Four days after Helen left, Maurice arrived in Helsinki. Jack, the station chief, had summoned him from Paris to make sure Charlie didn’t do anything drastic in his despair, like commit suicide or defect to the Soviet Union. Standing in the doorway, surveying the depressing living room tableau that surrounded Charlie—curtains drawn, bathrobe covered in crumbs—Maurice said: “I can see you would prefer to wallow in your misery. But this is no longer an option. I’m going to unpack, and you’re going to clean this place up.”
He was too numb to argue. Of course Maurice could see what was happening. As Charlie trudged across the room, filling the trash bag with crumpled beer cans and empty potato chip bags, he realized that things couldn’t get any worse. What was the point in fighting back? What would he be fighting for? Helen and Amanda were gone. He was ashamed that Maurice was seeing him at this pathetic rock bottom, but he also felt the smallest glimmer of relief. He was finally ready to take Maurice’s original advice, given years earlier in the safe house in Fastholma, and come clean about everything.
Maurice handed him a cup of coffee. “I didn’t do it,” Charlie said mournfully. “I didn’t listen to you.”
“Start at the beginning,” Maurice instructed. “Leave nothing out. Understood?”
Charlie stared down at his slippers. Do it, he thought. Rip the fucking Band-Aid off, you chump. It was difficult to form the words. They came heavy and sluggish, nearly choking him on the way out. The first part was the hardest to admit. See, at the beginning, it was black and white: you were either a traitor, or you weren’t.
But he forced himself to keep talking, and gradually it became easier, because once you crossed that line, what was another betrayal? And another, and another? The humiliations were burned into his mind with precise clarity: every classified memo, every code name, every geographic coordinate. Head hanging mournfully, he concluded: “And I know what you’re going to say. I have to come clean. I know.”
There was a long pause.
“Actually,” Maurice said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Charlie looked up in surprise.
“This is a disaster, Charlie. You’ve done too much damage. So now you have to make this be worth something. Mary believes you work for her. That she has you under her thumb. Well: turn that around. Use that to your advantage.”
“I tried that already. She’s bulletproof.”
“You didn’t try hard enough.”
“I tried as hard as I could.”
“You think this is about you?” Maurice snapped. “You think this is about what you feel like doing? You’ve put people in danger, Charlie. Real danger. You owe it to them to fix this.”
Those ten days were the longest stretch of time they’d ever spent together. Charlie was grateful for the companionship, even if Maurice was a very particular roommate, a neatnik with even higher standards than Helen. Maurice also felt no compunction about emptying Charlie’s beer down the sink, even though it didn’t seem unreasonable for a man whose wife had just left him to want a beer.
They made an odd couple. Though Maurice was only a few years older, he acted like he was born in a different century. They sometimes talked tactics, but more often Maurice took a philosophical approach. Though many of his observations struck Charlie as uselessly vague, no better than fortune cookie wisdom from a mustached Yoda in a tweed jacket, in certain moments they cut through his mind like the clean ring of a bell.
“I’ve seen how you are with Helen,” Maurice observed, one night over dinner. “And I believe your intentions are good. You try to protect her. You don’t want to hurt her. But don’t you see, Charlie, how this strength is also a weakness? It’s a universal truth. A person’s greatest strength is always, always, also their greatest weakness.”
That night, lying awake in bed, Charlie kept thinking about it. When it came to Mary’s weaknesses, he was stumped. So, then: What was her greatest strength? She was disciplined, obviously. An excellent actress, too. And she was canny. She could see what lurked beneath another person’s exterior. Years ago, that evening in the grocery store, she had sensed the loneliness behind Charlie’s smile. She had mirrored that loneliness back to him. She had given him exactly what he craved: a person he could rescue. A problem he could fix.
On Sunday night, with a mixture of benevolence and sternness, Maurice told Charlie that a week of moping was enough. It was time to get back to work. Charlie’s sense of dread on Monday morning proved correct: most of his colleagues mumbled awkward hellos and backed away as if Charlie carried a contagious disease. Hacker, at least, was unruffled. “Sorry to hear about Helen. That sucks. You know my parents got divorced.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“My mom moved to Chicago when I was in middle school. My dad was angry for a while, and then he was sad, and then he got back to normal. And you know what? The whole thing was a relief. By the end, they were so unhappy. Maybe it sounds like bullshit, but honestly, it was the best thing for me and my brothers.”
“Huh.” Charlie swallowed. “And your father got back to normal?”
Hacker shrugged. “People get used to things.”
That afternoon, Charlie knocked on Jack’s door. He volunteered to take on extra surveillance shifts to make up for his absence. He needed to stay busy, even if it was supremely boring work. Tailing the same people day after day, week after week, rarely yielded anything. People were predictable. Charlie thought about this during one of his shifts, trailing the Soviet cultural attaché as he left the embassy at the end of the day. Most of the KGB officers in Helsinki were known to the agency. But Mary, somehow, had always managed to fly under the radar.
After those ten days, Maurice had to return to Paris and finish his teaching duties for the semester, but the question he’d planted in Charlie’s mind kept buzzing. Mary’s strength—Mary’s weakness? Charlie didn’t have the answer, but he wasn’t going to stop until he did.
In early July, in Helsinki, another knock on the door. This time Maurice was carrying a bigger suitcase. He said: “I’m going to spend the summer here. I think you need my help.”
Charlie didn’t bother contradicting him. He hadn’t made an ounce of progress. It was like trying to scale an icy mountain without a pickax: there was nothing to hold on to. As he passed his intelligence to Mary—almost all of which, at this point, concerned Afghanistan—he found himself staring at her. Where was she from? Did she have a family? Did she suffer from any human affliction whatsoever? A mystery, all of it.
Charlie kept volunteering himself for surveillance shifts. “Good man,” Jack remarked. “You’re a real team player, Cole.” Charlie would be lying if he said he didn’t derive some pleasure from this newfound reputation. But the pleasure had its limits. One week in August, he realized that he had offered to take a colleague’s Sunday overnight shift. That was Sunday evening in New York, his ironclad time for calling Helen and Amanda, which was the highlight of his week. In the past, the choice would have been difficult. Now he didn’t even hesitate. Ignoring the ghost of his old people-pleasing self, Charlie told his colleague he was sorry, but something had come up, and he couldn’t take the shift after all.
A few days later, walking home from work, Charlie thought again about that moment. He was proud of his choice, but undoubtedly Mary would say it was foolish. You never knew when the breakthrough would come. Success required constancy, and constancy required discipline, and without discipline, you would never win. To make the choice Charlie had made was tantamount to admitting defeat. Her pride would never allow such a thing.
Defeat. Something about that word snagged at his consciousness.
Defeat. He thought again of Mary’s preoccupation with Afghanistan. By now the withdrawal of Soviet troops was over. The Soviets had been careful not to use this word, defeat, though defeat it inarguably was. To ordinary Russians, the humiliation didn’t matter. Too many sons and brothers and husbands and fathers had been sacrificed to this bloody war. But would the prideful men and women of the KGB agree with this calculation? Would Mary?
No, he thought. Of course not.
At the same time, rumors were circulating through the CIA. The KGB was increasingly unhappy with Gorbachev’s conciliatory leadership. There were reports of KGB officers taking their own initiative, ignoring the Kremlin’s diktat, confident that they, not the sellout Gorbachev, knew what the country really needed. And what about Mary? The war had ended months ago, but her interest hadn’t waned one iota. Could it be that Mary’s Afghanistan fixation was more than a fixation? Could it be that she and her colleagues were preparing to do something about this humiliating defeat?
A lightning bolt of possibility ripped through his brain.
He was jogging, then he was running. He burst into the apartment, sweaty and breathless, and found Maurice in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. “I have an idea,” Charlie gasped. Once he’d caught his breath, he explained. Maurice nodded along: he’d heard those rumors, too. It struck him as entirely plausible that a faction of the KGB might, despite the Kremlin’s orders, decide to take matters into their own hands.
“She’s too proud to let something like this just happen,” Charlie said. “She would fight back. Of course she would fight back.”
He had to find the patterns within the pattern. He forced himself to slow down and study the documents he passed to Mary. Details. Places and names. The name of one particular mujahideen commander in the Panjshir Valley kept appearing: Ahmad Baraath.
Baraath was a legendary fighter, a guerrilla in the mode of Che and Ho Chi Minh. Even the Americans spoke his name with reverence. Stone cold, they said. One tough motherfucker. He featured regularly in her requests. Baraath had orchestrated dozens of ambushes on Soviet troops; he was responsible for the death of hundreds, if not thousands, of her countrymen.
In early August, Charlie sat at his desk, reading a report from Islamabad station. The Soviets were gone, but the Afghan Communist Army kept fighting, trying to preserve the increasingly fragile regime against the encroachment of the mujahideen. The report described a recent meeting between Baraath and a top Communist commander. They were seeking to negotiate a cease-fire in one particularly bloodied corner of the country.
But did the KGB really want a cease-fire? Or did they want to inflict as much harm as possible on the enemy mujahideen? The negotiations would undoubtedly take a long time, but Baraath had the respect of his countrymen. He would eventually succeed; it was just a question of when.
That night, over dinner, Charlie said: “They’re fixated on Baraath. They want him dead. That has to be it.”
“It would be a coup,” Maurice agreed. “Both substantive and symbolic.”
“But they can’t get to him. He’s too careful. Anyway, this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, is it? I mean, of course the KGB wants Baraath dead.”
“No, it isn’t. But think of it this way. You could already make an educated guess about Mary’s objectives. What you’re doing now, bit by bit, is turning those educated guesses into measurable probabilities.”
It was hard not to want to do something with this. He could stride into Jack’s office and announce that Mary was a KGB officer, and that the KGB was going after Baraath. But was this enough to make up for his transgressions? No. Definitely not. He needed, somehow, to convert this grasp into real leverage.
Patience was never his strong suit. Years ago, Helen had told him about something called the marshmallow test, an experiment concocted by some headshrinker out at Stanford. Charlie had said: “You should eat the first marshmallow. Obviously. They could be lying to you about the other marshmallow.” He was joking, but also not.
His vigorous sense of momentum was beginning to flag. Pickax in hand, he was inching his way up that icy mountain, but the work was tiring, and frustrating, and it rested entirely on him. Maurice’s company had provided the illusion of shared effort, but as he prepared to return to Paris in early September, that illusion was shattered. During their last dinner together, Maurice said: “It’ll be okay, you know. There’s always the telephone.”
“We can’t talk about this on the phone. It isn’t secure.”
“Not this, but we can talk about other things.”
Charlie sawed into his pork chop. He’d been in a bad mood for days. “Yeah. Sure. Like what?”
“Like anything. Life goes on. You can call me and tell me how the weather is. Or what you ate for dinner. Or whatever might be on your mind.” Maurice paused. “I know what it feels like, you know.”
“What what feels like?”
“Being alone.” Pause. “Being lonely.”
“I’m not lonely. I’m just being practical. I need a sounding board for this stuff. That’s all.”
Maurice glanced down; he seemed hurt. Charlie felt a sharp spasm of guilt, but he didn’t know what to say, so he stayed quiet. He drove Maurice to the airport early the next morning. For some reason, as Charlie watched him disappear through the revolving door, he had a lump in his throat. Driving away, he wondered if this was what Maurice had been talking about. This uncertain, hard-to-swallow feeling. Loneliness? He shook his head. No. Charlie was humbled, he was remorseful, he was determined—but he wasn’t lonely.
His drive home took him through the harborside district. It was a crisp morning, the water glittering in the sunlight, the trees along the promenade holding the last of their summer green. A handful of joggers, a mother pushing a stroller, a boy riding a bicycle. Up ahead, the stoplight turned yellow. Charlie pressed the brakes. While he was stopped, he looked out over the harbor. There was a couple walking north along the promenade. The woman looked familiar. Charlie leaned forward and squinted. If it weren’t for her red hair and heavy black glasses—
The light turned green. His heart was thumping. He accelerated, then a block later turned onto a side street. He parked the car and hurried back the way he came. The couple was still walking on the promenade, now a dozen yards ahead of him. Charlie quickened his pace. The woman was wearing a shapeless coat. His gaze traveled down to her shoes. Low black pumps, with scuff marks on the heel. They looked familiar.
The couple stopped and turned to face each other. She spoke; he nodded. The woman crossed the road; the man watched her disappear. Then the man turned around. He began walking south on the promenade, right toward Charlie.
In the split second before Charlie averted his gaze, he got a clear view of the man’s face. He recognized him. This man was a prominent politician. A leader of the Finnish Rural Party. A party well-known, among other things, for its anti-Soviet views.
He couldn’t believe his luck. But wasn’t this the trick to a successful recruitment? Recognizing when luck had befallen you, and then making the most of it.
Charlie spent the next month tailing the politician-turned-KGB-asset across Helsinki. His office in parliament, his well-kept home in Eira, gourmet restaurants, shops in the Design District. Matti Sorsa had expensive taste, the kind of taste that far exceeded the income of a party leader, especially the leader of the populist, anti-elite Finnish Rural Party.
One night in October, Charlie waited across the street from one of those gourmet restaurants. When the group emerged, he followed at a discreet distance. The other men gradually peeled off, one by one. Sorsa kept walking. Soon he was outside his house, standing on his doorstep, digging in his pocket for his keys. It was late. The street was deserted. “Excuse me,” Charlie said, stepping forward. “Sir? I think you dropped this.”
Sorsa turned around. Charlie was holding up a wallet. Sorsa patted his breast pocket and shook his head. “Ah, thank you, but no. I have mine here.”
“But I saw you drop it.” Charlie extended it toward him. “Just back there. I saw it with my own eyes. I didn’t imagine it, I swear.”
Sorsa looked at him warily.
“I’m sure I’m not mistaken,” Charlie insisted.
“No, no, I don’t think—”
“Because I recognized you.” Charlie stepped forward again, keeping a tight distance between them. “Mr. Sorsa, isn’t it? Matti Sorsa? Well, it’s only fair that I introduce myself, too. I’m Charlie Franklin. I’m a diplomat at the American embassy.”
Sorsa blinked.
“We at the embassy think highly of you, Mr. Sorsa. We admire what your party stands for. We especially admire how you stand up to the Soviets. I really think the two of us ought to find the time to sit down and talk.”
“Well.” He coughed. “Yes. Certainly. But you see, my schedule, I’m afraid, very complicated.”
“How about this weekend? Sunday morning? Oh no, wait.” Charlie slapped his forehead. “I forgot. Sunday mornings are no good. That’s when you meet your lovely redheaded friend. No, that’s not a good idea. You definitely shouldn’t cancel on her. Am I right?” He laughed.
“Ha,” Sorsa echoed, with a strange rictus grin.
“You’ve put yourself in a tricky situation, Mr. Sorsa. I know you didn’t mean it to be like this. It started small, right? Just a favor, here and there, for a pretty woman. And then one day you wake up and, despite the fact that you’re the leader of the country’s most prominent anti-Soviet party, you find yourself working for the KGB. I bet it’s scary. I bet you think there’s no way out.”
Sorsa was now wide-eyed, back pressed up against the door, nowhere else to go. Charlie almost felt bad. Almost.
“But there is a way out,” he continued. “And we want to help. So. Mr. Sorsa. Let’s take another look at that schedule of yours.”