Janice wasn’t quite an alcoholic, but when her moods turned black she sat on the couch, watching soaps and sipping the afternoon away. The mole knew he ought to divorce her, but he felt bound to her. She was the price he paid for letting his son die, the price he paid for spying. And she could be sweet. Every so often she reminded him of the woman she’d been, the beautiful girl who took him to the National Gallery and showed him her favorite paintings. But his loyalty didn’t stop him from spending nights at the Gold Club. And his narcissism was so complete that he never wondered if she might be happier without him.
He poured himself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle and regarded his wife. She gave him a sweet, cockeyed smile. This was sloshed, happy Janice, infinitely preferable to drunk, sad Janice. He sipped his wine, feeling its mellow glow smooth the burn of the Dewar‘s, and sliced off a piece of the roast, slipping it under the table for Lenny. He was suddenly ashamed of his joke downstairs with the Smith & Wesson.
“This is great.” He chewed the meat heartily and sucked down his wine, then retopped her glass and his until the bottle was empty. Why not? They had cases more in the basement. Jan didn’t like the idea of running short, and he supposed he didn’t either.
“Not overcooked?”
“Not a bit. And you look great today, honey.” He tried not to think about the fact that she’d look even better if she lost the forty pounds she’d gained since Mark died. Her stomach had turned as soft as her mind. They still had sex every so often, mainly for old times’ sake.
“How was work?”
“Great,” he said sincerely, thinking of the $75,000 the Chinese had thrown him. There was more where that came from, for sure. The Chinks had money to burn from selling all those toys and computer chips. The Chinese were the future. The good ol’ U.S.A. was over. Always best to bet on the come. In his own way he was helping the trade deficit.
Anyway, he’d played them just right, not giving up too much at once, always leaving them wanting more. Doling out secrets slowly wasn’t just greed — it was self-protection. In the mid-1980s, Aldrich Ames, the worst traitor in the CIA’s history, had almost overnight given nearly all of the agency’s top Soviet spies to the KGB. Then he’d watched in agony as the Soviets arrested them all.
“You’re going to get me arrested!” Ames had complained to his handlers. “Why not just put up a big neon sign over the agency with the word mole written on it?” Eddie hadn’t made the same mistake, and he didn’t intend to.
He sipped his wine and smiled at his wife. “Yeah, Gleeson”—his khaki-wearing, infinitely stupid boss—“hinted I might be up for a promotion.” Unlike much of what he told Janice, this was true.
“Well. that’s great. I don’t suppose you can tell me the details.” She smiled like a girl hoping against hope for a pony on her birthday.
“It would be a transfer within East Asia. More responsibility, more counterintelligence work.”
In fact Joe Gleeson probably just wanted to get rid of him. But the mole didn’t care. If the move went through, he’d be the senior counterintel officer for all of East Asia, with access to every operation from Tokyo to Tibet. More details for the Chinese, more bo nuses for him.
“Counterintelligence.”
“You know, Spy versus Spy, all that stuff. Find their guys before they find yours.”
“Would we be traveling?” Janice clung to the ridiculous hope that he would get another foreign post. Ridiculous both because she could barely function even in suburban Virginia and because the agency would send him to Mars before it gave him another front-line job.
“Maybe a little, but it would be based at Langley.”
“Well, that sounds nice.” She finished her wine and poured herself another glass from a new bottle.
“How about you?”
“It was such a busy day.”
He tried not to smile.
“I took the car in this morning. You know how the brakes have been squeaking.” Janice brought in her Volvo to be serviced about once a week. The mole sometimes wondered if she was screwing a mechanic at the dealership. He hoped so. “Then this afternoon there was a sale at Macy‘s — I found this great dress I want you to see.”
“Just buy it, honey.”
“Really? It’s not on sale.”
“Do I ever say no?”
“Umm. ” He’d meant the question rhetorically. Janice’s requests were usually modest, and his second career meant that he never had to turn her down. He even surprised her with the occasional diamond bracelet, though nothing too extravagant. He didn’t want her showing off to the Knausses or their other so-called friends in the neighborhood.
Her face cleared as she arrived at an answer. “No, sugarplum. I don’t guess you do.” She stood, tottered over to him, leaned down to give him a sloppy kiss, running her tongue down his cheek until she found his mouth. “You’re the best.”
LYING BESIDE JANICE THAT NIGHT, the mole wondered what to do with his bonus. Maybe he should give Evie a present, that diamond tennis bracelet she wanted. But he was sick of Evie. When he’d met her at the club, she’d entranced him. Those fine long legs. And she’d seemed smart, at least compared with the other girls. He’d spent months tipping her extravagantly for her lame lap dances, until finally she agreed to have dinner.
Six months later they were still seeing each other. But her charm had worn off. She never shut up, and she was no genius, though she sure thought she was. Like she was the only stripper ever to go to college. If he had to listen to her talk about Occupied Palestine, as she called it, one more time. And the yoga. He didn’t mind that she liked it. It kept her flexible, that was for sure. But she took it so seriously. For a year she’d been training to be an instructor. A year? How much preparation could a yoga instructor possibly need? It was stretching, with a little bit of chanting, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was joking when she told him the classes cost $1,500 a month. He’d laughed out loud and she’d stamped off. He hadn’t even gotten laid that night.
Okay, forget the tennis bracelet. Forget Evie. Time for a new stripper, one who didn’t have any illusions about being a rocket scientist.
Somewhere in the night a dog barked. The mole folded his hands behind his head, feeling the rough skin of his scalp. He imagined God looking down on all the honest souls asleep in their beds. And him, awake, his house a tumor glowing red in the night. Could the neighbors feel it? The mole made sure his lawn was mowed, his gutters cleaned. He and Janice brought apple pie and beer to the neighborhood barbecues. But the neighbors knew, he was sure. They knew something was wrong, though they would never guess what.
Damn. He’d felt so good a minute before, thinking about the bonus. Now the glow was gone. People thought they understood him when they didn’t understand anything at all. Until the Chinese, no one had respected his talents. The agency had always pigeonholed him as a back-office loser.
IT HAD STARTED WITH DICK ABRAMS, the old Hong Kong station chief. That snotty Yalie, with his fake half-British accent. “We think you belong back at Langley,” Abrams had said. “You’re too cerebral to be in operations. Take it as a compliment.”
Too cerebral. The words were almost twenty years old, but the mole heard them so clearly that he half-expected to see Abrams beside him tonight instead of Janice. He flushed at the memory. They’d been in Abrams’s immaculate office, sitting on the couch that Abrams used for his quote-unquote informal chats. No matter where the mole looked, he couldn’t avoid the photograph of Abrams and Bill Casey, the old director, a legend in the Directorate of Operations. Abrams hadn’t bothered with a picture of William Webster, Casey’s replacement — his way of letting visitors know that he would be around long after Webster was gone.