The assignments started small. The first one came in March 1987.
Charlie Cole and Benjamin Hacker, a newly minted junior case officer, were conducting surveillance on a government delegation visiting Helsinki from Moscow. They parked across the street from the restaurant and watched the group of dark-coated Russians emerge. “Ten bucks says they’re headed to the club on Ratakatu,” Hacker said.
Charlie said: “Too easy. I’m not taking the other side of that.”
Hacker leaned forward, peering through the windshield of their Opel Astra. Some officers read magazines; others listened to the radio. Hacker, a freckled farm boy from Iowa, and the newest addition to Helsinki station, had decided gambling was the best way to pass the time during these tedious surveillance shifts. There was a tattered $10 bill that he and Charlie were constantly passing back and forth. Despite the age gap, the two men had an easy rapport, a comfortable shtick. Hacker the bachelor, Charlie the family man, Hacker the shit-disturber, Charlie the peacekeeper.
At the end of the night, when the Russian delegation was safely ensconced in their hotel and they’d handed over duties to the next shift, Hacker said, “Feel like getting breakfast?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’m headed back to the station.”
“Aren’t you off this weekend?”
“Just need to get a few things done. Behind on some contact reports.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie: he was behind on some contact reports. His comically slow hunt-and-peck typing skills were a well-known fact throughout the station. So much concealment, he was realizing, could be found within the existing contours of his life. Some excuses were so explicable, so natural, that they were practically true.
On this Saturday morning, the station was deserted. Sitting at his desk, Charlie paused his typing. He stood up, looked over the walls of his cubicle, surveyed the empty desks. “Hello?” he said softly. Then, more loudly: “Hello?”
Silence. Silence so perfect that it felt like a taunt.
He sat back down, took his key from his pocket, and unlocked his file cabinet. He pulled out the list and set it on his desk. It was a thin sheet of paper, marred with coffee rings and grease stains. An utterly ordinary document, a carbon copy, one of many: a list of KGB officers in Helsinki whose names and faces were known to the CIA. Charlie considered it. Of course, he could see why she wanted it. It was useful for the KGB to know which of their officers had been made. But was he actually endangering anyone by giving this to her? Was it really that bad?
Yes, you fucking idiot. Of course it’s that bad.
Okay. Bad, then. But was it worse than what might happen to Helen and Amanda if he decided not to cooperate?
(In the months that followed, he would realize that this internal exchange, this evaluation of relative badness, was now the sole calculation that defined his life.)
He folded the list into a neat square. He took off his shoe, slipped the square into his sock, put his shoe back on. The folded corner of the paper poked against his ankle, but soon he got used to it. The station remained empty for the rest of the day, but had anyone been there, that would have been okay, too, because Charlie, typing away, looked like a perfectly ordinary CIA officer on a perfectly ordinary Saturday morning.
Many decades later, on a day in late January, Charlie Cole was standing outside an Ethiopian restaurant in a Fairfax strip mall, reminding himself of how it felt to inhabit a lie-that-also-wasn’t-a-lie. He and Osmond Brown were finally having their lunch date. Charlie, as he’d explained to Osmond, was fast approaching retirement, and was seeking advice on how to handle the transition. “Happy to help!” Osmond had replied, with surprising chipperness.
See, it was funny, Osmond said. He’d expected to hate it. All of it. He’d been one of those people who saw retirement as a punishment. A lifetime of hard work, and this was what he got? His identity snatched away in one fell swoop? Not to mention the pill boxes, the AARP magazines, the senior citizen discounts, the crossword puzzles, the orthotic shoes, the transition lenses, the failures of his body, the thinning hair, the slackening skin, the weakening bones, the patronizing language, the early bird specials, the march of indignities that paved the road from here until the end. Not to mention the end! The big one, the End with a capital E. Why would anyone want that?
Therefore he was shocked, pleasantly so, to discover that he had been entirely wrong.
“I just got back from Jupiter,” he said, as they sat down at the table. “My niece was the one who convinced me. I said I didn’t want to be such a cliché, the snowbird down in Florida. She said it’s only a cliché because it’s an objectively good idea. And you know what? I loved it. Made an offer on a condo last week. Have you ever been to Jupiter?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not Jupiter specifically, but I had an aunt in—”
“She was right! My niece, this twenty-five-year-old kid, she was right. It’s paradise. Turns out I actually like being a cliché. I like blending in. I’m just another boring old man. No one notices me. No one cares! Spent my whole career trying to be anonymous and only now do I finally have it. Let me tell you. It’s liberating.”
Advice about retirement? Charlie had worried about the flimsiness of this pretext. But Osmond, absorbed as he was in his energetic stream of commentary, didn’t seem to question it.
“It’s funny how much you can get wrong about yourself,” he continued. “Take this restaurant. I thought I hated Ethiopian food. Had one too many bad experiences in Addis Ababa. Then one day I’m walking through West Palm Beach, and I pass this Ethiopian place, and I think, ‘Well, why not? If I was wrong about retirement, what else was I wrong about?’ You ever had Ethiopian before? No? I’ll order for us.” When the waitress arrived, Osmond enunciated the names of the dishes with the relish of a college student embarking on a semester abroad.
The restaurant, wedged between an Edible Arrangements and a Pet Depot, was surprisingly busy during this Monday lunchtime. Several customers waited by the front door. They were turning tables quickly. Charlie would need to hurry if he wanted his questions answered. But the food arrived, and immediately Osmond started instructing Charlie on his technique. “You do it like this,” he said, tearing off a piece of injera. “And then like this, and like this.” As Osmond waxed poetic about the visceral pleasure of eating with one’s hands, about how the West had really gotten this wrong, Charlie couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
After a while, Osmond sat back, taking a breath to digest. Charlie decided to seize his opening.
“Your niece sounds great,” he said. “It’s nice to know the next generation has things under control. Makes it a little easier to let go, right? Although, to be honest, it’s hard to accept that Amanda is old enough to be a station chief. I still think of her as a little girl.”
“She’s a good one.” Osmond nodded. “She was always very diligent. Thorough.”
Charlie smiled. He did love talking about his daughter. The lie that also wasn’t a lie. “She got that from her mother. Funny, though. It took a while for it to surface. She was a distractible kid. Head in the clouds. I was surprised when she decided to go down this path. But maybe she knew this job would give her what she needed.”
“Discipline, you mean.”
“And the stakes of it, too. She went through a phase where she thought everything was bullshit. ‘No one’s gonna die if I flunk history.’ That kind of thing. But then she took this job, and the stakes actually are life-and-death, and it—it changed her.”
“Heh.” Osmond’s tone grew quieter. “Yeah. I remember what that felt like.”
The waitress brought Charlie a second can of Diet Coke. While cracking it open, he continued nonchalantly: “It seems like you two got along. She spoke highly of you.”
A slight lift to Osmond’s brow. “Really?”
“Sure. She said you were a good boss.”
“Well, I guess that’s nice.”
“I don’t know if it matters at this point.” Charlie gazed at his soda, as if pouring it into his glass required immense concentration. “But I think she feels some guilt over her role in your… Well, that is, if she caused any changes to your, uh… timeline.”
His eyebrows arched higher. “How kind of her.” Osmond couldn’t quite keep the snark out of his voice. “Nothing like the pity of the young, is there?”
The waitress came over to ask if they were finished. “Obviously not,” Osmond snapped. After she turned away, he continued bitterly: “You know, I’ve had time to think. I’ve had nothing but time to think. And I have to say, Charlie. Your daughter didn’t waver an inch. She was relentless about it. Borderline disrespectful. Honestly, if things had gone differently, if she had been wrong, I probably would have tried to get her transferred to a different station.”
He paused, grimaced. “Yeah, I know. I sound like a rotten old bastard. Anyway, doesn’t matter. She was right. I was wrong. No two ways about it. After it happened, I felt humiliated. Miserable. But the thing is, I didn’t feel angry. How can you be angry at someone who was objectively right? Doesn’t matter that she’s younger, that she’s less experienced. Actually, you know.” He tilted his head. His tone softened again. “I wonder if Amanda is the reason I wound up listening to my niece.”
The waitress came by. Apologizing for his earlier outburst, Osmond asked for the check.
Fuck, Charlie thought. Fuck, fuck. “Listen, Osmond,” he said. “Thanks so much for the advice. I admire how you’ve navigated the retirement thing with composure. So little is within our control, isn’t it? But you’ve made the most of it.”
“Yeah.” Something clouded Osmond’s gaze. “I guess.”
Charlie lowered his voice. “I just don’t want Amanda taking the wrong lesson from this. Sure, recruiting an agent takes skill, but whether the agent turns out to be productive… That’s sheer dumb luck, isn’t it?”
Osmond, now lost in thought, said: “She has her convictions. Maybe I never did.”
The waitress took Charlie’s credit card. They had two minutes, three tops. “Did you ever meet the guy?” This was risky, but what other option did he have? “Amanda’s source, I mean. The one who warned her about the assassination. Sounds like he was a real character.”
Osmond snapped back to attention. “She told you about him?”
“I know, she probably shouldn’t have, but we’re family. We bounce things off each other. Anyway, sounds like he was an interesting guy. A bit… quirky?”
“Quirky.” He snorted. “Now there’s an understatement.”
“So you did get to meet him?”
“He just didn’t look right.” Osmond grimaced. “I walk past the conference room and there’s some weird, sweaty guy, pacing back and forth. And then Amanda comes into my office and says that this Semonov guy, the guy in the conference room, that he’s the walk-in. The brave and mighty hero. This guy? You can’t be serious.”
“Semonov,” Charlie repeated. “Right. Yeah. I couldn’t remember his name.”
“It didn’t make any sense. It was so random. He’s the guy who makes the passports at the GRU, and he overhears these other guys talking about Bob Vogel? And then he’s on vacation in Italy, and while he’s there, la-di-da, he decides to stroll over to the American embassy and raise the alarm? But I have to give her credit. She just knew, somehow. That girl, she’s something. She’s like a human lie detector.”
“Well, obviously, it isn’t the same source. This fellow—Semonov, you said?—this fellow who walked into the embassy wouldn’t have been the one talking to Senator Vogel. He would never have access to that kind of detailed information.”
It was a few weeks later, a cold morning in New York. Maurice stood by the fireplace, tending to the flames. Charlie said: “So what does it mean? What do we do with this?”
“I’m not sure there’s anything to be done. But take heart, Charlie. Apparently Semonov knew nothing about you. He clearly didn’t give them your name that day in the embassy. If Osmond had any reason to be suspicious of you, he never would have agreed to meet you for lunch. And he certainly wouldn’t have spoken so openly about Semonov.”
“So, in other words, until the moment I gave Amanda those papers, she didn’t suspect me of anything.”
“Well, yes. But you had a good reason. Those papers were a critical source of information, and you said it yourself. You didn’t want to impede the investigation.”
“It was a stupid thing to do.”
“It was the right thing to do. You know that, Charlie.”
They were silent for a while. Charlie stared at the embers in the fireplace: they were alive, shimmering, almost bejeweled. In the last several months, he had experienced the entire spectrum of terror. Sweat-drenching, sheet-twisting nightmares. Paranoid glances at the car down the block. Half-baked plans of escape to Morocco, Samoa, anywhere without an extradition treaty. But the worst were the moments of total paralysis, the moments when his frantic mind simply gave up. When he realized there was nothing to do but lie down and let the train flatten him. He’d come to New York hoping that Maurice would have an idea, but here he was: another dead end. “It’s not going to work, is it?” he said.
Maurice stood at the fireplace, coaxing the flames. “What isn’t?”
“What we talked about, back in the fall. That maybe Amanda would find out about Särkkä, and, okay, that’s fine, but I don’t want her to find out about…” Charlie trailed off.
“She’s very good at her job.”
“Yeah.” And he thought, but didn’t say, unfortunately for me.
“Sooner or later, she’ll come to you with her questions. Like Osmond said. She can tell when a person is lying. You’ll have to tell her about Mary. There’s no other choice.”
He sighed. “I’m fucked.”
“Charlie,” Maurice said. Then, more sternly, “Charlie. Look at me.”
Reluctantly, Charlie obeyed.
“Amanda will ask you for the truth, and you’ll tell her the truth, and it’s going to be okay. Do you understand? You’re not the person you were thirty-five years ago. You’ve changed. You made those terrible mistakes. But it’s in the past. What you had with Mary died with Mary. She’s gone, Charlie. It’s time for you to accept that. You need to let yourself move on.”
She’s gone, Charlie.
But what was he supposed to say to that? So he returned his gaze to those narcotic, mind-emptying flames.