Fidelity Page 15

  “What was it like back then?”

  “The clothes were worse but the music was better.”

  Kay had a sudden image of Jeffries in a disco suit, bobbing her head to a Bee Gees tune, but it was too absurd to stay firm in her mind for more than a split second. “I meant the job.”

  “I know what you meant, Malloy,” Jeffries said. “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Bureau was . . . different in some ways. When I joined there were other women in the FBI, but not many. You know we didn’t get our first female Agent until 1972?”

  Kay did, of course. They hammered FBI history into you in Quantico, along with investigative techniques and weapons training and legal theory and the dozens of other things you needed to know to do your job. It was more than personal curiosity: the history, the lore, was part of what made one an effective Agent. An appreciation for the mission, for how it had evolved and developed over the years and how the Bureau had grown to deal with it. There had been women serving in the FBI back in the 1920s, when it was still a fledgling organization, but they were retired once J. Edgar Hoover had taken over as Director. A brilliant organizer whose passion for the Bureau had created the modern FBI, Hoover was, at the same time, a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, and it wasn’t until after his death that women could again become Agents. Two were recruited for Quantico’s class of 1972, one an ex-nun, the other a former U.S. Marine—which, Kay had always felt, spoke to some indefinable part of the job that was somewhere between a military duty and a religious calling. These days there were more than two thousand women serving as Bureau Agents, in posts across the country and the world. For Kay the days of the FBI being a “boys’ club” were far distant, but they wouldn’t have been for Jeffries.

  “It was . . . different,” Jeffries said blandly. It was the closest that she would ever come to an outright complaint about the matter. Jeffries was a stoic through and through. “There were still a few holdovers from the old days, people who couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the idea that I was a woman and an FBI Agent. The ratios were still skewed: I can’t tell you how many times I looked around the room to see I was the only one in it with long hair. Not everyone thought that a woman could do the job.”

  “So?”

  “I cut my hair,” Jeffries said neatly. “And I outworked every one of my detractors. It’s not about showing that you can beat the rest of the office in an arm wrestling competition or drink anyone under the table. I made sure that I was the best Agent in the room that I was in, whatever that room was—not loudly, not in a way that called attention to itself. But at the end of the day I wanted my supervisors, when they had something important that needed to be done, something critical, to look around the bullpen and find themselves staring at me.”

  Kay could appreciate that sentiment.

  “That’s the thing about the Bureau, Kay: the mission comes first. The mission always comes first. I suppose there was the occasional holdout here and there who never got over the fact that I had two X chromosomes. But most of them came around quickly enough once they saw that I could further the success of our mission. The protection of the country, the safety of its citizens—that’s too important a thing to let prejudice get in the way. Most of the Agents understood that. Most understand that now. Enough with the matrix for tonight, Agent Malloy,” she said. “Go home. Black Bear will be waiting for you tomorrow.”

  “Is that an order?” Kay asked cheekily.

  “I suppose, if it needs to be,” Jeffries said.

  Kay smiled a little, and shut down her workstation, and followed Jeffries out.

  32

  THAT MORNING he had been called into the office of his superior, Alexei Rossokov. A casual request, his secretary coming by to ask if he had a few minutes, which of course Vadim did. And Rossokov had been friendly, as he usually was, with no hint of menace in his dark brown eyes. There was some course of training that the brass back in Moscow was demanding of all their Agents overseas. Unnecessary, probably, but what could Rossokov do about it, or Vadim, for that matter? Annoying to be taken away from one’s work, but it should only be a week or two, and it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing to be back in the old country for a little while.

  Vadim played the role of the competent subordinate well. He was extremely busy with his own work at the moment, but if Moscow wanted him to come for a visit, then of course he would find a way to get it done. He smiled and made a joke about Russian winters starting in American autumns while feeling his heart fall through his chest and down his pleated pants to rest uncomfortably in his left loafer.

  The rest of that day continued as usual. He went about his work with an easy attitude, or at least the easiest attitude that he could fake. The next day was Thanksgiving, obviously not a holiday in which anyone in the Russian mission had particular interest, although as a practical matter it made sense to shut down. He said good-bye to his neighbors when he left that evening, told them he would be heading back home Friday, to keep his seat warm until he came back. Then he went to a bar and began to drink heavily.

  “Called back to Moscow for new training.” It was plausible. It was not outside the realm of possibility. And yet it was not true, Vadim knew—knew the way a fisherman might know that it was going to rain before evening, hang the weatherman. A spy’s business is paranoia. He swam in it, he breathed it through his nostrils, he exuded it through his pores. Despite all her guarantees of secrecy, Jeffries or someone on Jeffries’s team had blown it. The SVR knew that he had been approached by the FBI and that he hadn’t reported that contact. That Vadim had not yet actually given them anything valuable would not be any sort of affirmative defense, he knew: ironic but irrelevant.

  Equally ironic was the fact that, having created this difficulty for him, Jeffries and the FBI were also the only ones who might solve it. Had that been the game all along? he wondered, his paranoia level rising sharply. Had they made preliminary contact with him, expecting that he would play it coy, all the while planning to somehow alert the SVR and thus force him into defecting? Put a pin in that one, Vadim told himself. Paranoia might be the only defense one had in this business, but still it could drive you mad if you let it. And anyway, it didn’t matter. However they had found out, whatever the plan was, Vadim had only one potential out, and he knew it.

  He woke up early the next afternoon with a splitting headache but absolutely clear on what he had to do. On his personal phone he found the number for Antonio’s Flower Service and dialed it. He let it ring three times, then disconnected. Five minutes later he called the number again, but this time he let it ring.

  It was called a parole, after the premodern military practice by which soldiers on watch would repeat two halves of a given password as a call-and-response, thus ensuring they weren’t about to fall victim to a surprise assault. Antonio’s Flower Service was, needless to say, not a real business but rather part of the elaborate game by which Vadim informed the FBI that he needed to talk to someone on their end.

  • • •

  It was bad luck that Marshall had pulled duty over Thanksgiving, but he tried not to let it bother him. It was part of the job; there was nothing else to say about it. He’d rather have been in Boston with his wife and his two children, but he wasn’t, so Marshall resigned himself to whiling away the hours with a Ludlum novel and a frozen turkey dinner. With Vadim’s recruitment still in play, someone needed to be around to man the station at all times, even though it seemed unlikely that it would end up being necessary.

  The drawer rang once. Snapped out of his boredom, there was a brief moment when Marshall thought he might have imagined it. When the drawer rang a second time he opened it with a curse, revealing a sea of cheap cellular phones attached to a power strip.

  A “hello” phone was called that because names were never exchanged over it, not real ones, at least. An Agent might have dozens sitting in their de
sk drawer, each keyed to one specific asset, each with its own peculiar set of code words that needed to be memorized by the user.

  “Hello?” Marshall said breathlessly.

  “This is Mr. Conrad,” Vadim said, as calmly as he could make himself. “I was supposed to stop in and pick up a floral arrangement you’re putting together for me, and I was hoping I might be able to come in a bit earlier than we had planned.”

  Long pause. “When were you hoping to pick it up?”

  “Today. Tonight. Immediately.”

  “I’m going to talk to our staff on-site,” Marshall said, thinking as quickly as possible. “This is a very busy weekend, after all.”

  “I assure you, I would not be bothering you were the matter not . . . extremely urgent.”

  “We’ll handle it,” Marshall said, trying to sound more confident than he was. “Call back in an hour.”

  Marshall hung up the phone, allowing himself one brief moment of horror-tinged confusion before grabbing his own phone off his desk and dialing Jeffries’s number as fast as he could.

  33

  AFTER KAY had finished baking her carrot cake, and frosting her carrot cake, and putting her carrot cake in Tupperware; and after she had finished applying her makeup; and even after she had put her shoes and her coat on, and pulled her keys out, and turned off the lights in preparation for leaving, she sat down on the couch.

  It would have been thirteen years—or perhaps fourteen—since they had all had Thanksgiving together, midway through Christopher’s first and only semester at college. Struggle though she did to date it correctly, Kay had no difficulty in remembering why their tradition had come to an abrupt end. It had involved drinking (Christopher’s mostly), and anger (here Christopher and Luis shared the honors), and yelling (everyone), and afterward Christopher slammed the door and headed back to school—but not for very long: they had rules at college like everywhere else, and like everywhere else, Christopher had proved steadfastly uninterested in abiding by them. By Christmas he had been expelled from campus, and by New Year’s he had vacated his room at Uncle Luis’s—to go on tour with his band, if she remembered correctly, or perhaps that had been the winter he ran off to Buenos Aires. There had been so many misadventures, so much disappointment, Christopher’s youthful foolishness stretching into his mid-thirties, at a time when most people settled down to careers and families.

  Kay checked her watch. Four thirty: if she didn’t leave now she’d be late, although of course Christopher wouldn’t show up on time, and in fact she found the idea of skipping the event not at all unappealing. She even spent a brief moment considering trying to come up with some sort of work emergency, but the thought of leaving poor Aunt Justyna alone to deal with Christopher and Luis was a step too far into outright villainy. Sighing, she slipped downstairs and found her way into the subway.

  Aunt Justyna had an apron on that said “Kiss the Chef” in Polish, and enough pots and pans on the stove to feed a small army, and the relief in her eyes when her niece came in was enough to make Kay feel guilty for thinking about not showing up. Luis was not, to judge by the way he stumbled as he came over to give her a hug, on his first tumbler of whiskey; but then again, it was a holiday, and Kay was not in the mood to be judgmental. She herself was thinking the evening might well prove more tolerable with a large glass of wine in hand.

  Uncle Luis and Aunt Justyna lived in a gorgeous apartment on the Upper West Side, only a couple of blocks from Central Park. It had been Kay’s home during the eight years of her life between the deaths of Paul and Anne Malloy and her leaving for Princeton, but she had never really thought of it as such. Home had been her parents’ house in Westchester, three stories with a big green backyard, a dog they had to give up, the sort of suburban bliss that most people can only dream of, and indeed that Kay often dreamed of in the long years after it had been taken away from her.

  But they’d done the best they could—that was what Christopher never seemed to be able to understand. If it hadn’t been a very easy thing to be uprooted from your home and moved into the city, into a different environment, Kay didn’t think it had been any easier from the opposite end. As a child you suppose that adults have all the answers to everything—or should have them, at least—and feel betrayed when your parents or guardians fall short of these impossibly high standards. But you get older and you realize that’s nonsense; the sudden arrival of two adolescents in Luis and Justyna’s pleasant, childless existence, the responsibilities and burdens of parenthood forced upon them unasked—it couldn’t have been easy. Perhaps Luis had been too harsh at times, too quick to dismiss Christopher; but raising children doesn’t come with a playbook, and he hadn’t had much practice before being thrown into the deep end.

  Kay spent a while sort of pretending to help Justyna in the kitchen but mainly just gossiping and drinking while her aunt did all the hard work. Kay had a little flutter in her chest that the white wine was not helping with, as if she were back in Quantico, about to sit down and take a test she hadn’t prepared for. Of course, Kay was the sort of person who had always prepared thoroughly for tests, so the metaphor wasn’t entirely apt, but it was close. Something unpleasant was coming, and there was nothing Kay could do to head it off, nothing but smile and play at ignorance.

  Luis came into the kitchen, swaying slightly from drink while trying hard to hide it. “So?” Luis began in a deliberately offhanded way. “Shall we eat?”

  Kay didn’t say anything. Justyna clucked unhappily.

  “What? What is that about?”

  “Christopher isn’t here,” Kay muttered.

  “It is Christopher we are waiting for?” Luis said, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “Then perhaps you will not mind if I go back into the den and watch some television. Or take a nap. Or perhaps order some takeout, because if we’re going to be waiting for my nephew’s arrival to eat, I’m afraid I may never get a crack at that turkey.”

  “A bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?” Kay asked. “It’s five thirty; I’m sure you won’t starve for at least another hour or two.”

  Luis chuckled and went back into the den.

  Although of course Christopher actually was late by about thirty minutes, minutes during which Kay at least half hoped that his arrival would be canceled rather than postponed. It would be a very nice thing if they could all sit down and enjoy one ­another’s company, this small ad hoc family that was now all that Kay had left. But, barring that, it would be a welcome change not to have to sit through another dispute between her brother and her uncle, one which she would unavoidably be called upon to referee.

  But then the buzzer rang and a few minutes later Christopher was at the door, a bottle of wine under his arm and another in his stomach. At least a bottle, to judge by his flushed red face. “Sister,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, then hurrying over to his aunt. “Aunt Justyna,” he said, kissing her as well.

  Prelude over, he turned suddenly towards Luis, who was not quite grinning around his unlit cigar. “Dearest Uncle,” he said, “how long has it been?”

  “A while.”

  “You look magnificent, Don, just magnificent. Aging like a monarch, and not one of the French ones who always had trouble with the gout.”

  “Dinner’s served!” Justyna said brightly, hoping food might head off trouble. Wishful thinking, but Kay couldn’t blame her. They each took a place at the large, rarely used dinner table, in front of china plates and white linen that were brought out just as infrequently. Justyna had gone all out, as if the prepared feast and elegant table setting could ameliorate any potential ­unpleasantness. All the classic Thanksgiving foods were in attendance: turkey and mashed potatoes; cranberry sauce, freshly made and canned, because Justyna knew that Christopher had always preferred the latter; cheesy broccoli and creamed spinach.

  It looked beautiful and it tasted even better, and no one seemed to
make any particular effort to eat any of it. Christopher grouped a few slivers of canned cranberry sauce onto his plate—to placate Justyna, Kay suspected—but mostly he just drank. Luis crammed his plate to near overflowing but then left it there as if he had forgotten to eat it. Kay did her best to swallow a few bites of turkey, as much to hold down the wine as anything else. Even Justyna, Kay felt, was only going through the motions, all of them playing at being a well-adjusted family, inexpertly and not for very long.

  “And how is your band, Christopher?” Justyna asked brightly, and as was often the case Kay was impressed at her easy grace, at the natural ability she had to focus on happy things, although she thought for once it wouldn’t be sufficient.

  “It’s all right,” Christopher said, eyes bloodshot from whatever he had drunk before coming to dinner. “We’ve got a showcase in Bushwick coming up next week.”

  “Straight on to the top forty,” Luis began, and Kay’s heart sank down into her gut. “Remind us again, Christopher, what’s the name of your brilliant ensemble?”

  “Chicken Shit,” Christopher said to Luis around a mouthful of greens. “Captain Swill and his Chicken Shit Extravaganza.”

  This was a lie, as Kay well knew, a cheap and rather petty attempt to infuriate their adoptive father, and one which Kay had hoped Christopher might avoid making, at least until the second course.

  “An apt sobriquet,” Luis said, as always happy to give as good as he got.

  Justyna shot Kay a quick, sad, helpless look, then took another sip of wine. There wasn’t much else to do, and a little more alcohol probably wouldn’t change anything.

  “And what are you up to apart from that, Christopher? What occupies your time, as an adult male in the prime of his years? What other accomplishments can we expect from you?” Luis’s sarcasm permeated his string of questions.

  “I do a lot of drugs,” Christopher said cheerily, “and I’ve gotten pretty good at Super Nintendo. Old-fashioned, I know, but then, the classics are the best, right?”