“Dear Mr. T.”—he always smiled at that, a cultural reference his handlers probably didn’t get—“As always, we most appreciate your work. You are truly our most valued asset. A bonus pay of three months has been received in your account for your service. Also please accept this gift.”
The English wasn’t perfect, but he got the point. They were happy. A gold Krugerrand had been taped to the paper. Nice touch, the mole thought. They’d never given him gold before. He flicked open his Swiss Army knife and cut the coin off the letter. The springbok stamped across its back gleamed even in the smoky basement air. It felt dense enough to stop a bullet. He flipped the coin in the air and caught it neatly. And a three-month bonus? That was an extra seventy-five grand.
“Eddie! The roast will be cold!”
Janice. Always spoiling his rush.
“For the love of God, shut up!” he yelled upstairs.
He slipped the coin into his pocket and returned to the letter. The rest was routine, until the end: “In light of the most recent events prudence dictates that we Discontinue”—he wasn’t sure why they’d capitalized the word—“Marco Trap immediately.”
Marco Trap was a mailbox on Moncure Avenue, just off the Columbia Pike, that he and the Chinese used as a signaling station. A vertical chalk stripe meant he’d left documents or a flash drive at the dead drop in Wakefield. Two horizontal stripes meant they’d picked up the papers. A diagonal yellow stripe meant he or they needed an urgent face-to-face meeting. A red stripe meant an emergency, a same-day meeting.
“Please begin use Tango Trap,” the letter continued. “All other procedures remain. We regret any inconvenience but you are too worthy to take chances. Most gratefully, your friend, George.”
George, aka Colonel Gao Xi. Officially, George was a cultural liaison at the Chinese embassy, responsible for bringing pandas and acrobats to America. In reality, he ran the Washington branch of the Second Department of the Chinese army — the main intelligence service of the People’s Republic. Put another way, George was China’s top spy in America. For three years, he had served as Eddie’s personal handler. There was no greater proof of the value of the secrets Eddie delivered.
The mole skimmed the letter again, wondering why the Chinese had changed the mailbox. He couldn’t imagine their signals had been noticed. Maybe they were nervous because of what had happened in the Yellow Sea. The North Koreans hadn’t exactly been subtle. But the mole didn’t think anyone had connected the Drafter with him.
Anyway, the CIA lost sources all the time. It was part of the game. Sure, the Drafter was more valuable than most, and the fact that the agency had lost its own men trying to rescue him guaranteed that the incident would get attention. But the CIA had been in perpetual crisis in the years since September 11. The mole didn’t figure the loss of one agent would be at the top of anyone’s agenda. The East Asia desk would wind up issuing a report about the dangers of emergency exfiltrations that no one would read. By the time anyone put together what had happened in North Korea with the agency’s continuing problems recruiting in China, the mole would have retired.
The Chinese were just being paranoid, the mole decided. They’d used Marco for eighteen months. Time for someplace new. Fine with him. He got the information. George kept him safe. They were partners.
The mole took a final drag of the Marlboro, then touched its burning ember to the letter until flames swallowed up the paper and smoke filled the basement.
“Eddie! Is something burning?”
The mole picked up the.357 Smith & Wesson snubnose on the coffee table and pointed the gun at the ceiling. The thought of killing his wife was oddly comforting, but he knew he would never follow through.
He popped open the revolver’s cylinder and dropped five of the six rounds into the ashtray on the table. He pushed the cylinder shut and gave it a long spin, watching life and death click through the revolver. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Smooth as traffic light turning green to red and back again.
“Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows,” he said.
The cylinder stopped. The mole pointed the gun at his eye and looked down the barrel at infinity. Or, more likely, at an empty chamber. He didn’t plan to kill himself anyway. Why give the world the satisfaction? He slipped the bullets back into the cylinder, unlocked a file cabinet, and dropped the Smith & Wesson and the Krugerrand inside. He poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Dewar’s that was a fixture on the coffee table and downed the scotch in one burning swallow.
“Be right up, dear,” he yelled up the stairs.
THE KITCHEN SMELLED of pot roast and string beans. Janice might be the only woman alive who still cooked pot roast. The room was dark, lit only by a brass lamp in the corner. Janice didn’t like bright lights. They hurt her eyes, she said. She sat at the table, chewing steadily, eyes down. Lenny lay under the table, tongue hanging wetly out of his mouth as he waited for scraps. The world was in the twenty-first century and this house was stuck in 1958, down to the fresh-cut daisies on the kitchen table.
But the mole couldn’t deny that he’d built his own prison. He’d met Janice playing softball on the Mall in 1996, back from Hong Kong after his humiliation there. She was an Alabama girl, a kindergarten teacher in Reston who hung out with the Langley admins. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever dated. But even at the beginning she’d been high-strung, a Thoroughbred prone to anger and depression. And drinking, though he hadn’t realized how much until after they married. Of course, he drank more these days too.
Still, they would probably have been okay if not for their son. Janice had had a difficult pregnancy. They had needed two years, and four cycles of in vitro, before they finally conceived, and Janice had spent most of her last trimester in bed. But Mark, their baby, came out of her healthy and strong. He stayed that way for almost two years. Then one day he had a stomachache and diarrhea and a touch of fever. Dr. Ramsey, their pediatrician, took his temperature and sent them home. The second night his fever spiked to 103. Ramsey told them to put a cool towel on Mark’s head, put the boy to bed, and bring him in first thing in the morning.
At 3:00 A.M. Mark woke up, screaming, a thin red gruel dripping out of his mouth. Janice held him in her arms as they drove to the hospital, the mole running red lights on Arlington Boulevard, using his emergency driving training from the Farm for the first and only time. Even now he could remember the fear in the young emergency room doctor who examined his son. Janice wouldn’t agree, but for him that moment was the worst of all. He’d never seen a doctor look frightened before.
The rest came as inevitably as an avalanche rolling downhilclass="underline" intravenous antibiotics, oxygen mask, organ failure, last rites. He would always believe that Mark knew he was dying. Even at the end, even after the boy had stopped moving, his eyes never closed, trying to grab as much of this lousy world as he could. He was dead four days after that first stomachache. A freak bacterial infection, the doctors said. Nothing anyone could have done.
Sometimes the mole thought Janice had died along with their son. She wouldn’t even try to get pregnant again. After a few months, he asked her to stop taking her birth control. She said she would. But a new tray of twenty-eight foil-wrapped pills kept appearing in their bathroom each month. Eventually the mole stopped asking.
She stopped working too. Teaching kindergarten was too stressful. All those little ones running around. Instead she stayed home. To catch up on her reading, she said. Two years later, they moved. She said she didn’t care, but he insisted, figuring a new house would be a new start. He pushed her to find a new job, work at the mall in Tysons Corner, anything to get her out of the house. And she did, part-time. But something in her was broken. About then he approached the Chinese.