Extraordinary Powers (10 page)

Someone answers the phone; it is Laura, my wife.

She is crying, pleading with me to come home, to our apartment on the rue Jacob, something horrible has happened. I am gripped with fear, and I begin to run, and in a few seconds (this is a dream, after all) I have arrived at the rue Jacob, at the entrance to my apartment building, knowing what I am about to see. This is the worst part of the dream: thinking that if I don’t go home, it won’t have happened; but some horrified fascination impels me onward. I swim through the air, feeling nauseated.

A man is coming out of my building, wearing a thick woolen plaid hunter’s shirt, Nike running shoes. An American, I am convinced, in his thirties. Although I can see him only from behind, I can see that he has a thick, unruly shock of black hair and—it is always the same detail—a long red ugly scar running along his jawline, from his ear to his chin.

It is a terrible scar, and I can see it quite clearly. He is limping as if in great pain.

I don’t stop the man—why should I?—but instead, as he limps away, I enter the building, smelling the odor of blood, which grows stronger as I climb the stairs to our apartment, and now the stench is unbearable, and I find myself retching, and then I am at the landing, and I can see the three bodies, splayed grotesquely in pools of blood, and one of them—it can’t be, I tell myself—is Laura.

And at this point I usually awake.

But that is not quite the way it happened, of course. My dream, and it is always the same, has created a grotesque semi parable out of it.

As a case officer in Paris, I was charged with running several valuable deep-cover field agents, and a host of minor ones. I’d had one major success in Paris: I’d succeeded in rolling up a ring of Soviet military-intelligence spies operating out of a turbine plant outside the city. My cover was as an architect at an American firm. The apartment I had been given on the rue Jacob was small but sun-drenched, located in the sixth arrondissement, the best neighborhood in Paris, to my mind. I was fortunate; most of my fellow spooks were housed in the drab eighth.

Laura and I had recently married, and she had no objection whatsoever to being moved to Paris: she was a painter, and there were few places she preferred to paint than Paris. She was small, irresistibly cute, with long blond hair that she wore up. We were pretty much intoxicated with love.

We had talked about having kids, and we both wanted them. But what I didn’t know was that she was pregnant, a fact that would have thrilled me. She never had a chance to tell me. I’ve always believed she wanted to tell me in her own way, at her own pace, after she’d had a chance to digest the news. All I knew was that she’d been feeling sick for several days-some sort of minor virus, I thought.

Around this time I was contacted by a low-level KGB officer, a filing clerk in the KGB’s Paris station, who wanted to strike a deal. He had some information to sell, he said, which he’d run across in the archives in Moscow. In exchange, he wanted to defect, wanted financial security, protection, the works.

I followed all the standard procedures, cleared the first meeting with the CIA station chief, James Tobias Thompson. Case officers are always wary of what’s called a “bund date,” which means a meeting with an unknown agent at a place of his designation. There is always the risk that the whole thing is a trap.

But this agent, who called himself Victor, agreed to meet on our terms, which was heartening. I arranged a rendezvous, risky but vital. Three quick rings of a telephone at a flat somewhere in the sixth arrondissement signaled the location and time. Then, a “chance”

encounter in an expensive men’s clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honore, but unlike in the dream, it went swimmingly. A navy blue sweater was hanging on a peg in the dressing room, as it was supposed to be, left behind by a careless customer who decided against making a purchase, and in the pocket I left the scrap of an envelope, the encoded message, designating time and place.

The next day we met at one of the Agency’s safe houses, really a grubby little apartment in the fourteenth. I knew that walkins generally didn’t pan out, but you could never ignore them either: many of the greatest defectors in the history of intelligence have been walkins.

“Victor” was wearing a blond wig, obviously a wig; his olive complexion was that of a dark-haired man. Below his jawline was a long, thin, beet-red scar.

He seemed to be the real article, at least as far as I could ascertain.

He promised me, the next time we met if a deal could be arranged a major, earth-shaking revelation. A document, he said, which he’d come across in the KGB archives. He mentioned a cryptonym: MAGPIE.

When my boss and close friend Toby Thompson debriefed me later, this little detail intrigued him. Apparently there was some substance to the case.

So I arranged a second meeting.

I have been over this a thousand times since then. Victor had contacted me, which meant he already knew my cover. And all the safe houses conveniently located were in use for debriefings and such. So, with Toby Thompson’s approval and even encouragement, I arranged a second meeting, between Victor, Toby, and me, at my rue Jacob apartment.

Laura, despite her sporadic bouts of nausea, was out of town, or so I believed. The night before she had gone out to visit friends near Giverny, to explore Monet’s gardens. She wasn’t to return for two days, so the apartment was available.

I shouldn’t have risked it, but that’s easy to say now.

The meeting was to have been at noon, but I was detained at work on a transatlantic conference call to Langley on a secure trunk line, to the deputy director of Operations, Emory St. Clair. As a result, I arrived twenty minutes late, expecting Toby and Victor to be in the apartment already.

I remember seeing a dark-haired man striding purposively out of my building, wearing a plaid hunter’s shirt, and dismissing him as a neighbor or visitor. I climbed the stairs, and something in the stairwell smelled somehow off. The odor got stronger as I neared the third floor: blood. My heart began to race.

When I arrived at the third-floor landing, I beheld a scene of unforgettable gruesomeness. Tangled on the floor, in pools of fresh blood, were two bodies: Toby … and Laura.

I think I must have cried out, but I can’t be sure. Everything slowed down, became stroboscopic. Suddenly I was kneeling beside Laura, cradling her head, unbelieving. She wasn’t supposed to be home; it wasn’t her; this was some mistake.

Laura had been shot in the chest, in the heart, the bloodstain spread over a large area of her white silk nightgown. She was

I don’t remember anything after that. Someone showed up, I think.

Probably I called someone. I can’t have made any sense. I had lost my mind. They had to separate me from my poor dead Laura, who I was convinced I could revive if I tried hard enough.

Toby Thompson had survived, if barely; his spinal cord had been severed, and he would be paralyzed for life.

Laura was dead.

Later, some things were explained.

Laura had returned home early that morning, feeling sick. She had called me at work to say so, although for some reason I never got her message.

Later, the autopsy revealed that she was pregnant. Toby had shown up at my apartment at a few minutes before noon, armed, in case anything untoward happened. He found the door ajar, the KGB man inside, holding Laura hostage at gunpoint. “Victor” had then pointed his gun at Toby and fired, then turned and shot Laura. Toby had returned the fire, tried but failed to kill him before the pain overtook him.

What had happened, it seemed, was a Soviet retaliation targeted directly at me. But for what? For rolling up the turbine factory spy ring? Or for any of the several incidents in East Germany in which I wounded, and in a few cases killed, East German and Soviet agents? I had been set up by “Victor,” and was to be taken in a shootout. But instead; Laura was killed-Laura, who wasn’t supposed to be there—and I, detained by some freak twist of fate, was spared. I had fucked up, and I was alive, while Toby Thompson was condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and Laura was dead.

As to the dark-haired man in plaid whom I’d seen leaving my building: who else could it have been but “Victor,” having shed his blond wig?

Much later it was decided that though I hadn’t been at fault, I had nevertheless performed badly—sloppiness of procedure, largely, which I could not contest, even though Toby had given me an okay—and in a sense I was ultimately culpable for my own wife’s murder and for Toby’s paralysis.

My career was not necessarily over; I could have appealed to yet another administrative board. In time, I could have surmounted this.

But I couldn’t bear it. I knew that I had as good as pulled the trigger myself.

The inquest went on for some time. Everyone who’d been even marginally involved, from secretaries to code clerks to Ed Moore, the chief of the Operations Directorate Europe Division, was questioned endlessly, administered polygraph tests. The inquest took over my life at a time when I had no inner resources left to draw from.

My wife and future child had been killed. My life seemed pointless.

Weeks went by. I was in purgatory. They’d put me up in a hotel a few miles from Langley. I would drive to “work” every morning: a windowless white conference room on the second floor, where the interrogator (every few days there was a new one) would smile cordially, give me a firm, bureaucratic handshake, offer me a cup of coffee and a brown jar of Coffee-mate nondairy creamer, and a flat wooden coffee stirrer.

Then he’d pull out the transcript of yesterday’s session. On the surface we were just two guys trying to figure out what went wrong over there in Paris.

In reality the interrogator was trying with all his might to trip me up on the slightest inconsistency, to find the tiniest hairline fracture in my composure, the most minuscule contradiction, wear me down, break me down.

After seven weeks of this—the manpower costs involved must have been extraordinary—the investigation was closed. No conclusion reached.

I was summoned to Harrison Sinclair’s office. He was still the number-three man in the Agency, the Deputy Director for Operations.

Although we had spoken only a few times, he acted as if we were old friends. I’m not saying he was insincere; more likely, he was doing his damnedest to put me at ease. Hal was a genuinely affectionate man. He put an arm around me, guided me over to a leather seat, and sat in the small leather couch next to me. He hunched toward me confidentially, as if he were about to brief me on some top secret operation, and then told me a joke about an old man and an old lady in an elevator in a retirement community in Miami. I remember only that the punch line was “So, are you single?”

Although I felt as if my insides had turned to scar tissue in the last two hellish months, I found myself laughing, felt the tension ebbing, if only for the moment We talked a bit about Molly. She was living in Boston after two years with the Peace Corps in Nigeria. She’d broken up with her college boyfriend—the lunk, as she referred to him.

She wanted me to give her a call when I felt I was ready to see people, Sinclair added. I said I would.

He told me that Ed Moore, the chief of the Europe Division, had decided I had to leave the CIA, that my career would always be clouded by questions. That although I was no doubt innocent, there would always be suspicions. The best thing for me to do was to leave. Moore, he said, was quite adamant I was hardly going to argue. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball somewhere and sleep for days and then awake to find it was all a bad dream.

“Ed thinks you should go to law school,” Hal said.

I listened passively. What interest in law did I have? The answer, I later discovered, was not much, but what difference did that make? You can do something well that you don’t care much for.

I wanted to talk to Hal about what happened, but he wasn’t Interested.

He had a full schedule; he thought it best to maintain neutrality; he didn’t want to rake over the past.

You’ll be a great lawyer, he said.

He told a very funny, very dirty joke about lawyers.

We both laughed. That day I left CIA headquarters—for what I thought was the last time.

But I was to be haunted by the nightmare of Paris for the rest of my life.

NINE.

Alex Truslow’s weekend house in southern New Hampshire was less than an hour’s drive from Boston. Molly, LAjniraculously enough, was able to free up enough time to join me. I think she wanted to reassure herself that Truslow was all right, that I was not making a colossal error by agreeing to work for the Corporation.

The house, a rambling old beauty perched on a bluff above its own lake, was much larger than we had expected. White clapboard with black shutters, it was at once cozy and elegant It looked as if it had begun as a humble two-room farmhouse a hundred years ago, and had gradually and steadily been added to until it sprawled, ungainly and serpentine, along the undulating crest. Here and there the paint was peeling.

Truslow was outside, tending the fire as we drove up. He was in casual attire: a plaid woolen shirt, bulky, moss-green wide-wale corduroy pants, white socks, and boat shoes. He kissed Molly on the cheek, clapped me on the back, and pushed vodka martinis at us. I realized for the first time, consciously, what it was about Alexander Truslow that intrigued me. In certain striking ways the mournful cast of the brow, the dogged honesty he reminded me of my own father, who died of a stroke when I was seventeen, the summer before I went off to college.

His wife, Margaret, a slender, dark-haired woman of around sixty, came out of the house, wiping her hands on a bright red apron, the screen door clattering behind her.

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said to Molly. “We miss him so much.

So many people miss him.”

Molly smiled and thanked her. “This is a wonderful place,” she said.

“Oh,” Margaret Truslow said, approaching her husband and touching his cheek fondly with the back of her hand, “I hate it out here. Ever since Alex retired from CIA he’s made me spend practically every weekend and every summer out here. I put up with it because I have no choice.” Her expression, doting and wearily amused, was the sort you might use on an errant but beloved child.