Spy Mom (60 page)

I am just about to say yes to the game when the glass in the backdoor window explodes and three men dressed entirely in black crash into the kitchen. As I throw myself on top of Theo and Connect Four, forming a protective shell, I can't help but think this is overkill. Two of the men grab Yoder, who is screaming once again about being an American, and drag him by the armpits through the glass and out the door. The third guy jabs me in the ribs with the barrel of his M6A2 assault rifle, which is no way government issue, and whispers in my ear.

“You weren't invited to this party, Sally,” he says, digging the gun in deeper. “Simon says you should remember that.” He sniffs the air. “Something smells bad in here.”

“Fuck you,” I say. More desperately than I want a shower, I want to reach up, slide my hand behind this guy's puffy-muscle neck, and slam his head into the floor, but that would leave Theo exposed and I will not take that chance. I stay completely still, listening to his heavy combat boots crunching the broken glass as he leaves.

I expected Simon to wait until dark, knock on my front door, and demand I turn Yoder over immediately, which I would have done now that I have what I need. Sending his goons to smash up my house and scare the shit out of my kid delivers the message that he is not playing games quite effectively. And I get it. But now I'm mad.

Theo squirms out from underneath me, still clutching the Connect Four box, his eyes glittering with a strange sort of glee I didn't anticipate. He should be hysterical, clinging to me out of pure terror, but he is anything but.

“That was just like The Warriors that we play on Xbox at Andrew's house. Totally cool, Mom! I can't wait to tell Teacher Wendy!”

Oh please, don't tell Teacher Wendy. And Andrew and his house are now part of the no-fly zone as far as I'm concerned.

Theo dances around in the glass in his Thomas the Tank Engine slippers, as if this is the most fun he's had all day.

“Who were those guys?” he asks, hopping on one foot. “Why didn't they knock?”

People with guns never knock. “They were friends of Richard's,” I say. “Please stop jumping. The glass is flying everywhere.”

“Boy, they must be mad at him.”

Yes. Something like that.

“Go in the playroom while I clean this up in here,” I say, lifting him up and beyond the glass.

When I join him ten minutes later, he has all of his LEGO people lined up in two rows. They have tiny plastic guns and helmets and light sabers and they appear on the verge of battle. Theo provides a dialogue that is part
Star Wars
and part Elmo and in different circumstances I might find it creepy.

War used to have simple rules. Soldiers would meet on a nice grassy field in the middle of nowhere, form orderly rows, and then run at one another with swords drawn. They would even bring a band and guys to hold their flags. Whoever had the most men standing at the end won the battle. It was almost civilized when you looked at it from a certain angle.

But now everything is complicated. The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is blurry, changing moment-to-moment depending on circumstances and personal gain. There is no black and white. There is nothing but a dark place in between, where just about anyone might show up to stab you in the back.

I wouldn't want you to get the impression that I was always on the top of my game. Spying is not that different from parenting. There are days when you kneel down next to the squabbling kids on the playground and in a calm mom voice explain why it's not okay to hit little Susie over the head with a plastic shovel, and all the kids nod solemnly and promise to never ever perpetrate such a crime again. And when you stand back up, dusting the sand from your knees, you feel like you know what you're doing, that the lesson you were trying to impart actually got through.

And then there are days when you kneel down in the sand and the kids actually hit you over the head with the shovel and it's all you can do not to hit them back. Everyone can have a bad day.

I only needed an official rescue once, which was not really an official rescue, being as we didn't exist. But that didn't make it any less humiliating.

It was the middle of the night when Simon called me. He was in Washington, sitting in front of a crackling fire with a glass of fifteen-year-old Macallan Scotch, cooking up ways to ruin my life. I was someplace I'm still not allowed to mention in casual conversation.

“There's a package for you at the hotel down the street,” he said. “It has instructions. Follow them.”

“Simon, I've got four operations ready to go here and now. Critical operations. Am I supposed to just drop them?”

“Yes. Disappear into the night like a bad romance,” he said. “S.K. is coming in your place.”

“S.K. is hopeless. He can't even speak the language. I don't think he knows how to brush his teeth.”

“He would be hurt to hear you say such things.”

“How about Gunther?” I asked.

“He's dead.”

“What? How?”

“Doesn't concern you. Hit the road now, Sally. That's an order.” I could hear the ice cubes tinkling in his glass and it made me homesick, although in a very abstract way. I had not seen an ice cube in the flesh for months. I had missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Presidents' Day, not that they missed me.

“Okay,” I said, already collecting my few belongings from the floor of the rented room. “I'm gone.”

Without saying good-bye, Simon hung up. He never said good-bye. Come to think of it, he never said hello, either. It was as if we were having one continuous years-long conversation interrupted by the occasional trip to a war zone.

As I stuffed my knapsack with a toothbrush and a T-shirt, a strange tingling started in the low of my back and slowly worked its way up to my neck. I shuddered, all the hair on my arms standing at full attention. Something was off about this situation. Simon had never pulled me out of an operation when I was this far in. But an order was an order. I had no choice but to march on over to that hotel, retrieve the package, and see what sort of crappy hand I'd been dealt this time.

Two hours later, I was on a flight to Belgrade as instructed. The flight was surprisingly long and only a third full, Belgrade not being a vacation hot spot this time of year. Or any time of year, really. I stretched out across three empty seats and dreamed about Ian Blackford trying to drown me in a sea of hostile pelagic fish. In the dream, he grinned while a ten-foot-long barracuda ate my leg.

I think the dream was an omen because before I could even take a pee at the Belgrade airport, a pair of ill-fitting handcuffs were slapped on my wrists by customs officials in faded uniforms. They barked at each other in Serbian about me being a terrorist and a bomber and possibly even a prostitute, but they couldn't seem to decide which offense was the worst. They dragged me backward into an interrogation room that was approximately the same temperature as my refrigerator and about as comfortable.

“I'm an American citizen,” I said, as they turned my backpack upside down, shaking the meager contents out on the rough concrete floor. The name on the passport Simon had sent me in the envelope at the hotel was drifting in and out of my mind with the consistency of a cloud. Sporting multiple identifies can be complicated at times. Who was I? Susan? Claire? Bella? Katherine?

“Why you travel on a fake passport?” one of the officers said, throwing the document onto the steel table between us. Like a skipping stone on a flat lake, it bounced twice and landed open in front of me. Well, that answered one question. Claire Simmons.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. But even from my position, trying to sit forward and not crush my bound wrists, I could tell something was wrong with the passport. The blue was too bright and the soaring eagle imprint was not so much soaring as crashing. I mentally chastised myself for not examining my documents before trying to pass them off to customs agents.

“Help her remember,” the guard said.

The man who hit me wore a signet ring about the size of a quarter. It raked across my face as if he had spent the morning sharpening it on a stone. The blood oozed out of the wound and dripped down my face, little red raindrops landing on my white shirt.

“Why are you here?” they demanded.

“I'm an American citizen here to take pictures for a magazine. I'm a photographer.” One of the guards picked up my small digital camera from the floor.

“With this?”

I shrugged. “Low rent,” I said. “I'm not the kind of girl to sit in a snow cave for six months in the Uzbekistan mountains waiting for the elusive snow leopard to show itself. If you know what I mean.”

“Who said anything about a snow leopard?”

“I did. I'm not who you think I am.” My cheek stung and every time I opened my mouth, the skin felt oddly loose and detached.

“Put her in a cell,” the head guy said, suddenly bored with this whole affair.

My new accommodations were underground. The cement block walls were tinged green with mold and a slow trickle of water came down from the ceiling, pooling in the middle of the floor. I sat down on the wooden platform I assumed was meant as a bed, pulling my legs up tight to my chest to conserve what little warmth I had left. I concentrated on keeping my face still, allowing a scab to form over the slice in my cheek.

“Hey. Hey, you,” came a voice. “On the other side of the wall. Is someone there?”

“Yes,” I said, standing at the bars, trying to see into the next cell. “I'm here. Where are you?”

“I'm next to you. I don't think there is anyone else down here.”

“Where are we?”

“The dungeon.”

Fabulous. Really, an actual dungeon was just what I needed. Now, if they could arrange for a purple dragon or two, things would be looking up.

“How long have you been down here?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know. Years maybe.”

Years?
I'll admit I started to panic a little bit with that news.

“Why are you here?” I asked. A burst of laughter came from the other side of the wall.

“I can no longer recall. Made someone angry. Killed the wrong person. It's not so bad down here once you get used to it.”

“And how long did that take?”

“A few years. At the most.”

“Lovely.” It was dark but I got the feeling not even Martha Stewart could do all that much with the place.

“So how about you?” my new cell block friend asked from the other side of the wall. “What did you do?”

I wasn't big on confessions. Besides, the list of things I'd done was so very long it might take the rest of my life to get it all out and I sincerely hoped I wouldn't be here quite that long.

“I'm innocent,” I said. “A case of mistaken identity.”

The man laughed and laughed as if this were the first joke he'd heard in a decade, which might actually have been the case. Being in this dark damp cave was punishment enough. Being down here alone was just plain cruel.

But his question was a good one that I could not answer even to myself. I had no dealings in Belgrade. I had no assets. I had no interests. The whole thing started to feel like a setup to me, from the badly forged passport to the waiting guards at the airport. It was as if someone arranged for events to unfold in this fashion and was now standing back and watching what happened.

In my limited life experience thus far there was only one person with that kind of power. That we were supposed to be playing for the same team did not seem to matter.

The next day, two wiry men in flannel shirts hauled me into a room lit with a single bare bulb. There was a metal chair, rope, a generator of some sort, buckets of water, and a variety of tools not available at the local Home Depot. Knowing I would die before I gave up any information, I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind for the inevitable questions and pain that would soon rain down upon me.

And rain down it did. I tried to disassociate from the pain as I had been taught to do but the men in charge of dispensing it were chattering away incessantly about the World Cup, distracting me from my attempts to disappear to my happy place. And to make matters worse my happy place on this day turned out to be an image of me building sandcastles with a small blond child, clearly of my own design. My normal happy place was indeed a beach but with swaying palms and warm white sand and a giant fruity cocktail in my tanned and manicured hand. My normal happy place did not include a child of any sort.

Through it all, the two men in charge did not ask me one single question. There was no shouting in my face, no degradation, no rage on their part. They were just a couple of guys doing a day's work that happened to involve the torture of another human being. They were oddly detached, as if working from an agenda they didn't quite understand nor care particularly about.

After five hours of this business, I'll admit I was feeling rather low and would have happily considered trading state secrets for a little relief. But then one of the guys glanced at his watch and nodded to his partner.

“We're done, looks like,” he said.

“Went fast, didn't it?” the other said.

Speak for yourself. They dragged me under the armpits down the deserted hallway and chucked me back into my cell. I don't know how long I lay there moaning before my dungeon friend called out to me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘okay,'” I groaned. I was alive but beyond that, I wasn't willing to say.

“What do they want from you?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I croaked. “They didn't ask me any questions.”

There was silence from the other side of the wall.

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Strange.”

“Yes,” I said. “And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go ahead and die.”