Palace of Treason (21 page)

“Equilibrium,” said Nate. He saw where this was going, and it scared him, because he was thinking the same thing.

“Yes, equilibrium. Balance. I did not feel that before, but now we have it.
I need it
.” She put her hands on his shoulders, and dug her nails in softly. She looked coyly at him. “I need
you
.”

“Last night. Last night was wonderful …, ” said Nate. “But you can’t work inside if we’re having an affair. We need focus, calculation, a clear—”

“
Bozhe,
Oh God,” said Dominika. “I am having an affair, I cannot go back inside.
Gore mne,
woe is me!”

“Keep your voice down, for God’s sake,” said Nate.

“
Dushka,
listen to me,” said Dominika. “What we have, it makes things stronger, it makes
me
stronger. There is nothing wrong in this. Bratok is wrong, you all are wrong.”

“How do you know what
Bratok
thinks?” said Nate.

“Because she’s smart and you’re a dumb ass,” said Gable, standing beside them in the gloom, a blanket wrapped around him like a Plains Indian. They both jumped: Neither of them had heard him come up the creaky stairs.

“And I am right about what you think,
Bratok
?” said Dominika, unembarrassed, turning toward him and tugging the blanket more snugly around his shoulders.
Just like a little sister would,
thought Nate.

“You know what I think, and you both know the reasons why. No one can operate at peak performance with an emotional attachment to his agent”—Gable nodded to Nate—“or to her handling officer. Especially in a denied area like Moscow. You two think it over.” He rubbed his hair and turned down the hall to his room. He suddenly stopped and came back to them.

“I want you both to be prepared for the black days ahead, maybe for the blackest day in your lives. Nash, I want you to be ready for the day we leave Domi behind in an airport terminal, or on a train platform, or at a border crossing, surrounded by FSB, without a backward glance, because we have to, because somehow, there’re bigger stakes. And you”—he pointed his chin at Dominika—“I want you to be prepared for the day you knowingly let Dreary over here walk into a surveillance ambush in some provincial capital and get thrown in prison for twenty years because there’s someone more important than Nash at risk and you can’t tip your hand.”

“
Bratok
, what did you call him?” said Dominika.

“Dreary,” said Gable. Dominika looked at Nate.

“
Grustnyi,
melancholy,” said Nate, shaking his head. Dominika laughed. Both Nate’s and Gable’s purple hazes floated in the low light of the hallway, a little alike, but different. Something in the house creaked. Gable hitched the blanket a little higher on his shoulders.

“I want you to be ready for the day one or both of you realize you won’t see each other ever again, for the rest of your lives.”

Dominika sighed. “All right,
Bratok
. Thank you for being
prepyatstvie,
how do you say this?”

“An obstacle,” said Nate.

“You mean ‘cock blocker,’ ” said Gable. “I can only hope.”

“Jesus Marty, we didn’t plan it, it just happened,” said Nate. He felt stupid and lacking.

Gable shook his head. “I didn’t say it was your fault; I said I was blaming you.”

Dominika turned, opened the bedroom door, looked back at the two men, and went inside. She left the door slightly ajar, itself a message:
I’m here; it’s your choice.

“Come downstairs with me and have a brandy,” said Gable. He nodded at the door. “Then you can do what you want.”

Gable shrugged off his blanket, threw a log on the dying fire, and poured two brandies. He looked at his watch, a chunky Transocean Breitling, and rubbed his face. He pulled two thick black cigars out of the button flap pocket of his safari shirt, stuck one in his mouth, and tossed the other to Nate.

Gable nipped off the end of the cigar with his teeth, spit it into the fire—or pretty close to it—and puffed it alight with a battered stainless Ronson lighter, enveloping his head and shoulders in a greasy cloud of smoke. He tossed the lighter to Nate, who noticed it was embossed with a spear point insignia.

“Yeah, OSS logo, from World War Two,” said Gable, puffing and looking at his ash end. “Some overwrought bureaucrat in Headquarters thought it would be romantic and adapted it for our clandestine service logo. Should’ve rounded off the spear tip and made it a butt plug.”

Nate lit his cigar, which, despite the dark black wrapper, was surprisingly mild. His experience with cigars was limited, and he hoped he wouldn’t keel over after the third puff. Neither said anything for a full two minutes.

“I know Forsyth has talked to you about this shit,” said Gable. “And I’m blue in the face talking at you.” Nate knew he was not supposed to say anything. Indeed, his job now, in this room, for the next hour, was to shut up.

“Nash, the most important person in your so-called professional life right now is upstairs in that bedroom, doing her kugel exercises under the covers, waiting for her lover-boy case officer to tiptoe through the door.”

Nate blew smoke up at the ceiling as Gable had just done. Jaunty. “Marty, kugel is a noodle casserole. The word you want is ‘kegel’ exercises.”

Gable stared at him, his cigar clenched between his teeth, and Nate resolved not to speak again unless spoken to.
“She is the most important thing,”
Gable repeated. “On one level, she’s a valuable piece of property, an asset of the fucking CIA with nearly unlimited access, and we got to protect that asset and make sure she’s productive, because this is all about national security.

“On another level, she’s a smart, tough woman who’s on a mission to ruin all those assholes who’ve fucked with her. She’s a Russian, and a little volatile, we all know that, but she’s committed. That’s a self-propelled howitzer up there, and if you’re a smart handler, you capitalize—no, you
exploit
—her motivations.” He puffed twice and flicked the ash in the general direction of the crackling fireplace.

“MARBLE was the best, and Domi might be even better, if she survives. And her survival—that translates into her keeping focus, making the right decisions, not losing motivation—is materially jeopardized whenever the two of you take off your underpants and go at it like two angry camels in a tiny car.” Nate willed himself to be still.

“We’re starting a new phase in the operation, and DIVA is going to have to move in directions few Russian agents have ever tried. Unprecedented fucking access: Can you imagine an agent close to Stalin? Never. But Domi’s caught the eye of Putin, and we want to know what that fucker has under his fingernails. And if we can screw up the Iranian nuke program, the stakes get even higher.” Gable got up and poured another brandy, then held up the bottle. Nate waved him off, and Gable sat back down.

“So for instance, Domi goes back in and reports that Putin made a pass at her, wants her to spend a weekend with him at one of those dachas. What do you, her handler, instruct her to do? Tell me.” Nate stared at him. The lead elements of cigar and brandy had arrived in Nate’s head, and he tried to order his thoughts.

“Shut up,” said Gable as Nate opened his mouth. “I’ll tell you what you tell your agent. You review the intelligence requirements with her so she knows what tidbits to elicit in his bed. You let her read the bio profile on Putin by the OMS shrinks so she knows how many sugars he likes in his morning-after cup of tea. And you make sure she brings an extra pair of
undies in case he rips the first pair.” Gable took a swig of brandy and a puff of cigar, leaned forward, and lowered his voice.

“And when she comes home with the smell of his aftershave still in her hair, eyes puffy from three days of Vladimir, you’re there to debrief her, and tell her what a shit-hot job she did, without a trace of irony, or judgment, or
inflection,
because she done her job, and you done your job, and there’s more to do, so clear the decks and get busy.” Gable leaned back in his armchair and puffed. “Sound like what you want to do, I mean, professionally?”

Nate closed his eyes. “I guess love doesn’t come into it?”

Gable smiled. “Not with a valuable agent, it don’t. It’s old school, Nash—an old-time division chief, a real baron, once told me that case officers should never get married; too distracting.”

“And you never got married?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So what, you were married or not?”

Gable shrugged. “Yeah, for a little while.”

Nate put down his brandy snifter. “And you’re going to tell me about it?”

“Fuck no,” said Gable.

“You’ve been wailing on me since I’ve known you,” said Nate. “How about throwing a bone? Tell me.” Two born manipulators, working on each other.

Gable stared into the fire. “Married young, both of us, thought she could handle the life, the travel, the nights out, but it was too much for her. She didn’t get that the job swallows you whole—funny, because she was a pianist, playing was
her
whole life. I didn’t know Lizst from Listerine, but the music was okay, when we weren’t fighting. The second tour was Africa, and her piano wouldn’t stay in tune until we lifted the lid and found a king cobra inside it; she wanted to live in Paris and Rome, but I dragged her to Manila and Lima instead, and she definitely didn’t like the rape gate on the bedroom door or the shotgun in the closet. We fought like two scorpions in a brandy glass, trying to hurt each other, until she packed up and left, and we didn’t get a second chance because back home she skidded on some ice and went off the road into a river, twenty-five years old, used to like listening to her play that Chopin, and two nights after she died, I was meeting a hitter from Shining Path in the port district of Lima, but the douche bag brought a knife to a gunfight, and I cancelled his ticket, and as I was going
through his pockets a radio in a window somewhere was playing Chopin like she used to, and I stood over the guy and had to wait a couple minutes before my vision cleared, but that was a coincidence, because I don’t think about her much anymore.”

Marty Gable, Chopin, and Shining Path,
thought Nate,
Jesus
. “I didn’t know about that, Marty. I’m sorry.”

Gable shrugged. “A long time ago, sort of where you are now. Only I didn’t have a fucking sensitive mentor like you got. Now all you need is to listen to my goddamn wisdom, grow some brains, and act like a top pro.”

“What happens to two scorpions in a brandy glass?” said Nate.

Gable flipped the soggy cigar butt into the fire, and drained his drink. “They can’t get traction so they get face-to-face, lock pincers, and sting each other over and over. They’re immune to their own venom. It’s a fucking metaphor for marriage.”

Director of the National Clandestine Service Dick Spofford sat at his desk on the seventh floor in CIA Headquarters. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto the tops of the lush trees lining the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Potomac River beyond. His office was modest—all the seniors’ offices on the top floor were surprisingly small—with a couch and two chairs along one wall, a built-in bookshelf running behind the unprepossessing desk, and a small circular conference table in an opposite corner.

The third most senior officer in CIA, the DNCS—pronounced “dinkus”—directed the Clandestine Service and all foreign operations. His office was decorated with relatively inexpensive prints, mostly travel posters of the golden age of steamship travel, the Italian Lake District, and lighter-than-air dirigible service between New York and Berlin in 1936. An incongruous note was struck, however, by Spofford’s displayed collection of small, plush animal figures—penguins, monkeys, starfish, buffaloes, leopards, puppies, a cross-eyed octopus—on the bookshelf behind him. Spofford was unaware of the furtive, incredulous glances as CIA’s Five Eyes liaison partners—the Aussies, Brits, Canadians, and Kiwis—first noticed the cuddly menagerie.

Spofford leaned back in his ergonomic executive office chair—an Aeron, the model designated for Senior Intelligence Service rank of SIS-Four and above—and closed his eyes. His special assistant, Imogen, was tucked inside the kneehole of his desk, kneeling between his legs and moving her hand in a motion that recalled setting a handbrake. Spofford checked his watch: Leadership Committee in fifteen minutes. As it turned out, he didn’t have that much time.

During a particularly energetic tug, Imogen’s shoulder hit the underside of Spofford’s desk—or, more precisely, the emergency alarm button under the desk drawer, which sounded a silent alarm in the nearby control room of the Office of Security, and which resulted in the immediate appearance in the DNCS’s office of three Security Protective Officers
and a two-person Emergency Medical Services team. The SPOs holstered their weapons as Imogen emerged from beneath the desk with cramping hands over her head. The woman on the EMS team privately noted that Mr. Spofford’s handbrake might now benefit from a touch of the defibrillation paddles in her emergency kit. The cross-eyed octopus grinned from the bookshelf.

The precipitate retirement of Dick Spofford (“our work is not done; I will be with you all in spirit”) set into motion a silent race for the DNCS position among senior officers who could reasonably be considered in line for the job: The three associate deputy directors (for Operations, Military Affairs, and Congressional Affairs) were leading contenders. ADD/O Borden Hood had his own public relations problems, recently having impregnated a young GS-11 reports officer during a foreign Stations inspection tour. The director passed on Hood.

The ADD/Mil, Sebastian Claude Angevine (French, pronounced On-je-VEEN, but widely known to subordinates as “Angina”), was tall and slim, with an enormous head topped by wavy hair, and a Roman nose down which he was accustomed to look. He had come up into the Clandestine Service through the security track—he started as a polygrapher, a career detail Seb Angevine took great pains to conceal. His frequent claim to have graduated from the Naval Academy was suspect. He ran Military Affairs badly—the Pentagon barely tolerated him. Imperious, self-absorbed, unaware, vindictive, and unloved, he expected the promotion to DNCS as head of Operations: It was his due.

The director hurried into the DCI’s conference room, a folder in his hands. His executive assistant slipped in behind him, closed the outer door, and took a seat against the wall. The director looked around the table at his executive team: his deputy, the executive director, the line deputy directors—known as the DDs and including Ops, Intel, Science, Admin—and the other program DDs from Congressional Affairs, Military, and Public Affairs.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said as he opened the folder. Angevine sat close to the head of the table, making sure the gold cuff links with embossed CIA logo—a gift from the director last year—were visible outside the sleeves of his suit.

“With Dick Spofford retiring,” the director said, “we’ve had to move quickly to determine who will take his place. The ops chair is not one we can leave empty … not even for a little while.” He flipped a sheet of paper in the folder, as if consulting notes.
Here it comes,
thought Angevine: When the director finished announcing that he, Angevine, would be the new DNCS, he would say only how much he appreciated the opportunity, how he acknowledged the trust bestowed on him, how greatly he looked forward to working with everyone around the table to accomplish the important mission that lay ahead. Or something like that.

He looked across the table at Gloria Bevacqua, ADD for Congressional Affairs, and smirked inwardly. What a hot mess: Asian slaw-stained pantsuit in primary colors with a knockoff Hermès scarf worn as a shawl. Feet bulging out of chunky-heeled Mary Janes. Legs by Steinway. Baked goods were always on a sideboard in the outer office of CA. DNCS,
yeah right.

Talk in the seventh-floor executive dining room was that she was already bragging that she was going to be named DNCS, but rumors traded in the EDR were unreliable. This plus-sized fireplug had no significant experience in CIA, much less in operations: She had been brought over to Langley a year ago from Capitol Hill by the director. The thought of her heading the National Clandestine Service was laughable.

“The job of running the NCS has evolved,” said the director.
He means he needs me, an experienced administrator,
thought Angevine. “The DNCS needs to bring in the entire Intelligence Community: Defense, NSA, NGA.”
He’s referring to my DoD account,
thought Angevine. “And managing Congress, the oversight committees, is arguably one of the most important components of the job,” the director said.
What’s he talking about?
“So while everyone around this table is eminently qualified and was seriously considered, I’m pleased to announce that Gloria will be taking over Operations. I’m confident Borden will support her in every way, as I’m sure you all will.” Bevacqua looked around the table and nodded at everyone. She spoke briefly, saying how much she looked forward—
It was too fucking much,
thought Angevine.

Angevine sat still in his seat, a mild expression on his face, eyes glued to that motherfucking backstabbing cocksucker director. He didn’t know that he had been passed over because the director—himself a hybrid, the former chief of staff for a senator—thought Angevine’s “douchebagnitude” was too high, even for the DNCS position.

The DNCS job was mine,
thought Angevine.
I was perfect for it.
He was constitutionally unable to contemplate that the director did not think Angevine was perfect for the job. For the next half hour, Angevine didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything: His mouth tasted like zinc. The meeting broke up and Angevine was caught at the door with Gloria Bevacqua. He stopped to let her go first—they both couldn’t have squeezed through together in any case.

“Congratulations,” muttered Angevine. Gloria wore a hair clip on one side. Her hair was watery blond with competing peat moss–colored roots.

“Thanks, Seb,” said Gloria with a sideways smirk. In a flash, Angevine knew that this had been cooked from the start—they’d known for weeks. More treachery.

“I’ll want to reach out to Defense HUMINT in the coming months,” said Gloria.
Why don’t you bring them one of your twelve-inch pies?
thought Angevine.

“Yes, of course,” said Angevine. Gloria knew that meant “Fuck you,” but from her years on Capitol Hill she was used to dealing with recalcitrant pretty boys.

“Look, I know you wanted the job, but James wanted to go in a different direction,” she said.
So the director is James now,
thought Angevine. He had a direction in mind for them all.

“How nice for you and James,” said Angevine. He felt a rage welling up inside him and looked down at Gloria with contempt. She saw it and decided to rock this mincing beanpole in his place.

“Look, Seb,” she said with a mocking smile, “don’t take getting passed over too hard. Chicks still dig you.” Angevine froze, actually froze at this towering insult from this … this sweaty
sagouine,
this slob. She walked away from him down the corridor.

Angevine sat at his desk looking blankly around his office, which was hung with pictures and commendations and awards—he had a decent vanity
wall going. But now the framed exhibits mocked him. He turned his hate for Bevacqua over slowly in his mind. The other
pèdès,
those perverts on the seventh floor, were nothing. The director had betrayed him, but almost certainly with Bevacqua’s encouragement. And now she was going to run the Clandestine Service? She was going to direct espionage operations and manage covert actions?

Over the next week, Angevine’s rage bubbled and developed an edge like cheap Chianti in a plastic carboy. He wanted to damage them, to drag his hand across the icing of the pristine wedding cake, to tread through just-smoothed cement. He felt he owed the Agency no loyalty now—as if he had ever felt loyalty—and his petty spirit and mean motives set him to contemplate doing something monumental, really
staggering.
There would have to be a big payday too—very big.

Seb Angevine’s late mother, Christine, had been an employee of the US Department of State, a career diplomat who specialized in the “consular cone,” an expert in US consular law regulating, among other things, the issuance of visas to foreign citizens to visit or work in or immigrate to the United States. In the nature of most career officers in Consular Affairs, Christine was earnest and awkward, knew the Talmudic Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) as if she had drafted it herself. She was short and slight, with bird-bone wrists and thin brown hair demurely done up in a bun. Christine was working on permanent spinsterhood: She essentially had given up on men.

Christine was in her late forties when she was posted to the US Embassy in Paris as consul general. The Consular Section had a large staff that Christine directed with her trademark introspective competence. Her young subordinates acknowledged her expertise and felt a little sorry for her, but did not particularly like her.

The allure of France was not lost on Christine, but she was at a loss as to how to find romance. Her two-year assignment was almost over; a return to Washington was imminent. It was a rainy fall afternoon, during a Consular Corps luncheon—dreary monthly events convened in elegant restaurants
and attended by self-indulgent, foreign consuls general—when she met Claude Angevine. He was busy seating the arriving diplomats, unfolding napkins, and handing out menus when their eyes met. Claude bowed from the waist and smiled—a coal hopper of Gallic charm. Christine nodded at him and thought the moment
very Emily Brontë.
Claude’s thoughts ran more along the lines of a K-3 visa (for a foreign spouse of an American citizen).

Claude was single, nearly fifty, tall, and dramatic, an ectomorph with a large head, long fingers, and a plowshare nose. He ran his fingers through impossibly wavy hair while speaking his sexy accented English. An intense courtship ensued—there were some initial awkward moments for Christine involving, well, the bedroom and sex, but he was charming, attentive, and told her he loved her. After three months Christine and Claude became engaged. Shortly thereafter they were married, transferred to the United States, and Christine got pregnant.