Jim moved down the aisle. His shoes slapped the concrete. “Esme, this is the deaclass="underline" You need to send people down to Cincinnati again. I want round-the-clock surveillance on the house. He bites his toenails, I want it on camera. You so much as see a toy sword, and I’ll have ATF shut him down. This time, you have to produce. We can’t go in there cold.”
Did Jim have a warrant? Of course not, though she knew better than to ask.
“If that’s what you want,” she said, trying to imply that surveillance would not produce anything, but without faulting herself for it. “No problem.”
“Put whatever team in place you choose, except this time, I want them to report to me.” She rolled her eyes, but more to roll back the panic that would show in them any second. “You know I don’t work like that,” she said. “Either I’m running things or I’m not.”
He frowned. “I gotta go see my wife in a few days. Wife, lawyers, divorce. My life is a shit storm. Don’t make it worse.”
Esme nodded. She wanted to get out of there. So much to do. “You should take me with you sometime. For backup.”
“Then I have to go pick up my daughter, which means seeing my in-laws. You know what’s the last thing I want to be thinking about when dealing with those people? Your psychotic fuck of an ex-husband.”
She linked her arm in his and tried, despite her ogre face, to remind him of their intimacy. He was Jim Bach. Her Department of Defense liaison and paramour of use. A henchman. Also a facilitator of plans brewed by men who were part of the furtive and freakishly right-wing Council for National Policy, though if asked, it was, No, no, never heard of those people, no way, no how.
They had been working together for a year. Before him, there were others, though all with the same bugbear, the Helix, and, in turn, Thurlow Dan. No one knew exactly when Dan had become such a threat, just that in 1995 he was that annoying socialist whose rhetoric offended people powerful enough to have him watched, but by 2005 he was doyen of a movement with reach. So Esme’s orders were more urgent than ever: produce enough intel on Thurlow to make the case and shut him down.
They walked past the space shuttle Enterprise, where a little boy was saying, “It’s too heavy to fly, Daddy, it’s too heavy,” and throwing himself on the floor as he did so. At the door, Jim stopped and faced Esme his way. Pinched both her arms and squeezed — the squeeze hostile and sexual in equal doses — and said, “Esme. Lynne. I’ve never told you how to do your job before, only now I have one piece of advice.”
She freed herself of his grip. “What’s that?”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
All the way home, she tried to feel nothing. But it was no good. For her, anxiety was like many people talking at once: no clue what anyone was saying, just that no one was happy about it. And so, if you can’t beat ’em, etc.: she tried to pull from the rabble some thoughts of use. For instance: I am alone; I self-sustain; these ideas are ballast for who I am. Bywords she’d relied on for years but that were of no help now. She was afraid. She’d been on Thurlow before they were married and every day since, but really, how long could this go on? How long could she protect him? Her job had been to produce a reason to throw him in jail, and she’d managed not to with remarkable skill. When the Helix didn’t pay taxes. When the Helix had a brothel. One or two or twenty. Whatever the members did in a Bond, Esme made sure no one knew. Or covered the bases when the Helix didn’t. Think Dean actually had permits for all those guns? It hadn’t been easy, but it had been doable. Only now Thurlow was getting reckless.
And it wasn’t like confronting him was easy. You couldn’t talk to a man like that. And you certainly couldn’t have him in your life. He was who he was: monstrous in his disregard for anyone but himself, and if Esme could barely handle it, her daughter couldn’t handle it at all. She shouldn’t even have to; she was just a child.
So, fine, she’d stay away, as always. And do her best. And in the meantime, she’d put together another team. Four people who would have no business being sent on a reconnaissance mission. Who’d come back with snapshots of the Helix House that were out of focus. The house in the snow, and maybe some hooker in the window. Esme would identify the hooker for Jim and then say that was it, nothing else of note to report. Nothing at all, and that would end it until the next time. And the time after that.
She got to her bathroom and sat at a vanity with mirror and bubble lights. “Martin!” she yelled. “Get this thing off me. The face, too. I’m done for the day. The Lynne Five-Oh is great.”
She leaned in close to the mirror, trying to find herself exposed in the silicone vamped to her skin. But she couldn’t. Martin was a genius. He had managed her looks for a decade. Together they had fooled everyone she knew. Even her lovers. Even her parents, though here was cause for regret, because it was hard enough getting your parents to know you in plain face — witness her own child, whom she barely knew at all.
Martin used a butter knife to peel a flap glued to her cheekbone. “Ow,” she said. “Easy.”
“Sorry,” he said, and he knelt to take off her calf plates.
She put her elbows on the vanity. She fit her index under the elastic headband of her wig and pulled. The wig sailed overhead and landed on a couch. Her real hair was tamped under a swim cap seamed to her head with mortician’s wax, which Martin dissolved with acetone. She removed the cap as per the wig and plunged her fingers into her hair to rouse its inclination to chaos. It was dark blond with copper veins, shoulder length and undulate.
“Where’s the case?” she said. She had forty-three different pairs of contact lenses. The blues with the pupil cast in a flax corona were her favorite. Tonight, she wore the hazel taupe. They radiated an unease that itself radiated sorrow. She looked at them in the mirror and wondered if they telegraphed feeling better than her own eyes, which were white grape.
“So it all went okay?” he said. “Anything feel loose?”
“No, just fat. I look like a fifty-year-old hag. Lynne the hag.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said, which was as far as the conversation would go. Martin was not a confidant. Not even a colleague. Their first project, he’d had to regender her face and age it ten years. As he’d applied spirit gum to a hollow in her cheek, he’d asked about the job. Why a man? Why the years? She’d said, “You know how people like to joke around — if I told you I’d have to kill you — you know that joke?” He did. “It’s no joke.” And that was that.
It’s true she wasn’t a case officer. Or even a spook. In the official parlance of human intelligence, the acronym was NOC. Nonofficial cover. Go out into the world, and if you screwed up, no one would bail you out, no one would reel you in, no one would say you were alive. Only difference was that a real NOC was affiliated with a parent organization that had an interest in getting her out despite the blowback. Esme did not have this luxury. Her burden was to go unacknowledged but also untethered. In the unofficial parlance, she was a freelancer. Hired by the government, case by case. Some more harrowing than others.