Three hours later, Preston Allender walked out through the gleaming marble lobby of the headquarters building, escorted by no fewer than four security guards and one of McGill’s aides. It was all acceptably dignified, and not some kind of perp walk. He’d turned over his pack of building passes, and, even more important, his Langley headquarters parking permit. Someone from the security division would come by later that afternoon to retrieve the secure telephony equipment from his house. HR owed him a packet of paperwork that would finalize his retirement from the federal senior executive service. He was amused to watch the reaction of people coming and going in the lobby. Word traveled fast in the headquarters building. “Dragon Eyes is out.” He could almost hear the collective sighs of relief in certain offices.
He resisted the temptation to pat the memorandum folded into his coat pocket. He knew that, in reality, the Agency could always renege and then deny they’d ever agreed to anything. On the other hand, he wasn’t too worried about that. The letter spoke mostly about retirement pay and benefits, a coded promise to protect Sloan, and his own acquiescence to taking early retirement in the “best interests of the Agency.” There was no mention of black swans or Allender’s part in creating one for the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
As he drove his elderly Mercedes out through the heavily defended gate complex, he resisted the temptation to lower his window and shout free at last! at the gate guards. He hadn’t realized how tired he’d become of all this BS, aggravated by the growing certainty that, for the past several years, the Agency had been sweeping against an implacably hostile and rising tide and doing so in the interests of a government and people who didn’t really care, unless it was in aid of preventing another demented religious nut from getting one through security.
He’d e-mailed Carol Mann, his own EA down at the Farm, with the news. She’d already heard, which for some reason made him laugh out loud, startling the office staff. Interestingly, she’d predicted that he’d be back, and sooner than he might realize, especially with a presidential election looming next year. Given the current administration and the prospects for any major changes, he told her his ever coming back was highly unlikely. She loyally bet him five bucks, and then informed him she was going to retire as well.
Once home he reached for the Scotch before he remembered that it was still early afternoon. And your problem is? his whiskey devil wanted to know. That was when it hit him: He was fifty-five years old, home from work and out of a job at two in the afternoon, and there wasn’t a single soul he could talk to about it. Admittedly, it wasn’t as if he’d soon be homeless—one of the advantages of staying a bachelor all those years was that there was no clutch of horrified dependents sitting in front of him this afternoon wondering what was going to become of them. The only times he’d even thought about money had been when the bank called to tell him that his direct-deposit checking account had reached its FDIC insurance limit. Again. But, still.
He stood by the front windows in his study, staring idly out at the people walking by on the sidewalk and the seemingly endless stream of traffic all going urgently somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Had he screwed up with his decision to remain an outlier all these years? On balance, he didn’t think so. In the course of vetting just about everyone of consequence in Agency management over the past twenty-five years, he’d seen just about everything that could possibly go wrong in a person’s career: the most unlikely people conducting stupidly illicit affairs or living secret sex lives; middle-grade officials struggling with huge money problems caused by gambling debts or a prescription-medicine problem; the effect on an officer’s performance of a surprise divorce or a gravely ill spouse; the usual alcohol addictions, or just the overwhelming financial burdens of having children in an age where four years at even a public university left parents, graduates, or both drowning in debt. His own career had given him some deep insights into the expression that family is everything.
He’d felt he had much more in common with the Clandestine Service operatives who had to come see him every time they rotated back through Washington from an overseas assignment. Many of them had given up on trying to maintain a marriage or even a special friend, given that their service required them to disappear for months on end, often under deep cover, where homecoming meant dropping your bags in a temporary rental or an Agency apartment with all the hearth-and-home attributes of an empty double-wide. Some of them did manage the double life, a spouse and maybe even kids who became very independent people. Many these days didn’t even try, because anyone with half a brain knew that, to create a middle-class family success story in contemporary America, it took two full-time parents with really good jobs or careers for them to even have a chance.
No, all things considered, he was right where he needed to be at this juncture in his life. He could now literally do anything he wanted to and not have to think about how that decision might impact anyone else. He would have preferred to have gone out on his own initiative and not be forced to leave because of bungling at the top level of the Company, but: What was the saying? No good deed goes unpunished?
He’d had to leave because his op had succeeded beyond expectations. He’d hit one of the Agency’s most dangerous enemies hard and where it counted. In these times of nonconfrontational, apologetic crypto-isolationism and multilateral diplomacy über alles, a sudden strike at one of the nation’s most formidable enemies was apparently a major faux pas, so much so that he would not have been too surprised if the Chinese didn’t approach him one day with an offer to join them. They were clever that way, the bastards. Plus they were always willing to indulge in something few Americans had ever mastered except possibly the Founding Fathers: They were willing to take a long, patient view.
Hell’s bells, he thought. I think I will have that Scotch. It’s not like anyone’s going to call with an urgent problem.
Attaboy, his devil whispered approvingly. Why not two?
* * *
A little after nine, Melanie Sloan called from the West Coast. The tech division had retrieved their special phones and the Agency’s computer terminal, so he had to remind her they were on an open line.
“I just heard,” she said. “WTF, over?”
“How goes the nipping and snipping?” he asked, ignoring her question. “Like your new looks?”
“Right now I look like a raccoon accidentally mated with a woodchuck and then got run over,” she said. “An ugly woodchuck, who’s toying with an addiction to Blessed Mother hydrocodone. They asked if I wanted to become a black woman. Can you believe that?”
“Now there’s a trick question if I ever heard one,” he said. “On the other hand, the Chinese would never look twice at you—they’re the original racists. Can they really do that?”
“Apparently someone in the Company developed an injection that can change the pigments in the body’s largest organ.”
“Hunh?”
“The skin,” she said, triumphantly.
“Ri-i-ght,” he said. “I knew that. A thousand years ago in med school. Can they reverse it?”
“Now who’s asking trick questions?”
He laughed.
“What will you do now?”
“Still thinking and drinking,” he said. “Early days.”
“I’ve met some people who say they’re important in the Hollywood scene,” she said. “I’ll bet they could find a use for those eyes of yours. You’d make a phenomenal vampire.”
He laughed again. “I’m sure I would,” he said. “But I’ve had a lifelong fascination with trees, or rather, the woods and veneers they produce. Some of them are so rare that I have the only specimens in this country.”
“Cool,” she said. “So—import-export? Artwork? Museums?”
“Try Washington decorators,” he said, and this time she laughed.
“Oh, that’s perfect,” she said. “And lucrative, too. Would you travel?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know a lot of people who spend time in faraway places. I can call in some favors, I think.”
“I’ll just bet you can,” she said. “Need an assistant, Doctor?”
“I think they have plans for you, my dear,” he said. Shit, he thought. My dear. I’m starting to sound like McGill.
“What kind of plans?”
“Discreet plans.”
“Oh, right. Well, eventually I hope to be back in the land of guns and posers. Perhaps you can show me your etchings one evening.”
“Veneers,” he said, but smiled to himself. Etchings, indeed.
“What I said,” she replied. “Keep well, Doctor. You never know when opportunity might knock. So to speak.”
“I will do that, Melanie Sloan. But keep your eyes peeled, okay?”
“They’ve been peeled by professionals,” she said. “Right now they’re swollen shut, but I’ll try. Who or what should I be watching for?”
“One of us, maybe?”
She had no answer for that, so he wished her well and said good-bye.
He felt a smidgen of regret, which surprised him. Listen to you, he said to himself. She’s in her thirties. You’re in your fifties. She’s been trained in how to lay waste to an entire room full of unwitting men. You’ve been trained to scare people. How’s that for a match?