Once a Spy (13 page)

A silver-haired woman in a wheelchair rolled over to meet them.

12

Charlie hadn’t
anticipated that she would be paraplegic, but it rated as a background detail. That his mother was really alive was almost as great a shock as her “death” had been. She looked to be in her early fifties, but unless Social Security were in on the deception, she was sixty-five. As ever, she was trim, her features were sharp, and her sea-glass-green eyes radiated intelligence. She wore a buttery blouse, a cashmere cardigan, and tartan riding breeches. Even with the wheelchair and the woolen blanket atop her legs, she had such windblown vitality that he might have believed she’d just come from breaking a horse—which she used to do on the ranch in Montana, where she grew up.

Or so he’d been told.

“It’s them, definitely,” she told the guard.

The guard looked from her to Charlie and back again. Probably the resemblance alone convinced him. He lowered his rifle, allowing Charlie and Drummond onto the terrace.

Crossing the flagstones to meet her, Charlie felt an otherworldly weightlessness. He considered that the guard had in fact shot him against the stone wall, and this was some sort of afterlife.

“Never in the thousands of times I dreamed of this were you so handsome, Charlie,” she said. “And this can’t be a dream, because Drummond’s here.”

Drummond didn’t react.

She turned to him with the mischievous grin Charlie remembered. “Of course I’m just joking, Drummond. It’s wonderful to see you.”

“Same,” Drummond said vaguely.

She reached up to Charlie. He leaned into a courteous if tentative embrace. Then she wheeled to Drummond, presumably for the same.

Stepping sharply out of the way, Drummond asked, “Where’s the dog?”

She looked to Charlie.

“Bit of a story there,” he said.

“Well, I’m in the mood for a story.” She turned to the guard. “Lieutenant, you can leave them with me.”

He dropped an eyebrow. “Ma’am?”

“My son and I need to chat.”
Son
left a glow on her.

“Yes, ma’am.” The lieutenant withdrew to the portico.

“Alone,” she added.

He
yes, ma’amed
again and departed. Or gave the appearance of having departed; Charlie had a prickly feeling that the guard was hiding somewhere, finger on a trigger.

Drummond wandered across the terrace. He fidgeted with a loose rock in the balustrade, seemingly disturbed by the way it spoiled the symmetry. The far tennis court caught his attention and riveted him.

Nobody was playing.

Watching him, Isadora shook her head. To Charlie, she said, “After you showed up at the main gate, the good folks in the office did a little digging. I was shocked to hear about his condition. It’s awful—I don’t know what else to say. We also learned about the trumped-up FBI charges. If you can bring me up to speed on a few things, we ought to be able at least to solve that.” She waved him toward the nearest of several sets of cast iron chairs.

“I wouldn’t complain,” Charlie said, mustering delight. His reserve lingered. Sure, she was like the long-lost mother of fairy tales, and it seemed safe here, but …

“But first you probably want to know why I’m not in a box underneath six feet of dirt?”

He took a chair. “It did cross my mind.”

She rolled up opposite him. “I hadn’t expected it would be today, but I always knew that someday we would meet again, and that you would want to know why—” She looked away, fighting tears.

He found it heartening. “It’s okay. This is already a way better explanation
than
It was just business, nothing personal.”
Which was how the conversation had played out in his imagination.

She smiled. “Most of what you already know is true. My parents—your grandparents—spent their entire lives in Billings. I was their only child. I used to be a swimmer and would have been an Olympic swimmer if I’d been three hundredths of a second faster. Other than my occupation, I kept nothing from you, until—” The tears got the better of her.

She didn’t move to stem them, not even when they cut into her blush. She rummaged through her purse, producing a cigarette case and a gold lighter. Charlie knew the lighter’s signature flask shape; vintage Zippos occasionally made it into Broadway Phil’s, the pawnshop he visited more often than he cared to. She snapped open the lid, spun a flame from the spark wheel, sucked it into her cigarette, then took a long drag. Her eyes dried and her composure matched the cloudless sky.

Either she had extraordinary resilience, Charlie thought, or he needed to find out her brand of smokes.

“I always imagined that when this day came, I would be much older, or at least more mature, and prepared,” she said. “Also, I would have had my hair done.”

He smiled. “Your hair looks nice now.”

“You’re sweet. So tell me then: How much do you know about the spy game?”

“Bond movies,” he said sheepishly.

“Actually, that’s a fine place to start. You see, in reality, James Bond wouldn’t last a week on the job. An egomaniac with weaknesses for cars, girls, and booze? An enemy could exploit any of those to get him to give up the crown jewels. That said, I enjoy Bond movies. If only covert operations took place at the Casino de Monte Carlo. In reality, the job is mostly paperwork. The action, what there is of it, rarely gets more glamorous than bad coffee with a frightened local in a place with lousy ventilation—and that’s if you’re lucky enough that your man remembers the appointment. But the brief moments when we do learn something—‘product’ that actually advances our position—make it worth it.” She nodded at Drummond, who remained fixated on the tennis court. “You might be interested to know that he likened the job to playing long shots at the track.”

Self-consciousness shrank Charlie. “I’d imagine the men and women in the clandestine service have slightly loftier motives than us guys at the track.”

“It’s about patriotism less often than people think,” she said, putting him at ease. “I do care about our country, but my reason for getting into the game was the thrill, or perceived thrill. As a girl, I’d read too many of the Bond
books
. Once on the job, I had my share of bad coffee and some successful operations. You need to know about two of them. The first commenced August 27, 1977: I met your father at a lunch in conference room Seven C at Langley. One week later, we were in Peshawar, Pakistan, as honeymooners.”

“Pakistan in August? Was Death Valley booked up?”

She grinned. “By ‘honeymooners,’ I mean husband-and-wife cover. He posed as a mortuary supplies salesman—if ever you’re trying to keep a low profile and a chatty neighbor asks your line of work, that one’s a great conversation ender. I was Suzy Homemaker, utterly obsessed with American soap operas—again, to ward off neighbors. Really we went to Peshawar for bridge.”

“And by ‘bridge’ you mean …?”

“The card game.” She laughed. “Our prime asset was a Pakistani tea magnate. His home in Peshawar was the top floor of the charmingly old-world Dean’s Hotel. He and one of his mistresses hosted couples’ bridge nights there. Pakistan’s nuclear program was then in full swing, and among the bridge players were many of the swingers.”

“So you and Dad were never married? It was only your cover?”

“The agency is known as ‘the world’s most expensive matrimonial service’ because of all the men and women who work so closely together in deep cover and then wind up that way in real life. Your father and I always had maintained a professional relationship, but near the end of our tour, something happened—”

“
I
happened?”

“Please know, dear, that once the shock wore off, we were delighted. And by the third trimester, we could hardly contain ourselves.”

Charlie was almost touched. He decided it best to keep his sentiments in check until the part where she faked her own flattening by bus.

“We came around to the idea of getting married for real,” she said.
“We wed in Las Vegas, at a chapel called Uncle Sam’s, fittingly. Then we went back east and gave settling down a go—bought the house on Prospect Place, a six-piece living room set, even chose a china pattern.”

“But?”

“Yes, the ‘but’…” She took another long pull at her cigarette and glanced at Drummond. He continued to watch the tennis, or lack thereof. “Your father and I had the difficulties in adjustment most new couples do. Also, a legitimate domestic situation is a quantum leap from the life to which we were accustomed. Embassy soirées notwithstanding, spying is a state of war. What made your father a good spy—and he’s a natural—is what made him a poor husband. He had what the Buddhists call ‘right mindfulness,’ an eternal and unflagging attentiveness to what’s going on. The problem with that was, to him, outside work,
nothing
goes on. So what I got at home was the dullest guy on the block, who viewed being the dullest guy on the block as fantastic cover. I’d complain, and he’d quote from scientific studies that showed that people are conditioned to ignore their environment, that if something is mundane, they tune it out. So, he maintained, it would be in our interest to be even more mundane.”

“Well, he mastered it,” Charlie said.

His mother laughed, and he couldn’t help joining her.

“And, though I can’t think of any,” she said, “I may have had a failing or two of my own. Surely he wasn’t entirely to blame for our discord. In any case, I’d decided that you and I would leave, but I hadn’t worked out the precise escape route. Then Moscow Station called with what sounded like a good initial phase …”

She was forced to halt as a distant whine turned into raucous thumps. Over the treetops appeared a helicopter, its fuselage emblazoned with
NEWS RADIO
.

“Gracious, this is the fourth medevac this week,” she said against the ruckus. “We’d best get inside while we still have our hearing.”

She started toward the portico. Charlie went to fetch Drummond. The helicopter aimed for the far tennis court, the one Drummond had been watching. Charlie noticed for the first time that it had no net. Unease coated him.

“You think it’s
them?”
he had to shout.

“No,” Drummond said. He stared with childlike fascination at the swirl of grass and leaves caused by the helicopter’s descent.

Charlie wasn’t at all assured.

The helicopter’s skids touched the court, and two paramedics jumped from the cabin. Shimmering with each rotation of the main rotor, they slid out a gurney bearing an unresponsive patient. The first paramedic was a diminutive brunette, no more than twenty-five. The other was a weary-eyed Hispanic man in his early fifties. They unfolded the legs and wheels from beneath the gurney with a synchronization and fluidity of thousands of repetitions, which comforted Charlie.

But how about the patient? Probably around fifty, he had gray hair and an athletic build. His face was largely veiled by an oxygen mask, dark glasses, and the brim of his fishing hat.

The tumult now made it impossible even to shout to Drummond. Charlie tugged at his elbow and gestured with urgency toward the portico.

13

With Drummond
in tow, Charlie followed Isadora through a monolithic bronze door into the clubhouse’s cathedral-sized entry hall. Cloaked in elegant gray velvet curtains, three-story windows admitted only stray particles of daylight. The floor was a pool of black marble. As Charlie’s eyes acclimated, trophies sprang from the dark mahogany walls—a lion, a boar, a herd of antlered animals, and an elephant with tusks big enough to bracket a car. Breathing in the bouquet of cigars and old leather, Charlie reflected that at least the Bond movies got the locations right.

As large as the entry hall was, it was hushed. The hiss of Isadora’s rubber wheels reverberated into a shriek. “Let’s go to the tea parlor, it’s a bit cozier,” she whispered—any louder, it seemed, and the echo might loosen bits of ceiling.

The tea parlor was indeed cozy compared to the entry hall; still it was as large a room as Charlie ever had been in that wasn’t public. Fluted columns sustained a high ceiling and framed ten bays, each adorned with hand-painted battle scenes. Friezes repeated in half-moons over the doors and over a stone fireplace almost as big as his bedroom. A waiter wheeled an antique silver trolley, laden with tea and pastries, to “club members,” as Isadora referred to the casually dressed men and women, all in their gray years. The members occupied about ten of the fifty or so tapestry-upholstered sofas and chairs. The quantity of muffled reports from the other end of the clubhouse suggested that pistols and trap shooting were much more popular at the “club” than tea.

“Charles, I may have rushed to judge assisted-living facilities,” Drummond said. “Is
this
Holiday Ranch?”

“This is the Monroeville club, Drummond,” Isadora said. “You’ve visited several times before.” He looked at her as if she were a mile away. “It’s a residence for injured and retired intelligence officers, and it serves as a medical facility in a pinch, when an injury treated at Bethesda Naval or Hopkins might make unwanted headlines or, worse, enemy intelligence.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said.

But he appeared confused. He even walked with uncertainty, as if a misstep might trip a mine.

“Why don’t you sit, dear?” She pointed him to a sofa.

He let himself fall into it. At once, his head toppled to his shoulder and he began to snore lightly. She seemed relieved.

Charlie noticed that Drummond’s fly was halfway down. “Any chance there’s a room for him here?” he asked Isadora.

“I’m sure he’d say that this place isn’t big enough for the two of us. But hopefully he can be assigned to another club once we get to the bottom of our inquiry.” She waved Charlie into the adjacent chair and pulled up beside him. “Now, where was I?”

“About to die.”

“Right.” She laughed. “Officially, I was the second assistant secretary at the embassy. Really, I went to Moscow to run Nikolay Trepashkin, a Federal Assembly member notorious for chasing American skirts. The idea was he’d point me to a mole we suspected the KGB had in Washington, then I’d come home to you. But trouble arose with what should have been the simplest part. Usually when Trepashkin had a message for me, he wedged it behind the sink in the men’s room of a drab little bar off Pushkin Square.”