Fidelity (7 page)

13

A
FTER A
few weeks in the New York Office, Kay had started to fall into the grind. Some days she almost felt like being an FBI Agent didn't seem all that different from working in any other high-pressure office, except that this high-pressure office was inside a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, where access was controlled by a keypad and cell phones were prohibited to preclude electronic eavesdropping. Which admittedly was probably not something that the bankers and public relations flacks and Wall Street wolves who occupied the other buildings in Midtown had to deal with.

To the general public there were few things more exciting than counterintelligence work. A firm century of misinformation, of legend, of Rudyard Kipling stories and Ian Fleming novels, had inculcated an almost comprehensive misconception of what the job actually entailed. Within the Bureau itself, however, counterintelligence was far from a plum assignment—indeed, quite the opposite. Gone was any hope of street work, gone was the thrill of the arrest, gone was the joy of wrapping up a case, of taking a legitimate villain off the streets. A counterintelligence operation could last years—decades, even—and involve endless hours sifting through paperwork and engaging in other subtle and obscure maneuvering.

It was a life for which Kay was not overly prepared. Perhaps more than any other law enforcement agency in the world, the Bureau's mission was extraordinarily varied. With fifty-six field offices in every state of the Union and more than sixty legal attaché offices scattered throughout the rest of the world, responsible for a portfolio of tasks ranging from counterintelligence to counterterrorism to white-collar crime to public corruption, the Academy could only equip an Agent with the essential skills that would be required of them upon being assigned to a field office: a background in the legal system, self-defense and firearms training; information on the Bureau itself and on law enforcement generally. Much of what was required of any given Agent would be determined by whatever their placement was: Kay had known little about the drug subculture of Baltimore before being sent there, but after two years she had left with no small level of expertise. No doubt if she had been placed in some other office, in some other part of the country or the world, she would have developed a different skill set, one tailored to the needs of that assignment.

But still, Kay felt certain, there could be few positions within the Bureau as taxing as counterintelligence. An Agent might be focused on a specific country, in which case they needed to become familiar not only with the current political and clandestine service structure of the nation in question but also its history, culture and language if possible.

It was a far cry from what Kay had been doing in Baltimore, her nose to the concrete most days, cleaning up the streets one savage at a time. “The needs of the Bureau come first,” she would remind herself when the days started to drag long. “You didn't get into this job for the thrill of it” was another one she liked to use. “It beats mining coal” was her final card to play, although some afternoons, looking through reports or decade-old State
Department I-94 forms, she began to wonder if this was actually true or if she wouldn't be better off trading in her service weapon and badge for a hard hat and a pickax.

But most of the time Kay felt like she was settling into the New York Office well enough. Being the newbie on the squad always carried with it a certain amount of rising, but at least they had dropped the Ivy bit. Here in the New York Office she was far from the only Agent who'd attended an elite college. The Bureau prided itself on evolving to deal with the threats of the moment, and in the twenty-first century that meant the need for foreign languages, computer programming, and special skill sets mandated going after the best-educated and most driven young men and women. The Baltimore Field Office had been “old-school,” with hard-bitten field Agents who knew the streets and the people on them, and for gang work there was nobody better. But it was clear that counterintelligence required a different sort of mentality. After two years swilling Natty Boh with Torres and the rest of the office, it was something of a culture shock for Kay.

The other Agents in the squad were sympathetic. Sitting in the break room early one afternoon, working their way through deli sandwiches and diet soda, the chatter drifted to her background in Baltimore.

“Bit of a comedown from putting murderers into the ground, huh, Malloy?” Marshall asked. Marshall was a short African American whose career had been confined to the New York Office. Despite that, he was comfortable with the work and the city, smiling often, and free of the “sharp elbows” that so often characterized hardened New Yorkers. Kay had come to like him almost as soon as she met him, a feeling he seemed to inspire in most of the people he came in contact with.

“Put who where?” Wilson asked. Wilson was tall and thin,
serious and, to Kay's mind, at least, a bit standoffish. In the time since she had transferred to New York, this was practically their first conversation that wasn't directly work related. He was also reputed to be very good at all of the elaborate stages of cultivating an asset, and had worked hand in glove with Jeffries over the years to help build the reputation for excellence that her squad enjoyed.

“You didn't hear?” Marshall paused to wipe a bit of ranch dressing off his chin, and to build anticipation. “Agent Malloy here is a straight gunslinger. Tracked down the biggest drug kingpin in Baltimore, challenged him to a duel at high noon, shot him down in the street like a dog.”

“High noon, huh?” Wilson repeated drily. “Man, things ­really are different in Baltimore.”

“Very little of that is true,” Kay said flatly. She didn't like discussing the Williams shooting and would have been happier if it weren't public knowledge, although of course that was impossible. The FBI was like any other tightly knit organization, and the gossip flew pretty quickly, especially gossip as good as hers. There might not be an Agent on the East Coast who hadn't heard the story of her going at it with Williams; certainly she had figured it was common knowledge amongst her new squad. Being one of those rare few involved in a firefight had clearly given Kay a certain amount of status within the organization, but it wasn't one she relished. If it were up to her, that horrible afternoon with Williams would be the last time she ever had to draw her service weapon off the range, and she didn't quite appreciate the flippant way in which it was being discussed.

“You and Jeffries should start a club,” Marshall said sardonically.

“What do you mean?”

“You don't know? Back before they put her behind a desk,
Jeffries was a stone-cold brick Agent,” Marshall said, meaning an investigator who preferred not to enter into management. “Spent most of her time working the Iron Curtain countries.”

“Lot of stories seem to be circulating about our Jeffries,” Kay said.

“All of them true,” Wilson responded. “She can drink three pots of coffee without peeing.”

“She doesn't need to pee,” Marshall corrected. “She has absolute control over all her biological functions. Haven't you ever noticed that she never sweats?”

“So she's a robot?” Kay asked.

“I don't think so,” Wilson said, “though it's hard to say for sure. I think it's more like the way they say Buddhist monks can lower their heart rate through sheer strength of will.”

“So she's the Dalai Lama?”

“I'm pretty sure the Dalai Lama doesn't carry a gun,” Wilson observed.

“I've never heard of the Dalai Lama carrying a gun,” Marshall agreed.

“What did she do before working counterintelligence against the Russians?”

Marshall shrugged. “Sucked on a pacifier, I suppose. Professionally she's been doing it since before I came into the Bureau. You know she speaks all those Iron Curtain languages.”

“Which ones? Polish? Czech? Ukrainian? Russian? Hungarian?”

“All of them,” Marshall said, probably joking. “She speaks all of them.”

“No one speaks Hungarian,” Wilson insisted. “Even the Hungarians don't really speak it; it's just an elaborate con they're playing on the rest of us.”

“I'll make sure to mention that next time I'm in Budapest,” Marshall said. “You know she can still make possible on the gun range.”

“Possible” was the highest score that one could achieve on the FBI gun range, the name itself almost a challenge, as if to say,
It's possible, but you sure as hell won't be able to do it.
Kay, who had been one of the better shots in the Baltimore Field Office, had never gotten close.

“Bullshit. Everyone knows that when they promote you from a brick Agent, they take away your service weapon and replace it with a pen.”

“I came in on my lunch break and watched her put two straight clips into some unfortunate theoretical subject's septum,” Wilson insisted. “So that cap gun has quite a punch. You know they've been trying to send her up the chain for years now, but she keeps rejecting it. Won't take anything that might take her out of the day-to-day running of counterintelligence. It's all she lives for,” he said, which Kay thought was a pretty strong statement to be making about someone as reticent about opening up as Jeffries.

“Never been married?” Kay asked. “No significant other?”

Wilson laughed, shook his head. “Sure, she's got a significant other: Pyotr Andreev, her Russian counterpart. It's a star-crossed-lover kind of thing,
Romeo and Juliet–
style. Pulled apart by politics, only able to demonstrate affection through elaborate attempts to entrap and defeat the other.”

If counterintelligence was a game, then success meant knowing your opponent. The FBI kept files on their counterparts throughout the world: personal history, education, professional background, likes and dislikes—anything that might potentially be useful, that might offer some insight into the opposition's
thinking. Pyotr Andreev was another part of counterintelligence lore, an ice-cold ex-Soviet who had done more damage in his long career to the U.S. security apparatus than Hanssen and Ames combined. Unlike some of his colleagues, there was very little on file about him, hearsay and rumor more than anything else, operations he might have been involved in. The only thing that could be said of him with any certainty was that he was as good at his job as anyone on the planet, and he had a strong affection for a particularly noxious brand of cigarettes called Belomorkanal.

“So far as I know,” Marshall said, “she's never been on a date. Jeffries is about the mission. I mean, we're all about the mission, but . . .”

“Jeffries is
about
the mission,” Wilson finished. “Speaking of which,” he said, tossing the end of his sandwich in the trash, “duty calls.”

Kay stayed late that night, as she did most nights, trying to catch up on everything she needed to know in order to be an effective counterintelligence Agent. And when she left—as ­always—the light in Jeffries's office was still burning brightly.

14

L
UIS PUSHED
his pawn forward a spot, leaving his knight unprotected.

Kay pursed her lips and thought for a while.

“Didn't see that coming, did you?” Luis asked happily. Close to seventy but still spry—handsome, even—silver hair and icy blue eyes, a smile that overflowed its mouth whenever he was with his niece.

“If you're trying to rattle me, Uncle,” Kay said, “you're going to have to work a bit harder.”

It was late afternoon on a Sunday. Kay had met her uncle earlier that morning and they had spent several hours walking through lower Manhattan, catching up on old times, ending up in Washington Square Park to enjoy the fading sunshine and get in a few games of chess.

“How is the new job?” Luis asked, putting another packet of sugar into his takeout coffee. He had always had a passion for sugar, as he did for red meat, alcohol, pretty girls, tobacco—really, the entire suite of things from which a person finds himself in a grave before old age, or at least some of the suite. He had given up most of the more egregious vices under the watchful eye of his wife, but he still enjoyed what sins were allowed him.

“It's all right,” Kay said, trying to keep her mind on the game.

“Are you doing gang work? Like back in Baltimore?”

“Not exactly,” Kay said. She castled, protecting her king, leaving Luis's knight hanging.

“Counterterrorism, perhaps? Tapping the phones of various Muhammads, listening in on the Friday-evening sermons to make sure they're within the acceptable bounds of anti-Americanism?”

Kay had long grown used to Luis's old-fashioned, quasi-­radical sympathies, which she assumed to be a product of his having lived through the sixties and that she knew he only half believed anyway. “That's not really how we think of it,” Kay said.

“It
is
counterterrorism, then?”

“No,” Kay said, taking the knight.

Luis laughed and moved a rook to threaten her queen. “White-collar crime? Knocking down the next Madoff before he can cheat some poor old woman out of her last billion?”

“Not white-collar crime, thank God.”

“I can only assume that your reticence to answer me is because they've taken to giving you the cloak-and-dagger.”

“You know that I can't tell you, Uncle Luis,” Kay said.

Luis smiled, reached out to take Kay's knight with a bishop. “You'll need to learn to lie better if you're going to work intelligence.”

“The FBI does counterintelligence, Uncle. Just as a point of fact,” Kay said, taking Luis's knight.

“I've never been entirely clear on the distinction between the two.”

Which was understandable. In theory, it was Kay's job to defend America from infiltration and compromise by the intelligence organs of foreign governments, to act as a shield against potential malfeasance. In practice, doing so required the Bureau to adopt many of the tactics of its enemies: covertly gathering
intelligence, actively recruiting informants from foreign governments and rival intelligence agencies. “We're the good guys,” Kay explained half jokingly.

“I'll try and keep that in mind,” Luis said.

“I saw Auntie last weekend,” Kay said, shifting the conversation abruptly and without preamble.

“I see her every day.”

“And a lucky man you are.”

“Absolutely.”

“Anyway, she told me something that I didn't know about Mom and Dad's . . . about what happened to Mom and Dad.”

“Which was?”

“She said that after their funeral a couple of FBI Agents came by the house, offered their condolences and asked some questions about Dad's work. Do you remember anything like that?”

Luis pursed his lips, as if hyperfocused on the game. “I suppose, now that you mention it,” he said, holding his hand over one of his pieces, then bringing it swiftly back to his side. Luis had raised her to play what was called “touch-move” chess, ­tournament-style, meaning that if you put a finger on a piece you had to move it. It had once made her cry uncontrollably in Washington Square Park at the tender age of eleven, but she had to admit that in the long run it had helped sharpen her focus.

“That didn't seem odd to you?”

“Not really,” Luis grumbled, finally conceding to the inevitable and trading his rook for a bishop. “Maybe you didn't appreciate this, being so young, but your father had a great deal of status within his field. His death was in the
Times
, the
Post
 . . . I suppose the FBI were just being thorough.”

Kay had realized that, actually, indeed it was one of the things that, even as a child, she had associated most with her father: that he was, in some way that a ten-year-old girl could express
only imperfectly, a good man, an important man, an important man who did good. But neither had he been a State Department Foreign Service Officer, and Kay still could not quite understand why the Bureau would have such an interest in him. Their resources were, God knew, far from unlimited, and for that matter the investigation into his murder in a foreign country would have fallen outside of their purview. “That's it, then? Just being thorough?” Kay asked, moving a piece.

“Remind me, Kay, which one of us is in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I would think you would be better equipped to determine what interest the FBI had in the death of your parents than I would.”

Which made sense as far as it went, but in fact part of being an Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that you didn't get to use the powers of your office for petty personal reasons; didn't get to pull the bank records of disliked neighbors or send out a SWAT team to torment old boyfriends. It was a clear breach of policy for her to be snooping into an old case, and there was no reason Kay could think of that her counterintelligence work would overlap with a twenty-year-old murder investigation.

“And how are your finances?” Luis asked.

“I didn't get into this business for the money,” Kay said simply. In fact, wealth had never been a particular motivator for Kay—a legacy, she assumed, of her parents, both of whom had given up lucrative opportunities to work in the far less remunerative field of international development. As a federal employee, Kay was paid at a GS-13 rate, far less than some of her friends working in law or finance, but more than enough for her own needs.

“I've been . . . doing some thinking,” Luis said, suddenly red-faced. “Perhaps your aunt and I could . . . help you out a
bit. Just in these early years. You know we have enough,” he said quickly. “It wouldn't be any trouble for us. We would be glad to do it, I mean.”

Kay's hand hovered around her queen. Happy images flooded through her mind of renting an apartment in a part of town near where she worked, of avoiding an hour-long commute, of being able to order takeout without double-checking her bank account. She savored them for a long moment, knowing the entire time that they were only fancy. Aunt Justyna and Uncle Luis had done enough for her as a child—more than enough; indeed, she knew she owed them a debt she could never repay. There was no point in adding to it.

“That's very kind of you, Uncle Luis,” she said, moving her queen to the back rank. “But I couldn't possibly accept. Incidentally, it's mate in three.”

Luis laughed, looked down at the board and began to set up the pieces for another game.