Melanie Sloan relaxed on the protected balcony of her new Washington condo with a glass of wine and a view of Rock Creek shimmering through the trees in the gorge behind the building. It was early evening. An amazing number of cars were running the Rock Creek Parkway five floors below. She’d invested every cent of her generous bonus, after taxes, of course, in buying the condo, which had two bedrooms, two full baths, a living room–dining room combination, a kitchen with a breakfast counter, and this delightful balcony. Twice a day it was filled with the hum of Washington’s commuter frenzy down below, but the rest of the time it was as quiet as a tomb. Her neighbors were mostly retirees living on their government pensions. By nine thirty at night hers were probably the only windows still lit. She thought it was perfect. There were upscale markets only a few blocks away, underground parking, card security at the front doors and on the elevators, and even a twenty-four-hour concierge service that she couldn’t afford.
The condo was a big step up from the Randy Towers and a far cry from the faceless Los Angeles suburb where she’d spent just over a year creating the new and improved Melanie Sloan. Having been whisked out of Washington literally on the night of Chiang’s Big Surprise a year ago, she’d been dropped into the hands of the Agency’s discreet plastic-surgeon group, kept on retainer for those occasions which demanded the complete reconstruction of someone’s face either because of injury or, as in Melanie’s case, a need for someone to morph facially into a brand-new person. The practice occupied a large, six-story medical-arts building at the edge of one of the movie-star neighborhoods north of the city. Various other medical practices operated out of the first two floors. The middle two floors consisted of one-bedroom apartments where patients who were in for a major siege of cosmetic surgery could stay until their faces healed sufficiently as to no longer frighten people. The surgical suites occupied the final two floors. It had been a long and surprisingly painful year, the first part of which had been a blur of time, powerful painkillers, and lots of tubes and lines.
She was only now able to say that she had just about managed to expunge the more uncomfortable parts from her memory. She’d been surprised to find that real cosmetic surgery was rarely done in one fell swoop but rather in a series of operations, some of which had to be done to recover from a previous surgery that had had an undesired effect. But they’d been good, really good, Hollywood good, as she reminded herself every time she looked in a mirror these days. She now looked enough like a young Grace Kelly that some older people at LAX had done double takes as she went through security.
The best news was that she’d kept her job at the Agency, especially after someone senior had seen her “graduation” pictures. What that job entailed she would find out tomorrow morning, but apparently it was going to be something based right here in Washington, just as Allender had predicted. She wondered if they’d send her to a reception at the Chinese embassy just to test the new face. She was confident she’d pass that test, but secretly wanted to go find Dragon Eyes and see if he recognized her. She still remembered those times when he’d verbalized the thought that she’d been about to speak, but she’d resisted the temptation to call him until she found out what Langley wanted of her in her next posting. They’d forced him out, and she knew enough to realize that consorting with one of the Agency’s more prominent exiles was not the way to begin a new assignment at headquarters. Still, she smiled to herself; she’d kept his home number.
* * *
Her first day back on the job found her sitting outside the office of the DDO himself at ten in the morning. She’d been assigned to the Office of the Director for administrative purposes and then told to call on the DDO at ten. She’d turned down an offer of coffee and was reading The Washington Post on her phone when the DDO’s secretary called for her to go in. The inner office was expansive and decorated in a faintly British style with incandescent lighting only, rich rugs on the floor, and lots of brass accouterments. The chubby little man sitting behind the desk was apparently trying for the same effect, dressed as he was in light gray wool trousers, a tweed jacket, and a bow tie, and, inevitably, she thought, fooling with an ornate pipe.
“My good gracious,” he exclaimed as Melanie entered. “That’s phenomenal. How in the world do they do that?”
“With knives?” she said, stepping forward to shake hands. “I’m Melanie Sloan.”
“You are when you’re here within the fold,” he said. “On the assignment we have waiting for you your name will be—” He checked a three-by-five card on his desk. “—Virginia Singer.” He sat back down at his desk and indicated a chair for her. “I’d say you’re absolutely safe from recognition.”
“I don’t recall meeting you before, Mister McGill.”
“Oh, we haven’t met, but Preston Allender showed me your picture. You were striking then and more so now, which is perfect for your next assignment.”
“How is the good doctor?” she asked as innocently as she could. “Still scaring people with those vampire eyes?”
“I don’t actually know, my dear,” McGill said. “He retired after the black swan. I’m told he’s doing something in the export-import world, of all things. Exotic wood veneers from equally exotic places. Childhood hobby he learned while growing up in Taiwan. Are you comfortably situated here in D.C.?”
“Yes, sir, I am, thank you, courtesy of that generous bonus.”
“Oh, good,” he said. “Smart way to invest it, too. So: Here’s the program. I’m going to send you down to the Farm for some special training, something vaguely similar to what you did for the black swan. Once we see how that goes, I’ll reveal your target and put you together with young Mister Smith again.”
“Mister Smith,” she said. “I remember him.”
“Thought you might. Has anyone told you how much you look like Grace Kelly in her movie days?”
“One or two,” she replied. “I had several choices of faces, but that one jumped out at me, I have to admit. I never saw her in person, of course. Long before my time.”
“Mine too, unfortunately, but I have seen her movies. The good news is that no one could mistake you for Melanie Sloan. The bad news is that no one will forget your face once they’ve seen it.”
“Then this will be a one-time deal?”
“Clever girl,” he said, silently clapping his hands. “Very clever girl. That’s just what I meant.”
He must have pushed a button under the desk somewhere, because the office door opened and the secretary called her name. Melanie told McGill it had been a pleasure and then left the office. McGill’s secretary sent her down to the travel office to set up her stint at the Farm. On the way down she realized that McGill might be contemplating yet another black swan. Except: That program had supposedly been extinguished after what they’d done to General Chiang. She knew she’d have to be careful here; what had happened to Allender could well happen to her. Then she realized that the likelihood of losing everything increased as a function of how well the upcoming op went. Wasn’t that just perverse! Welcome back.
* * *
Two days later she went in for her first day of mission training at the Farm. She’d been told to report to Gabrielle Farrell in a branch euphemistically called Applied Physiology. Farrell turned out to be a hard-bitten-looking woman in her early fifties who was dressed in a severe gray pantsuit and wearing shoes that looked a lot like men’s brogues. Her hair was cropped short and she wore no jewelry of any kind. She had slightly protruding eyes that made it look like she was glaring and a surprisingly deep voice. She took Melanie to her private office and closed the door.
“Did they tell you anything about the mission?” she asked as she sat down behind her desk and pointed Melanie into a chair.
“Nope,” Melanie said. “The DDO told me to come down here for training, and that’s about it.”
“Carson McGill, himself, told you that?” the woman asked in a challenging tone.
“Yes,” Melanie said.
“What division do you work out of at Langley?”
“The director’s office,” Melanie said, wondering now why this woman seemed to be angry with her.
“Oh, great,” Farrell snorted. “Another goddamn prima donna from Hingham’s ‘special branch.’ Funny how all the really pretty girls end up in the director’s office.”
Melanie rolled her eyes and got up to leave but Farrell just laughed. “Hold your horses, sweet cheeks,” she sneered. “If this mission folder is accurate, you better get some thicker skin than that. Sit down.”
Melanie thought about it for a moment. She wasn’t going to put up with some kind of plebe-year indoc bullshit from this dyke or anyone else.
“Please?” Farrell said in a grating voice. “We haven’t even started yet and right now you’re wasting my time.”
“I think we’re even, then,” Melanie said.
This time Farrell really did glare. “Repeat after me, Virginia Singer or Melanie Sloan or whatever the fuck your name is: I am a lesbian.”
Melanie was taken aback. “I am not a lesbian,” she replied.
“Got shit in your ears, baby-cakes? Repeat after me: I am a lesbian.”
“I am most definitely not a lesbian.”
“But you’re gonna be,” Farrell said, softly. “If you’re gonna do this mission. That’s why you’re here, and that’s why I will be your training supervisor, because I most definitely do play for the other side.”
Melanie was surprised. This was as bad as Dragon Eyes casually telling her to disrobe. A lesbian, for God’s sake? Farrell watched her absorb the news.
“You don’t have to look so disgusted,” Farrell said. “Lesbians have to get their licks in, too, sometimes.”
After three seconds, Melanie burst out laughing despite herself and then saw Farrell grinning back at her.
“Let’s start over, shall we?” Farrell said. “Welcome to the Farm’s hall of mirrors. When we’re done with you you’re going to be just as good an actress as the one you look like. Call me Gabby.”
Melanie’s introduction to the curriculum of the Applied Physiology Department came thirty minutes later when she accompanied Gabby to a lecture in the department’s small auditorium. There were six attendees, five men and herself. She deduced that the lecturer was an Englishman as soon as he began speaking. He was also the poster child for the effete world of Old Boy public school graduates, tall and willowy, complete with supremely languid gestures, a broad Oxbridge accent, just a little too much hair, and a three-piece suit that fairly shouted bespoke. His subject was the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited, and in particular, the character portrayed by the actor Nickolas Grace, called Anthony Blanche in the show. He showed a few scenes from the series, where Blanche manages to outrage just about everyone within visual range with his bombastic homosexual antics.
“There’s ‘out-there,’ and then there’s ‘out there,’” the lecturer drawled. “No one encountering Antony, as he pronounced the name, would have any doubt whatsoever that here was most definitely a queer. And yet, many at Oxford back in the twenties and thirties would have simply smiled and said, So what? Remember, the author of the book was Evelyn Waugh, himself a homosexual when even being a homosexual was a crime in England. Anthony Blanche outed in a pub in the East End of London would have been found headless in the Thames by morning. At Oxford, he was just another self-promoting eccentric and his homosexuality was of zero consequence.
“So: How does Anthony Blanche bear on what you will learn here in the Department of Applied Physiology? I’ve been told that you are operatives who are going to have to adopt a homosexual cover in order to meet your objectives. One would think that the easiest way to do such a thing is to employ actual homosexuals, but apparently, that’s not an option. Here’s the thing. Most people who are gay are pretty much indistinguishable from people who are not gay. Except, some of the time other homosexuals can sense that another person is gay. The term of art is ‘gaydar,’ a semimythical sixth sense that allows a gay person to detect, as it were, that another person is one of ‘them.’ It is hardly infallible, but an awful lot of gay people believe in it. So, if you are not gay, and are going to pose as someone who is gay, then you will need to explore the phenomenon of gaydar, and we will show you how.
“Now if one ran into Anthony Blanche, as amazingly depicted by the openly gay actor, Nickolas Grace, one would not need gaydar, would one. But recall the scenes I showed you: Charles Ryder encountering Anthony Blanche. Was Charles gay? Waugh hints at it in one of the chapters, where he has Sebastian Flyte comment that ‘we sunbathed naked on the rooftops of the estate, and we were at times, wicked, very wicked, indeed,’ or words to that effect. Recall that Charles Ryder and Sebastian were close friends, but it was more of a case of the young and relatively impoverished Ryder being swept into the decadent orbit of the obscenely rich Lord Sebastian Flyte, whose house measured thirty-two thousand square feet, not counting the wings, situated on three thousand acres of lawns and gardens. And yet their friendship, patron to hanger-on, was not really depicted as a gay situation, nor would Ryder’s classmates have assumed that. It was more a whiff of something going on behind closed doors than overt sexual display. That’s what you’re going to be exposed to.
“The second thing you will learn here is how to avoid the inevitable ‘proof of purchase.’ If you’ve been masquerading as a gay person and your target calls the question, as it were, what do you do? We will teach you what to do, what to say, and how to get out of actually consummating a homosexual relationship, unless of course you want to, although I would assume the Agency has its own version of gaydar, what?”
There were some uncomfortable sniggers in the tiny audience.
“Now: I work for British counterintelligence. We have had some sad experiences with gay people in our organization. Historically, to be outed, found out, or compromised as a homosexual in the intelligence business led to blackmail or worse. Nowadays, the more enlightened elements of the Great Game would say: Not so much. Or, as the privileged boys at Oxford would have said: Who cares? That said, in certain parts of the world being accused of homosexuality gets you thrown from the roof of a six-story building. Don’t let so-called modern and enlightened views of gender equality—the end of the he-she-it labels—lull you into a complacent view of the danger associated with this particular label. Let’s watch some more movies.”
At the end of the lecture, Melanie accompanied Gabby back to her office.
“What’d you think of that?” Gabby asked as she handed Melanie a bottle of water. “And, by the way, I’m going to call you Virginia because that’s going to be your name in this op.”
“No fucking way, is my first reaction,” Melanie said. “My first op of this sort they wanted me to vamp a Chinese general. I give good vamp. But the physical realities of a lesbian relationship just leaves me cold. No offense, Gabby—this isn’t some religious bias.”
“None taken, Virginia,” Gabby said. “What sort of men do you prefer? I know that’s personal but I need to know.”
“Older men. Sophisticated, interesting men, men who’re amusing, like to have fun, and who are not on the hunt for a wife and kids.”
“Is there anyone now we have to think about?”
Melanie smiled. “There’s one but he’s well out of reach, I think. I may make a play one day, but…”
“Somebody in the Company, perhaps?”
“Not anymore,” Melanie said.
“Okay, then here’s what we need to do with you. You’ve had a facial remake and it’s drop-dead gorgeous. In the pantheon of sexual objects, unattainability can be a serious amplifier of desire, as in the millions of young men who fell in love with Grace Kelly—fancy that!—after seeing a couple of her movies. She seems to be the perfect woman, thanks to the gallons of illusion they pour over the silver screen. In our world, my world, however, that phenomenon is just a bit different. The most exciting game of all is when we meet another woman who doesn’t know she harbors latent homosexual desires. She’s beautiful, sweet, nice, friendly, soft, a little demure, possibly a bit fragile, and not the least bit gay. But like those Grace Kelly fans, we can imagine the possibility of softly enveloping the dear little thing and introducing her to her real role in life.”
“Okay, I get that,” Melanie said.
“Good, because that’s what we’re going to teach you how to be, with perhaps just a fillip of discreet tease included.”
“And also that bit about how to avoid the inevitable ‘proof of purchase,’ right?”
“Of course, my dear. Of course.”