In the end, the boat made it back to Helsinki without incident. Amanda accompanied the Semonovs on their flight to Washington, where they would be formally debriefed. After that, they would be released into their life in New York, where a modest apartment and a well-padded bank account awaited them. The agency had pulled some strings, arranging a job for Chiara at a publishing house. Semonov would be kept on in a fashion, working as a translator and a loosely defined friend of the agency.
At Langley, the day after the Semonovs had been safely delivered, Director Gasko congratulated Amanda on a job well done. “Seems like you’re on a hot streak,” he said. “Although, I’ll admit, I’m surprised you wanted to pull such a productive asset from the field. I got the sense he was really hitting his stride in Moscow.”
“Actually, sir. About that.”
On the flight back from Helsinki, she debated the order of operations. Did she owe it to her father to talk to him first, to hear what he had to say before involving the agency? But if she did, could she trust him not to run? He’s a different kind of person, Maurice had said. And she wanted to believe this. The man she knew—who dressed up as a pirate to hand out candy on Halloween, who cared so tenderly for his garden, who cajoled Lucy into barking hello on their Sunday phone calls—could he really wake up every day and decide to betray his country?
But of course he could. Anyone could. And so she had no choice but to talk to Gasko first.
Amanda continued: “We had strong evidence the GRU was beginning to suspect the asset. So we had to move fast, and get him out. Komarovsky had warned Senator Vogel about the possibility of leaks. He claimed there was a mole in the agency, which was why the senator kept the intelligence from us.”
“Ah. And Bob fell for that old chestnut?”
“The thing is, Komarovsky actually gave him a name. Apparently the senator thought there was some credence to this possibility. And so, last year, when all of this began, I decided to… see about that credence. I know I should have told you sooner. But this situation… It was delicate.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You know the person?”
“Well, yeah. You could say that.”
While mentally rehearsing, Amanda had decided that she would admit to wrongdoing—she had done wrong, after all—but that she would stop short of apologizing. What she had done could very well result in a demotion, or transfer, or even firing. But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered: Do I really regret this? Am I really sorry for this? If I rewound the tape, would I have done things differently? And if not, then why would she say otherwise?
After she spoke her father’s name, Gasko’s expression flattened into unreadability, followed by several seconds of silence. Then he said: “I suppose you considered that this was just a provocation. That your father’s name was deliberate misinformation. For you, personally.”
“I did, but Vogel had written down my father’s name long before I ever got involved. I should have recused myself the moment I found out, but I couldn’t. I had to see if there was anything to it.”
She took a deep breath. The only thing to do was to get on with it: to tell him the story of what happened in Helsinki, the honeypot, the trapping and leveraging, how the infamous Särkkä bloodbath was the fruit of his betrayal. And had it ended at Särkkä? Or was he, in fact, still working as a Russian mole? Amanda wasn’t sure. Her father had over thirty years to come clean. The fact that he hadn’t was, obviously, cause for suspicion. Then again, Charlie Cole wasn’t much more than a PR flak these days. He had no access to classified intelligence. If he was a mole, he wasn’t a very useful mole.
“So I’d put the odds at fifty-fifty,” she said. “But, obviously, I’m not objective. Someone else needs to take it from here. But before that happens, I’d like to ask for something. I want the chance to talk to him first. To be the one to bring him in. I can wear a wire so that you know nothing strange is afoot. Actually, I want to wear a wire.”
Gasko stared at her. It was awfully rich of her to make these demands. After concealing the truth for so long, how could Gasko be certain of her loyalties? He didn’t owe her anything. The longer the silence lasted, the more she was tempted to cave, to say, Never mind, bad idea, I’ll see myself out, but she kept holding on, and finally, finally, Gasko shook his head.
“Jesus Christ, Cole.” He shook his head heavily. “Jesus Christ. What a clusterfuck. But you know what? I should have known. The win was too clean. It’s never this clean. Not when you’re dealing with the Russians. Just when you think you’ve closed out the balance, gotten that fucking ball out of the fucking court, it comes right back to fuck you over, doesn’t it? There’s always another twist to the story.”
She blinked. Gasko seemed to assume that she knew what he was talking about. He shook his head again. Then: “You said fifty-fifty? You mean that?”
“Oh—well, yeah. Yes. I do.”
“Okay. Fine. If it’s fifty-fifty, I’m okay with you going to talk to him. But I’m taking you at your word, Cole. If the odds are actually, say, ninety-ten that he’s their man, well, then, obviously this move is a whole lot riskier. But yeah, we’ll do the wire. And backup in case he tries to run. I’m taking you at your word—you’ve been killing yourself this past year, I can see that, Cole; if anyone’s earned that trust it’s you—but just because I trust you doesn’t mean I think you’re necessarily capable of putting a bullet in your old man if the situation demands. No offense.” He smiled grimly. “You’re tough, but you’re not that tough.”
In Helsinki, Jack told Charlie to come up with an explanation. He was burned out, he missed his family, he wanted to return to America. “Or whatever,” he said. “I don’t give a shit. Point is, you’re being transferred out of the DO at your request. At your request. This was your decision and no one can think otherwise. Got it?”
Thus began the strangest time in his life. It was hard in a way that was different from Helsinki. He had endured his time with Mary by imagining that he might someday free himself from the lie. But this lie, the one he was currently living, would be with him for the rest of his life. And yet—
And yet the world kept spinning. When he returned to the States in February 1990, he didn’t have anywhere to live, but Raines, his friend from college, had an extra room in his apartment in Fairfax. He was completing a neurosurgery fellowship at a nearby hospital, and his wife had just filed for divorce, too, and didn’t these two sorry bachelors both need the company?
At Langley he was a beginner again, learning the politics and procedures for a completely different branch of the agency. Not to mention the broader changes at the agency, because the Cold War was over. The Soviet Empire was fracturing. The KGB was dissolving. Russia and America were becoming friends. Friends? What movie was he living in? He ate microwave dinners, wore mismatched socks, left the toilet seat up. In time, Raines was the one who shook him out of his pathetic malaise. He told Charlie that if he ever wanted to get laid again, he really needed to lose that weight. So he started playing tennis as a guest at Raines’s club. A group played a few mornings a week, and while they were a little starchy, these doctors and lawyers and professors and the like, they were nice enough, and Charlie knew that this was good for him, meeting people beyond the hothouse of the CIA.
On weekends he took the train to New York. He spent every Saturday with Amanda, taking her to the Central Park Zoo and the Temple of Dendur and the Mister Softee trucks that dotted the neighborhood. In August, he requested a week off work. He and Amanda went to stay with his parents in Greenwich. His father was frostily silent, Charlie having proven to be a quitter, therefore letting down the Cole lineage. His mother was silent, too, but more out of fear of contradicting her husband. Charlie found, to his surprise, that he didn’t really care. He wasn’t here for himself; he was here for Amanda, and Amanda was delighted by deep summer in the suburbs, by the lush green lawns and cicada song, by the crinkle-cut french fries from the snack bar at the town pool.
He often wondered why no one said anything. His father was right, after all. People like Charlie didn’t go through those years of training and dues-paying just to quit. But in the decades that followed, no one in his life asked the most obvious question: What happened in Helsinki?
The silence felt like a conspiracy, or maybe like a test. There were moments when he came close. In 1991, when Maurice moved to New York City, and Charlie was convinced that Maurice and Helen were finally going to become A Thing, and he realized that he had to tell Helen before Maurice did; but then it turned out Helen had fallen in love with Sidney Wilson, and that Maurice and Helen really were just friends. In 1993, during the dedication ceremony for Hacker’s star, when Charlie met Hacker’s mother and father, and told them how much he had loved their son, and said it was his fault, and began to cry; but then Hacker’s father stepped forward and hugged him, and the strength of his embrace made it so that Charlie could no longer speak. And in 1995, when he testified about Ahmad Baraath before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Senator Vogel seemed to sense that Charlie was withholding something; but then they adjourned for the day, and he was sent home, and he lost his nerve. And in 2002, when Jack was nominated to become director of the agency, and Charlie was so appalled by this idea that he almost went back to the Senate to volunteer his testimony about what had happened in Helsinki; but then it turned out that Jack had overseen the torture of some Sandinistas in the early 1980s and that was enough to sink his prospects. (A few years later, when Jack died of lung cancer, more stories came out. The Sandinistas, not to mention the Särkkä cover-up, were just the tip of the iceberg.)
And in 2011, when his father died, and Charlie stood up to give the eulogy, and he thought about how satisfying it would be to ruin this distinguished moment with his confession, how satisfying to shock the distinguished people filling the pews of Greenwich’s distinguished Christ Church; but then he saw his mother in the first pew, frail and bent with loss, and realized he couldn’t do that to her.
And when Amanda decided to join the agency, and he knew how good his daughter would be at this, how this work would both harness and amplify her strengths, and he thought that she ought to know this about her father, ought to know of his mistakes so she was never tempted to do the same; but then he realized that Amanda’s love mattered more to him than anything in the world, and risking that love was the one risk he could never take.
And so many years later, when Jenny Navarro found those papers, and the universe was finally sending him the message, telling him to do it, to just fucking do it, and he thought about all those times he’d edged right up to the cliff, and he thought that maybe this was it, that maybe it was finally time to stop running.
But he was scared. And he panicked. And in his panic, he called the person he loved most in the world, and only later, only when it was irreversible, did he realize what he had set in motion.
And now that person was sitting across the street, the engine of her car ticking and cooling in the shade of an oak tree, checking to make sure the recording device concealed beneath her shirt was working. She glanced in the rearview mirror. A Northern Virginia Electric van was parked down the block. Another version of this van was around the corner, covering the back door.
She felt strangely calm about the whole thing. She walked up the redbrick path to the front door and rang the doorbell. Inside, Lucy started barking. A minute later, her father opened the door. “Someone’s happy to see you,” he said, his finger hooked in Lucy’s collar. “Come on in.”
Inside, he let go of Lucy’s collar and they hugged. The embrace, too, felt strangely normal. Charlie led the way into the kitchen. “Coffee?” he said. “I’ll make a fresh pot.”
Amanda glanced around the kitchen. She noticed the waffle iron, the mixing bowl, the maple syrup. “Are waffles a regular weekday thing for you?” she asked.
“How about I get this going, and you set the table for us.” As he scooped out the coffee grounds, he continued: “I saw you leaving the office last night. I was just pulling out of the parking lot when you came through the door. You hadn’t told me you were in town, and you always tell me when you’re in town. And, also, it was how you looked.”
Laying out the fork and knives, she paused. “How I looked?”
“You looked relieved. So I figured you’d probably gone ahead and done it. And I figured you’d probably want to break the news to me yourself, and that you might be stopping by.” His determined smile, she could see, was entirely for her benefit. “Hence the waffles.”
Amanda blinked. So he had known. He had always known what she was going to do. She was overcome by a surge of compassion. What must the last twelve hours have been like for him? Forget the last twelve hours. What about the last nine months? “Dad,” she said, her throat aching. “You must hate me.”
“That would be impossible.”
“But you… You asked me to do it, but I just… I couldn’t.”
“I know. And I never should have asked you.”
“You must hate me,” she repeated.
“Honey, no. There’s nothing you could ever do that would make me hate you.”
He was so calm. Maybe he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. There were traitors from the Cold War who were still behind bars. Charlie would never survive prison. He was old, he was weak. He would die in prison, just like Jakob. What the fuck! This was her father, and she was shipping him off to prison? What the fuck was wrong with her!
Charlie saw the horror dawning on her face. “Amanda. Amanda. It’s okay. Sit down. Take a breath.” He steered her toward a chair. “I promise you, it’s okay. I think, on some level, I’m actually relieved.”
“But, Dad,” she said. “Why?”
He understood the question she was asking. “I don’t know. You’d think three decades would be enough time to figure it out, but I never did. I’m not like you and your mother. I’m not smart enough to understand myself.” He turned to the window above the sink. In profile, he looked especially old. The drooping earlobes, the blood on his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. The waffle iron began to hiss, interrupting his silent contemplation. He shook his head. “It’s ready. Are you hungry?”
“Dad, no. This isn’t the time for waffles.”
“Why not?” He lifted the lid. “If this is my last meal as a free man, I might as well go out with a bang.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed, as he ladled out the batter. He looked up. “I’m kidding. Honey! It’s only a joke.”
The heh sound she made came more from fear than amusement. Charlie made the same sound. Heh. Heh heh heh. She couldn’t tell if he was actually laughing, whether he actually found this amusing, or if he was just as terrified as her. But this was so incredibly absurd. Her father, the traitor, her father, the Russian mole, making waffles, cracking jokes about prison, laughing or pretending to laugh. It was so incredibly absurd that it caused her to laugh, this time for real. This, she thought, has got to be the weirdest fucking moment of my life.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’ll have a waffle. Why not.”
They were quiet again as they waited for it to cook. The sweet fragrance of vanilla, the wisps of steam in the sunlight, the occasional snuffle from Lucy, sleeping in her bed. Amanda would have been happy to sit here for a while, to simply exist in this room with this person she loved, to let the release of the truth sink in—but she was aware, too, that the drivers of the panel vans were listening. And that if she didn’t get on with it, they would break through the door and finish this for her. She cleared her throat. “I went to see Maurice the other week. He told me what happened in Helsinki.”
Charlie nodded. “I figured you’d talk to him eventually.”
“And I told Gasko everything. Mary. Särkkä. I didn’t leave anything out.”
He lifted the first waffle free. “So, then. Does Gasko think I’m still working for the Russians?”
“I told him the truth. Which is that I… that I don’t know.”
His back was turned to her as he ladled out the next waffle. At her words, he seemed to stiffen. Oh God, she thought. Oh no. No. No. He was avoiding her gaze on purpose. Writing his script, mapping his escape.
Or was he? When she looked more closely, she saw that his posture had changed. The slightest droop to his neck, the tiniest curve to his spine. This wasn’t a man getting ready to flee or fight. This was her father, hunched over the waffle iron, wondering how on earth he was supposed to face her.
Not just the last twelve hours; not just the last nine months. She realized, suddenly, how hard the last thirty-odd years must have been. She felt so sad. And yet her sadness, and his sadness, didn’t mitigate the betrayal. The sadness would never bring back the dead. And she knew—she knew because she came from him—that what he was feeling would be a thousand times worse. There was nothing she could offer, no words, no actions, to lessen his pain. And, even if there was, there would be no kindness in that. There are things in life you go through with other people, and there are others you go through alone; and she thought to herself, Why is it so hard for us to accept this?
“I’m so sorry.” She could barely speak. “Dad. I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head, his back still turned. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
“No. I mean, I’m sorry you were alone with this for so long.”
After a beat, he turned around and gave her a watery smile. “Here we are, in any case.”
Charlie slid a plate in front of her. She wasn’t hungry in the slightest, but she drowned her waffle in syrup and took a bite. They were crispy on the outside, tender in the middle, reassuringly sweet, the way he knew she liked them.
“Well,” he said. “That was nice of them. Letting you bring me in. You can tell them I’m not going to run. Although I assume you have backup, just in case. So how should we do it? Front door, hands up, that sort of thing?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Well. Good. That’s a testament to how much they trust you. So do you…” He cleared his throat. “Do you know what’s going to happen when we get there?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to be involved.”
“Right. Right. Obviously.”
A few minutes later, after Charlie had scraped his picked-at waffle into the trash, rinsed the plates, and loaded the dishwasher, he said: “Honey, before we go, can I ask you a favor?”
He looked across the room to where Lucy was snoozing, her pinkish belly rising and falling, her black fur gleaming in the sun. He loved her. He loved her in a way that was hard to fathom. Every day, she would bump his leg and gaze at him with those soft black eyes, asking to be fed, to be walked, to have her belly rubbed, to have her ears scratched. And Charlie did those things without fail. From the moment he brought her home, eleven years earlier, they had loved each other. They had kept each other company, which was, he had belatedly learned, often the same thing. He was blinking. “Can you make sure…”
But he broke off, unable to continue. He went over and placed his hand on Lucy’s soft belly. She lifted her head, blinked sleepily, then lowered her head back to the bed.
Lucy felt no cause for alarm. Why should she? This was the time that Charlie always left in the morning, right as she was beginning her nap. Later, a woman would come to take her for a midday walk. Then she would have her afternoon nap, and before she knew it, he would be walking back through the door. Her senses were aware of what was happening, the lifting of his hand, the retreat of his footsteps, the click of the closing door, the rumble of the starting car, but she felt no sadness at these things. There was no reason to miss what always came back. The sun was warm, and her bed was soft, and her belly was full, and until he returned she would dream an endless dream of rabbits scampering through open fields, and wide blue skies that stretched farther than the eye could possibly see.