“Don’t do that,” Dar exclaimed, forgetting what radio protocols he knew. Ullmer’s glance was surprised but not hostile. Flushing slightly, Dar went on, “Uh, Hornet here, Blue leader. Be advised the pilot is not alone, over.” You could kill my daughter, you callous idiot, he raged inwardly.
“Wilco, Hornet,” said the F-16 pilot, in the bored, “no-sweat” tones cultivated by fighter pilots. “We can widen our pattern. I’ve got four-zero minutes fuel left. Red flight is on alert and can take up our station, over.”
Ullmer saw Dar’s hopeful nod. F-16’s were less than ideal for this work, and Ben had offered little hope that they would succeed. Still, “Wasp to Blue leader,” he said. “Understand your offer. If the Broncos hold the tight pattern, we’ll circle higher while you widen your pattern. We’d appreciate your replacements.”
“Wilco, Wasp. Blue leader out.”
Dar leaned back, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to squash the pain building between his eyes. A hell of a time for eye strain when I’m so near recovering my only child, he thought. Dar was not what others would call a believer in fate, but as he pressed his face to the porthole again he wondered if this might be some kind of retribution for choosing to place his country ahead of his family.
He had recognized the choice in ‘fifty-three, while engaged to the willowy, elegant Helen Longworth. Her father, CIA deputy Creighton Longworth, had made his approval plain and the match had seemed natural, even inevitable. The whole arrangement had toppled when Helen made her demand. She had grown up without her absentee father, she said, and did not intend to marry a man who spent years at overseas posts where wives were not permitted.
Helen had assumed that her father could simply adjust Dar’s work, as a marketing executive might adjust the travels of a salesman. She met their explanations head-on, and eventually returned Dar’s ring. Creighton Longworth observed to Dar that every parent is a Frankenstein who creates his own monsters, and continued to champion Dar in the Company. It took Dar over a year to realize that the failure had been his own: he would never consider marrying unless the woman needed him. Yet she might not see him for years at a stretch. Helen had been wise.
After that, Dar settled for alliances with women who needed him for the short term, and honorably admitted to each that he would never marry. He made certain that Creighton Longworth knew their names. He took pains to avoid any entanglement that might jeopardize his work. Until Dani Klein.
Stationed at Langley after his Near East posting, Dar made long trips to the Philippines but met Dani at a Washington soiree during a three-month stateside respite in 1964. Small and blond, Dani Klein had been born to German Jewish refugees in wartime Baltimore. The girl had gone to Europe when her parents repatriated but remained an American citizen, returning to America at age twenty-four, fluent in four languages and lively as a sparrow. A blue-eyed, freckled blonde, Dani Klein shattered Dar’s stereotype of the German Jew.
He was surprised to find she thought him endearingly awkward. She was amazed to learn he thought her sexy. Perhaps, he said, it was that hint of an exotic accent in her voice. Old Longworth saw no reason why Dar should avoid a young State Department translator, leaving her Jewish background undiscussed in the Old Boy network because, of course, Dar Weston never intended to marry.
In 1966, while sharing a weekend suite at a Vermont country inn with Dani, Dar told her he would soon be leaving again. He said nothing about the Philippines or spy aircraft; only that he understood why she could not wait for him.
Dani, sitting nude and cross-legged in artless glory on sheets damp from their lovemaking, stopped him with a forefinger over his lips. “You understand nothing, my love. Why should I not wait, so long as you will come back?”
“Time moves slowly when you’re young,” he said. “I could be gone six months, maybe more. It’s not fair to ask that.”
“Find me a fair world; I will emigrate,” she replied, her gray eyes serious. “In the meantime, like you, I have my work. Even if you left me, I would have that.”
He drew her into his arms, kissing her closed eyes, feeling her small perfect breasts against his body, and swore that he would never leave her by choice. They made love more frequently and more tenderly that weekend than ever before, or ever after.
To his immense surprise, Dar was brought back from the Philippines only three months later. Dani welcomed him with solemn joy and with a few more pounds that, he said, bordered on the voluptuous. On their second night together, she made one confession while hiding another.
Dani said she had originally returned to America with a secret agenda, a promise she had made to an Israeli friend after protracted talks and one very strange interview. Other Israelis had contacted her on occasion, needing small favors, nothing that even faintly smacked of espionage; she had told them she would never do that, but still-In short, Dar Weston’s lover was an agent in place, a mole for the Mossad, very likely one who would never be used in any important way. Dar, quietly furious, commanded her never to speak of it again. It was the one facet of her that he would not, could not share. “You’ve broken their most basic rule, Dani,” he said in tones that must have frightened her. “You’ve told someone. Only you haven’t, because I didn’t hear it. If you love me, I must never hear it again. Good Christ, I’m attached to the State Department myself! What if they decided to give me a polygraph?” Angry as he was, he did not call it a “flutter.” That was spook jargon, and Dani did not know his true employment.
She promised, crossing her heart, drawing a scarlet fingernail across breasts that had grown larger in the three months of his absence, and delighting in them, he did not suspect. Perhaps, he realized later, she told him one secret to lessen the internal pressures of the greater secret she carried inside her.
His next mission involved SR-71 overflights based in Japan. The peripheral work demanded savagely long hours and took longer than it might because, so far away from Dani, Dar himself did not handle it well. Dani’s letters were full of her love and joy but also, increasingly, with a shadow of something opaque which he could not identify. Her final letter to Japan, after six months, mentioned a “necessary” vacation in Canada. Dar continued to write as always, and finally returned in the summer of 1967. Dani had disappeared.
Her last letter, posted to him through State cutouts, had been held in accord with the envelope’s instruction. He still had it, could recite it verbatim.
My love:
You have made your position clear on marriage. Please believe that I do not complain. My choices, all of them, were and are my responsibility. Yet I am not so strong as I thought, and for reasons sufficient for me I can no longer live for you alone in this way.
I am sure that you could find me eventually, but think hard. I beg you, do not seek me out unless you are ready for the dread rigors of the family man.
I kiss your eyes. Dani.
Dar spent one sleepless night before making the only decision he could live with, and immediately found an elation he had never known before. He called in some IOUs for aid in Canadian records and took emergency leave. It no longer mattered what cool disdain his family might show toward a Jewess. He could indeed balance a career and a marriage, if that marriage was with Dani.
He traced her through her work permit and found the address in Montreal, a three-story brick apartment house. The owner, a hefty middle-aged widow with the sad eyes of a beagle, had been an old friend of the Kleins in Germany.