Charlie was discharged from the hospital with a bandage-wrapped torso, a bottle of painkillers, and instructions to rest. Jack drove them back to the station in silence. The route took them along the harbor, where the setting sun scattered gold coins across the water. Charlie held his bloody coat in his lap. Hacker was dead. And nothing, no words or actions, could ever put this right.
When they arrived at the station, Jack had him wait in the conference room. Charlie sat with his head in his hands, palms pressed against his eyes. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Hacker died. (Since Hacker was killed. Since Charlie got Hacker killed.) Head down, Charlie noticed his belt. He looked up. He noticed the brass light fixture on the ceiling. He noticed the chair he was sitting in. Belt, ceiling, chair. He should do it. Stand up. Do it. It would be better for everyone.
But you know you won’t, a voice in his head taunted him. Because you’re a coward. You’ve always been a coward.
When Jack reappeared, he was holding a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He slid them across the table. “Drink,” he said. “Eat. Direct order. I need you to focus right now.”
Charlie forced himself to swallow the bitter coffee, chew the dry bread. Jack said: “It looks like the people in critical condition are going to pull through. That’s the good news. That’s the only goddamn good news in this whole clusterfuck. Now listen to me, Cole. You got played. And a whole lot of people died last night because you got played.”
“I need to talk to them,” he said. “Hacker’s parents.”
“No.”
“I need to tell them. I need to—”
“You need nothing, you selfish bastard. These poor people just lost their son. You call them and you start crying and suddenly you’re making it about you.”
“Seppanen. At least let me talk to Seppanen.”
Five Finns had been killed. A bloodbath. Seppanen would be furious, and Charlie wanted that fury. He wanted to be shouted at, punched, shot, anything. He wanted to not be in this clean and quiet room, with his coffee and his sandwich, with his living, breathing lungs.
“Pull it together, Cole,” Jack barked. “Flagellate yourself if you want, but do it on your own time. We’re exposed. This is a major fucking problem. Got it? We need to figure out what happened so it doesn’t get worse. This whole thing was a trap. Sorsa lied to you, he tricked you, and that means our people are in danger.”
Charlie shook his head vehemently. “Sorsa didn’t know anything about Särkkä. I made that part up. Sorsa didn’t lie to me. I lied. I made it up because of her. Mary. Remember when I told you that she tried to recruit me, back in 1985?”
Jack narrowed his gaze. “But you knew who she was.”
“Nope. I was clueless. She came up to me in the grocery store and she flirted with me and one day she took me home and then she—”
“You’re a goddamn CIA agent,” he interrupted. “You had to know.”
“I thought she was just some secretary. She—”
“Stop.” Jack stood up. “Stop talking. Right now.”
“I don’t know why. Loneliness, I guess. Vanity, too. This pretty young secretary.” Charlie grimaced. “I took the bait. I fell for it. It’s so much worse than you realize.”
Jack was now pacing back and forth. “No. No. That isn’t going to work.”
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault. I’ve spent the last three years under her thumb, and I wanted to escape. I wanted payback. But I got it wrong. She didn’t want to kill Baraath. We could have done something. We could have arrested the Russians and stopped the exchange, but I decided to push our luck.”
“No,” Jack shouted. “That’s not what happened.”
Charlie blinked, baffled. “Aren’t you listening to me?”
“Yes, Cole. Yes, I am fucking listening to you. And now you listen to me.” He shook his head. “That isn’t what happened. Okay? Mary tried to recruit you. Sure. But you saw through it. And then, later, you wanted revenge, and it became emotional, and you lost sight of things, and stretched the truth, and it ended in disaster.”
Belatedly, Charlie began to see what was happening.
“No,” he said. “No! That’s not—”
“That’s not what? I’m trying to save whatever tiny scrap of dignity this station has left, because you destroyed the rest of it. I’m trying to protect the others from your rot. What the fuck is wrong with you, Cole? It’s not enough to destroy yourself? You want to destroy the rest of us, too?”
“She won! I’m telling you, she beat me! This was my fault. This was my fault. This has nothing to do with the rest of you!”
“Shut up, Cole! Just shut the fuck up! You have no idea how serious this is. So listen to me. Listen to me. We’re dealing with a heap of shit. I don’t have time for this moaning and groaning. So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to sit down, and you’ll have exactly three minutes. You can waste those three minutes talking about how guilty you feel. Or you can use those three minutes to tell me how to stop the bleeding. Which operations you’ve compromised. Which agents we need to pull from the field. Got it?”
Jack took a deep breath. Then he sat down and clasped his hands. After a few seconds of silence, his expression of rage dissolved into perfect calm. Charlie stared at him. This man was a sociopath. He was kidding, right? One of his deputies had just confessed to spying for the Russians for the past three years. Jack glanced at his watch. “Two minutes and fifty-five seconds,” he said. “Fifty-four. Fifty-three.”
Maybe he wasn’t kidding.
Of every outcome he had imagined, Charlie had utterly failed to imagine this.
“Charlie,” Jack said placidly. “I’m trying to keep our people safe. I’m asking for your help with that. I know you want to do the right thing.”
“I don’t…” But his voice was breaking. He couldn’t accept this. He couldn’t accept the idea that this, the worst thing he had ever done, was going to be swept under the rug.
But maybe Jack was right. Maybe he knew best. What was Charlie going to trust in this moment? His own instinct, which had gotten him here? Or the instinct of the man in charge, the man who had never done anything half as despicable as what Charlie had done?
He spent the night in the conference room, slumped over the table. After his confession he’d slept in fits, dreaming of arrest, of metal cuffs digging into flesh. Now it was morning, and Jack was there, sliding another cup of coffee across the table, and he was saying: “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
Charlie would be shipped back to Langley. He would be transferred out of the Directorate of Operations, shelved in a dull desk job where he would never again have contact with a foreign agent, where he would no longer have the power to get anyone killed, where he would be kept far away from any valuable intelligence. He would spend the rest of his life within the prison of the agency, because Jack wasn’t going to let Charlie unleash his stupidity on the rest of the world, but he would be nothing more than a bureaucrat. This was the agreement; this was his punishment.
The Helsinki newspapers were already writing about Särkkä. The Americans would let leak that one of their own, a man named Charlie Franklin, had been killed in the firefight. If Mary had told anyone at the KGB about Charlie, they would believe him dead, too. And given that Mary had been killed on Särkkä, this meant that only two people in the world knew about what Charlie had done, and both of them were sitting in this room.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” Jack said. “I hope to God you weren’t stupid enough to tell anyone else about this. You didn’t tell Helen, did you?”
Meekly, Charlie shook his head.
“Good,” Jack said. “Maurice is here. I called him yesterday. He’s going to help you get through this. You’ll see, Charlie. It’s going to be okay.”
Maurice had come straight from the airport. He offered to call a taxi to take them home, but Charlie shook his head. He’d rather walk. They passed several blocks in silence. “Was it a trap, then?” Maurice eventually asked. “Was she expecting you?”
“No. Nothing about it was a trap. Mary didn’t know we were there. And she didn’t want to kill Baraath. That was never her plan.”
“So then what—”
“It was me. I waited too long. Awad must have told Baraath about our conversation. And maybe Baraath was glad. The Afghans could get their weapons, we could make our arrests, they could keep their money. Baraath was probably wondering when we were going to come out. So he provoked us into coming out. I kept waiting,” Charlie said. “I wanted to be right.”
“Oh, Charlie.”
Another stretch of silence.
Then Maurice said: “But Mary was killed, in the end?”
In Charlie’s mind, a movie of that night. Mary crumpled in the snow. The other people on Särkkä had seen her carried limply onto the boat, seen the boat roar away from the dock. But then what? In one version of the movie: the Russians check her pulse, find it stopped, confer among themselves. They turn the boat out to sea, and her body plunges into the water. In another version of the movie: the Russians check her pulse, find it persisting, confer among themselves. They continue to shore. At the Soviet embassy, a doctor tends to her wounds. She lives. She goes back to Moscow.
But Jack had decided that she was dead. And even if she wasn’t, the man named Charlie Franklin was dead. Jack had decided that this would suffice.
They were almost home. He found that he couldn’t look at Maurice.