“Don’t do anything until I get back,” Osmond said. “Amanda. Did you hear me?”
It was Friday afternoon, right after the news had broken. On social media and CNN, the stroke narrative was already prevailing. Semonov had been right. Aging man, poor health, hot day: there was no reason for anyone to question the circumstances of Bob Vogel’s death.
“When will that be?” Amanda said. The news was everywhere. Semonov would have seen it by now. The longer he went without hearing from her, the more difficult this would be. Her window was narrowing.
“Alitalia just canceled this afternoon’s flight,” Osmond said. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll get the first flight tomorrow morning.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, sir. You know I don’t like doing this.”
“Doing what? Listen to me, Amanda, you can’t—”
“I’m the deputy station chief,” she interrupted. “When you’re not here, I’m officially in charge. Tomorrow could be too late. I’m sorry, Osmond, but I’m going to see him today.”
“No. No. If this guy is the real thing, we need to brief the director, we need to get a plan in place, we need—”
“Come on. You know this isn’t an if.”
She could hear him breathing, could imagine his red-cheeked frustration. Many times, their relationship had been stretched thinner than seemed wise. But apparently today wasn’t quite the day that it reached a breaking point, because Osmond sighed and said: “Fine. Fine! But don’t offer him anything. Make no promises. Understood?”
The walk from the embassy to the hotel took her past the Spanish Steps and the Piazza del Popolo. Both of them were, as she’d been hoping, thronged with tourists. She entered the marble foyer of the hotel and turned into the bar. It was pleasantly dim and cool, with its parquet floor and leafy potted palms. Behind the bar, Tomasso was polishing a glass. “Signora!” he cried when he spotted Amanda. “La bella signora! Where have you been?”
Tomasso, who as bartender at this well-known hotel was privy to any number of interesting conversations, had been one of Amanda’s first recruits in Rome. She ordered an espresso and a Pellegrino and slid a piece of paper across the bar. “There’s a man named Semonov staying here,” she murmured. “Could you slip this under his door?”
Over the next two hours, the bar swelled with the Friday evening crowd. Amanda drank three espressos, pretended to read something on her phone, and kept the door in her peripheral vision. The precautions were excessive. This was Rome, not Moscow. She could have simply picked up the house phone in the lobby and asked Semonov to come downstairs. But after so many years, the habits were too ingrained to shake.
Finally, around 6:45 p.m., he appeared. Following her instructions, he strode through the bar without looking at her, carrying a book beneath his right arm. Amanda left a twenty-euro note on her table and hurried to follow him. Outside the hotel, he turned down the Via della Penna toward the Piazza del Popolo, navigated his way through the crowd, and found a seat on the edge of the Neptune Fountain, which was packed with people seeking relief in the cool mist. After several minutes, when the woman next to Semonov stood up, Amanda walked over to the fountain edge and took her place.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
He shrugged heavily.
“I’m so sorry. This was my fault. I knew you were telling the truth.”
Semonov shrugged again. He was too exhausted to feel anything. Two weeks of this high-wire tension had left him spent. He’d told no one of his plan, not even Chiara, because Chiara was entirely too sensible to let him go through with it. She would have pointed out the obvious: the Americans were never going to believe him. He had learned about the assassination through mere happenstance. They would see that his story was full of holes.
But he knew, too, that he didn’t want to be talked out of it. Even if it was a mistake. Which it probably was. Not because he necessarily thought the GRU would find out about his conversation with this American official—Rome offered a degree of anonymity that was impossible in Moscow—but because, in having tried to stop this terrible deed from happening, he had recognized just how terrible the deed really was. A deed of which, despite being a low-level bureaucrat, he was undoubtedly a part. A deed that was just one of many, many similar deeds. And now he would have to live the rest of his life with that terrible recognition.
But he didn’t blame Miss Clarkson for this. Yesterday, in the conference room, she had clearly believed him. She didn’t have to, but she had.
“I was reading about his wife,” Semonov said. “His children.”
“He was a good man.”
“A good man. Yes. And now he is dead, and I am his murderer.”
Amanda shook her head sharply. “No, you’re not. You tried to stop it. Listen to me, Kostya. I’ve seen how these things go. A lot of people in your position would have done nothing. But you did something. You tried. That’s the difference.”
He blinked, his face crumpling. She could see him teetering on the edge of collapse. If he fell apart now, he would be no use to her. Time to change tack, then. Amanda was sitting beside a GRU agent who (a) was morally repelled by his work, (b) had just been proven to be telling the truth, and (c) was getting on a plane back to Moscow in just a few days. This could be a gold mine, but she had to act fast.
“Look,” she said. “I understand. I’ve been in your shoes, Kostya. I know how painful this is. Right now you have two paths. You can let yourself be sad and depressed, or you can do something about it. You can fight back. We weren’t able to save Bob Vogel’s life. But we might be able to save the next one, if you’re willing to help us.”
Semonov looked down at the book in his lap. A hardcover copy of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which he’d taken from one of the bookshelves in the hotel lobby. He traced his finger over the cover. “I don’t know anything else.”
“You might think you don’t. But you have an important job. Maybe you don’t realize just how important it is.”
“I didn’t even want this job!” he cried. “I wanted to be an interpreter. I wanted to travel the world! You know that I attended the Military University of the Ministry of Defense? My mother was so proud. It is the best language program in Russia. But I only made it through the first year of that training. And do you know why? Because of a man named Charles Dickens.”
They were getting offtrack, but at the same time, Amanda had noticed how his expression had changed with this last remark. Anything to interrupt his self-flagellation. So she said: “Charles Dickens?”
“I’ve always loved to read. Chiara does, too. It’s one of the reasons we get along. Of course, she reads everything. She reads much more than me. During training, I used to read on my lunch breaks. One day, during the first year, the instructor spotted me on my way to lunch. I was holding a copy of Bleak House. He sneered and asked why I was reading it. I told him it was useful for improving my English. He said it was subversive. I told him I disagreed. And then I offered to lend him the book when I was finished. Apparently this offended him. The next day he ordered my reassignment to another division of the GRU.” He sighed. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“You were honest. You couldn’t help it.”
“But it’s not very useful to you, is it? If I were an interpreter, I would be meeting people, hearing things, learning things. But I sit in my office and spend my days making passports and visas and bank statements, and I know nothing.”
“That’s not true. You knew about Senator Vogel.”
He shifted his weight uneasily. “It was only that one time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you see, I’m never told why a thing is needed. Simply I am told to do this or do that. They submit their request, and I fulfill the request, and I am never told what happens next.”
She cocked her head. “Then how did you come to learn about Vogel?”
The fountain behind them burbled and splashed; the church bells pealed seven times. Semonov began to blush. Even in the evening light, his embarrassment was obvious. Amanda averted her gaze, giving him time to collect himself. On the horizon were the dark green pine trees of the Borghese Gardens. Above it was the clear blue of evening.
Finally, he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “It happened two weeks ago.”
It happened two weeks ago. Most of his colleagues left at 5 p.m., he said, but he often stayed late. He did his best work when the office was quiet, and though he didn’t particularly enjoy the work, it would have filled him with shame to do anything less than his best. That night, after everyone else was gone, he went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As he waited for the water to boil, two men appeared. He didn’t recognize them. They must have been from a different directorate.
“Isn’t there anything to eat?” one of them demanded, after finding the refrigerator bare. “Where is the food, hmm?”
This man clutched a bottle of vodka loosely in his hand. The other man swayed slightly. They were drunk, and bored. They looked at Semonov. Then they glanced at each other, reaching silent agreement. “Nothing to eat?” one of them said. “Then at least sit with us and have a drink. Forget the tea. A real drink. Come, comrade.”
They wore identical expressions of self-satisfied stupidity. Tweedledum, Semonov thought. And Tweedledee. They pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and ordered him, the solution to their boredom, to sit. So who was he? What was his name? What did he do? Why was he working so late? Did he not have a nice lady to go home to? See, they were working late because their work was extremely dangerous and extremely important. But you, comrade! Tweedledee laughed. With glasses like that, what do you know of danger?
“Hang on.” Tweedledum narrowed his eyes. “Now wait just a second. Your name is Semonov? I’ve heard of this Semonov. You’re the one making our passports.”
“Semonov!” Tweedledee yelped. “Ah, of course, the famous Semonov!”
Yes, of course, this explained why he was here so late. Surely he was toiling away on their passports right this moment. Wasn’t that so? He should be honored to be given this task. Not everyone had the chance to work with their unit. But their superior had requested him specifically. He had a reputation for being the best.
“You’ve heard of our unit, of course,” Tweedledum said. “Unit 29155?”
The kettle came to a screeching boil. Semonov leapt to switch it off. “Ah,” he said nervously. “Well. As you said. Your passports. I must get back to them. They’re very—”
“Sit down, you’re being rude. Oh yes. Yes, you’ve heard of us.” He was clearly amused by Semonov’s terror. “You know exactly what Unit 29155 does, don’t you?”
“I don’t wish to pry.”
Tweedledee laughed. “He’s a liar! Just look at him. He hasn’t been this excited since… since… since he was a baby sucking at his mother’s breast!”
“Well, and are we feeling generous?” Tweedledum said, with a cruel grin. “Shall we tell him why we need those passports?”
“Oh, yes. I’m feeling generous.”
“You see, my friend. There is an American. A man named Robert Vogel.”
They talked and they talked. Why had they decided to brag in such detail? Something about Semonov’s manner filled them with a violent contempt. Striking fear into the heart of this pathetic man was, to them, as darkly gratifying as kicking an injured animal. They egged one another on, adding details, relishing the fear on Semonov’s face. The nature of the poison. The method of delivery. The death would look natural, but on the inside would be agony. His muscles would be frozen in pain; his lungs would refuse to breathe. Robert Vogel would know, in his final moments, that he was dying an unnatural death. You understand how it will feel for him? They grinned wickedly. You understand, my friend? He will know that God is not doing this to him. We are doing this to him. There will be no grace in this departure.
By the time Semonov finished talking, the sky above Rome was a deep navy blue. The water in the fountain was lit with a pale glow. “That’s awful,” Amanda said. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“It’s nothing compared to what happened to him,” he said quietly.
“And they didn’t…” She shook her head. Where to go from here? It was tricky. “You don’t know why they were targeting Senator Vogel. They didn’t say.”
“No.”
“But do you think that, maybe, they did know? That they knew and just didn’t say?”
“No.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“I know what kind of men they are.” He lifted his shoulders. “Some people learn to make peace with their limited knowledge. Other people find it offensive. It irritates them, the idea that they are missing something. That’s how those two men were. Offended. Insecure. They haven’t been told the most important thing, which is why they are doing what they are doing. They are merely cogs in the machine. They know that, and they hate that. So they boast, they brag. They find people like me, who know even less, and they brag to make themselves feel better.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You see what I mean, don’t you?”
Like Semonov said. Some people learn to make peace with their limited knowledge. Other people find it offensive. The world might well be a happier place if there were more of the former than the latter, but this isn’t the world we live in.
Charlie Cole, for instance. He, like so many ambitious young officers during the Cold War, had been intoxicated by the notion of the world as a solvable problem. The answers could always be found, if only you worked hard enough. It was energizing, thrilling, capable of lending romance to even the harshest backdrop. He had been fully under this spell when he and Helen moved to Finland in the early 1980s. Their apartment was two blocks from the Baltic Sea. The enemy was just over the border. Blizzards hushed the city into a frozen snowscape. The northern lights shimmered above the road to the safe house. Heavy-browed Russian visitors took their Finnish cousins to dinner while the Americans watched from across the street. These vivid details accrued into righteousness. I’m doing this for you, Charlie sometimes thought, as he lifted Amanda from her crib and kissed the top of her head. I’m making the world a safer place for you.
Osmond Brown had his own version of this. He’d arrived in Angola in 1976, freshly minted from the Farm, wearing pleated khakis and a clean white shirt and aviator sunglasses, every inch the cinematic hero. Angola was wracked by civil war. Did the Americans know how that war ought to end? Did they know what this country needed? Damn straight they did, the young Osmond thought, and sometimes said, in his Mississippi twang. In the Angolan summer it rained every day, the sky bursting violently, the pavement steaming in the heat after the clouds passed. The humidity persisted from November through April. Osmond loved it. The skin-drenching weather reminded him of home. Here in the jungle, he felt charged up with purpose. The work came easy. He was good at this. Guns, land mines, aircraft, money, food, water. Life and death. All of it.
And then, he thought to himself, so many years later, as the plane arced high above the Atlantic, then I got soft.
It had been a long time since Angola, or Libya, or any of the postings in which Osmond Brown had been required to risk bodily harm. But the older he got, the more he tended to lose himself in those overgrown thickets of memory. Long flights were the worst, with their awful dearth of distractions. He shook his head. It was Monday, a few days after the assassination. Another three hours until they landed. He couldn’t focus on the papers he’d brought along, and the TV screen in his seat wasn’t working, and he had no one to talk to, because across the aisle Amanda was asleep. Slumped over, her head at a lopsided angle. He reached over, shook her arm. “Amanda. Hey, Amanda, wake up.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You’re going to get a crick in your neck if you sleep like that.”
She grumbled, shifted position, closed her eyes again. “No, listen,” Osmond found himself saying. “We need to go over the plan one more time.”
“Why?”
“Why! Because this is a big fucking deal, that’s why.”
It was never a good sign when the director summoned you back to Langley like this. On Friday afternoon, Osmond called Director Gasko and told him about the walk-in, the strange Russian who had delivered his warning to Amanda, and who now gave them reason to conclude that Senator Vogel had been assassinated by the GRU.
After a beat of silence, Gasko said: “So we had the chance to stop this.”
“Well, yes,” he said carefully. “But we had no way of verifying the—”
“Jesus Christ, Osmond. You made a mistake. Own the fucking mistake. And go get Amanda. I need to know more about this guy.”
“Uh, sure. Okay. I’ll ask her to call you right now.”
“Just go grab her, would you?”
His face flushed. “Well, you see, I would, except I’m not. Well. I’m not in the station right now. I’m in, um. I’m in Capri. I’m trying to get back to Rome as soon as I can.”
“Capri?” the director yelped. “You’re in fucking Capri?”
From there, it only got worse. When Osmond explained that he’d asked Amanda to wait, to hold off on reestablishing contact with her walk-in until they had a strategy, but in his absence she had gone ahead and done it anyway, Gasko snapped: “You said what? Of course she needs to get with him. What were you thinking, Osmond? This guy can’t be left out in the cold. No. Forget it. Amanda is calling the shots on this. And by the way. I need both of you here in Washington by next week.”
Both of them? But surely it would be better for Amanda to stay in Rome, stay close to the situation. Surely he, Osmond, the station chief, could handle the big picture and… “Both of you,” Gasko barked.
So he and Amanda needed to have a united front. That was the only way to survive this. As Osmond was about to launch into his speech, the flight attendant rolled the cart down the aisle and stopped between them. “Chicken, beef, or pasta?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He drummed his fingers against the armrest impatiently. When the cart was finally wheeled away, he looked at Amanda, lifting the foil from her tray of pasta, which somehow looked both gloopy and dry. “Why are you eating that?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “Because I’m hungry.”
“Well.” He sat up straight, trying to project as much dignity as thirty inches of legroom allowed. “Well. So. You don’t know the director like I do, but I can tell you, Amanda, Gasko is a team player. And he wants the rest of us to be team players. He doesn’t tolerate discord. Got it? Infighting, drama, none of that flies. He needs to know, he needs to trust that Rome station is running smoothly. So tomorrow morning, when we meet with him, we’re going to make it clear that this was a decision we made together.”
She poked at her pasta and frowned.
“I mean,” he continued, “that we both decided, we both decided, that it was imprudent to act on Semonov’s information. Right? I know you agreed with me in the end, Amanda. It took a while for you to get there, but in the end, you didn’t go raise the alarm in Cairo, did you?”
She stabbed at her pasta in silence. Lifted her fork, considered it, set it back down. “I didn’t raise the alarm in Cairo,” she said quietly, “because you’re my boss. I wasn’t going to disobey a direct order. You knew that. I knew that. But that doesn’t mean I agreed with you. I did it because you told me to. You’re my boss,” she repeated. “I have no problem saying that. Is that what you mean by a team player?”
She looked up. Her green eyes were blazing.
As he was summoning his response, they hit an air pocket. The plane jolted, and Osmond grabbed for the armrest, and the passengers let out yelps of fear and surprise. The plane shuddered and juddered with unnerving persistence, the kind of violent rattling that caused a person to suddenly reevaluate his relationship with God. But the turbulence didn’t faze Amanda. She was staring right at him, without so much as a flinch.
Why on earth had he thought that she, of all people, would compromise herself in order to protect him?
Osmond, you fool, he thought. Whatever you have coming, you deserve it.
The next morning, in Langley. Osmond felt a painful envy, watching the men and women stream into the marble lobby, coffees in hand, badges displayed, happy and unfearful. These normal people. These annoyingly normal people.
As Osmond and Amanda stepped through the turnstiles, he asked himself what he had asked so many times: What happened to me? But he knew exactly what happened. What happened was Aisha, the young woman he’d been running in Tripoli in the 1980s. Aisha was the daughter of a high-ranking general, and a member of Gaddafi’s entourage. She was a born spy, with an appetite for risk, but also an instinct for when she was pushing it too far. She had warned Osmond that she needed to lay low for a while. Gaddafi was, lest they forget, a violent lunatic. But this was April 1986, and the Berlin nightclub bombing had just happened, and the U.S. was determined to strike. They needed to get to Gaddafi, and Osmond needed her intelligence. Needed it. This wasn’t optional. Understood?
The airstrike happened. It killed a bunch of Libyans, but not Gaddafi. Not long after this failed strike, Aisha was executed.
There were trade-offs to this work, Osmond told himself. The master he served was bigger than Aisha. What was the value of an individual life when tallied against the greater good? After she was executed, he tried to believe in these old calculations, but Aisha was dead. She was dead. When you really got down to it, what was the difference between Osmond and the person who pressed the gun to her forehead?
It wasn’t worth it. That was what he’d realized. That realization was his life’s great dividing line. From that point forward, part of Osmond had understood that, from here on out, he wasn’t going to be very good at this job. That he was simply marking time.
“Osmond?” A light touch on his arm. “It’s this way, isn’t it?”
He and Amanda were standing in the middle of the seventh-floor hallway, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows with their view of the courtyard. The trees outside were the color of American summer. Bright green, defiantly green. An exquisite overabundance. He shook his head. “Follow me,” he said.
They reached the end of the hallway. The phone on the secretary’s desk rang. She said: “The director is ready for you.”
Behind his desk, Gasko was standing up and striding over. Osmond’s heart was racing. He and the director were shaking hands. Before he knew it, he found himself saying:
“Director Gasko, sir, I’m here to offer my resignation. This past week made it clear to me that I’m no longer capable of serving as an effective station chief. It’s time for me to step down.”
Gasko’s eyebrows shot up. “You are.”
“Yes, sir. I see no other way forward.”
After a moment, Gasko’s eyebrows descended into a pleasant expression. “Well. Well. Osmond. You’re a good man.”
“No, sir.” He let go of the director’s hand. “I’m an old man.”
He was flooded with relief. This feeling! This was the best feeling in the world. He should have done this sooner. Much, much sooner.
“Well, how about we just call this retirement?” Gasko said. “That’s the only thing we need to say. Don’t have to get into the rest of it, right?”
“Really?” Osmond said. “That’s, uh. I mean, thank you, sir. That’s kind.”
“You’ll be leaving the station in good hands, anyway.” Gasko glanced at Amanda. “Thanks, Osmond. We can take it from here.”
“Not bad,” Gasko said. “What are you, thirty-eight? Station chief at age thirty-eight? Not bad at all.”
The director gestured for her to sit. Amanda instinctively glanced back at the closed door. That was really it? That had really just… happened? She shook her head, collecting herself. “I, uh, turned forty in April.”
“Cole,” he said. “So you’re Charlie Cole’s kid. Good guy. I’m guessing you always wanted to do this. Like father, like daughter.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, actually. No.”
“Really?”
Her pulse was gradually settling. This was one of the things that made her good at the job, this rapid absorption of new realities. So she was station chief. So, okay. This wasn’t the moment to celebrate. Just take a deep breath and get on with it. “Growing up,” she said, “this was the opposite of my plan.”
Gasko tilted his head, asking the silent why. Not that she was going to tell him the real reason. Amanda’s relationship with her father was a particular thing. Her mother she never worried about; her mother had a toughness that permeated to her core. Charlie, though. Her father’s gentle nature was what she loved most about him, but it often struck her as a reaction, as a calculation: like his determined contentment was a shield against the dagger of wanting. Even as a child, long before she had the words, she could sense that her father had a sadness about him. The older she got, the more it seemed related to his work. And this, she decided, was never going to happen to her. She was freewheeling, she was fun. So she graduated from high school and decided to travel the world. Vaguely she imagined the travel would yield a glamorous outcome: she would fall in love with a rich foreigner, maybe, or become a writer. She certainly hadn’t planned to wind up in Langley, doing exactly, literally exactly, what her father had done.
But she didn’t feel like explaining that to him. And she doubted that Gasko really wanted that explanation. So she used a truth better-suited to the seventh floor. “I saw the cost of it,” she said. “Lying for a living. It destroyed my parents’ marriage. So now you’re wondering, what changed?” She shrugged. “Well, I realized marriage is a scam, so what did it matter?”
A gold wedding ring glinted on his left hand, but Gasko merely smiled. He was the type of man who prided himself on taking nothing personally. “So you met with the source again,” he continued. “How did he seem?”
“Calm, actually. Depressed, but calm. He’d always known it was a long shot, that we weren’t likely to take him at his word. With his job, he’s usually in the dark. This time he got lucky. He happened to learn about the threat to Vogel.”
“And this was his guilty conscience at play?”
Amanda nodded. “And despite sounding the alarm, he still feels guilty. Complicit. It’s kind of amazing. After so many years at the GRU, this guy hasn’t lost his moral compass.”
“Great. That’s great. So you think there’s more juice in that lemon?”
“If we play it right.” She was careful not to promise anything. “He’s not read into much at the GRU. But he might be willing to get creative. Might. It could be a way of working through his guilt.”
“I assume he wants money.”
“Money wouldn’t hurt. But he mostly wants a fresh start. He wants to leave Russia and come to America.”
“Not Italy? You said his wife was Italian, right?”
“Not Italy. Something about his wife wanting to stay far away from an overbearing mother. But also, if they leave Russia, he imagines that the GRU will eventually put it together and come after them, and he doesn’t trust the Italians to keep them safe.” She paused. “But he thinks we probably can.”
“Well.” Gasko grimaced. “I guess it’s nice that someone still admires our capabilities.”
The director’s tone contained more than a trace of self-pity. The CIA’s reputation was currently in tatters, and a large part of Gasko’s job was reweaving the scraps into something serviceable. While President Caine had been in the White House, even their closest allies, MI6 and Mossad and the BND, had stopped trusting them, and stopped sharing intelligence with them. The bosses on the seventh floor liked to moan and groan about the loss of prestige. But Amanda had never understood those complaints. So their allies didn’t fully trust them? But they weren’t supposed to be trustworthy. They were spies, for God’s sake.
Again, not that she was going to say this to Gasko. Instead she continued: “He’d prefer to leave sooner rather than later. They’d pick up and move to America right now if they could.”
“Does his wife know what he’s been up to?”
Amanda shook her head. “He’s trying to protect her, I think. Or doing the chauvinist thing. Doesn’t think this is her turf. Both, maybe. In any case, I told him we couldn’t move that fast. We didn’t have the authorization, etcetera. I probably bought us six months. Maybe a year, if we’re lucky. So they flew back to Moscow yesterday.”
“Good. And you’ve figured out how to maintain contact?”
“Yup.”
“This is great, Amanda. Really great stuff. Keep him in play as long as you can.” Gasko nodded. “Now. Let’s talk about what we’re going to tell Diane Vogel.”
From his perch on the seventh floor, the director had been gradually thinning the ranks of the older generation, gently but firmly urging them toward retirement. The older generation had too much scar tissue for his liking. They had lived through the 1960s and ’70s, the agency’s era of disrepute: failed coups, botched assassinations, the Church Committee. This didn’t enhance the image Gasko wanted to cultivate. (His generation had their own failings, of course, but he found it much easier to forgive their faults and flaws.)
So when people heard the news of Osmond Brown’s retirement, no one thought much of it. Just another victim of Gasko’s geriatric purge. On the same day that Amanda met with the director, Charlie Cole bumped into an old friend from the DO. “Well, I guess I’m allowed to tell you, right? You must be so proud of your girl.”
His friend shared the news. Charlie wondered whether he had misunderstood. “He retired?” Charlie asked. “Osmond Brown?”
“Guess so.”
Charlie wandered away in a daze. Actually, he had been in a daze ever since his conversation with Jenny Navarro the day before, on Monday morning, when she handed him the papers from Bob Vogel’s desk. Bob had kept them private from her, she explained, which meant he had kept them private from everyone. So Charlie had nothing to worry about. Jenny’s face was creased with anxiety, hoping he understood the subtext. He nodded and said, sure, he understood, he would take it from here. Then he drove away with the manila folder on the passenger seat, glancing over every few seconds, as if expecting it to explode.
At home he placed the folder on the kitchen counter. The longer he stared at it, the more certain he became about what he was looking at. His past, submerged in darkness for so long, now preparing to surface. This moment had always been inevitable.
He might have stood there for hours were it not for Lucy, alarmed by his stupor, barking at him. Charlie jolted back to attention. “Right,” he said to her. “Well, shit. So how do we want to play this?”
She lumbered over and shoved her head into his knee. She hadn’t liked the tense silence. It wasn’t Charlie’s style. “What do you think? Should I turn myself in, just get it over with?” Her tail wagged. “Maybe I shouldn’t even read it.”
But this idea was obviously ridiculous. Not read it? If he had that kind of self-control, he never would have found himself in this situation to begin with.
So, instead, Charlie poured himself another cup of coffee. An ordinary Monday morning in the suburbs. A moment thirty-odd years in the making. He ought not rush through it. He sat down at the kitchen counter, took a deep breath, and began to read. The first page didn’t make much sense to him. Day traders? Meme stocks? The next page was more of the same. And so was the next, and the next. He flipped through the papers faster, searching for familiar words—Helsinki, Särrkä, Ahmad Baraath—but it was in vain. Vogel had uncovered some kind of scheme, but Charlie couldn’t see how this was connected to him. That last piece of paper bore his name, but why? What did it mean?
He looked up. The clock on the oven showed that he was already late for work. As he returned the papers to the folder, he felt his chest tightening. You thought it was over, a voice said. But it isn’t. Not if you play your cards right.
If he gave the folder to someone at the agency, they would ask him why his name was in there. Charlie would say that he didn’t know, which was the truth. But that person, while carrying forward the investigation, would probably, eventually, manage to answer that question. And in this they would probably, eventually, perceive a certain murkiness surrounding Charlie’s departure from Helsinki. Setting this into motion would probably, eventually, lead to his demise. This was one option.
The other option was to keep the folder to himself. Burn it. Destroy it.
The sharp clarity of surrender—not anymore. Now he had to make a choice. He also had to get to work. “Fuck,” he muttered, starting the car, backing out of the driveway. “Fuck. Fuck!” Obviously he didn’t want to go to jail. But in destroying the papers, he would, in effect, be aiding the other side. Moscow. Gruzdev. Did he really want to do that?
Twenty minutes later he pulled into the parking lot without any memory of the drive. That day and night passed in much the same way. His paralyzing panic blocked out the rest of the world. But hearing this news about Osmond Brown on Tuesday afternoon—something pinged in the back of his mind.
Last Christmas, after spending the holiday with her mother in New York, Amanda came down to Virginia to visit Charlie. He took her to lunch at the country club, where the dining room was festooned with pine boughs and red ribbons. When the waiter came over, she said: “Grilled cheese and a chocolate shake, please.”
Her old childhood favorite. Charlie smiled. “You’re not just indulging me, are you?”
Amanda smiled, too. “Maybe a little.”
“So how’s Rome treating you?” Charlie asked, even though he knew she couldn’t really talk about it. It was the nature of the job.
“Honestly? It feels like death.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Seriously. I mean, Rome is never going to be the most exciting posting. I know that. But it’s not just quiet. It’s like, it’s purposely stagnant. The station chief—Osmond Brown, did you ever know him?—it’s like he doesn’t want to do anything. Nothing. He’s allergic to even the smallest, tiniest molecule of risk.”
“Well, that can happen. Probably means it’s time for him to retire.”
Amanda snorted. “That’s the problem. He’s never going to retire. This job is the only thing he has going. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. And honestly, Dad, Rome is such a ghost town that no one in Langley will ever notice what a mediocre job he’s doing.”
On that Tuesday in July, the memory of this remark came rushing back to him. It had been years since he’d used the old machine. Decades, really. But it was still in there. The cold, clinical, action-oriented apparatus of logic, unspooling two different threads:
One: If Osmond Brown wasn’t planning to retire, that meant something significant had happened. If Amanda had been elevated to station chief, that meant she had been on the right side of that something.
Two: If an old man in poor health collapses under the blazing sun, death by stroke is a reasonable conclusion. But if the old man is revealed to be in possession of papers that outline the tenets of a mysterious conspiracy, then that conclusion must be reexamined.
A shakeup in Rome. A death in Egypt. Coincidences happened. They weren’t necessarily connected. But Charlie could feel the prickle up his spine. He’d shoved the folder in a kitchen drawer, jumbled up with the whisks and wooden spoons, because he didn’t know where else to put it. Even from here, miles away in Langley, he could sense it radiating a white-hot danger.
But maybe—maybe—he had just stumbled upon a way forward.
At the end of the day, Charlie stood on the grass outside the main entrance, checking his watch. Amanda was running late. Well, sure. Considering what had just happened, she was probably deluged with new responsibilities. He checked his watch again. This whole thing might be a bad idea, but it was the only idea he had.
“Dad!” she said, emerging at last. “Sorry. I got caught up.”
For a few seconds, the sight of his daughter swept away every concern. She was the walking, talking embodiment of his marriage; of the most significant years of his life. Her green eyes, which she’d gotten from her mother; her freckled complexion, which she’d gotten from him. He returned her smile. “Sweetheart!” he said. “I’m so proud of you. This is a big deal.”
He saw the blush beneath her shrug. “Yeah, I don’t know. It’s good. Listen, Dad. I promised I’d stay with Georgia this time. That’s cool with you, right?”
“Oh,” he said. “Well. Sure. No problem.”
“And actually,” she said, typing on her phone, “what do you think if she comes to dinner? You probably haven’t seen her in forever, right? I bet she’d love to see you.”
“Dinner?”
“I’ll tell her to bring a bottle of wine. What are we having?”
“You know.” He swallowed. “Maybe not this time, honey. There’s something… There’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important.”
She looked up, alarmed. “You’re not sick, are you?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“So, what, then? Hey. Are you and Grace finally getting married?”
He tried to smile. “It’s just… better to have privacy for this. Tell Georgia I’m sorry. Next time.”
On the drive home, Amanda kept glancing over. The atmosphere in the car was thick. “You can’t just tell me now?” she pressed. “Dad. You’re being so intense. What is it?”
“Hey,” he said. “So this station chief thing. That’s fantastic. That must be why you’re in town, right? Is there some kind of rite to mark the occasion? Some secret ceremony?”
“No,” she said, although it was unclear which question she was answering.
Fishing, he said: “He’s not really retiring, is he? Osmond Brown, I mean.”
Charlie kept his eyes on the road, but he could sense Amanda staring at him.
Eventually she said: “Well. So. The Yankees swept the Jays, huh?”
Which was code for: Please don’t ask me questions you know I can’t answer.