Chapter 14 #2
“I might join you,” he said. “Too quiet in here.” He followed her outside and sat on a wooden bench on the porch.
Had he sat on the same seat with his wife?
Instead of sitting beside him, Alice leaned on the railing, facing the same way.
The colors were leaching from the trees, the shadows spreading, the blue of the sky melding into black.
“All that digital stuff… Was that why the operations in the novel were so low-tech? I did question Nika about all the dead drops and brush passes that the heroine and her assets used. It seemed unlikely that these people—and many of them were in IT—would use such pedestrian techniques in the twenty-first century. It all seemed very Cold War. I suggested we use the dark web, cryptography, fun stuff like that. But Nika was adamant that with all the digital tracing around these days, it was more plausible to go old school. One of the dead-drop locations we initially had in the book was a store, and the owner would put a coded message into her marketing posts on social media to indicate there was something for Galina to pick up, but that was as high-tech as it got.”
“Technology can’t see inside people’s heads—yet—but conversations with actual people can. I’m making up for the lack of gadgets now, though. I’m playing around with some fun ones—some prototypes an ex-CIA contact made for me.”
“Like the camera trap you set up?”
“That’s nothing. I have a regular-looking tie clip that’s a voice recorder.
You press it, and it records to the cloud.
Of course, I never wear a tie so we need to rethink that.
I have a pendant that uploads live video to the cloud.
Plus GPS trackers. But, like I say, it mostly all comes down to talking to people. Regular old-fashioned HUMINT.”
“Human intelligence,” she said, remembering her research. “You mentioned a ‘we.’ Who’s ‘we’?”
“I occasionally contract a handful of trusted people. How come the dead drop at the store wasn’t in the book?”
“It ended up on the cutting room floor—Nika’s call, which was a shame. I thought it was cool.”
“Around the time we started the Moscow operation, there’d been a lot of high-profile hacks—CIA employees and agents being exposed, that kind of thing.
That was why we set up the network like we did.
Pretty much nothing went onto a computer until it was transmitted securely from the embassy’s code room, and even then I’d get nervous.
Sometimes I’d wait until I’d crossed into Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, if I was taking the train out, and leave my intel at dead drops for colleagues working out of embassies there.
The assets we had in the Kremlin knew only too well how fragile the CIA’s systems were, and were careful to wipe identifying data from anything that could be tracked back to them.
Some of the higher-ups thought our skepticism was ridiculous and pressured us to use more tech, since they were spending millions—billions—on it, but over time we proved them wrong.
As far as I know, we shut down the network with no lives lost. If the Russians had gotten their hands on Nika…
If she had to die, I’m relieved it was a peaceful end. ”
Alice took an audible breath.
“It wasn’t peaceful?”
“No, sure, it was.”
She sensed him standing. “Alice?” he said, stepping up beside her. “The truth?”
“It was peaceful,” she said, staring into the trees.
“Then what are you not telling me?”
“Right at the end it was peaceful, when she was too sedated to fight anymore.”
“But…”
“But cancer… It’s brutal.” Alice looked down at her boots. They were speckled with mud. One of his was worn on the top—from shifting gears?
“How long ago did your mom and sister die?” he said quietly.
“My mom three years ago—she was sick for a long time. My sister just over a year.”
“That same cancer?”
“Defective gene, the doctors say.”
“Jesus. That sucks.”
Alice made the mistake of looking up at his face.
His eyes were wide with the horror of a complete stranger randomly oversharing, and a wish to be anywhere else.
Shit. She’d gone there. “I’m hungry,” she declared, pivoting, and striding into the cabin.
She wasn’t the slightest bit hungry. She could never eat when her stomach got that hollow grief-y feeling.
Between that and the way it was flipping with nerves at being in such close confines… Who needed keto?
Predictably, her morbid episode brought the mood down, and they ate the chicken wraps she’d bought in silence but for the calls of birds settling in for the night.
They sat side-by-side on the bench, their eyes trained on the view as if there were something more interesting to watch than trees growing. Well, he ate. She picked.
“So that was hands-down the craziest day of my life,” she said, overly brightly.
“It was pretty crazy.”
She studied his profile. The low light emphasized the cut of his cheekbones, the smoothness of his skin before it transitioned into stubble. He shot Alice a sideways look, that very distinctive mouth kinking. Great. Now she’d been busted staring.
“It wasn’t even in your top-ten craziest days, was it?” she said quickly, as if that was what she’d been pondering.
He screwed up his face, long crow’s feet imprinting around his eyes.
“Top twenty?” she tried.
“Securely in the top fifty. Top sixty, definitely.”
“Huh.”
Maybe if she’d spent more of her life outside the town she’d grown up in, she wouldn’t stress so much when unexpected things happened.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff had to take on added meaning when everything seemed small in comparison with the kind of stuff he’d experienced, with the military and then the CIA.
For her, the small stuff was the big stuff.
Even among all the big stuff of death and mourning, she obsessed about the details.
The wording of the obituary. The colors of the flowers.
Who to call in what order. It was about exercising control over something that made her feel powerless, Kimberly said.
And like with a lot of behaviors and thought patterns that Kimberly pointed out, knowing the reasons she did dumb shit rarely stopped her doing dumb shit.
Carter shifted to face her, which left her stuck eyeballing him. “You don’t seem all that freaked out now. Or is that the neutral-expression teacher thing?”
“Chill on the outside, losing my shit on the inside. Even out of school, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to keep my emotions from showing on my face.”
“And covering with humor, I’m guessing.”
“A family thing. We try to keep things light, but not be in denial, either.”
“Hard to find that balance, I imagine.”
“Can be. But when someone around you is dying, you don’t want to make it all about your grief and your fears. Plus, at work, it’s a bad idea to let students know how you really feel.” She shrugged. “You wear a mask for long enough, and at some point it gets fused on. Like a method actor.”
He grunted.
“I guess you’d know about that.”
Another grunt.
“Do you still wear the mask, now you’re out of the CIA?”
He brushed crumbs off his sweater. “Mine fused on a long time ago. And not just because of working in the I.C. You wear one in the military too, especially doing the shit I did.”
“But you must feel that stress on the inside, right? Like when the doors opened at the transfer station, and the van was there. God, look at me—I’m shuddering just thinking about it.”
He lifted an arm, as if he was about to put it around her shoulders, and then lowered it, linking his fingers together and looking down at them.
He shifted away a little. “Nah. Adrenaline makes me go super calm and clearheaded. Like all the other shit drops away. Even when I was at school, playing quarterback, even in big games, I got that feeling. Like time actually slowed down in those moments, and I had all this headspace to calculate the best moves. I like those moments.”
“Of course you played quarterback. That would have been a perfect detail for the novel. Exactly how much of Anderson Holt’s backstory was true—I mean true of you, not your alias? Coz there are like three versions of you in my head right now.”
“The broad brushstrokes are true. I told Nika from the beginning that my wife was missing, presumed dead. And then when we got to America, when we could finally take off the masks, we spent a night at a hotel—which you know all about—and I told her a few things about the real me, which she obviously remembered. But we didn’t have time to cover a whole lot of ground.
I realized after we parted that I hadn’t even told her my real name—she married my alias.
So even if she had gone looking for me… Some of the details in the book were fused with my cover story, some were wildly incorrect. ”
“Yeah, I went through and layered in some details later.”
“I didn’t kill Vanessa, my wife. In case you’re wondering.”
“I’m really sorry about that.” It had only been a suggestion, a question she’d left with the reader at the end of the book, after Holt turned out not to be the hero he seemed.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, with sarcastic brightness. “Ah well, better get started on this tape.” He stood and walked inside, as if to turn a new page, like Alice had with the ruse of getting food. She felt the sting of a mosquito biting her ankle and slapped at it.