“We don’t expect you—we don’t want you—to decide who’s important. It’s my job to assess the value of targets; my boss’s job. Not yours. Your job is to report. To scout.”
“But what am I scouting?”
“Weaknesses.”
“Is that what you call what you do?”
“That’s what we all do, Will. It’s just that only some of us admit it.”
“Here.” She handed Will a small sheet of paper.
He looked down at the neat handwriting,
Arthur’s Alehouse
and
Bridget’s Saloon, Café Fifty
and
Drinkwaters,
an alphabetized list, one item for every letter of the alphabet, each business name accompanied by a general location,
49th St off 10th, Lex near 37th.
“This is a list of the places we’ll meet. You’ll memorize this, then destroy it.”
Will continued to scan the page, looking for something familiar, some anchor to his old reality, but there was none. “These are all in New York? I haven’t heard of any.”
“That’s the point. These are dive bars, convenience delis. Subsistence eating, subsistence drinking. You’re unlikely to run into anyone you know. Unlikely, but not impossible. So if you happen to notice someone you
do
know, we signal to abort. You’ll sneeze, to draw my attention, then wipe your nose with the back of your hand, to confirm.”
“Okay.”
“Show me.”
“What am I, a moron?”
“God, I certainly hope not. So show me.”
He fake-sneezed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“Good. Wherever we are, whenever, that’s abort. If we’re already in the same room, I probably won’t leave immediately. I’ll just sit there doing whatever I’m doing, reading my newspaper, scrolling through Twitter, eating my hot dog.”
“You eat hot dogs?”
“If we’ve aborted, but I’m still there,
leave me alone.
Don’t come near me, don’t try to make eye contact. Likewise, if I sneeze and then wipe my nose, you stay away.”
“What if I just have to sneeze for normal reasons?”
“Don’t.”
They were walking on a dirt path, out past the working-ranch part of the finca, the horses and cows, barns and chutes and long feeding troughs, a half-mile from the guest rooms, far enough to get a hint of barnyard aroma, when the wind was right, but not too much. The constant smell of cow shit would definitely deduct a star from the luxury rating, maybe two.
“To set up our meetings, I’ll text you on this.”
She handed him a flimsy little flip phone.
“What’s this?”
Elle looked at him like he was a dimwit. “It’s indistinguishable from your basic burner. But this is a very precise GPS tracking device, which will allow us to pinpoint your location to within a couple of meters.”
“Well that’s comforting.”
“The point is not to locate you, but rather to capture the other mobile-phone signals around you, whose numbers will be transmitted by an app on your device to headquarters, where the numbers’ accounts will be traced and then monitored in the hours immediately following contact with you.”
“Why?”
“To see who you spook. And to see who those people choose to call, when they’re spooked. That’s one of the ways we’ll assess the potential targets’ value.”
He examined the thing, which did in fact look like a convenience-store disposable.
“It’s also an actual phone, for you to communicate with me, and only with me. If you need to contact me, text or call anytime.” She opened the back, removed the battery. “But when you’re in America, keep the battery out. Once a day, midday, pop it in, power up, and check messages. When I want to meet, I’ll send you a text with a code word—
evasive
, or
ignominious
, or anything.”
“Ignominious?”
“Focus on the first letter. We’ll meet at the establishment whose first letter immediately follows the first letter of the code word. So if I text you, say, Deuteronomy.”
“What the hell kind of words are these?” He glances down at the list in his hand. “Our meet will be at Edgecombe’s in, um, Murray Hill. What if I don’t show?”
“Then I’ll be pissed off.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, when?”
She looks perplexed. “I’ll be pissed off immediately.”
“I mean, when will these meetings be?”
“You’ll respond to my text with the hour you can make it, cleanly, allowing plenty of time to run a proper surveillance-detection route.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You’ll learn. So when you send me the reply text, you’ll choose the time, which in actuality will be two hours
past
whatever time you send me. So if you text me four-thirty?”
“We meet at six-thirty.”
“See? You’re a natural.”
He looked at her sidelong, confused, unsure what sort of relationship they were supposed to have. She’s going to tease him? “Okay. This happens after every trip?”
“Correct.”
“How will you know when I’ve come back from a trip?”
She laughed at this, at him, his cluelessness. Then she continued without answering. “When you arrive to the bar or deli or whatever, don’t make eye contact; I won’t either. Order something, and find a place to sit.
By yourself.
Not near me. You’re just a guy getting a drink, at the beginning or end of a workday, sitting alone, at a table that offers privacy, and always facing
away
from the door, the window, the street. You understand?”
“Yes. I don’t want anyone who’s passing to be able to notice me.”
“When I’m confident no one is following, I’ll join you. Or I’ll beckon you to me.”
“How?”
“I’ll make eye contact. But this is important: if I don’t definitely—beyond any shadow of a doubt—make eye contact with you, and hold it for a couple of seconds,
do not come to me.
There may be times when I
never
make contact. Instead, after five minutes I may sneeze, wipe my nose, and leave, without ever having any interaction with you.
Do not follow me.
That meeting is not going to happen. Understand?”
He nodded.
“You understand why?”
“Sort of.”
“What
don’t
you understand about it?”
“Why anybody would be following me.”
“Maybe they’d be following
me.
”
They walked in silence, the reality of these future activities sinking in. Overhead, a hawk was circling, floating on air currents, looking for prey. Will hoped he wouldn’t be mistaken for prey. Hoped it hadn’t already happened.
Was this a commonplace experience for her? Did she do this same thing last month? Would she do it again next?
“Your name’s not really Elle Hardwick, is it?”
“Of course not.”
“But there’s a real Elle Hardwick? Someone who’s actually a journalist in Australia? I’ve read some of her articles. I
stalked
her, online.”
“The real one lives in Sydney with a lot of cats. And I mean
a lot.
Not just real-live pet cats. Also cat photos, cat paintings, cats crocheted on sweaters, cat-shaped ashtrays.”
“What should I call you?”
“If we’re being formal, I guess C/O Hardwick. Case Officer Hardwick. But I think Elle will suffice. We’re journalists, Will. We met in France? Surely you remember.”
She was his CIA case officer? But she was still an Australian freelance writer? She was someone he went to bed with last night? Or not? “You’re saying we pretend to know each other?”
“Pretend? We
do
know each other, Will. Obviously.
Empirically
. There are witnesses on two continents, people you’re likely to see again. So pretending we haven’t met, that might get us into completely unnecessary trouble. Our story is simple, Will, because it’s true. We know each other exactly how we know each other. We met in St-Émilion, and again—surprise!—here in Mendoza. Last night, we had a drink together, alone.”
“And?”
“And what? You’re a happily married man, right?”
Did she really expect an answer?
“You made an understandable—a predictable—mistake.” She continued to explain it away, a natural story, one she’d heard before, maybe one she’d told before. “If I were you, I’d not mention it to anyone. Unless you start seeing a therapist, which frankly I’d recommend.”
“I don’t understand. Is this part of the cover?”
“Do you want it to be?”
He was unsure what they were talking about. His real life? Or the fictional legend they were constructing? Or was there any meaningful difference? He felt frustration welling up within him, anger.
“I
never
cheated before. Not once, not even so much as a kiss.”
She turned to face him, ready to hear him out, to let him vent.
“How could you
do
this to me?” He felt so wronged. “What type of a person does this to someone else?”
“It wasn’t personal.” An explanation, not an apology.
“Of course it was fucking personal!”
She put her hands up. “Hey, no one forced you to do anything. You were corruptible, Will, and I corrupted you, because that’s my job. And let’s remember that it wasn’t that difficult.”
“That’s horrible.
You’re
horrible.”
“You may not be one hundred percent guilty, Will, but neither are you anywhere near one hundred percent innocent.”
He knew this was true. He was just as angry at himself as he was at her. More. He’d screwed up, and he’d done it because he was weak, because he was vain.
“And you know what, Will? Everyone is corruptible. So don’t beat yourself up.”
He turned from her, off toward the facsimile of a farm, a sanitized, idealized version of what’s really a messy, difficult life. They’d spent the whole day together, just as they’d done in Bordeaux a few weeks earlier, back when Will thought they were two people who were unexpectedly falling in love, as falling in love always is. But they weren’t. And today they’d been talking about his new job, his new life, his new relationship to telling the truth to the people around him, to his colleagues, his friends, his wife.
“Speaking of beating up, Will: I’m sorry about punching you in the face.”
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
Peaceful countryside Argentina was just a couple of weeks ago, but a world away. Here, evidence is everywhere that this is the largest naval base in the world, one of NATO’s strategic command centers: aircraft carriers and submarines, destroyers and cruisers, eighty thousand personnel, big thick necks and wraparound sunglasses and the rigid, upright bearing that you just don’t find in magazine offices in Manhattan.
Will is met at the airport by an unremarkable, unmarked gray SUV, civilian Virginia plates, rear windows tinted an impenetrable black. The driver takes Will’s bag, says hello, doesn’t offer a name.
They leave the airport, and a few minutes later pull to a stop in the middle of a very long block dominated by a shuttered factory, completely deserted, except for a lone man waiting by the curb.
“What’s going on?” Will asks.
The driver doesn’t answer, but instead unlocks the doors, which Will didn’t realize were locked. The new man climbs into the backseat. “Hi,” the guy says. He’s holding something, a piece of black cloth. “I have to ask you to wear this hood. Security.”
Will looks down at the cloth, then back up at this guy, buzz-cut and humorless. Will pulls the mask over his face.
Within minutes they’re speeding along at a clip that feels like forty-five or fifty miles per hour, with occasional gusts of wind that shake the car, and air-pressure changes that must be a tunnel. They’re traveling over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, twenty-three miles over water from mainland urban to the peninsula’s rural.
Back on land, they speed along the Eastern Shore, slowing and stopping at red lights, along what Will assumes is Route 13. He spent an hour studying maps, suspecting that this was exactly what was going to happen, trying to make practical use of his lifelong geography obsession.
The car takes a turn onto a bumpy road, dirt and not exactly straight. After a couple of minutes the car stops, and Will can hear an electronic hum, a mechanical grinding, as they pass through what must be a security gate.
“You can take off the mask.”
Will removes the big hood and looks around, a tall chain-link fence to one side, a single-lane dirt road stretching ahead. They stop at a modest farmhouse, white shingles with green shutters, to which have been added two rear wings, low and long and windowless, big HVAC compressors sitting alongside.
“Intake is in the front hall,” the man in the backseat says. He holds out his hand, and for a second Will thinks the guy wants to shake, but he just wants his mask back. “And I’ll need your phone.”
Up a few stairs and across a porch and through the door. There’s a desk at the foot of the center-hall stairs, an unsmiling man who glances up at Will. “You’ll be in room six, upstairs. But right now they’re waiting for you at the outdoor gym.”
EASTERN SHORE, VIRGINIA
“I understand you practiced karate as a kid?” The man is wearing a skintight tee shirt and camouflage cargo pants and combat boots. His name is apparently Jim.
Will had cycled through a variety of martial arts in elementary and intermediate school.
“That’s a good start,” Jim says. “We can work with that.”
Without any warning Jim lunges at Will, who shunts him aside with a decent semblance of a knife-hand block.
“What the fuck?” Will yells.
“Welcome to hand-to-hand training.”
Jim takes another pass at Will, this time more aggressively, and hammers him in the chest. Will stumbles backward, finds his footing, takes a deep breath.
Jim sets his feet again, with something that might be a little smile on his lips.
Okay, Will thinks again, confronted with another man: here we go.
“Do you think you’ve memorized our codes?”
Will nods.
“Good,” she says. “Let’s go through them again.”
He recites the keypad sequences he memorized, tested, and retested over the past day. Meeting times and places. Emergencies.
“What types of emergencies?” he’d asked, when she introduced this idea.