I followed all 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?”