lovell and the rest of their group had been playing together for two decades—no, three—and he could no longer fathom life without these thrice-weekly games.
Charlie enacted his clubhouse ritual. Steam room, shower, shave. Plain white shirt, plain blue tie. Gym bag and tennis racket in the trunk of the car, suit jacket laid across the back seat. “See you next week,” Charlie called to Lovell, who was unlocking his Corolla a few spots over. On his lobbyist salary, Lovell could afford a car with a lot more flash than a ten-year-old Toyota, but he drove the Corolla for the same reason Charlie felt so conflicted about the country club membership: because forget the gray hair, forget the potbelly: for a certain kind of aging man, idealism is the hardest vanity to surrender.
With traffic at that hour, it took exactly thirty-one minutes to drive from the country club to the agency. Thirty-six minutes if he decided to stop at Starbucks, which, because it was a Friday, he did. Charlie turned in to the campus, passed the visitors’ center, passed the front entrance and the cars parked directly outside that entrance. He kept driving and driving until he finally arrived in his lot. If the parking lot assignments were an accurate reflection of status, then Charlie was squarely at the fiftieth percentile.
Next year would be his last year at the Central Intelligence Agency. Several of his tennis buddies had already retired from their careers as doctors, or judges, or general counsels. They said it wasn’t so bad. There were other things to live for: kids and grandkids, travel with their wives, little projects around the house. But his tennis buddies often seemed to forget that Charlie had never remarried, and that his only daughter was (a) uninterested in children, and (b) far too busy to devote herself to her old man. He did, however, derive great pleasure from yardwork. If nothing else, retirement would be his chance to improve the health of his garden.
Besides, when his friends tried to share their wisdom, Charlie felt inwardly defensive. I’m not like you! part of him wanted to say. What I’ve had is different. His had been more than a career. It had been a calling. And yes, that was true half a century ago, when he first joined the agency. But then there was Helsinki—the disaster that was Helsinki. After that, at the tail end of the Cold War, Charlie was recalled to Langley and assigned to a boring desk job. This had been his life ever since. The brick colonial in Falls Church. The country club in Arlington. Not a calling, then: just the safe sinecure of failure.
He parked the car, draped his jacket over his arm, and walked toward the front entrance, carrying two coffees. Basically, this was a job like any other. Thousands of people passed through that white marble lobby every morning. Most of them, like Charlie, would spend their day engaged in the minor progresses and petty questions of any ordinary bureaucracy. Some people were different—some lived closer to the edge, some put their actual bodies on the line—but Charlie was no longer among their number. He’d spent the last thirty years trying to make his peace with this, but every morning, as he walked through the lobby and caught a glimpse of the stars carved into the marble wall—caught a glimpse of one star in particular—he felt a visceral wave of guilt. There were certain things a person couldn’t undo; certain mistakes that could never be forgiven.
“Triple venti soy mocha with whipped cream?” Cherise asked, like always, as Charlie handed her the Starbucks cup with plain black coffee.
He smiled at the security guard and said, like always: “Just the way you like it, Cherise.”
Charlie scanned his pass and the turnstile buzzed open. He was joining the stream headed toward the elevators when a voice boomed from behind him: “Cole! Hold up a second.”
Charlie turned to see John Gasko attempting to buzz himself through the turnstile. The scanner wouldn’t read his badge. Gasko smacked the ID against the scanner again and muttered, “Jesus Christ. Today of all days.”
“Sir?” Cherise offered. “If you want, I can—”
“No!” Gasko barked. “Just give me a second, it’s just this stupid—There. Finally.” He strode through the turnstile and clapped a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “I hate those things, don’t you? Listen, Cole. Nice work on that speech. I liked that line about unintended consequences.”
“Oh. Thank you, sir. I’m glad to hear that.”
After leaving the Clandestine Service, Charlie had cycled through a series of jobs in the Directorate of Support, doing the kind of administrative work that no one beyond the CIA ever thought about. After a long stint as a recruiter for HR, he was currently a mid-level flak in the Office of Public Affairs. With his gray hair and white-toothed smile, Charlie projected the kind of official-but-nonthreatening air that played well in the public sphere.
“Might need you to work something up for Vogel if they decide to do a memorial service.” Gasko shook his head. “Such a loss.”
Charlie smiled vaguely. “Vogel?”
“You haven’t seen the news?”
“The news?” Charlie began patting his pockets, then remembered his phone was in his briefcase. He’d put it there before his tennis game and hadn’t looked at it for over two hours. (Not a habit you wanted in a PR flak, which was probably why he had never progressed beyond that far-flung parking lot.) As Charlie reached into his briefcase, Gasko touched his forearm, steering him toward the hallway that stretched south from the lobby.
“Stroke,” he said quietly. “They said it was quick. At least he didn’t suffer.”
“Bob Vogel had a stroke?” He walked quickly, matching Gasko’s gait. The hallway was lined with tall glass windows on one side, presidential portraits on the other. Gasko nodded at each person they passed, conveying a blanket message of hi-how-are-ya, great-work-keep-it-up. John Gasko had to be equal parts operator and politician, winning hearts and minds on both sides of the fence that surrounded the Langley campus. It was his second year as director of the agency. The consensus was that he was finally getting the hang of it.
“Two hours ago,” Gasko said. “Just before noon in Cairo. A hundred and ten degrees in the shade, and he had those bad lungs. Poor guy. Poor Diane. She’s a wonderful woman, you know. Pam and I had dinner with them just last week.” He cocked his head. “Come to think of it, Bob didn’t look so good, even then. You knew Bob, didn’t you?”
“I met him once or twice.”
“Great guy. Just a great guy. Such a loss.”
Gasko stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the seventh floor. From his body language, Charlie knew he, the mid-level bureaucrat, was meant to remain here, on the ground, on the other side of the threshold. As the doors closed, the director smiled mournfully. “They don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”
It was a funny thing. Men like John Gasko loved men like Bob Vogel. It shouldn’t have worked—two egos that massive shouldn’t have gelled—but Vogel was more than twenty years older than Gasko, and the generation gap allowed them to admire each other without any need for wariness. In the coming days, as the flag-draped coffin made its way across the Atlantic, countless men like John Gasko would grow misty-eyed as they talked about what a legend Bob Vogel had been.
Charlie had only known Senator Vogel in a vague way. Live in Washington long enough and paths were bound to cross: it was a thermodynamic law in the capital. The longest exchange they’d had was in 1995, when Charlie participated in closed-door testimony for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The Taliban was starting to sweep through Afghanistan. The army was holding strong in Kabul, thanks mostly to the forces under Ahmad Baraath’s command. The Senate committee was weighing whether to send aid to those forces. And while, by 1995, Charlie was working in the agency backwaters, because of his experience with Baraath a few years prior, he was summoned to Capitol Hill to deliver his personal assessment of Baraath’s trustworthiness. The senators grilled him, and he hemmed and hawed—after all, it wasn’t like he could tell the real story of Ahmad Baraath—and in the end, they seemed palpably unimpressed.
In the years since, he’d seen Vogel at occasional dinner parties in Georgetown, and performances at the Kennedy Center, and black-tie fundraisers at the Newseum. The last time Charlie had spoken with Vogel was three months earlier, at a book party in a brick mansion in Kalorama. At the buffet, while reaching for the shrimp cocktail, their elbows had collided. Charlie stepped aside and said: “Sorry about that, Senator. After you.”
Vogel looked up at Charlie. He didn’t say anything. He only stared.
“Great party, isn’t it?” Charlie tried, faltering.
But Vogel just kept staring. He was notorious for his prickly manners, but this seemed extreme. After what felt like several minutes, Vogel finally said: “Charlie Cole, right? Well. It was good seeing you.”
That was the extent of the encounter. Charlie probably would have forgotten about it were it not for the strange fact that Vogel had remembered his name.
A couple of days after Bob Vogel’s death, on Sunday afternoon, as she was partway through a long-overdue spring-cleaning of her closet, Jenny Navarro’s phone rang.
When she found the phone under a pile of sweaters and saw the name of the caller, her stomach twisted. VOGEL HOME. Was this some kind of sick joke? Or had she (please, God) somehow imagined the events of the last forty-eight hours? It took her a moment to remember that, obviously, there was nothing strange about this. More than one person resided in the Vogel home. Come on, Jenny, she told herself. Pull it together.
“Diane?” she answered, her voice shaky.
“Oh, Jenny. Oh, honey.”
“I’m so…” But Jenny couldn’t get the words out.
“I know,” Diane said. “I know. Me too.”
Diane apologized for not calling sooner. And she was sorry to ask this, to be so businessy about things, but Bob kept certain important papers in the house—the Georgetown house, that was—and between the funeral arrangements and the press inquiries, she wasn’t going to have time to get down to D.C. for a while. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but he wouldn’t want things to slow down just because he, you know. Died. God forbid some piece of legislation languish on his desk just because he died.” Diane sighed. “That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
Jenny smiled, despite herself. “No. It sounds like him.”
“And I know it’s the weekend, but I was wondering if you would—”
“Of course,” Jenny interrupted. “I’ll go right over.”
“You really don’t mind?”
“Honestly, I’d like to make myself useful right now.”
Besides, she wasn’t making any progress with her closet, and to do something that needed doing was an immense relief. It didn’t seem possible that Bob was actually dead. Bob: her boss, and one of her favorite people in the world. Bob: her unlikeliest friend. A few years back, when Jenny first interviewed for the position, the senator skipped over her résumé (degree in applied math from Stony Brook, two years at McKinsey, degree from the Kennedy School) and zeroed in on her upbringing. Jenny Navarro, born and raised in Central Islip. Oldest of four children, taught her immigrant parents how to speak English, first in her family to go to college. “Interesting,” he said. “Tell me more about that.”
A certain kind of person loved Jenny’s story, loved what it represented. This person was always older, often male, always white. She found this increasingly irritating. Not bothering to conceal her impatience, she said: “You’ve never hired someone like me.”
“No, I haven’t. I recognize that this is a problem.”
“Okay. Well, I’m not sure I’m interested in fixing that particular problem of yours.”
Vogel arched an eyebrow.
“You represent New York State,” she continued. “Hempstead. Buffalo. The Bronx. If you’ve never hired someone like me to run your policy, that means you’re not trying very hard.”
“But you want this job.” He paused. “You’re pretty bold for someone who’s asking me for a job.”
“I’m not a good liar. And if you’re planning to use me to check a certain box—like I said, that isn’t going to work. So I’d rather just establish that right now.”
After a moment, he broke into a grin and asked her when she could start.
Last year, Vogel had promoted her to chief of staff. Jenny knew that her parents and siblings back in Central Islip were proud of her career, but she also knew that they didn’t quite know what it entailed. Her new position came with an enormous amount of influence, but that influence was really only understood by those who played the game for a living. This, she was learning, was both the pleasure and the pain of life in politics.
Jenny hurried over to the house on N Street. It was a grand building, wide and palatial where most of the houses on the block were narrow and modest. She had once encountered a pair of tourists lingering on the sidewalk, craning their necks at the topiary, the red brick and dark shutters. The woman had whispered to her husband, “That’s the French embassy, you know.” Jenny, amused, hadn’t bothered to correct her.
Jenny unlocked the front door and disarmed the security system (3-7-4-5, Diane’s birthday). In the front hall, she paused for a moment. The orchid on the table, fresh and sprightly. The polished wood floors, smelling of lemon Pledge. The air conditioner, keeping the house at a pleasant seventy-four degrees. The rest of the Senate delegation was flying back that afternoon. In an alternate universe, Bob would be walking into this house in a few hours. He would be happy to be home. Like all consummate Washington insiders, Bob claimed to be an outsider, but his love for the house on N Street belied that. Bob had offices in the Capitol, in New York City, in Albany and Buffalo and Rochester and Syracuse, but his office upstairs, Jenny knew, was his favorite. Here he did his best thinking, seated behind a handsome oak desk whose surface was obscured by a messy sprawl of papers.
In the study, Jenny surveyed the mess. Good thing Diane had thought to call her. Who knew what might have gone missing otherwise? She began sorting the documents into stacks. And Diane was right; Bob wouldn’t have wanted the work to stop. Drafts of legislation. White papers from think tanks. Schedules, calendars, scribbled notes on legal pads. It was her job to know everything he knew, and then some. “You’re just like me,” he’d once said to her. “That’s why I hired you.”
“A workaholic, you mean?” she’d replied.
“Yes. But a smarter, nicer workaholic.”
Both of them recognized this addiction for what it was. But they also both agreed that, as addictions went, at least this one might do some good in the world.
Over the next hour, Jenny made steady progress. She could almost see the surface of the desk. Buried beneath a pile of letters from constituents was a plain manila folder. Inside were several pieces of paper covered in the senator’s spidery handwriting. She was unsure which pile this belonged in. Sometimes Bob would read about someone in the news, an obscure expert in an obscure subject, and then he would call them up, ask them to dinner, spend hours grilling them, scrawling notes while they spoke. (As he said, what good was being rich and powerful if he couldn’t do things like that?) And then he would ask Jenny to read the notes and see what she thought. This was probably just the most recent instance. Probably he just hadn’t gotten around to sharing the contents of this folder yet.
She skimmed the first page. New frontier in markets. Online mania. Day traders moving in tandem. This wasn’t surprising. Having made his fortune at a hedge fund before getting into politics, Bob remained keenly attuned to the world of finance. Meme stocks. Virality—online forums, social media. She kept reading. Algorithm VERY influential. Which posts get clicks. More clicks, more enthusiasm, snowball effect, thesis is self-validating. Well, sure. Bob was also genuinely fascinated by the behavior-shaping power of social media. He was, despite his age, the only senator who could hold his intellectual own with the tech world’s evil geniuses.
Finger on scale of algorithm. Plant idea, create virality, stock goes up. Leverage. Okay. She had never heard of this. Approach CEO w/ demands. Greed usually sufficient. Don’t want music to stop. Other threats if necessary. Yeah. This was getting a little strange. No visible patterns. Market movement obscures links to Moscow. Goose bumps surfaced on her arms. Gruzdev believes this is next frontier. Business drives geopolitics, not vice versa. Nikolai Gruzdev, the Russian president? Her heart beat harder. Keep quiet. Risk of leaks. “Quiet” was underlined three times.
Jenny was frozen. Diane had asked Jenny to get his papers. Had she known? Was she referring to these papers specifically? But no—if Jenny didn’t know, then Diane didn’t know. The notes on the next page continued along the same lines, but the color of the ink changed. The writing was in blue, then black, then pencil, then back to blue. The paper kept changing, too. Lined yellow sheets, plain white printer paper, smaller pieces of hotel stationery. She flipped back to the beginning. In the top corner of each page were numbers: 1/20, 2/26, 3/12, 3/27, 4/9, 4/23, 5/15, 5/30. These were dates, she realized. These notes were taken at different times, in different places, over the past several months. Keep quiet. Risk of leaks. So it wasn’t a question of Bob getting around to sharing these notes with her. He had obviously never intended for her to see them.
She held the papers lightly, as if they might scorch her. Jenny knew that whatever this was, if it was important enough for Bob to conceal from her, it was important enough to merit further investigation. And Jenny wasn’t an idiot. She knew her limits. She wasn’t some crackerjack Nancy Drew. She needed to get these to someone else—someone with expertise—someone equipped to do this the right way.
The last piece of paper in the folder caught her eye. It had no date. Written at the top was a name, and beside the name was scrawled a star. She recognized the name. But from where? Who was this? It hadn’t been that long ago. A few months, maybe. A year at most.
Her gaze landed on the bookshelf across the room. Then she remembered.
That pretentious book party in Kalorama. Bob had dragged her along. The Senate was preparing to pass a last-minute budget amendment and he wanted to get work done in the car. During the party, when she was being verbally waterboarded by a lobbyist for Dow Chemical, Jenny noticed Bob at the buffet table talking with a man she didn’t recognize. Bob looked unusually wary. Even from a distance, Jenny could perceive the wariness. Later, in the car, he seemed distracted. “Who was that?” she’d asked.
“Who was who?”
“That guy at the buffet.”
“Oh. Uh. Just someone from Langley.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Langley?”
In retrospect, Jenny could see how uncomfortable these questions made him. He was doing his best to feign nonchalance. “No, no, nothing like that.” He shook his head. “That guy, he’s, uh, no one. Charlie Cole? He’s just one of those glorified paper pushers.”
That Sunday, like every Sunday, Charlie kept himself busy with a series of minor household tasks. He walked Lucy, his yellow Labrador. He weeded the bed of zinnias and made a note to buy more fertilizer. He drove to Safeway and bought groceries for the coming week. He flagged a recipe for grilled salmon in the Times Magazine. In the domestic sphere, he was far more capable than most men his age.
At first, in the stinging aftermath of the divorce, he resented this growing self-sufficiency. A tidy house, a stocked refrigerator, a respectable meal: he’d learned to do these things because Helen had left him, because he had failed. But as time went by, it became clear that, rather than making him pathetic, these skills actually made him more attractive. When he eventually started dating again, the women seemed to appreciate that he wasn’t some feral bachelor in need of rehabilitation. Grace, the petite widow whom he was currently seeing, had been impressed when Charlie showed up at their mutual friend’s dinner party with homemade brownies for dessert. Impressed enough to say yes when he called and asked if she’d like to go with him to Rigoletto at the Kennedy Center.
Charlie and Grace got along well. She, like Charlie, had no interest in remarrying. He always established this at the outset. It wasn’t a fear of commitment, as many women seemed to suspect. Rather it was the awareness—sharp, stabbing, omnipresent—of just what a shitty husband he’d been to Helen, and the determination not to subject another person to this shittiness. But this was too complicated to explain, so he let them think whatever they wanted to think.
He and Grace had dinner together a few nights a week, but never on Sundays, because Grace had three children and five grandchildren, and every Sunday her family gathered for dinner at her place in Arlington. Her devotion to her family was one of the things he liked most about her. Charlie hadn’t yet attended one of these dinners, but he didn’t think an invitation was beyond the realm of possibility.
At 6:30 p.m., Charlie turned on the news and poured himself a glass of wine. Earlier that day, he’d marinated a pork chop in soy sauce and brown sugar. As it sizzled in the skillet, he looked at Lucy, who gazed up at him forlornly. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He would eat his pork chop, he would drink his wine, he would clean up the kitchen, and he would turn off the light by 9 p.m. And then, in the morning, he would wake up with the sun, drink his orange juice with Metamucil, do the crossword, and begin another unremarkable day. Every once in a while, when Charlie recalled the ambitions of his younger self, it struck him how flat and ordinary his life had become. But most of the time, this flat and ordinary life seemed like a miracle, an allotment of tranquility he didn’t deserve. Even Helen, in time, had forgiven him.
Toward the end of the nightly news, the anchor said: “We finish tonight with a remembrance of Senator Robert Vogel, who died Friday at age eighty-one. He was in Cairo as part of a Senate delegation and suffered a stroke during their review of the Egyptian military. Over the course of his twenty-five years in the Senate, he served as chair of the Finance Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and minority whip. A member of the Democratic Party known for his bipartisan alliances, Vogel began his career in finance. This afternoon, President McAllister released a statement that reads—”
Charlie changed the channel. The Yankees were up 5–3 against the Blue Jays. Lucy lay with her chin on the floor, gaze fixed on Charlie. He’d left the fatty rind of the pork chop on his plate, and now he nudged it over the edge. He only did this on special occasions. Like Sunday nights. Like Saturday nights, or Tuesday nights, or pretty much, these days, any old night. He found it almost impossible to resist her sweet brown eyes. “Stop looking at me like that,” he said, when Lucy finished licking the floor and returned her gaze to Charlie. “No more. I mean it.”
As Charlie loaded the dishwasher, the phone rang. The screen showed an unfamiliar Washington number. Sunday evening seemed like an odd time for a stranger to call. He answered: “Hello?”
“Charlie Cole?”
“This is he.”
“My name is Jennifer Navarro. I work—worked—for Senator Vogel. I was his chief of staff.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m calling because… well, I understand that you and the senator knew each other?”
“Not really. We spoke once or twice.” A heavy silence as she waited for him to continue. Charlie was perplexed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Why are you calling?”
“Before he died, Senator Vogel was working on something, something obviously… important. But he didn’t tell me about it, and I’m guessing it goes beyond my security clearance.” A pause. “But I think you probably…” Another pause. “I think you’ll know what to make of it.”
Charlie frowned at the muted TV. The Yankees were now up 7–4. Security clearance. Her suggestion was clear enough. But if she had some kind of agency-related inquiry, well, Vogel was friendly with plenty of people at Langley, all of whom outranked Charlie by a mile. Director Gasko not least among them.
“Mr. Cole?” she prompted. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here. I’m just wondering why—”
“I think it would be best to show you in person,” she said. “Could we meet tomorrow at the Grant Memorial at seven a.m.?”