His snooty language aside, it was accurate that the CIA topped the list of government agencies whose human resources too often jumped aboard the Downbound Express into suicide and depression. And it had held that inglorious distinction for quite some time, followed closely by the Feebs, local police departments, all five armed services, and that old bad joke punch line, the rain-or-shine U.S. Postal Service…which, in absolute fairness, technically operated as a private enterprise and fell into a different pot from the others. Over the past decade, in fact, with field operatives increasingly deployed to countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and other war-on-terror hellholes, where poverty, disease, and the atrocities of armed thugs were so widespread as to be virtually atmospheric, the rates of depression and suicide had soared to unprecedented heights. According to the most recent studies, two-thirds as many agents had died by their own hand than had been officially killed in the performance of duty. Officially, because in her mind the line wasn’t nearly that clear-cut. As Benjamin Disraeli was once supposed to have said, “There were lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Of course, it wasn’t about numbers for Allison, not in the end, besides their underscoring what she already knew from her up close contact with men and women who had returned from the field or were engaged in clandestine ops. It was really pretty basic: stress and trauma were no less destructive than bullets.
The day Allison submitted her resignation, her department head, Edward Rockland, had made a strong, earnest appeal for her to stay on, offering to shift her to an analysis and research job within the Directorate of Intelligence, where she would have a chance for consultancies with senior government policymakers. When she’d declined the offer, he’d asked her to at least do him the favor of speaking with the deputy director of Management and Services, Office of Personnel, to see if there was anything else that might be done to convince her. Rockland was a legitimately decent guy who took good care of his people, and though she’d agreed to it out of respect for him, Allison was convinced he’d viewed that second meeting much as she had-as a requisite formality. Though she had heard him out with all due deference, his reconciled tone had made it evident that he had very little doubt her decision was a firm one.
Allison had brought that same polite yet unassailable demeanor to her sit-down with the DD-MS, although she went into it with an added measure of remove. Psychologically and emotionally, she was already well out the door, and all she could think about while quietly listening to his pitch was that old William Blake poem “The Tiger,” with several lines in particular nearly jumping from her lips: In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?
The thing she’d recognized in herself upon deciding to leave the Agency was that she could no longer spend all her days trying to seize the fire in the eyes of its most damaged operatives. The heat was too strong; its overflow into her own daily life too consuming.
But there was a major catch. In the thirty-two years since she’d come kicking, bottom down, into the American heartland via C-section, Allison had learned there was nearly always a catch somewhere. And for her it had been lurking inside her.
What was it she had been thinking about irony? As loath as she was to admit it, it was her constant yet maddening companion through life, a disobedient pooch she walked on a long leash while complaining it was always out of control. Because the inescapable paradox at her core, one she’d first done her best to disregard while formulating her exit strategy from the Central Intelligence Agency, and then closed off from her mind as she gave her spiel not once, but twice, was that she not only took gratification from helping people with dire psychological problems-and had chosen her vocation precisely for that reason-but was fascinated by the prospect of tackling cases others deemed tough or insoluble.
Although she now spent the bulk of her time doing research and lecturing at the university on Charles Street, Allison had found herself missing the rewards of people in need and had gradually begun taking a select number of Agency patients on referral.
Jonathan Harper had been the first of them, and the one that made her realize she could take on others on a limited basis without once again succumbing to the sort of nervous tension that had given her constant, tightly wound insomnia throughout her latter months with the Agency. And the whole thing had been pure serendipity.
It would have sufficiently floored her if someone of Harper’s stature had sought her out on his own, but the wild, wild coincidence was that their connection had come through his wife, Julie, whom Allison had met during her time at Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota, long before she’d ever heard of Jonathan Harper or set foot in Langley. An attractive, slightly plump woman with a warm maternal disposition, Julie had been a head nurse at the clinic and had been considerably older than Allison when they’d gotten to know each other while treating a breast cancer patient who’d opted for in-house counseling. Always the type to take young people under her wing-particularly a green psych intern for whom buying groceries took a backseat to paying off student loans-Julie had invited her over to her place for dinner one evening after a late conference. Besides being pleasant, intelligent company, she had turned out to be quite the gourmet cook, making her company an irresistible draw for a young woman who considered preparing unburned toast a proud accomplishment even when she could afford the luxury of a trip to the supermarket.
At the time, Allison had known Julie’s husband did sensitive work for the federal government and occasionally spent extended periods overseas on what she assumed were diplomatic missions. But neither she nor anyone else at Mayo ever had the slightest inkling that he was CIA…which was, of course, how he wanted things. Or to put it more correctly, how things had to be for the welfare of Harper and his family.
That carefully preserved secrecy about the nature of his work had never changed. Harper remained unknown to the vast majority of Americans. As the Agency’s deputy director, he was the second most powerful person in the organizational hierarchy. Individuals in his position weren’t supposed to be photographed in the newspapers or to appear with policy wonks on televised Sunday morning political shoot-outs. He was among the quiet ones. The ones who did the work of keeping the country safe and secure from behind the scenes. Anonymity was an essential part of his curriculum vitae.
Among the members of the intelligence community, however, Harper was a renowned figure, a man who not only had a close relationship with the president but had also been among those who’d once uncovered a plot to assassinate some of the world’s most powerful leaders. That accomplishment alone would boldface most careers, but his exploits went back to the late eighties, when he had conducted some of the most incredibly daring missions of the Cold War behind the Iron Curtain-including one he had personally told Allison about, which involved his hanging from the skids of a Black Hawk chopper while snapping recon photos of ancient Thracian passes over the Balkans. And that itself had been part of an operation in which he’d smuggled a Communist defector and his family out of Sofia, Bulgaria, negotiating miles of rugged, wooded terrain to eventually rendezvous with a Sturgeon-class submarine in the Black Sea…
Allison smiled a little. If she had heard that story from anyone but Harper, she might have smelled a very ripe fish.
To be sure, she’d learned nothing about his mysterious career from Julie during their time together at Mayo, or after moving on to her residency at Johns Hopkins, though they’d periodically stayed in touch with one another over the years. It was only after she’d been introduced to DCI Jonathan Harper sometime early in her tenure with the Agency that she’d registered the possible connection…and even then, her suspicions weren’t fully confirmed until she attended a dinner symposium in Washington at which both Harpers were guests, arriving at the affair arm in arm.