Extraordinary Powers Read online

  While we were finishing our appetizers (as a matter of principle, no one ordered focaccia), Molly arrived, profusely apologetic.

  “How was your day?” she asked as she kissed me. She gave me a look that was a second or two too long, which meant she was asking about Truslow.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She kissed Ike and Linda, sat down, and said, “I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

  “Medicine?” Linda asked.

  “The preemies,” Molly replied, medical jargon for premature babies. “Today I admitted twins and another baby, and the three patients together weighed less than ten pounds. I spend all my time taking care of these critically ill little things, trying to put in umbilical artery catheters, dealing with stressed-out families.”

  Ike and Linda shook their heads sympathetically.

  “Kids with AIDS,” she continued, “or bacterial infections around the brain, and being on call every third night—”

  I interrupted her. “Let’s leave all that behind for now, huh?”

  She turned to me, her eyes widening. “Leave it behind?”

  “All right, Mol,” I said quietly. Ike and Linda, looking uncomfortable, concentrated on their Caesar salads.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. I took her hand under the table. Work sometimes strung her out in this way, but I knew she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of seeing that photograph.

  Throughout dinner she was distant; she nodded and smiled politely, but her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. Ike and Linda no doubt attributed her behavior to her father’s recent death, which was largely accurate.

  In the cab on the way home we had a quarrel, in fiercely whispered tones, about Truslow and the Corporation and the CIA, everything she had once made me promise I would give up forever. “Dammit,” she whispered, “once you start dealing with Truslow, you’re back in that awful game.”

  “Molly—” I began, but she was not interruptable.

  “Lie down with dogs and you get fleas. Dammit, you made a promise to me you’d never go back to that stuff.”

  “I’m not going back to that stuff, Mol,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment. “You talked to him about Father’s murder, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t.” A minor falsehood; but I didn’t want to tell her about the alleged embezzlement or the Senate hearings.

  “But whatever he wants you for, it has something to do with that, doesn’t it?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  The cabbie swerved to avoid a pothole, slammed on the horn, and cut into the left lane.

  We were both silent for a moment. After a minute or so—as if she’d been deliberately trying for some kind of dramatic effect—she said, too casually, even airily: “You know, I called the Fairfax County medical examiner’s office.”

  Momentarily I was confused. “Fairfax—?”

  “Where Dad was killed. To get a copy of his autopsy report. The law states that immediate family members can get copies if they want.”

  “And?”

  “It’s sealed.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “It’s not a public record any longer. The only parties allowed to see his autopsy report are the district attorney and the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

  “Why? Because he’s—was—CIA?”

  “No. Because someone involved in the case decided something we already know. It was a homicide.”

  We rode the rest of the way home in silence, and for some lunatic reason had another fight after we got back, and ended up going to bed furious at each other.

  It’s funny, but now I look back on that evening with fondness, because it was one of the last normal nights we’d ever spend together, just two nights before it happened.

  EIGHT

  That night, the last normal night in my life, I had the dream.

  I dreamed about Paris, a dream as lifelike as any waking nightmare, a dream I have suffered through perhaps thousands of times.

  The dream always goes like this:

  I am in a clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, a men’s clothing store that is a rabbit’s warren of small, bright rooms, and I have lost my way, moving from room to room, looking for the rendezvous point I have laboriously arranged with the field agent, and at last I find a dressing room. It is the rendezvous spot, and there, hanging on a peg, is a sweater, a navy blue cardigan, which I take, as we have arranged, and in the pocket I find, as we have also arranged, a scrap of paper containing the coded message.

  I spend too long poring over the message, and now I am late for the phone call I am supposed to make, and frantically, I go from room to room in this wretched store, looking for a telephone, asking for one, unable to locate one, until at last, in the basement of the building, I find a phone. It is a bulky, old-fashioned French phone, two-tone, tan and brown, and for some reason it will not work, try after try after try, and then—thank God!—it rings.

  Someone answers the phone; it is Laura, my wife.

  She is crying, pleading with me to come home, to our apartment on the rue Jacob, something horrible has happened. I am gripped with fear, and I begin to run, and in a few seconds (this is a dream, after all) I have arrived at the rue Jacob, at the entrance to my apartment building, knowing what I am about to see. This is the worst part of the dream: thinking that if I don’t go home, it won’t have happened; but some horrified fascination impels me onward. I swim through the air, feeling nauseated.

  A man is coming out of my building, wearing a thick woolen plaid hunter’s shirt, Nike running shoes. An American, I am convinced, in his thirties. Although I can see him only from behind, I can see that he has a thick, unruly shock of black hair and—it is always the same detail—a long red ugly scar running along his jawline, from his ear to his chin. It is a terrible scar, and I can see it quite clearly. He is limping as if in great pain.

  I don’t stop the man—why should I?—but instead, as he limps away, I enter the building, smelling the odor of blood, which grows stronger as I climb the stairs to our apartment, and now the stench is unbearable, and I find myself retching, and then I am at the landing, and I can see the three bodies, splayed grotesquely in pools of blood, and one of them—it can’t be, I tell myself—is Laura.

  And at this point I usually awake.

  * * *

  But that is not quite the way it happened, of course. My dream, and it is always the same, has created a grotesque semiparable out of it.

  As a case officer in Paris, I was charged with running several valuable deep-cover field agents, and a host of minor ones. I’d had one major success in Paris: I’d succeeded in rolling up a ring of Soviet military-intelligence spies operating out of a turbine plant outside the city. My cover was as an architect at an American firm. The apartment I had been given on the rue Jacob was small but sun-drenched, located in the sixth arrondissement, the best neighborhood in Paris, to my mind. I was fortunate; most of my fellow spooks were housed in the drab eighth. Laura and I had recently married, and she had no objection whatsoever to being moved to Paris: she was a painter, and there were few places she preferred to paint than Paris. She was small, irresistibly cute, with long blond hair that she wore up. We were pretty much intoxicated with love.

  We had talked about having kids, and we both wanted them. But what I didn’t know was that she was pregnant, a fact that would have thrilled me. She never had a chance to tell me. I’ve always believed she wanted to tell me in her own way, at her own pace, after she’d had a chance to digest the news. All I knew was that she’d been feeling sick for several days—some sort of minor virus, I thought.

  Around this time I was contacted by a low-level KGB officer, a filing clerk in the KGB’s Paris station, who wanted to strike a deal. He had some information to sell, he said, which he’d run across in the archives in Moscow. In exchange, he wanted to defect, wanted financial security, protection, the works.

  I followed a
ll the standard procedures, cleared the first meeting with the CIA station chief, James Tobias Thompson. Case officers are always wary of what’s called a “blind date,” which means a meeting with an unknown agent at a place of his designation. There is always the risk that the whole thing is a trap.

  But this agent, who called himself Victor, agreed to meet on our terms, which was heartening. I arranged a rendezvous, risky but vital. Three quick rings of a telephone at a flat somewhere in the sixth arrondissement signaled the location and time. Then, a “chance” encounter in an expensive men’s clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, but unlike in the dream, it went swimmingly. A navy blue sweater was hanging on a peg in the dressing room, as it was supposed to be, left behind by a careless customer who decided against making a purchase, and in the pocket I left the scrap of an envelope, the encoded message, designating time and place.

  The next day we met at one of the Agency’s safe houses, really a grubby little apartment in the fourteenth. I knew that walk-ins generally didn’t pan out, but you could never ignore them either: many of the greatest defectors in the history of intelligence have been walk-ins.

  “Victor” was wearing a blond wig, obviously a wig; his olive complexion was that of a dark-haired man. Below his jawline was a long, thin, beet-red scar.

  He seemed to be the real article, at least as far as I could ascertain. He promised me, the next time we met—if a deal could be arranged—a major, earth-shaking revelation. A document, he said, which he’d come across in the KGB archives. He mentioned a cryptonym: MAGPIE.

  When my boss and close friend Toby Thompson debriefed me later, this little detail intrigued him. Apparently there was some substance to the case.

  So I arranged a second meeting.

  I have been over this a thousand times since then. Victor had contacted me, which meant he already knew my cover. And all the safe houses conveniently located were in use for debriefings and such. So, with Toby Thompson’s approval and even encouragement, I arranged a second meeting, between Victor, Toby, and me, at my rue Jacob apartment.

  Laura, despite her sporadic bouts of nausea, was out of town, or so I believed. The night before she had gone out to visit friends near Giverny, to explore Monet’s gardens. She wasn’t to return for two days, so the apartment was available.

  I shouldn’t have risked it, but that’s easy to say now.

  The meeting was to have been at noon, but I was detained at work on a transatlantic conference call to Langley on a secure trunk line, to the deputy director of Operations, Emory St. Clair. As a result, I arrived twenty minutes late, expecting Toby and Victor to be in the apartment already.

  I remember seeing a dark-haired man striding purposively out of my building, wearing a plaid hunter’s shirt, and dismissing him as a neighbor or visitor. I climbed the stairs, and something in the stairwell smelled somehow off. The odor got stronger as I neared the third floor: blood. My heart began to race.

  When I arrived at the third-floor landing, I beheld a scene of unforgettable gruesomeness. Tangled on the floor, in pools of fresh blood, were two bodies: Toby … and Laura.

  I think I must have cried out, but I can’t be sure. Everything slowed down, became stroboscopic. Suddenly I was kneeling beside Laura, cradling her head, unbelieving. She wasn’t supposed to be home; it wasn’t her; this was some mistake.

  Laura had been shot in the chest, in the heart, the bloodstain spread over a large area of her white silk nightgown. She was dead. I turned, saw that Toby had been shot in the stomach, saw him shift in the lake of blood, heard him groan.

  I don’t remember anything after that. Someone showed up, I think. Probably I called someone. I can’t have made any sense. I had lost my mind. They had to separate me from my poor dead Laura, who I was convinced I could revive if I tried hard enough.

  Toby Thompson had survived, if barely; his spinal cord had been severed, and he would be paralyzed for life.

  Laura was dead.

  Later, some things were explained.

  Laura had returned home early that morning, feeling sick. She had called me at work to say so, although for some reason I never got her message. Later, the autopsy revealed that she was pregnant. Toby had shown up at my apartment at a few minutes before noon, armed, in case anything untoward happened. He found the door ajar, the KGB man inside, holding Laura hostage at gunpoint. “Victor” had then pointed his gun at Toby and fired, then turned and shot Laura. Toby had returned the fire, tried but failed to kill him before the pain overtook him.

  What had happened, it seemed, was a Soviet retaliation targeted directly at me. But for what? For rolling up the turbine factory spy ring? Or for any of the several incidents in East Germany in which I wounded, and in a few cases killed, East German and Soviet agents? I had been set up by “Victor,” and was to be taken in a shootout. But instead, Laura was killed—Laura, who wasn’t supposed to be there—and I, detained by some freak twist of fate, was spared. I had fucked up, and I was alive, while Toby Thompson was condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and Laura was dead.

  As to the dark-haired man in plaid whom I’d seen leaving my building: who else could it have been but “Victor,” having shed his blond wig?

  Much later it was decided that though I hadn’t been at fault, I had nevertheless performed badly—sloppiness of procedure, largely, which I could not contest, even though Toby had given me an okay—and in a sense I was ultimately culpable for my own wife’s murder and for Toby’s paralysis.

  My career was not necessarily over; I could have appealed to yet another administrative board. In time, I could have surmounted this.

  But I couldn’t bear it. I knew that I had as good as pulled the trigger myself.

  The inquest went on for some time. Everyone who’d been even marginally involved, from secretaries to code clerks to Ed Moore, the chief of the Operations Directorate Europe Division, was questioned endlessly, administered polygraph tests. The inquest took over my life at a time when I had no inner resources left to draw from.

  My wife and future child had been killed. My life seemed pointless.

  Weeks went by. I was in purgatory. They’d put me up in a hotel a few miles from Langley. I would drive to “work” every morning: a windowless white conference room on the second floor, where the interrogator (every few days there was a new one) would smile cordially, give me a firm, bureaucratic handshake, offer me a cup of coffee and a brown jar of Coffee-mate nondairy creamer, and a flat wooden coffee stirrer.

  Then he’d pull out the transcript of yesterday’s session. On the surface we were just two guys trying to figure out what went wrong over there in Paris.

  In reality the interrogator was trying with all his might to trip me up on the slightest inconsistency, to find the tiniest hairline fracture in my composure, the most minuscule contradiction, wear me down, break me down.

  After seven weeks of this—the manpower costs involved must have been extraordinary—the investigation was closed. No conclusion reached.

  I was summoned to Harrison Sinclair’s office. He was still the number-three man in the Agency, the Deputy Director for Operations. Although we had spoken only a few times, he acted as if we were old friends. I’m not saying he was insincere; more likely, he was doing his damnedest to put me at ease. Hal was a genuinely affectionate man. He put an arm around me, guided me over to a leather seat, and sat on the small leather couch next to me. He hunched toward me confidentially, as if he were about to brief me on some top secret operation, and then told me a joke about an old man and an old lady in an elevator in a retirement community in Miami. I remember only that the punch line was “So, are you single?”

  Although I felt as if my insides had turned to scar tissue in the last two hellish months, I found myself laughing, felt the tension ebbing, if only for the moment. We talked a bit about Molly. She was living in Boston after two years with the Peace Corps in Nigeria. She’d broken up with her college boyfriend—the lunk, as she re
ferred to him.

  She wanted me to give her a call when I felt I was ready to see people, Sinclair added. I said I would.

  He told me that Ed Moore, the chief of the Europe Division, had decided I had to leave the CIA, that my career would always be clouded by questions. That although I was no doubt innocent, there would always be suspicions. The best thing for me to do was to leave. Moore, he said, was quite adamant.

  I was hardly going to argue. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball somewhere and sleep for days and then awake to find it was all a bad dream.

  “Ed thinks you should go to law school,” Hal said.

  I listened passively. What interest in law did I have? The answer, I later discovered, was not much, but what difference did that make? You can do something well that you don’t care much for.

  I wanted to talk to Hal about what happened, but he wasn’t interested. He had a full schedule; he thought it best to maintain neutrality; he didn’t want to rake over the past.

  You’ll be a great lawyer, he said.

  He told a very funny, very dirty joke about lawyers.

  We both laughed. That day I left CIA headquarters—for what I thought was the last time.

  But I was to be haunted by the nightmare of Paris for the rest of my life.

  NINE

  Alex Truslow’s weekend house in southern New Hampshire was less than an hour’s drive from Boston. Molly, miraculously enough, was able to free up enough time to join me. I think she wanted to reassure herself that Truslow was all right, that I was not making a colossal error by agreeing to work for the Corporation.

  The house, a rambling old beauty perched on a bluff above its own lake, was much larger than we had expected. White clapboard with black shutters, it was at once cozy and elegant. It looked as if it had begun as a humble two-room farmhouse a hundred years ago, and had gradually and steadily been added to until it sprawled, ungainly and serpentine, along the undulating crest. Here and there the paint was peeling.