It was a bluebird day, and the last moment of American innocence. Living was easy, money was flowing, democracy was flowering, the Cold War was over, and the United States was luxuriating in a new type of peace on earth: one that felt—as hard as it is to comprehend today—lasting.
Each day transitioned into the next so peacefully and predictably that the era’s conceit was that we’d finally arrived at “the end of history”—in a good way, believe it or not.
The first shaky baby-steps to the new world order had been taken in 1982, when Ronald Reagan had finally agreed with the Soviet Union to freeze construction of all new nuclear weapons, by invoking the old Russian motto of Doveryai no Proveryai, meaning: “Trust, but verify.” He meant that he’d only trust the Russians if they could prove they deserved it, with facts and figures.
Looking back, it might seem easy to predict that Soviet Russia would soon disband, but at that time their politics were almost completely unpredictable. Americans in both parties thought Reagan’s deal was doomed. The left believed that trust based on verification wasn’t trust at all, and the right thought that there was no such thing as trusting an enemy. They were both wrong. It worked, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
But that era was about to end. Trust, and the predictability that almost always accompanies it, would be over in a few seconds.
A colleague and I were standing in front of a food cart in the Wall Street district, just outside our towering regional HQ. It was eight forty-five in the morning, but I was ready for my second round of coffee, because I’d come to work at five a.m., excited just to be there at such a great time in the long American experiment of trusting only the leaders who act in our own personal best interests: a political philosophy that we call democracy.
I heard a thud.
It looked like a small plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. My colleague said, “Poor guy must have had a heart attack.”
“At least it’s not terrorism,” I said.
We rushed back up to our offices, where almost everyone was standing at the windows, transfixed.
A fire truck from a station below screamed toward the scene, and it felt as if we had front-row seats to an inspiring display of heroism that would carry the country to even greater heights.
But five of the firefighters that I saw in the truck would soon be dead, along with hundreds of others.
Debris started to fall from the tower. But as it fell, I realized with a sick feeling that it was people, because their arms and legs were flailing.
Soon a fireball shot through the South Tower. I yelled, “Oh my God—it’s terrorism!” and looked behind me. The room was empty.
Ten agents soon returned, all of them former marines, like me, and somebody said that truck bombs were headed for our building, which was one of the tallest in the neighborhood, and also a federal outpost.
“We gotta evacuate!” I shouted. I was a relatively new recruit at the New York City field office, in a room filled with senior agents, but this was not the time for concern about overstepping authority.
“No!” one of the agents cried. “If it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go!”
I’d long considered that agent to be remarkably reasonable, but his emotion-driven exhortation was reckless and foolhardy. So I shot it down and helped organize a group that ran to an FBI command post at the base of the towers.
In an act of incredible courage, someone charged toward the towers to help one of the people who’d stumbled out of the building, but the rescuer got so close that he was killed by one of the jumpers. People were dodging falling debris and flailing people, but in the smoke and dust most people were invisible or looked like stick figures.
Men and women were risking their lives for strangers, but many people—understandably—cowered in fear or just disappeared. Some were dumbstruck, but others operated with the military precision of soldiers in combat.
An agent I’d worked with, Lenny Hatton—an ex-marine explosives specialist who’d worked three prior terrorist attacks, and had just testified in an al-Qaeda trial—recognized the need for a communications network from inside the towers. So he ran into the darkness as everyone else was running out.
It was possible, but unlikely, that Lenny had made contact with my former boss at the FBI, John O’Neill, who was on his first day as the head of security at the World Trade Center. John and his team had solved the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and he’d spent his last four years at the Bureau working the Osama bin Laden case, trying to convince people that bin Laden was capable of a direct hit on the U.S. At that moment, John was on the forty-ninth floor of the South Tower, commanding the evacuation and refusing to leave.
In the chaos, I was surrounded by agents I thought I knew well, but suddenly it seemed impossible to predict what any of them would do. Run? Hide? Help? Or go home to their families, instead of working Ground Zero? As usual, there was no right or wrong—just reality. But being able to read the realities of the people around me was critically important, and in these desperate moments I couldn’t do it. I thought I knew these people, but I realized that I knew only what they wanted me to know, due to their own modesty, secrecy, shame, subterfuge, or simple privacy. I was almost equally ignorant of their many virtues, including the raw physical courage of John and Lenny.
Everything had changed, and nothing was predictable.
I headed back to our tower, which seemed to be free from damage, although the third building destroyed that day had yet to fall. A few guys followed me, and I said, “Buddy up! It’ll be worse if we have to die alone.” One of our agents dropped back, then fell out.
The building started to tremble and sway, and everyone looked stricken. But it was caused by the first tower collapsing. When the second tower went down, we abruptly lost communications with Lenny.
He was dead. His last known words—spoken to a guy he’d saved, who was blinded and choking from the heat and filth—were, “I’m going back into the building.” Lenny probably had no illusions about his odds of surviving. I thought I knew him well, but I’d had no idea that he was capable of compassion so deep that it overrode his terror.
John went down with that tower, too, after saving many lives. He lies now in a New Jersey grave commemorated with a small American flag. In 2002, PBS ran a Frontline episode about him—called “The Man Who Knew”—but I’ve never been able to watch it.
More than two hundred law enforcement officers from dozens of agencies joined the 338 firefighters who died not only as patriots, but as people so benevolent and brave that they made no distinction that day between friends and strangers.
That night, I found my car where I’d parked it, now with a jet engine in front of it. As I crept home through the wreckage, I traded stares with unblinking pedestrians and wondered who was waiting for someone they’d never again see. One of them, a woman standing by the curb, had obviously been crying, but handed me a bottle of water and said, “God bless.” I was unable to even say thanks, but bowed my head.
I was face-to-face with the worst of times, and the best of people: a tragically common nexus. As always, the sudden and unexpected pain of that day carried an equally common and terribly bittersweet wisdom that simply said, “Open your eyes, and see people the way they really are.”
Even on this first day of the strange new America, the people I passed on the streets appeared to be struggling viscerally with that sudden challenge, applying the same stoic will to it that they applied to enduring the poisoned air and stench of death. Many looked numb, still locked in shock, and unable to see the new reality.
I didn’t have that option. My profession, and my peers, were tasked by default with seeing past our pain, remaining rational, and delivering a safe and sane new worldview to the people on these streets, and far beyond.
I knew how hard it would be. Most people want to cast off their illusions—but who among us wants to be disillusioned?
Our intel strongly suggested that bin Laden was responsible, but it felt very much as if we didn’t even need the intel—because virtually all of us had a gut feeling that it was him. I had a great deal of confidence in gut feelings back then. Now I don’t.
My brain swarmed with a tangle of questions. Why hadn’t the State Department or any of its three-letter agencies acted decisively on John’s knowledge about bin Laden? What was next? Who was still in New York that we needed to worry about? What can I do?
And why had I been so utterly unable to know what my own closest colleagues would do when it mattered most? I felt very close to those people and had thought we were all connected, or were at least on the same wavelength. As an agent, I was supposed to have veritable X-ray vision, and if I couldn’t predict my good friends’ actions, how in God’s name could I ever predict what the bad guys would do?
I had no answer. Obviously. But I promised myself I would find one. Growth also happens fast on the worst days.
It would have been nice, of course, to think I would do that for Lenny, who had four kids, and John, who had two. But it was too late for that.
Few of the most serious problems in life are as common as not being able to read people and accurately predict what they’ll do. It’s not because we’re all loose cannons, compulsive liars, or have rapidly shifting personalities. It’s because most of us hide or disguise the parts of our lives that we don’t want others to see—particularly if there’s something important at stake, like love, money, our careers, or our reputations.
Even good people feel the need to hide things, because nobody’s perfect and everybody’s vulnerable. A high percentage of people break rules and lie when they’re desperate: for something they want or something they fear. But even people in comfortable situations often shade the truth and cut corners just to get a little further ahead in life.
Decent, moral people also shade the truth, because each of us wants to be loved, and sometimes we’re afraid that our true selves aren’t worthy of it.
Millions of people, though, conceal their agendas and hide the whole truth for reasons that are far darker—such as greed, manipulation, power, control, and deception. Sadly, that’s very common, especially in difficult environments and situations. It’s particularly likely when people rise to positions of power, even if it’s a petty form of power.
Because people are so often unethical, when you’re involved in something important with someone, and don’t know what they’ll do next, life can feel not only strange and disorienting, but frightening.
To soften this fickle and debilitating aspect of human nature, almost all societies attempt to create fair and binding methods of ensuring commitments, such as business agreements, prenuptials, religious rules, laws, manners, promises, and unspoken social contracts. Even so, most of us are still wary of other people from time to time, because we’ve all witnessed the destruction of airtight deals, friendships, marriages, alliances, romances, manners, laws, and child custody.
And at one time or another, we’ve all been cheated and lied to.
Sometimes sizing people up can feel almost impossible, especially in business deals, because you’re often dealing with people you don’t know well, in a very competitive environment, in which sharing is not the norm.
Even worse for most people, though, are the times when they can’t even predict what their own friends and family will do. Divorces, domestic violence, suicides, custody battles, and sexually transmitted diseases—to name but a few—commonly come as great and terrible surprises. All these situations can cause hardship. When someone leads you astray in your profession, you can be crippled financially. And when a loved one betrays you, it can change your whole outlook on life.
These inevitable violations of our most sacred codes chip away at our highest values—including the one that influences, and often completely governs, most human transactions, from business deals to love itself. That lofty value is trust. Trust is the active form of faith. It demonstrates—in real time and in the real world—a belief that people will not only try to do what they say they will, but also have the competence and diligence to make it happen. A betrayal of trust is one of the most devastating experiences that can happen to any human being, partly because it’s almost impossible not to take it personally. It wounds you deeper than an accidental loss, because it makes you not only doubt other people, but even yourself, thinking that you should have known better.
In this book, I’m going to show you how to know better.
It’s not as hard as you might think. You do it by learning to predict what people will do in the most important situations, and why. When you know that, you can finally feel safer from further harm. Your heart will begin to heal from past experiences and your confidence will soar. With any luck at all, during the times it matters most, you won’t get fooled again.
My education in this issue didn’t come naturally or intuitively to me, partly because I’m a fairly typical type-A American male who has no innate gift for deciphering human behavior. Like so many others, I learned to analyze behavior the hard way—through trial and error—before it dawned on me that I could create a system for understanding people: one that can be taught and refined, through fairly simple training.
Without this training, though, you’ll probably still struggle to predict what people will do during critical, life-changing events. As always, the villains will manipulate, the variables will mount, and your mind will cloud with indecision and doubt—because when you don’t know what to expect from people, it becomes almost impossible to make the careful plans that a successful life demands.
As the clock ticks, your doubt will deepen, and the dread of the decision will spread like a contagion and create problems all its own: the alienation of innocent people, the need to snoop into people’s private lives, or the postponement of a decision until it’s too late for due diligence. At that point, time runs out, and most people just cross their fingers, go with their gut, and roll the dice.
Unfortunately, people who lack all the facts make the correct decision only about half the time, according to the best studies in behavioral science. As a rule, it’s not their fault, because the person they were trying to size up often manipulates the situation. Sometimes people mislead you without even knowing that they’re doing it, because everybody likes to see themselves in the best possible light, so they often lie to themselves, and then spread the lie around. Such grandiose myths often become part of a person’s basic reputation. How often have you met somebody who’s supposed to be great at something, but isn’t?
Bottom line: Almost everybody on earth, at one time or another, has experienced the sick feeling of betrayal, and most of the time it leaves them dazed, despairing, and suspicious. They’re not stronger or wiser, but simply reluctant to trust anybody—which can be crippling in and of itself.
To function effectively, humans must be able to predict what others will do, and trust them accordingly. But if you hand out your trust like candy, you can lose the things you treasure most. If there’s any hint of that happening, you’ll be tempted to close the doors you need to open, and you’ll end up cold and alone in your own foreboding.
Fear, fear, fear. We’ve all been there.
Almost every primary fear in relationships, though, can be conquered by one of the mightiest of all human abilities: the power of accurate prediction. Without that power, you’ll probably always be reluctant to trust—and you’ll pay a steep price for that deficit. Trust creates a state of calm and creativity, animates everyone involved, and unites entire nations. It sits at the top of the human hierarchy of positive actions, because it is the action-equivalent of love—and often exists in combination with love.
When you’re sizing people up, you learn a lot about their character, traits, tendencies, desires, fears, affections, strengths, weaknesses, and skills, but all of that feeds into the single most important attribute that you’re invariably looking for: trustworthiness. It’s the one quality that strips away mystery, illuminates the truth, and is indispensable to a positive relationship.
In this book, I’m going to show you my six-sign system for verifying trust—and the tells that reveal those signs—by predicting human behavior.
Here’s a bird’s-eye view of what you’re going to learn:
Sign #1: Vesting
Creating symbiotic linkage of mutual success.
Sign #2: Longevity
Believing your bond will last.
Sign #3: Reliability
Demonstrating competence and diligence.
Sign #4: Actions
Displaying consistent patterns of positive behaviors.
Sign #5: Language
Creating connections with masterful communication.
Sign #6: Stability
Transcending conflict with emotional accord.
This system replaces guesswork, gut feelings, luck, intuition, and drama.
Many of the greatest fears that make life so difficult can be tamed by this simple system, and it can reveal the right path in most relationships.
The system isn’t a popularity contest, nor even a measure of good or bad, but only predictability. It consists of reading the tells that accurately reflect somebody’s character, traits, and abilities.
If you can trust somebody to do something you need, that’s fine, and you can adjust your actions accordingly. But even if you find that you cannot trust someone to do something you need, that’s also fine, because you can, again, adjust your actions accordingly.
The system won’t solve all your problems, but because it confers the power of prediction, it will enable you to approach your decisions about whom to trust rationally and wisely, free from fear. It will help protect you from scam artists—including those in the C-suites—and will limit the time you lose to manipulators, flakes, phonies, and the well-meaning people who want to do what you trust them to, but just aren’t able to.
Even better, the system will lead you to the right people: those who truly want you to succeed, have the ability to help, and will do whatever they can to make it happen. With them at your side, your worries will subside, your workload will lighten, your relationships will deepen, and your ability to predict your own future—and thus create it—will become phenomenal.
My system works because it cuts to the core of human behavior and rests primarily upon a single fundamental truth: The one thing that you can almost always predict people to do is to act in their own best interests.
Some people think that’s cynical, but I think it’s not only healthy, but necessary. It’s the heart and soul of human survival, the wellspring of achievement, the hallmark of authenticity, and it can include any number of virtuous, altruistic goals.
The simple principle that people try to get what they want is so sensible, and so embedded into our culture and our psyches, that we tend to believe that people who don’t act in their own best interests are self-destructive, lazy, or indifferent to the needs of those who depend upon them.
So to determine how people will act, you simply need to learn what they think is in their own best interests, and use that knowledge to predict their behavior. That’s not always easy, but you can learn how. Quickly. And your life will never be the same. The power of prediction is a virtual superpower.
Trust, therefore, is not a matter of morality. Trust is a predictability.
This widens the definition of trust, from assuming that people are usually good to assuming that people are generally so consistent about trying to get what they want that you can predict how they’ll act.
But trust must rest upon rational reasons—and simply liking someone is not one of them. A sad fact of life is that most people lose more to those they love than to everybody else put together. And it’s not because the person they love is evil. It’s because they didn’t trust wisely.
That’s why data-based predictability is so important. Predictability comes first. Trust follows. If you can’t reasonably predict what someone will do, you usually can’t trust them.
With trust come its trademark behaviors: loyalty, helpfulness, kindness, honesty, reliability, and wisdom. They’re almost always part of the package of the people you trust. So as a rule, if you can predict the quality of trustworthiness in a person, you will naturally and inevitably wish to ally yourself with them. And they will feel the same.
This core truth about predicting what people will do is the only thing that any of us can ever know with certainty about trust, and it’s all we need to know.
But it’s important not to use this truth for mere manipulation. If you do, you may still be able to find people who you can trust, but they’ll never trust you. The world is already full of manipulators, and you do not want that label to apply to you.
The first step in putting this principle of prediction into action is to find out what people think is in their own best interests. Most people will be happy to tell you. Why wouldn’t they? It’s usually the best way for them to get what they want. So what somebody tells you, obviously, is usually the best tell there is.
But some people will be afraid that they’ll look pushy, needy, offensive, or narcissistic. Even when that happens, though, you can still find out what they want. Agents in the section of the FBI that I was recently in charge of—the Behavioral Analysis Program (BAP)—do that every day, and I’ll teach you how to think like a BAP agent: objectively, rationally, systematically, and free from emotional distractions. With that mindset, you can accurately analyze the most predictive data points of people’s behavior: their actions, statements, body language, opinions, personal reputation, professional track record, and abilities.
Those tells are easier to spot than you might think, because people usually reveal their inner traits and ideas through relatively obvious actions, similar to the tells in a poker game. Good poker players don’t just play the cards; they also play the people.
Predicting behavior isn’t rocket science—but it is a social science, and requires you to apply the right equation of logic, strategy, skepticism, observational skills, and the ability to accept unwelcome truths.
It also requires empathy, because to truly understand people, you’ve got to temporarily drop your own perspective and look at the world—and yourself—through their eyes. If you do, you may not like how they see you—especially if it’s negative, and not accurate—but you’ll still be one step closer to the reality of the rest of the world, and that alone is enlightening and empowering.
Doing this difficult reality check requires the raw courage of stoicism and the kindness of empathy: two of the most powerful forces in human behavior. When these two qualities work in unison, they create a trait that I now describe as “stempathy.” The quality of stempathy, I believe, is one of the most profoundly positive traits in human behavior, my primary area of expertise.
For centuries, the study of human behavior was mostly philosophical, but far more inarguable truths about it emerged when it became a social science.
The data-driven analysis of this relatively new science first emerged in the 1970s and has since been refined. Behavior is, in effect, a smoking gun that’s in plain sight.
I first became fascinated by the science of behavior as an officer in the United States Marine Corps, an environment in which bad decisions about people can cost lives. As a commander in charge of more than two hundred marines and sixteen drill instructors at Parris Island, I tiptoed into the realm of predicting what people will do. But that was in a very controlled environment.
When I joined the FBI in 1997, I took every advanced course I could in social psychology and the science of relationship development, and had my first contact with the BAP. It was run by leaders who held the almost futuristic belief, back then, that criminal and espionage activities—and, by extension, business and personal problems—could be controlled far more effectively by diving into the white-hot core of human behavior than by applying only the blunt-force instruments of power, money, punishment, or withdrawal.
At that time, the BAP was largely unknown to most Americans, although it was later featured in several episodes of the TV show Criminal Minds. The BAP is part of the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), a department that focuses on violent crime rather than counterespionage. The BAU has been portrayed in the book and film The Silence of the Lambs, as well as in TV shows like Law & Order, Mindhunter, and The Wire. One reason it’s a popular subject is because people intuitively know that they shouldn’t rely on intuition. Life’s too short, and we’ve all got too much to lose.
From early on, my professional dream was to be part of the BAP, because I believed it would not only empower my service to the country, but also help me to become a better, more prosperous person, with fewer conflicts, less fear, and deeper relationships.
Initially, though, I depended upon it mostly as a survival system. Every business and industry has its own share of sharks, but the sharks in espionage and counterespionage are backed by the full force, finances, and munitions of the most powerful nations on earth. Although I was lucky enough to eventually become the third of the four people who have run the BAP, I struggled at first.
I wish I knew then what I know now.
Before dawn, we started pulling months of twelve-hour, seven-day shifts, starting with a search in the rubble for leads. We simultaneously worked “fingers-and-toes” duty in the World Trade Center rubble that had been hauled to the landfill on Staten Island, where we collected pieces of people while they were still identifiable as human.
As we arrived and went home in the dark each day—developing our own domestic sense of combat fatigue—the West Side Highway in Manhattan was lined with people and volunteers, solemnly applauding with gloved, muffled hands, and holding candles in the rain and snow from September to January. They handed us juice boxes, homemade sandwiches, respirators—anything that would make our day better. They also gave us notes and photos scrawled with messages like “Please find my daddy.” I still have every bit of it. It reminds me not only of those people, but of the deprivation my own kids felt as I was called away during that turbulent time.
None of us considered refusing the food, even after someone began to send notable people packages that contained the potent poison anthrax. We thought people deserved our trust and that their virtuous behavior was so predictable that we could bet our lives on it. I doubt I would do that now—or even get the chance to, because these days cops would probably cordon off the crowds.
Four years later, the FBI traced the anthrax to a suspect who’d worked for the federal government. We closed the case shortly after America invaded Iraq—in a war about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t, in fact, exist—and the revelation that the anthrax had come from a government worker wasn’t greeted with any great sense of irony by the public. America had changed.
By midwinter, most Americans were weary with their own version of combat fatigue—compassion fatigue—and a new level of wariness set in, limiting air travel to such a degree that two major carriers went bankrupt. People shifted so far away from seeing new places and seeking new friends that the word “cocooning” was coined.
A blanket of distrust had descended and still, for the most part, remains.
On this gray day in the winter of our discontent, I was tasked with following leads that would rule out Russian complicity. It made sense on one level, because everybody in the office was working 9/11 leads, and I’d been working Russia since I’d started.
A supervisor put me in touch with a secret informant who worked Russian counterintelligence for us—a Confidential Human Source (CHS), in spy-talk—and this person had flatly refused to talk about 9/11 with his current handler. That was his fourteenth agent, and I was going to be the fifteenth. The CHS—whom we’ll call Leo, for our purposes here—had been a double agent for years, but he had a reputation for walking a fine line between helping us and helping himself. Somebody even said he might be connected with the new Russian entrepreneurial class later called the Russian Mafia. We did know that he owned some kind of gentleman’s club for Russian expatriates. That alone was enough to generate rumors, and in this chaotic moment in history no rumor was too wild. Even if he was legit, I hated his way of operating. It seemed selfish and narrow, like the mindset of a mercenary whose only loyalty is to the highest bidder. But that’s not how I would feel these days, because I’ve realized that a lasting, valid transaction with anybody—including a CHS—has to be win-win.
It took me two hours to drive out to Leo’s comfortable Dutch colonial near the woodsy part of West Babylon on Long Island, and by the time I got there, about fifteen hours into my workday, my nerves were shot. As I stood on Leo’s porch, he fumbled open the door, acting and smelling like he was drunk.
So here I was, trying to save the whole damn world, and he was wasting my time. Pissed me off. It didn’t take much that winter.
Instead of stepping aside for me to enter, he said, “This is the last time I will see you here,” as he glanced up and down the block.
“Why?” Was he pissed off himself? Because he sensed my anger? Probably. He had penetrating eyes, drunk or not.
“Neighbors,” he said.
“I think maybe you’re being a little paranoid, sir.” That was putting it mildly, I thought, but it felt good to give him some shit. This was back in the days when I thought that venting was emotionally healthy. These days, I’d never say something like that—not because I’m Miss Manners, but because it serves no purpose. And good managers—in any business—don’t piss away words on casual observations. Every letter of every word they say moves them closer to their ultimate goal.
Leo reared back a little and said, in his part-Russian, part-Queens accent, “Ya got a big mouth on ya.”
That’s why I’d never say it now. When you talk shit, you get shit. More on that later. Besides, “just being yourself” is overrated. If you can’t bring your best self to a meeting, stay away.
I stood my ground, as would any good marine or FBI agent—or so I thought. I just wanted to get the hell in, get the hell out, and cross Leo off my list.
He opened the door wider and motioned me to his family room, which had an elaborate bar. Leo plopped four ice cubes into his drink, and said, “I was in a prison camp after World War II, and learned to love ice. We had none. Of course.” He topped it off with more vodka. “Drink?”
I shook my head.
“Although,” he continued, “they called the camp a Displaced Persons Center. Although nobody was being ‘placed.’ All told, there were about ten million of us living behind barbed wire. For five years I was there. Almost always hungry. And when I would ask about going back to my village, to see if my family was still alive, they would tell me to not be . . . what was your word? So paranoid. They would say, ‘Don’t worry about something you cannot control.’ It made no sense. We have no need to worry about what we can control. The danger comes from the things we can’t.”
“Did you get back to your village?”
“Eventually. But on my own penny.” His eyes grew vacant for a moment. “Only the ground was there. With rubble.” He didn’t elaborate on the survival of his family, and I didn’t pry. If I knew then what I know now, I would pry—but delicately, and strictly for the benefit of the other person. When you give more to people, you get more. Back then, I would have thought that was ironic.
The Russians, he clearly wanted me to know, as he swirled his drink, had suffered twenty million deaths in World War II, compared to America’s half million. Forty times the suffering, if you can imagine. “That is why we took over Eastern Europe,” he said. “We were paranoid. But even with the buffer of the Iron Curtain, twenty million more people were killed by Jughashvili. That was Stalin’s real name, until he became a politician. Stalin means ‘Son of Steel.’ So Comrade Jughashvili also made us”—he paused for effect and drew out the word—“paranoid.”
So the war, plus Stalin, brought the sum of Russia’s suffering to eighty times that of America. I must have looked sheepish, because for the first time he smiled, but it was the creepy kind.
I wanted to get down to business. “I understand that you’re not happy with your current contact at the Bureau,” I said.
“It’s always busy-ness first with the FBI,” he said, his face looking dead.
Another insult—which in my dumb-ass, near-rookie mind meant: Fire back!
“What I’ve heard about you,” I said—in full combat mode, with little to lose—“is that to give something, you’ve got to get something. It’s almost like—” I had to pause, because this was a nasty shot. “Like you’re a double agent.”
“All agents, my young friend, are double agents.”
And that was the end of that.
But only from my point of view—which, I was soon to discover, was absolutely irrelevant, because the only thing that mattered right then was his point of view. Staying stuck in your own perceptions, I’ve found, is like having a long conversation with no one there. Save your breath.
By picking a fight with him, I was in over my head—which I thought at the time was the best way to learn how to swim with the sharks. That’s how far in over my head I was.
I had almost learned to think like an agent over the past few years, but I hadn’t learned how to think like a Behavioral Analysis agent.
Dark hit early and hard. It always does at that time of year, although people usually feel sheltered from the specter of darkness by the approach of the holidays. But this was a bad winter, and the spring held no promise.
I was getting nowhere. From Leo’s file alone, I had innumerable data points, but none of them revealed who he really was or what he’d do next. Confusion reigned.
I wasn’t alone. Much of the Bureau, and even the country, had been blinded by the same shared fog of cold war. Our enemies seemed to be everywhere, but we didn’t even know who they were.
Even the three-letter agencies had limited knowledge of who would strike next, how they would come at us, or whom we could trust.
In this seemingly endless holding pattern, the best-case scenario for me and a lot of other New Yorkers seemed to be the luxury of simply surviving until we died of old age. People were sick all over town—especially in lower Manhattan—and were still breathing air so filthy that it would soon cause even more deaths than the collapse of the World Trade Center itself. Fires were still burning underground, fed by approximately 24,000 gallons of jet fuel, 100,000 tons of rotting debris, and 230,000 gallons of heating and diesel oil.
I was still coughing up all kinds of crap, and the cough has never completely let go. Cancer was on people’s minds. Realistically. About ten thousand first responders now have various cancers and deadly diseases, and the toll will climb throughout our lifetimes.
Leo freshened his drink and again offered me one, which may or may not have meant he was trying to bridge our gap.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, too loudly, as drunk people sometimes do.
Then I heard a man call out something that sounded a lot like, “Dead!” Was it “Dad,” but with a Russian accent? Doubtful. Leo’s folder said that his only son had died in the Soviet Union’s war with Afghanistan.
Even so, after working fingers-and-toes, and looking everywhere for new threats, even seasoned agents were jumping to unlikely conclusions, based only on paranoia.
Agents aren’t supposed to think like that. They’re supposed to remain rational and believe only objective, observable facts. But a lot of things were happening that weren’t supposed to.
Leo looked alarmed. “You must go now,” he said, nodding toward his front door and hurrying down a hallway.
I looked behind me as I walked to my car in the dark. Paranoid? At this point in my life—which was headed inevitably toward death, and sure to include more suffering, as every life does—I agreed with Leo on the concept of paranoia: Who invented that happy bullshit? Whoever did must have been lucky as hell to feel so fearless. Or was crazy.