Fidelity (6 page)

11

I
T DID
not take long for Kay to understand how Susan Jeffries had acquired her nickname. She was a dowdy, bespectacled woman of forty-five or fifty, but she was the sort of person who, Kay suspected, had looked forty-five at twenty, had given the impression of late middle age while still in adolescence. She had beady little eyes that were made too large by her out-of-fashion glasses; she had a quivering little contralto; she had not bothered to dye her hair in a long time. If you had passed her on the street, you would have thought her to be that breed of librarian who leaves the back stacks only to yell at rambunctious children, who sees every book under her care as a treasure on par with the
Mona Lisa
, who secretly dislikes it when people check them out and read them, getting their grubby little fingerprints on the covers, bending back the spines.

Well—there was no point in looking like a spy if you actually were one, and Kay suspected that Jeffries's charmless ubiquity had served her successfully in the long years she'd spent working counterintelligence operations. Suspected but didn't know, because—for all the rumors that flew around about her new boss—there was very little hard information to be found, even for those members of the squad who had worked with her for years and years.

Kay was a half hour early her first day, as she wanted to make a good impression, wanted also to make sure she didn't accidentally get lost en route; but Jeffries was there all the same, working quietly at the desk in her office. Kay got the sense that one needed to wake up awfully early in the morning to get the jump on Assistant Special Agent in Charge Susan Jeffries.

She called Kay into her office a few minutes later, introduced herself in a brisk but not unpleasant fashion, asked a few ­questions—how Kay was handling the transition, where her new apartment was—then promptly got down to brass tacks. “So they had you on gangs down in Baltimore?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I think you'll find that your new slate of duties will require a rather different mind-set. You're going to spend your time doing a lot of what you might think is mundane work, reading FISA take and CI reports and doing surveillance.” FISA was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prescribed procedures for electronic surveillance of foreign powers engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. What was gathered from all of this was called “take.” “It can be slow work, but it's the FBI's second-highest priority after terrorism, and we take it very seriously.”

It was clear that Jeffries was not big on melodrama. “Yes, ma'am,” Kay said again.

“If you have any questions about your new role, feel free to take them up with me.”

“Absolutely,” Kay said.

Jeffries handed Kay a list of manuals on counterintelligence that she suggested Kay familiarize herself with. Kay scanned the list quickly:
Venona: Soviet Espionage and American Response, 1939–1957
by Robert Louis Benson,
Soviet Espionage
by David J. Dallin and four more titles that sounded like heavy, ponder
ous, difficult tomes. Kay had anticipated a somewhat lengthier introduction to her new position, but she could also recognize a dismissal when she heard one. She thanked Jeffries and went quietly back to her desk.

The rest of the squad had arrived by the time Kay had finished her meeting. The FBI was not the sort of work environment where one slunk in in mid-morning hoping the boss wouldn't notice, and anyway it seemed clear that Jeffries noticed everything. Introductions were brief and not overwhelmingly enthusiastic as there was little common ground between working criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Kay knew it would take time to learn the new vernacular let alone be accepted by her new squad. That was fine: She'd done it in Baltimore, hadn't she? She'd do it again in New York.

Kay spent the better part of the morning engaged in the usual administrative tasks one gets embroiled in whenever one enters a new office. There was a grim efficiency to the squad that contrasted somewhat with what she was used to—less freewheeling, more formal. Part of that, probably, was the nature of the work itself. As Jeffries had intimated, counterintelligence was about as far from gang work as you could get. But part of it, Kay assumed, was Jeffries herself. An office begins to take on the characteristics of the person who runs it, and Jeffries was the epitome of the counterintelligence professional: cool and competent if not particularly gregarious. Midway through the morning Kay found herself missing Torres's attempts at humor, the easy back-and-forth she had acquired with much of the Baltimore Field Office.

Five o'clock rolled around and the rest of the squad began to fade out slowly, although Kay remained where she was—indeed, found that her work moved more quickly with the rest of the cubicles empty, computers shut down and silent, with just her in the bullpen—although of course Jeffries hadn't left but remained
in her office as she had throughout the day. Admittedly, it was possible that the ASAC was playing FarmVille or updating her Facebook status, but somehow Kay did not really believe it.

When Kay finally left, she crossed paths with the janitorial staff, and the light in Jeffries's office was still on. Late enough already, she was made later still by the elaborate security procedures—­understandable, given the nature of the work, but still not an ideal addition to what had already been a very long day. In the plus column, she had missed rush hour, and she was able to get a seat on the R train up to Fourteenth Street. The L, unfortunately, was busy and crowded and smelled strongly of unwashed flesh, and by the time Kay had made it back to Greenpoint she was in a mood not so shy of foul.

But stepping up out of the subway, she felt better. Early summer, and New York was a place to be—was
the
place, with handsome couples walking down the street, arm in arm; a thousand different restaurants, every cuisine and culture imaginable; a multitude of loud, laughing bars. Uncle Luis and Aunt Justyna had offered to let her stay in the spare room in their Upper West Side apartment—just for a little while, until she got her feet down—but Kay wanted none of it. She had seen enough of her old friends and classmates give in to that mid-twenties malaise that saw them move back in with the 'rents. And she had fallen in love with this part of the city almost as soon as she had seen it. It reminded her a bit of Baltimore: the unaffected locals brushing past overcute hipsters, old-fashioned Polish bakeries abutting fifteen-dollar-a-drink cocktail bars . . .

Kay hadn't yet eaten a real meal that day: she had been too antsy for breakfast, too focused once work had started, and she was feeling it now. With nothing to cook at home, she dropped into a little falafel spot, laid a few dollars down on the table, devoured the sandwich they brought her. Afterward she thought
about going somewhere for a beer, but a quick check of the clock revealed that morning was not so far away—not so far away at all—and she found herself back in her apartment.

It was small, and the paint was faded and the brick was crumbling, and it had one window that looked directly into a window across the way, close enough that she could identify the spices on her neighbor's rack, cardamom and ginger and saffron. But at least it was hers; after two years alone in Baltimore there was no way Kay could have brought herself to live with a roommate.

Kay brushed her teeth and changed into her nightclothes. She had planned on reading awhile before going to bed, a text on cognitive psychology; Kay liked to keep abreast of current developments as best as her time allowed, which wasn't very much. Or perhaps she would do a few chapters in her Russian language textbook: since Kay had found out months ago that she would be transferred to Russian counterintelligence, she'd gone back to try to improve her speaking ability, her tongue having grown slack with disuse. Then of course there was the homework that Jeffries had assigned her; she'd need to start on that as soon as possible.

But the instant Kay felt the bed against her back, she knew she was too exhausted to get any more work done. She set her book down beside the two pictures that rested on her night table. The first was a photo of her parents taken a few years before their deaths, staring into the camera and smiling, looking happy and wholesome. The second was from outside the gym in Quantico, a tree that Kay had run past hundreds of times during her time there. Nailed into the wood were boards reading
HURT, AGONY, PAIN, LOVE-IT
and, beneath them,
FAMILY, PRIDE, ATTITUDE, RESPECT, LOYALTY
. Kay stared at both photos for a few moments, then hit the light and passed swiftly into slumber.

12

J
USTYNA
D
Ą
BROWSKA
Alvaro-Nuñez was one of those woman who seemed, infuriatingly for the rest of the world, destined to spend the entirety of her time above the ground beautiful. When Kay was a child Justyna was a staggeringly attractive forty; when Kay was an adolescent she was a stylish and handsome fifty; and now that Kay was a woman, Justyna was a dignified sixty. Perhaps in the dim years before her birth Justyna had experienced some period of awkwardness when she was gawky and big-boned, but Kay could not imagine it. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, the slightest Eastern European tremolo when she spoke, just enough to give her an air of mystery. Her sense of fashion had always been unerringly keen, and her birthday presents were inevitably the best thing in Kay's wardrobe.

Today Justyna was in a smiling sundress from one of the downtown boutiques that Kay liked to walk past but could never really imagine buying anything from, shoes smart and sensible, her earrings stylish but not overdone. The gloves were the only off touch: they were too thick for a warm day in June, not quite seamless with the rest of the costume. Beneath them, Kay knew, although virtually no one else alive did, were seven fingers, three on the left and four on the right, a souvenir of a week spent beneath the less-than-tender ministrations of the
government back in Poland, now almost forty years in the past. Justyna had never spoken of it, retaining that ineffable sense of class that seemed to have died off with Grace Kelly, allowing her to remain just above the world's unpleasantness, never quite getting stained by it. What Kay had gleaned of Justyna's years before she came to America she had gotten from Luis, and he had been very nearly as closemouthed, referring simply to some “political unpleasantness” and leaving the matter at that. It was not until after the death of her parents that Kay learned more about the half-century-long nightmare that was the Soviet Union, the humiliations and outright brutalities inflicted by the secret police upon members of a recalcitrant intelligentsia. What exactly Justyna had done to draw their attention, and how she had managed to escape, was a mystery to this day, and one that Kay knew better than to attempt to plumb.

This was not at all on Kay's mind when they met for brunch at a very cute place on the Upper West Side that Kay would not normally visit.

“Kay, darling,” Justyna said, leaning in for an air-kiss, which Kay, for all her practice, had never quite learned to manage as adroitly. “Sit down and tell me everything!”

It was the Saturday afternoon of Kay's first weekend since starting work in counterintelligence, and since she had spent the morning reviewing one of the texts Jeffries had recommended to her, it was also essentially the first time in six days that Kay was not actively working. She had to make a conscious effort to enjoy the moment, the sunny weather and her aunt's good humor. “Everything would take a while,” she said.

It had been Justyna who had kept them together, Kay knew, kept them together that long first summer after her parents had both died. Luis was all but broken by it, wandering about the house, staring out the windows aimlessly, drinking probably
more than he should. Christopher had just begun that stage of adolescence when nothing anyone tells you makes any sense at all, when you don't need an excuse for rebellion. Kay, three years younger, still a child, had been sad and scared and lonely and desperately confused.

It had been Justyna's quiet strength that had stopped them from collapsing completely. Christopher had determined—for reasons that to this day remained unclear to Kay, probably in large part because they remained unclear to Christopher as well—that he and Luis would be enemies; that nothing their surrogate father could do would gain favor in his eyes. But even Christopher's impressive sense of youthful rebellion, one that he had sustained far beyond adolescence, could not extend towards disliking Justyna. Perhaps somewhere in the world there was a person capable of such meanness, but Kay had trouble imagining who it was.

“How is the new position?” Justyna asked.

“Tiring,” Kay replied. “Like the old one.”

“I don't remember anyone forcing you into it.”

“I'm not complaining,” Kay said, and indeed she wasn't. “It's interesting. It's very different than what I was doing in Baltimore. There's a ton to learn,” and even as she said it Kay could find her mind shifting back to the text on counterintelligence she had been reading earlier that morning. She would get back to it this afternoon, and of course there remained the two chapters of Russian she had assigned herself to finish that night before she went to bed. “Asking Directions in a Museum” was the title of tonight's first lesson, although Kay wasn't exactly sure how often that sort of dialogue would come up in her counterintelligence work.

She shook herself back into the moment. “Anyway, I'm still feeling things out. They haven't given me much to do yet.”

“I'm sure that will change,” Justyna said. “Have you spoken to your brother lately?”

“Not since he came to visit me in Baltimore. He's been dodging my calls since. You?”

“He sends me notes, sometimes. Postcards from little spots in the city that I've never heard of.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“Your brother is . . . a free spirit,” Justyna said lamely.

That was one way to put it. A slow moment of unhappiness, but Justyna turned the page quickly. She had a rare talent for seeing the happy side of anything. “You know, Kay, we're all so proud of you. Christopher too. We know what it took to get where you are, how few applicants are accepted into the FBI, how many wash out of Quantico. And you seem to have done so well in Baltimore, even the New York newspapers ran articles about your . . . about what . . . about the shooting.”

“I'd rather not talk about that,” Kay said abruptly. She did not regret what had happened to Williams on that long winter afternoon months earlier. It was part of the job, part of the mission, and Williams had forced her hand. But she didn't like talking about it, especially not with anyone from outside the Bureau, a civilian, even if that civilian was family. It sounded too much like bragging to Kay, however casually she discussed it; and there was something in her mind irredeemably foul about crowing over the death, however unavoidable, of a fellow human being.

“Of course, of course,” Justyna said, graceful as ever. “I'm just trying to let you know: we're proud of you. Paul and Anne, if they were here, they'd be twice as proud.”

Paul and Anne Malloy had met during their residencies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, two young ideologues meeting and bonding over shared passions. They married just before graduation and dedicated the better part of their careers to trying to
bring the benefits of modern medicine to remote and impoverished parts of the third world, fighting leishmaniasis in the Congo, tuberculosis in India.

And then they had been killed. A robbery gone wrong in Colombia late one summer. Kay thought about it frequently but almost never discussed it. Not with her friends or acquaintances, not even very much with Luis and Justyna. If Christopher had ever been around, perhaps she might have discussed it with him, but given his habits and lifestyle this was rarely an option. It bothered Kay some—actually it bothered her quite a bit—that she could not remember much of her mother or father, or more accurately that all she could remember were the bits and bobs that a child could piece together: that they were kind, that they had loved her, that she missed them.

“You know, after their death was the first time I ever had any experience with anyone from the FBI. Coming from where I did, one did not have a very high opinion of state security.” This was as close as Aunt Justyna would ever get to directly discussing having been arrested, jailed and tortured. “But they were very professional—friendly, even. I'd never have thought at the time that my little Kay would end up in their ranks.”

Kay hadn't really been paying attention to the last few sentences, lost as she was in memories of her parents and her early childhood. It took a few seconds for her to seize on her aunt's comment. “FBI? What are you talking about?”

“You don't remember? Well, you were very young at the time. And I suppose there was a lot else going on. We had a visit from the FBI a few days after . . .”
your parents' death
was how that sentence ended, although Justyna had let it trail off. “Anyway, they wanted to ask us a few questions.”

This was the first Kay had heard of this, and it didn't make any sense. “Why would the FBI have gotten involved?”

Justyna shrugged. “They said it was standard practice, a U.S. citizen dying abroad in such circumstances.”

Except that it wasn't standard practice at all, as Kay well knew. “What did they ask about?” she asked, taking a sip from her drink to feign indifference.

“It was twenty years ago, dear, and to be honest I had other things on my mind.” Justyna thought for a moment. “They said they wanted background information on your father. They had a few questions about his new job, though I didn't know much about that and couldn't really help them. They talked to your uncle awhile also, though not for very long.”

If the FBI in the mid-nineties in any way resembled the Bureau that she was currently dedicating her life to, they would not have had the manpower to run about investigating every unfortunate accident that befell an American in a foreign country. There was something strange here, something off, and for a long moment Kay found herself worrying at it like a loose tooth.

“Kay? Kay dear? What's wrong?”

“Nothing, Auntie,” Kay said, returning to the conversation but filing the information neatly away for later. “Shall we have another mimosa?”