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  Andrew seemed cheerful enough about the whole thing. But then, Andrew always seemed cheerful. Whatever interagency tension might have been expected was swiftly soothed by his good humor, competence and willingness to handle the duller and more burdensome aspects of Black Bear. Indeed, it was hard to dislike Andrew. He smiled easily; he held doors for people in an unself-conscious and gentlemanly sort of way. He brought in donuts. In meetings he spoke succinctly, and what he said was worth listening to. Which was why Kay could not quite explain her own feelings towards him, which were somewhat more towards the negative side of mixed. Maybe it was that things seemed to come so easily to him, as if all of the props and levers of human existence had been greased and twisted to his advantage. Or maybe it was that she found him so handsome.

  The train ride passed smoothly. Kay dodged all attempts at small talk, an evasion that didn’t seem to bother Andrew, assuming he had noticed. They grabbed a cab from the stand at Union Station. Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is based, is only a few miles west of the capital, but with midday traffic it took nearly an hour to get there. The cabdriver was Pakistani and enormously entertained by Andrew’s facility for Urdu, which Andrew claimed was fledgling but which seemed to Kay to be more than competent. By the time they were dropped off in front of CIA headquarters, the driver was shaking their hands vigorously and Andrew could add another name to his seemingly endless list of casual friends.

  Kay and Andrew passed through security without any particular difficulty, and Kay was unsurprised at the good humor that greeted Andrew’s return, the security guards laughing and waving, people slapping him on the back when they passed in the hall. The meeting with Mike Anthony went quickly and smoothly, primarily because there wasn’t very much to report on. The Black Bear squad had identified a number of potential targets for recruitment, but nothing firm. An old hand like Anthony wasn’t fool enough to expect results so swiftly, not in an operation like this. He listened carefully, asked relevant questions, thanked Kay and Andrew for their work and requested that they relay similar feelings to the rest of the team. Was he just the slightest bit brusque with his younger colleague, casually or not so casually unfriendly? Having only met Anthony once, Kay couldn’t say with any sort of certainty, although she made a mental jot on the subject in the impeccable ledger that she kept stored between her ears.

  Andrew and Kay had lunch at the CIA cafeteria, which honesty forced Kay to admit was way better than its FBI counterpart. She had a cup of coffee and an Italian sandwich. Andrew had sparkling water and a salad. It was not a fair thing to hold against him, but she found she couldn’t quite help herself. They spoke little, and when they did it was about the case. Andrew was as up-to-date on the matrix information as anyone involved in the Black Bear investigation, despite the fact that he was kept entirely in the dark about how exactly the FBI had acquired their data.

  The cab ride back to Union Station took longer than the one going out, and they barely made their train, cramming in with the rest of the evening commuters heading north back to Manhattan.

  “You’re from New York, aren’t you, Kay?” Andrew asked on the way home. The train ride from D.C. to New York, the most heavily commuted portion of the country, is not what you would call particularly scenic: mostly gray suburbs and highways. But there is a short portion between Baltimore and Philadelphia that cruises north through the Chesapeake Bay, offering the occasional view of grass and water, one that Kay had been enjoying in the interim before Andrew had spoken.

  “You pulled my file?” Kay asked, half kidding.

  “It’s the best part of being a spy,” Andrew answered toothily. “We have files on everyone at the CIA. During the annual Christmas party we drink heavily and read from the funniest ones.”

  “That’s interesting,” Kay said. “We do the same thing. But I bet our jokes are better.”

  Andrew laughed. “Just office scuttlebutt.”

  “I spent my childhood years in Westchester,” she said, then added, “but when I was ten I moved to the Upper West Side to live with my aunt and uncle.”

  “Why?” Andrew asked, shining those eyes on hers—eyes that Kay did not doubt had entranced many a woman into revealing her secrets.

  “It’s a long story,” Kay said uncomfortably.

  To his credit, Andrew knew enough not to push her. A brief silence, but not an awkward one, which Kay chalked up to Andrew’s easy sociability. “And you? Where are you from?”

  “I’m from outside of Dallas, originally.”

  “Do you get out there much?”

  “Not really.”

  “No family?”

  “Not for a while,” Andrew admitted. “I’m an orphan, actually. My parents died when I was twelve.” Said with that false casualness that Kay knew intimately, that she had mastered during her own long years of answering questions about why the couple coming to graduation looked nothing like her.

  “I’m sorry,” Kay said, knowing how hollow it sounded, because she was usually the one hearing it but not able to think of anything else.

  Andrew received the condolences with more grace than Kay usually managed. “Thanks,” he said. “It was a long time ago. I’ve turned the page.”

  “I hadn’t . . .” All of a sudden Kay found herself feeling very foolish for her false assumptions about Andrew, for supposing his friendly manner was all there was to him. “I hadn’t known.”

  “I don’t really advertise it,” he said, smiling.

  “My parents died young also!” Kay found herself blurting out after a long moment of silence.

  “Really?”

  “When I was about ten.”

  Andrew’s eyes lost some of their usual casual friendliness, that veneer of good humor that covered what went on beneath. “I didn’t know that.”

  “That wasn’t in my file?”

  “We’ll have to update it,” he said.

  Kay found she was smiling, their shared intimacies, tragic though they were, bringing out some measure of good humor. “What happened to yours?”

  “Drunk driver.”

  “Jesus,” Kay blurted out.

  “Had his license suspended, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. Actually he had a number of outstanding warrants, should have been in jail, but . . . he wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Andrew shrugged. “The world isn’t always a nice place.”

  “No,” Kay agreed. “It isn’t. Is that why you joined the Agency?”

  “Maybe. Who can say? Who knows why we do anything? Even the reasons we give ourselves are usually false, self-serving, comforting lies.”

  “I thought the CIA made a living off dishonesty.”

  “Is that what Jeffries told you?”

  “Was she wrong?”

  “No,” Andrew admitted. “She wasn’t. But it’s one thing to sell a falsehood—it’s entirely another to believe it yourself. I suppose in that sense, maybe what . . . Maybe what happened with my parents did play a role in my joining the Agency: the lies they feed you, the lies most children believe. I never really bought them. Didn’t you ever feel that way growing up? All the ‘Tomorrow will be better; things work out for the best.’ You learn early on that none of that’s true, that the certainties people cling to are nothing of the sort.”

  “Yes,” Kay admitted. “I have often felt that way.”

  Andrew looked for a while like he was going to say more, but in the end he just smiled at her—not his usual smile but an authentic one, or at least one that seemed authentic, and turned back to his work.

  They spent the rest of the ride in comfortable silence, Kay sifting through one of her Russian textbooks, or pretending to, although in truth she was spending very little mental effort on verb tenses and much more on Andrew’s shoulders and on his clean, strong scent. They said good-bye at Penn Station, and when he asked if he could call
her sometime, Kay did not say no.

  26

  KAY SAT at her desk a few days later, the matrix booted up on her desk computer, drinking a cup of coffee. These were not noteworthy activities; indeed, they were activities that Kay spent probably a rough majority of her waking hours engaged in. There could be no possible reason why the other Agents in the bullpen, most of whom were busily puttering away at their own work, could have any idea what she was considering. All the same, Kay found herself growing unreasonably paranoid, as if Marshall and Wilson and the others could read into the folds of her mind and know what she was secretly planning.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Kay reminded herself. “You are a spy, essentially. You ought to be capable of a little bit of subtlety.”

  Besides, she was probably driving herself crazy over nothing. In the early days after Kay had moved in with Luis and Justyna, she had created all sorts of scenarios to explain the death of her parents, fantasies that offered her some comfort. Perhaps it had all been a mix-up, with the Colombian authorities misidentifying the bodies; elaborate dreams at the end of which the door to her room would swing open and the two of them would be standing there, holding hands and waiting to embrace her.

  But they hadn’t lasted long. Even at ten years old Kay was, if not a cynic, at least a realist. The deaths of her parents had taken what little naïveté had been left her. She did not believe in Santa Claus or happy endings. And she didn’t believe in their reverse, in a devil or in the grand plans of evil men. Her parents had walked down the wrong street in the wrong part of the planet and crossed paths with some bitterly impoverished thug, some kid from the slums who had gotten his hands on a functioning pistol and recognized Paul and Anne as gringos and hoped to steal enough for food or drugs. And something had gone wrong, as things often did, and then there were two more corpses to be put into the ground. There was nothing more to it than that. The world was a grim and a dangerous place; the righteous remained unrewarded; greed and corruption and cruelty too frequently went unpunished. Life had no natural bent towards justice; it needed to be forced into that direction, forced by hard-eyed men and women with badges on their chests. A difficult job, one that no one did perfectly and that many did not even do well. But it was necessary all the same, to have someone standing by to push against the world’s savagery. This had been the fundamental underpinning of Kay’s thinking for twenty years, the reason she had joined the Bureau, the reason that she pushed herself so hard, day in and day out.

  And yet . . . in a minimized window on her browser Kay had opened up Sentinel, the FBI’s case management database. A quick search would reveal any information the Bureau had put together on her parents and their untimely deaths, and might clear up any last lingering mystery. Of course, performing that search was, strictly speaking, against Bureau policy. The vast agglomeration of data that the Bureau had painstakingly developed over the course of almost a century was not something that could be lightly perused by anyone. It existed to service active investigations, not so that Agents could use them for personal matters. There was no legitimate reason that Kay could be using Bureau resources to investigate her parents’ deaths. If anyone found out, Kay would get in trouble, and deservedly so.

  An extremely unlikely possibility, Kay had to admit. She did not suppose that Jeffries was spending her afternoons looking over every keystroke logged onto each of her Agents’ computers. But that wasn’t really the point, not as far as Kay was concerned. She had not spent the better part of her life trying to join the FBI only to bend its protocol. A person either stood for something or they didn’t, and Kay thought that she did, and that meant that you had to play by the rules that you’d chosen to uphold. Even a minor breach of regulations like the one Kay was considering made her feel guilty and out of sorts.

  “Malloy . . . Malloy!”

  “What?” Kay looked up abruptly.

  “Going for sandwiches. You interested?” Marshall asked.

  At the moment Kay found that she was not at all hungry. “No,” she said. “Thanks.”

  For some reason the interruption seemed enough to push Kay into action. After Marshall had stepped out to get the order, she quickly tabbed over to Sentinel. She typed “Paul Malloy” in the text box, her heart beating with each keystroke.

  The search lasted, or seemed to Kay to last, a very long time, long enough for Kay to replay in her mind all the reasons why this wasn’t a good idea—indeed, was quite the opposite. When her father’s name popped up with a “0” next to it, Kay wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sad. A zero or “0” file was a control file in which information not acted upon for various reasons was stored. At least her breach of FBI protocol hadn’t been pointless. The FBI had been in contact with her father for some reason. More than that she couldn’t say without having her hands on the file itself, and it was only now that it occurred to Kay that her father’s file—being an inactive case from twenty years ago—would not be in the database. Electronic record keeping only went back to around 1995; everything before that was stored in a huge warehouse near Washington, D.C., referred to within the Bureau as “Pickett Street.” If she wanted to learn anything else, she’d have to find a way into it.

  This was the problem with breaking rules with minor sins. This was why corruption needed to be guarded against so vehemently. No one started off planning to turn to evil, or at least Kay thought that very few did. One rubbed away a line, even a small one, at one’s own peril. The relatively small breach of protocol that Kay had just committed would require a more substantial transgression if she ever wanted to find out what was in her father’s file. “This must be how the RIPs feel,” Kay thought. One act of malfeasance begetting a second, and then a third, and then at some point you looked up and realized you had no idea who you were anymore, that what had once seemed a bedrock moral code was as hollow as a rotted tree.

  Kay sighed, closed down Sentinel. She stared at the matrix for a long time without actually seeing it. Then she headed towards the bathroom, stopping in the hallway outside of the SCIF to take out her cell phone.

  “Torres?”

  “If it isn’t Ms. Big Leagues herself. What are you doing calling down to the minors?”

  “I’m thinking I might be in Baltimore this weekend,” Kay decided. “Can I buy you lunch?”

  27

  KAY AND Justyna were enjoying an elaborate dinner at a three-star French restaurant in Manhattan, the sort that Kay could not afford or could have afforded only if she had spent the next week fasting. She had made it a point of pride not to take money from her adoptive parents, not for years, not since she had finished college—but if ever there was anything that might tempt her fierce sense of independence, it was cassoulet and a red Bordeaux.

  They had spent cocktails discussing Justyna’s week. Like many women of her social milieu, she was involved in any number of charitable organizations, although unlike many of her peers Justyna actually cared about these charities beyond an excuse for social activity. When the appetizers arrived they had switched over to Kay’s recent history, or what she could tell of it, which wasn’t much. Life for Kay lately had been work, and obviously the specifics of Black Bear weren’t the sort that could be made public knowledge.

  “Yes, yes, you are a big important FBI Agent; we’re all overwhelmingly impressed,” Justyna said, although it was obvious that her sarcasm was feigned. “Let’s talk about something interesting: How are the boys?”

  Kay smiled. “I’m afraid being a big important FBI Agent doesn’t leave me lots of time to cruise singles bars.”

  “Oh, Kay, you’re far too young to have gotten so dull. Surely duty can’t take up all of your time. There must be someone in this city of nine million who wouldn’t mind meeting a beautiful young woman who is legally allowed to carry a concealed firearm.”

  Kay laughed. “I’ll put out a Craigslist post, see if I get any responses.”

  “Seri
ously, Kay,” Justyna said, laying one gloved hand on her niece’s. “Life can’t only be about work, however important that work is. You have to find some sort of balance.”

  Which sounded nice in theory, Kay had to admit, but which in practice meant less time with the matrix, less time looking over case files, less time doing her job. And meant the increasing likelihood of another death attributable to the unknown subject, or UNSUB, of the Black Bear investigation, more sensitive information filtering its way into the ears of the nation’s enemies. For most people, extra hours at work, increasing dedication, meant a few more dollars to the company’s bottom line, maybe a nice bonus at the end of the quarter. For Kay it was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. You couldn’t turn that on and off like a switch.

  “Well . . .” Kay began after an unsure moment, “there might be someone. Maybe.”

  Justyna gave an overdramatic clap of her hands. “Is he tall?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is he handsome?”

  “He is.”

  “I like him,” Justyna said. “You should marry him.”

  “It’s nice to see where your priorities are.”

  “Handsome and tall you can’t change. Everything else . . .” Justyna shrugged her shoulders, which were left uncovered by the small black dress she wore, one that would have been inappropriate for any sixty-year-old woman who was not her aunt. “A woman can work on. When I met Luis he used to wear sweatpants and sleeveless white T-shirts. He used to drop cigar ashes on the carpet and spit onto the street. But after forty years I’ve almost managed to civilize him.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like my uncle,” Kay said.

  “I might be exaggerating slightly,” Justyna admitted. “Don’t try and change the subject. Tell me more about the potential father of my grandchildren.”