All the Old Knives (7 page)

I shake my head. I might feel a breathless urge to drag her back to Vienna with me, but seeing her here, in her element, the idea grows more and more outlandish. I am, in spite of the wine, giving up my dreams. I say, “Tell me about the Flughafen.”

If I want to put a damper on our conversation, this is the way. It's a subject that's avoided conscientiously in various parts of the world: Vienna, London, and Carmel-by-the-Sea. It's like bringing up the rape of a loved one in mixed company, for all of us are mixed, each having experienced the Flughafen incident in our own particular way. The subject makes some of us clam up. Others grow tense and shift quickly into anger. Bill it brought to tears.

Celia, on the other hand, leans forward. This is something new. She downs the last of her wine, and I wave to the waitress, pointing at our glasses. Celia says, “What do you want to know about the Flughafen?” Her tone is light, airy, conversational.

“How about we start with the wide-angle shot? Then we can zoom in for details.”

“Everybody knows the wide-angle shot,” she points out.

“Still,” I say, “it's good to be sure we're on the same page.”

“I thought we were always on the same page, Henry.”

The waitress approaches with fresh glasses, a smile on her face. Perhaps the bartender's making clever jokes at my expense. Perhaps I'm helping him get into her pants. Or maybe her smile has nothing to do with me, and I'm not really the center of the universe. Unlikely, but possible.

Celia lifts her glass as the waitress recedes. “To you trying to get a defenseless mother drunk.”

I tap her glass with mine.

Her smart-ass toast has me dreaming again.

 

CELIA

 

1

Through his windows I can see that it's a bright, breathless morning. The kind that invigorates from the moment you open your eyes to it, the kind that gives you, if only briefly, a sticky-sweet surge of optimism. That feeling holds on, even after I've cast my eyes on the man dozing quietly beside me. A year-long mistake—that's what he felt like last night, and my last conscious thoughts before sleep were about escape, how to dislodge myself from his embrace. And now? It's like magic.

In the face of a morning like this, I forget his jealousy and his self-pity, his tender ego and his slovenly habits. In this light, Henry is a man in the encyclopedic sense, a creature of near-infinite possibility for endeavor, and for change. In those minutes before he finally opens his eyes and yawns into the back of his hand, I nearly believe that I'm an adjective I would never, at night, apply to myself: lucky.

You don't get these mornings often in the gray Austrian winter, and you learn to appreciate them, even when you know better than to pin your hopes on the future. It's a double-edged sword. While our expectations for the future are all that really keep us going, the failure of those expectations is the source of all our sadness.

There: His eyes open. I say, “Hey.” Henry says nothing, just squints at me, at the window, then with a quiet groan pulls the pillow over his head.

Expectation will get you every time.

I pad off to the kitchen and set water to boil, thinking about this. Not expectation, really, but
this:
this thing Henry and I have, now more than a year old. Sometimes it's best to begin at the beginning.

I'd arrived a year before him, so it was up to me to show him the town and introduce him to agents he would be managing. Given where he'd come from, Vick asked me to connect him with the Russian community, but after a few meetings I could see that he was troubled. The wife of a Ukrainian businessman began needling him about America's role in Putin's success, and he snapped at her: “Don't fucking accuse foreign powers of not doing what you can't do for yourself.” The woman, startled, gripped her purse to her stomach, and I had to break in to calm everyone down. She eventually moved back to Kiev, but before leaving she became one of Henry's best sources.

Though I'd arrived first, it gradually became obvious that I was the junior officer when it came to working assets. I approached my agents the way I had in Dublin, with calmness and reassurance. This usually worked, but when it didn't I never blamed myself. Espionage isn't accounting; success is never assured. Henry, on the other hand, took failures personally, and despite—or because of—his emotional approach, he won more often than he lost. Agents could read his commitment in his face; they knew from his outbursts that he was human. And they responded.

No matter how much success you have with your sources, a case officer's life is still full of downtime, and Henry and I spent half our working hours in the cafés of Vienna—the Hawelka, the Museum, the Sperl, the Prückel, changing regularly for security. After exhausting work topics, we discussed things we knew better than to talk about. Where from? How here? Where to? That last one was the most difficult for me, for I had only the vaguest outline of where I was heading. Family? Sure, eventually. The States? Someday, after I've had my fill here.

Once it began in earnest, his flirtation was a marvel of clumsy seduction. I mentioned once, casually, that in Dublin I'd fallen in with the rave crowd and, despite Neanderthal doormen and tripped-out Irish youth, I'd been surprised by how much I enjoyed dancing to the blip-beeps of European house music. That was all it took for him to drag me to slick clubs all over Vienna, where I had to witness his awkward moves and try not to be embarrassed for him. Yet he wore me down, not so much by seduction as by persistence. When a man truly wants you, and is willing to hang on for months, waiting in the wings as you try out other men, you can't help but be intrigued. I even grew to appreciate his ridiculous dance moves.

The sex—beyond some groping in Austrian alleys—didn't come until I moved into the embassy and my free time came at a premium. Only with that abrupt loss of time were we able to put our few hours to better use. Or maybe it was just that, after I'd realized what a good agent-manager he was, I wanted to establish my bureaucratic superiority before letting him climb on top of me. I don't know. I just know that now, a year and three months later, I wake sometimes in his cluttered apartment on busy Florianigasse, open his refrigerator, and see it stocked with things I've added to his collection: soy milk, organic (“bio” they call it here) cheese and eggs. I have a drawer, too—top right—with spare panties and an emergency stash of feminine hygiene products, as well as a toothbrush. Some would call this progress, but it's not. I've stored these things in his apartment for nearly a year, just as he lodges a toothbrush, a comb, underwear, and socks in my place. We've been joined in Purgatory for a long time.

Words come with coffee, me sitting on the edge of the bed, him supported by a pile of pillows. He says, “Time?”

“There's a little more. No need to hurry.”

He sips, then frowns. “This isn't that soy milk, is it?”

I shake my head.

“Tastes funny.”

“Arsenic,” I say with a wink. “You busy today?”

He frowns at the window—he, I know, interprets the blazing sun differently than I do, because he'll be spending much of his day in its glare. It's a burden. “Vick's got me looking into some bank-related stuff.”

“Bankers.”

“Yeah. Right?”

A smile, finally. It's a rare thing, but when it comes it changes the whole shape of his face, sparking little flashbacks:

Laughing at the expense of politicians in the Café Prückel.

Sharing bites of beautifully sculpted catfish and cherries swimming in vanilla custard at the Steirereck.

Necking, uncaring, in a cobblestoned alley near Fleischmarkt Stra
ß
e, when the snow breaks.

In bed, his sweat-slick hand gripping my ankle as he moves his hips deeper, smiling.

The images fade as he takes his phone off the bedside table and scrolls through messages.

“You want breakfast?”

He reads the messages, eyes narrowing, and shakes his head. “Looks like I'm gonna have to go.”

Which is another way of saying that I have to leave, too.

 

2

Though it's nearly nine when I arrive, Bill isn't in the office. He's usually in by eight thirty, which over the past year I've interpreted as his need to escape Sally's reach as soon as possible after waking. I know him, and I know her, and I carry within myself a fear of ending up in a relationship like theirs. Sally is a bully of the worst sort, for she never lays a hand on Bill, never gives her bullying a properly physical manifestation. She beats him with words and body language and selectively brutal silences. Bill, with all his Agency experience, should know better, but apparently he doesn't, and I sometimes think that I'm the one who's been given the responsibility of carrying the anger he's not strong enough to shoulder.

It may not be fair, but over the past year I've grown to truly hate Sally. Occasionally, I even broach the subject with Bill, cornering him in a subtle imitation of her aggression, so that he will sit in one place and listen. He does, but then begins to tell me stories of her history. Her mother, for instance, a glowering monster of a role model who tortured Sally all her life. Sally's first husband, Max, he of the literally backhanded rebuttals. But I remain unmoved. I am not of the childhood-trauma camp. We've all had hard times. My parents wrapped their Subaru around an electrical pole when I was fourteen. Things happen. The only thing that matters is how we deal with the now. Either we face the difficult moral decisions with ever-stronger responses, or we do not. This is what separates the mensch from the asshole. Full stop.

In my virtual in-box, among the detritus of diplomatic spam, I find a flash from Langley to Vick, duly forwarded to the rest of the staff with a request to meet in his office at nine thirty. It's from Damascus station, a terse summary of a conversation with a source they've christened TRIPWIRE.

Source TRIPWIRE: Expect within next 72 hours an airline-related event on flight heading to Austria or Germany. Departure port uncertain—Damascus, Beirut, Amman possibilities. Group: Aslim Taslam, though the primary actors likely recruits from outside Somalia. Likelihood: HIGH.

I'm not an expert on the myriad Islamist cells that salt and pepper the planet, but Aslim Taslam has made headlines in recent years. Former members of Somalia's Al-Shabaab, they split off from the group over an ideological dispute (some reports suggested it had to do with the use of drug money to finance operations), and under their new name they approached Ansar Al-Islam, the Sunni organization formerly in Iraq, now based in Iran, for assistance. Perhaps prodded by the Iranian government, Ansar Al-Islam has given Aslim Taslam financial and logistical support, sharing networks and operational planners. With growing anxiety, Langley has watched from a distance, noting heightened cooperation between what would otherwise be antagonistic terrorist groups. In the past year, Aslim Taslam has been responsible for deaths and explosions in Rome, Nairobi, and Mogadishu. The group is on its way up.

Since Bill still hasn't arrived, at nine thirty I join the other three in Vick's large-windowed office. There's Leslie MacGovern, whose title, collection management officer, belies the fact that she's the modest brains behind Vick's rule. In her grandmother glasses, she laughs a lot, usually at Vick's jokes but sometimes at herself. She's been with him longer than any of us, and has mastered the art of feigning stupidity while passing on her real thoughts in secret. Of all of us, she's the one who excels at making Vick look good.

Ernst Pul is our naturalized spy. Born in Graz, at age ten he was brought by his academic parents to Atlanta, Georgia, a move that twisted his accent into an odd blend: down-home Austrian. He wears Swiss banker's suits and an Austrian haughtiness that three decades as a southerner haven't shaken. His peculiarities work well here, charming our opposite numbers in the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, which is why he's our direct go-between with the Austrians.

Off to the side, under a black raincloud, sits Owen Lassiter of codes and ciphers. Perpetually dismal, he blinks a lot, as if he's just visiting from a dark world of ones and zeroes, or blips and beeps, like a raver stumbling into the morning light. I'd like to like Owen—I think most of us would—but he makes it difficult.

It's not the kind of crowd I would choose on my own, and at moments like this I wish I were still on the street like Henry, who's probably drinking coffee with a source, sharing a joke and a smoke. But no—I am by nature built for four walls and central heating. Both Henry and I are where we're supposed to be.

Vick—Victor Wallinger—smiles gaudily from behind his too-clean desk. “You hear from Bill, Cee?”

I shake my head.

“Apparently Sally's taken ill.”

I try to appear concerned. Leslie goes so far as to say, “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Fainted, Bill said. Stress, maybe, but they're checking her out at the Krankenhaus. We should expect him by eleven, latest.”

I nod at this, wishing Bill had phoned to warn me. Maybe, though, it really is something serious. Maybe Sally is at this moment in the throes of her final hours, and Bill is unable to see the joy that will soon be his.

“Our prayers,” Ernst mutters unconvincingly, nose in a folder.

“Of course,” Vick says before raising his eyebrows. “So? Aslim Taslam in our backyard. What's our take?”

Ernst is ready with an unequivocal opinion. “In Germany, maybe. But Austria? Impossible.” When we look at him, waiting for more, he closes his folder. “It's a question of what they
want.
Troops out of Afghanistan?” He shakes his head and continues professorially. “The Austrians have maybe a hundred there. The Germans have the third-largest presence in the ISAF—over four thousand. Maybe they want to get some comrades out of jail? Same thing. There's only a handful of militants in Austrian prisons—which are, by the way, not unlike resorts—while Germany's holding more than its fair share. Do they want money?” Again, the head shakes. “Not these days. They don't need it, not with Tehran bankrolling them. What else?”