Fidelity Page 18

  “And what is it that you will do, exactly, Tom?” Vlad asked. Three drinks had done little to counteract the no doubt significant quantity of cocaine that Vlad had snorted before coming to the meeting, and beneath the table his foot, clad in hideous off-white tennis shoes, tapped arrhythmically.

  Sergei shot him a worried look, then turned fretful eyes back to Tom.

  “Excuse me?” Tom asked quietly. It was one of his rules, one of the many little things he had picked up from watching how Pyotr handled himself: the nastier things start to turn, the softer and sweeter one ought to speak. “I am not sure I heard you.”

  Somewhere in the mass of pink pulp that served Vlad as a brain, the dim realization that he had overstepped his bounds warred with his own implacable sense of arrogance, ending in some sort of stalemate. “I’m just wondering what part you will have in the operation,” he mumbled meaninglessly.

  “Why, Vlad—do you have aspirations of moving up the ladder? Feel like taking on my job? Think that’s something you can handle?”

  “Nothing like that,” Sergei said. The brighter of the two, smart enough to recognize that Tom was a bad man to make angry, although you hardly needed to be a rocket scientist to put that together. “Vlad is just talking.”

  “This is the problem with this country,” Tom said evenly. “Everyone talks. Talks all the time. Talks to make themselves feel strong and powerful, talks to make themselves feel important. Talks to impress pretty girls and strangers at bars. Talks and talks and talks.” Tom could feel himself getting angry, tamped down most of it but let enough leak out to bring Vlad and Sergei to a state of tension. “I have no use for a talker. I need thinkers and I need doers. There is no question that neither of you are the former: all that is left, should you wish to continue in my employment, is to show that you are the latter. And you show that by doing exactly what I tell you, exactly as I tell you to do it, without ever asking any questions as to the why. And if you ever, ever speak to me disrespectfully again, Vlad, I am going to be forced to do something to remind you why I’m the one who gives orders in this operation and you’re the one who follows them.”

  Vlad opened his mouth to speak, to explain or excuse himself, but Sergei astutely and somewhat roughly elbowed him into silence.

  “He is sorry, Tom,” Sergei added quickly. “You must forgive him: he does not know you like I do.”

  It had been a long time since Tom had needed to get his hands dirty, years and years. There was some part of him that was happy to see his reputation hadn’t entirely faded in that time, that he was still known as a man to fear. “Stick to the script and do not forget who wrote it,” Tom said, finishing off his can of beer and then crushing it in a fist the size of a cinder block. A bit too blunt for his tastes, but with men the likes of Sergei and Vlad one needed to eschew subtlety. “I want Christopher Malloy wrapped up in a neat little bundle, ready to be plucked up anytime I feel like doing so. Understood?”

  “Is no problem, bro,” Vlad agreed quickly.

  “Is no problem,” Sergei echoed.

  “It had better not be,” Tom said, then left a C-note on the table and disappeared into the evening.

  40

  THEY WERE lying in bed late one night, listening to the city sounds from outside Andrew’s window, enjoying the soft mattress and the thick covers and the warmth from each other’s bodies. “Our UNSUB is important enough to have access to all of this classified knowledge,” Kay began, “but not someone in a leadership position or likely to get there.”

  Andrew laughed. It was an old game of theirs. Andrew was very sharp and had more experience in the intelligence world than Kay did. He was a good person to bounce thoughts off, and he didn’t seem to mind that Kay took her work home with her and never got annoyed at having to spend dinners discussing tradecraft.

  “He’s stalled out in the middle ranks, bitter that his genius isn’t recognized. Sees an easy way to make a few hundred thousand dollars and stick a finger in the eye of everyone who ever passed him over.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” Andrew returned. “That’s the most common profile, but not the only one. Philby was well liked, moved swiftly up the chain of command. If it hadn’t been for the rest of the Cambridge Five being drunken buffoons, they might have made him head of MI6. But then, Philby was a fanatic, a true believer. Hard to imagine, but there was a time when people gave their lives for the ideal of international Marxism.”

  “I’m not sure there ever was,” Kay corrected him. “Not for most of them, at least. Here and there, maybe, in the beginning, some of them might have really believed in Bolshevism, ‘Workers of the World Unite’ and all of that. But for most of them it comes down to a personality defect, pure and simple, a psychological tic that mandates their misbehavior.”

  “Playing armchair Freud again? I studied the Classics in college, but you don’t see me constantly quoting Homer.”

  “Philby was a drunken manic-depressive with daddy issues. If MI6 hadn’t been such a chummy old-boys’ club, he’d never have gotten in, and if anyone over there had been doing their due diligence, they’d have caught him long before he defected to the East.” Kay sucked at her teeth, went back to thinking about the Black Bear UNSUB. “Our guy is different: sharp as hell, sharp enough to stay hidden just beneath our noses. If it wasn’t for the SVR being so anxious, overplaying their own hand, rolling up our networks left and right, we wouldn’t even know he existed.”

  “Oh my God!” Andrew said, sitting up suddenly and slapping his hand to his forehead with deliberate melodrama. “It’s Mike! All this time, how could I have failed to see it! It’s been Mike this whole time. I feel so betrayed!”

  Kay laughed and pulled him back down against her. “I’ll let Jeffries know: we can pick him up tomorrow.”

  “Poor Mike,” Andrew said. “I guess he needed the money.”

  “Money’s part of it,” Kay said. “But not all of it.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Narcissism,” Kay replied. “The excitement of feeling like he was smarter than everyone else around him. A strange sense of self-importance he must have from running both sides simultaneously.”

  “Good thing it isn’t really Mike,” Andrew said.

  “Good thing,” Kay agreed.

  Andrew went silent awhile and Kay did the same, though just when the conversation seemed over he began to speak again. “Our first double to get picked up was a signals man, right? Tapping phones and reading e-mails?”

  “Yup,” Kay said, having long ago memorized every detail of the Black Bear investigation.

  “Maybe that’s the way in: go back and take a look at everyone in the CIA who matches the profile you’ve worked up and was doing signals work over the last few years.” He shrugged rather deliberately. “Might get lucky, at least.”

  “Just might,” Kay said, the wheels inside her head turning.

  Andrew fell asleep shortly afterward, his snoring in an even and pleasant rhythm. But Kay stayed awake long after, running through what Andrew had told her, pulling strands together, trying to force connections. She went into work early the next morning and sat down at her desk with a fire in her eyes that had been missing for months.

  41

  THE FIRST thing to keep in mind, the main thing, the crux of the matter, at least as far as Joseph Sadler was concerned, was that it was not his fault.

  Not really. A little bit, perhaps—obviously he was not entirely uninvolved with the matter—but in the main, by and large, he had not done anything that anyone else wouldn’t have done. It was just a question of circumstance. He was convinced of this. He was absolutely certain.

  Whose fault was it, then? There were lots of culprits; there were many fingers to be pointed. If he had been appreciated properly, if they had treated him better—they being the Agency, his wife, the world—he would certainly not be in this situation. Twenty years he had gi
ven to the CIA, a man of his obvious intelligence and drive, two entire decades. Had they appreciated his efforts? Had he been rewarded according to the merit he had demonstrated? No, not at all, not a bit of it, watching as underlings became colleagues became superiors, men and women—women especially: with the PC cops ascendant, the only requirement for promotion was an XX chromosome.

  And his wife, Janet—had she ever really tried to understand him? Understood the pressures he was under, the stresses? No, of course not: he had come home from long days of strain to longer evenings of the exact same. There was never enough money—and why hadn’t he gotten that promotion they had both expected?—and she did not like their landscape crew or the maid. Always complaining, never satisfied.

  Not like Indre. He had noticed her the first time she had walked into McKeever’s. McKeever’s was a neighborhood dive bar that Sadler had been to a lot back in those days, slipping out of the office a bit early, not too early, and he had put in his time; no one could say otherwise. But anyway Sadler was in McKee­ver’s a lot back in those days, and of course he noticed her as soon as she came in, a body like that you’d have had to be blind not to, blind and deaf also, because there was a collective sigh from the patrons inhabiting the bar at five in the afternoon when the door opened up and Indre stood there.

  But, being neither blind nor deaf, Sadler didn’t have any trouble noticing her; indeed, found himself blushing and turning back to his drink. Would you believe it, a man of his age? And then there had been the scent of perfume, sweet but not cloying, and then she was standing right next to him. Was the seat taken? No, he assured her, the seat was not.

  She was new to the city, she told him, born in Vilnius. Her name was Indre; she’d come over to study fashion design. She seemed simple and kind and slightly lost. That night he rolled her name over in his mind, whispering each syllable while his wife slept soundly beside him. Of course he would never see her again. Beautiful women did not have trouble meeting men in a city like New York. Not in any city, probably.

  But then she was there the next day, blushing and looking away from him as she walked in, but then looking back and taking the seat next to him. She asked about his day and he found himself telling her, not in thorough detail but more than he should have, given that he worked for the world’s foremost covert organization. She seemed fascinated, asked insightful and interesting questions, questions that elicited more answers, one after another like pieces of bread in a fairy tale, leading him home.

  He came back to McKeever’s every day afterward, every workday, at least, and she came back nearly as often. She would tell him some about her struggles being an immigrant to the country, trying to navigate her new life, and he would tell her a great deal about what he did, skewed in a way to make him seem heroic, rather than one more bureaucrat in the largest bureaucracy in the history of the planet. He saw her five days a week or at least four, and she always laughed at his jokes, and she always smelled delightful.

  Finally she came in one day and she looked worried, and he asked her if there was anything he could to do help. And as it turned out, there was, in fact. Her sister had been dating a man, was supposed to marry him, and Indre was nervous: there was something a little bit off about him, something she didn’t quite trust. And she loved her sister so, and couldn’t Sadler just take a little peek at his records, see if there was anything in the databases or whatever it was that they used—Indre wasn’t sure of the terminology—but if he could just take a look and make sure that her soon-to-be brother-in-law was on the up and up, take a look, maybe bring her back the file? She hated asking him, she was quick to explain; she felt terrible about it, just terrible, her red fingernails brushing against his leg.

  Life drags most of us down slowly, bit by cruel bit, in savage wars of attrition. But some of us are given a choice, a moment—left or right, up or down, white or black—even if we don’t realize it at the time. Sadler had another beer and told Indre that he would take care of it, no problem, and the noose was pulled tight around his neck.

  There was more to it, of course: hotel room liaisons, lunch-hour romances, paid for by her—she said that she did not want him to think she was taking advantage of his wealth, and since in fact he did not have very much, he did not complain. If he did not know it when she had asked for the first file—and on some level he did, because Sadler was not a fool, though he often acted like one—then he certainly knew it when she asked him for the second, because there could be no reason why she would need to know the background of her best friend’s new boyfriend also. No legitimate reason, at least.

  So he was not exactly surprised when he walked into the suite for their weekly session and found a thin Slavic man in a not particularly nice suit sitting on the bed, clear-eyed but not smiling.

  He had been frightened, of course. Anyone would have been. But Pyotr was calm and affable: no nasty words, the soft sell all the way. They were both professionals, Pyotr reminded him; there was no need for any of the usual intelligence tricks. Sadler had already been working for them for two months, ­effectively—at least, the CIA would see it that way, should they be alerted to his having stolen information. And had it really been so bad? Had his quality of life suffered? Was he struggling to sleep at night? Had he turned towards the bottle? Indre would remain his usual contact. She liked him, Pyotr mentioned, but did not insist. Moreover, Pyotr was authorized to offer Sadler a reasonable gratuity, extremely reasonable. And what was a case officer’s salary, after all, these days? Not enough for a boat or a second house or a yearly trip to Tuscany. Everything that Sadler had done for them over the years, the hard work, the sacrifices, and here he was passed over again and again, stuck in middle management, a wage slave like any other.

  Strange to say, but in the short term, at least, his work improved. Sadler was so nervous that some slipup would draw attention down on him that he regained a motivation he hadn’t possessed since being fresh from training, making sure to dot every i and cross every t. Six months after he had become a double agent, his boss had called him into his office, told him that he had noticed his renewed effort, thanked him and gave vague promises of some future reward. On his way home Sadler had started to laugh so hard that he couldn’t breathe—laughed so hard that he nearly lost control over the steering wheel and ended up splattered against a highway barrier.

  He gave the SVR anything that came across his desk that he thought might be of interest to them, which was to say that he thought might result in them giving him more money. He slept fine at night. The Cold War was over, after all. Not like the old days, when any moment the Soviets might decide to storm over the Rhine. The Russians were a spent force, the bear toothless and old; nothing Sadler’s tidbits would do would change the balance of power. And if any of these secrets were so important, then they wouldn’t be so easy to sneak out, would they? Hell, security was so bad down at the shop, security was such a joke, they were practically asking for a breach! Looked at that way, which is the way that Sadler looked at it, he was practically doing the CIA a favor. Could you imagine if the SVR had gotten their hooks into someone really nasty?

  Of course, the thrill had gone out pretty quickly, as the thrill tends to do. A year became three became five, and in time Sadler began to find his espionage banal: “Have to call a plumber, have to pick up dog food, have to put out the call sign to let Pyotr know that I’ve got something to slip him.” The SVR wasn’t any different from the CIA, when it came right down to it: it was staffed by the same set of self-obsessed incompetents unable to recognize Sadler’s quality no matter how frequently he demonstrated it. Of course, Pyotr was all right; at least he appreciated Sadler, realized all the things he’d done for them, pushed to get Sadler just compensation. But the higher-ups, Pyotr explained—well, if it was up to Pyotr, Sadler would get twice as much as he was getting, but he had people to answer to, just like everyone. Just like everyone.

  The second week of April, Sadler
began to get antsy. Faces repeating themselves in crowds, strangers or apparent strangers paying slightly too much attention to him. Paranoia, Indre insisted, lying naked next to him in their room at the Sheraton, the same one they had been sharing for years now. Why would they start looking at him now? Why indeed? Sadler wondered, uncomfortable.

  But the third week he was certain that he had caught the same unmarked car prowling around his neighborhood, spending two hours pretending to read beside his upstairs window, flipping a page every so often to keep up the charade but actually staring through the blinds like his life depended on it. Was he going mad? After all these years as a double, quietly gliding by without drawing attention, had his number finally come up?

  Pyotr understood, at least. He wasn’t angry when Sadler contacted him, even though it was two weeks before their set meet, and it was against protocol to approach him directly. But Pyotr was one of the good ones; there were few of them on either side of the divide, few of them regardless of which acronym you worked for. They talked for a long time, forty-five minutes or so, starting with Sadler’s worries about being followed, though by the time he had unspooled these to Pyotr he got the distinct sensation that they were nothing but the product of paranoia, a sensation aided by Pyotr, who, if he was too polite to scoff outright, nonetheless helped Sadler realize that it was just his nerves getting him into trouble. He hung up the phone thanking his handler and meaning it. And why not? Five years they’d been working together, and he liked the Russian more than he did any of his other colleagues.

  Sadler went into the office that morning smiling, as he did most mornings, a man happy with his life and comfortable with the choices that had formed it.

  42

  THIS IS Joseph Sadler,” Jeffries said, pressing a button and throwing his face up onto the display board, “and he’s been a very naughty boy.”