Spy Mom (59 page)

“I just don't cry,” I said. There was a story to it but even I was unsure how it went. She nodded, as if that explanation was satisfactory.

“You are so alone, aren't you? But you can't see it. You believe you are married to the Agency, Sally Sin. You are not.”

But she was wrong. I was married to the Agency and it wasn't until I saw Will Hamilton standing on a dive boat in Hawaii that I even considered the idea of a divorce.

Six weeks after I left the Ranch, on a moonless night in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I found myself caught in the house of a local businessman who was also the head of a number of regional terrorist cells. Rumor had it he was busy assembling the components for a nuclear weapon. Cornered in a narrow hallway, I listened as the man waved his gun around and explained in Krio what he was going to do to me before he took mercy on my soul and shot me in the head. He was so close, grinding his hips into mine as he pushed me back against a wall, taking my Colt Commander from the waistband of my pants and tossing it aside. His breath was hot and smelled of rancid spices.

The energy has to be focused, like a laser, Madame Li said. It has to flow from all the parts of your body to this one controlled point. It must be lightning fast. Keeping my eyes averted, I pulled my right elbow back as far as the wall would allow and fired my fist forward, striking the man right in the heart. He did not fly across the room as Popeye had but he was suddenly silent, even as his lips continued to move. After a few seconds, he collapsed at my feet, his face the color of a blue Popsicle.

“I didn't think you could,” he wheezed, white foam appearing at the corners of his mouth.

I had never killed anyone before. A mixture of delight and horror surged through my veins and I felt instantly sick. Even in the moment, I knew I had passed over into a place from which I could never return. But before I could spend any time contemplating the power Madame Li had literally put in my hands, I heard footsteps in the courtyard. Sixty seconds later, I was running down a dark, empty alley littered with garbage and crawling with rats. As the distance between them and me opened up, I thought about the dead guy's last words. What he really meant was, sometimes you just aren't expecting it from a girl.

Even though I don't see anyone, I know they're following us. We pull up to Henry's house and I honk the horn. Judy pops out of the front door, her face tight as a spring and slightly puffy.

“Thank you so much for driving,” she says, leaning in the driver-side window. “Did everyone have fun?” She notices Yoder. “Oh, hello.”

Yoder gives her a half smile. He's behaving better now that he's realized the alternative to me is Simon Still.

“Say hi to Judy, Richie,” I say, giving him a nudge. “I'm giving Richie a ride home.” Theo and Henry high five in the backseat and Henry reluctantly climbs out, his oversized baseball hat sliding down over his eyes. I wonder if he recognizes his mother. Can you reach a point in plastic surgery where your own child would have a hard time picking you out of a lineup? I suppose if Theo continues to hang out with Henry, I'll have ample opportunity to field-test my theory.

“Bye, Henry,” I say. “We'll see you at school tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the hat, Mrs. Theo's Mom,” he says, waving to us as he runs up the front steps.

Judy lingers by the car window. Hard as it is to believe, I think she might be flirting with Yoder.

“Are you still interviewing at Country Day tomorrow?” Judy asks, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. How come everyone seems to know about this interview tomorrow except for me?

“Yes,” I say with complete confidence. “I can't wait.”

“We
loved
it,” she says. “Absolutely fabulous and
so
diverse.” By which she means there's at least one student who is not blond. She's very close to Yoder now. He backs away from the open window but the seat belt won't let him get too far.

“Oh, it would be so much fun to have the boys together again next year, don't you think?” she continues. “We could carpool.” Yoder is practically sitting in my lap now.

“Mom, I want to go to school with Henry,” Theo says.

“Great!” I say. “We have to go now. See you soon, Judy!” I roll up the window, forcing her to pull her head out of the way or face decapitation. I think she might still be talking to us as I pull away from the curb.

“It's just school,” Yoder says. “Why are you all so hung up on it?”

“You overhear two conversations and now you're an expert?” I snap. “Your intel is rather sparse.”

“I had tutors,” Yoder says. “Never went to school.”

“You see?” I say. “I don't want my kid to turn out like you.”

“That was mean,” he says.

“It was,” I agree, “and I meant it to be.” I'm clearly more troubled by the idea of kindergarten choice than I'm willing to admit. I stomp on the gas and the hybrid roars to life, closing in on roughly forty miles per hour. We can almost hear the wind rushing past the rolled-up windows.

“Hey, Mom?”

“Hey, Theo?”

“I feel funny.” I glance in the rearview mirror just in time to see Theo projectile vomit popcorn, illicit bites of corn dog, and something that might have been nachos all over the back of the car.

“Oh, no,” I say, pulling over to the curb. Yoder is covering his ears and whimpering when he should really be holding his nose and praying.

“Theo, honey,” I say, pulling him out of the backseat. “Are you okay?” I want to avoid getting vomit on me but he seems so pathetic that I pull his head to my chest. A clump of vomit jumps onto my fleece jacket. I turn my head into the fresh, cold air and take a few gulps. It will make everything worse if I end up puking on Theo's head. Usually, I'm a pro with bodily fluids but today I'm close to coming undone.

Theo nods, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It comes away covered with stringy slime. Seeing no reasonable alternative, he runs his hand through my hair and, just like that, it's clean.

“Theo!” I shout. “Please. Let me get some wipes.” But it's going to take a whole lot more than wipes to make this right. It surprises me that Theo's little stomach could hold this much food. I stand him on the sidewalk and strip off his jacket, turning it inside out on itself and throwing it in the trunk. I pull off his shoes and pants while he stands there in his Spiderman underwear, looking like a newborn calf. I shake out my fleece jacket and wrap it around him. If I were Yoder, I would choose now to run. But when I look up, he's still in the front seat, hand over mouth, eyes wide with horror.

“What?” I ask. “You've never seen anyone throw up before?”

“The smell,” he says, through his fingers. “It's awful.”

I point a finger at him. “If you puke in my car, I will hold you prisoner until you clean it up.”

“You're already holding me prisoner,” he says. True. But still.

“Mom, I'm freezing,” Theo says. His legs look skinny and pale under my long jacket.

“Okay,” I say. “Almost there.” I peel off my long-sleeved T-shirt and put it over the soaked booster seat. It won't do much but it gives me the impression of being in control of the situation, which counts for quite a bit at the moment.

We drive the rest of the way home with all the windows rolled down. I now wear only a thin cotton tank top and my teeth are chattering wildly by the time we pull into the garage. I tell myself the elaborate plan I was developing to keep Simon from taking Yoder back was derailed by the puking. But who am I kidding?

“We just leave the car like this?” Yoder asks, climbing out.

“You want to clean it?”

“No.”

“Well, neither do I,” I say. All I really want to do is wash the vomit out of my hair.

We file into the house. It's cold and gloomy now and I go around and turn on all the lights because Will isn't home to yell at me about wasting energy so I can see. Next, I crank up the heat to a pleasant 75 degrees. I pull my hair up in an elastic band and sit Yoder down at my kitchen table.

“Do you drink coffee?” I ask. My time is limited. I know Simon meant what he said and they will be coming for Yoder soon. It's inevitable. I have no cards to play, no way to hold Yoder for long enough to trade him for Gray without risking all of our lives.

“Yes,” Yoder says. “Coffee would be nice.”

Although it's not obvious, the gears in my head have been turning, grinding up the question of why Simon wants Yoder back so badly. And sitting here with him, I catch a glimmer of the truth and I hang on.

“How long did you need?” I ask.

“What?” Yoder asks. There's a scar on his forehead that turns a deep red. Unconsciously, he rubs it with his forefinger.

“Did you even need the full four minutes, while your boss was in the john? Is it possible you would have been fine with only two minutes?”

Yoder buries his head in his hands. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he says. His shoulders are tight and up near his ears. He rocks gently in his chair. “Why are you asking me these things?”

I stir my coffee with a spoon that has been lying on the table since breakfast. It's coated with a thin layer of dried milk.

“In Sudan, when you were young, Chemical Claude used you as a runner,” I say. “It was dangerous work but we both know Claude has no real respect for mortality, especially someone else's. You were good, better than the other little boys, because you didn't need to carry paper. It wasn't something you ever talked about; no kid wants to be labeled a freak, does he? But the truth was you could remember everything a document said by reading it just once. There were a couple of times the so-called police caught you but they could find no evidence that you were anything other than a kid out for some dangerous fun.”

Yoder keeps rubbing at the scar, faster and faster. I slide a piece of paper and a box of crayons in front of him.

“Start writing,” I say.

“Why would I do that?” he says defiantly.

“I can't save you if I have no leverage,” I say. How did step five of my plan become saving Yoder? What happened to step four? I want to kick myself.

Slowly, Yoder picks up a purple crayon and positions the paper horizontally. I watch upside down as he starts to scratch out a series of seemingly unrelated words and symbols. My throat goes dry. It's not what I was expecting but it's very clearly what Simon was after.

“That's enough,” I whisper, pulling the paper from him.

“But there's much more,” he says.

“Do you know what any of this means?” I ask.

“No.”

Well, I do, and at this moment I kind of wish I didn't.

There are always leaks in the intelligence business, small ones that are merely irritating and big ones that are dangerous. Sometimes they embarrass the government and other times they bring it to its knees. Simon hated leaks. He took every single one personally.

After a few episodes in which Gray had to attend closed-door meetings at the White House, he and Simon got serious about a solution. They came up with a code that would render leaks useless, at least those originating at the USAWMD. If information is leaked in an utterly incomprehensible format, then it doesn't really matter who sees it. It remains meaningless unless you happen to have the right Rosetta stone.

The code was instituted during my second year at the Agency. It was meant only for the eyes of Director Gray and Simon, but to me it was just another language and easy enough to understand after a moderate amount of late-night snooping. The code was used to secure the most sensitive information, primarily an agent's identity and all of his known assets in the field. Simon could look at a spreadsheet littered with symbols and letters and numbers and know immediately where all his people were and what they were doing. He could add and subtract and reorganize as necessary. When someone died or disappeared, their symbol was deleted and their assets were redistributed among all the other symbols. It was a game unless you were the deleted symbol. Then it was as if you woke up dead.

“You never told Simon Still about this?” I ask Yoder.

Yoder casts his eyes down. “No.”

“Even after he saved you?” I say.

“It was not an act of kindness,” Yoder says. It's clear he might have bared his soul to Simon if Simon had thought to skip the torture part of the daily schedule.

“No one is ever the same after spending time with Simon Still,” I say. And I mean that on many levels.

“You said you would save me,” Yoder says bluntly. “You don't know me. Why would you do that?”

I suddenly remember Simon Still berating me for being soft.

“You're the kind of person who takes home all the kittens from the pound to save them from being drowned,” he had said. “No one wants the fucking kittens, Sally. That's why they're at the pound to begin with.”

There are probably many reasons why I feel the need to save Yoder, but the only relevant one has to do with the pound kittens and the drowning bucket. I cannot change who I am.

“I believe in second chances,” I say. “And sometimes thirds and fourths, if absolutely necessary.” It's only what I hope for myself.

Yoder's face flushes. He swirls his last bit of coffee around in his mug.

“Three minutes,” he says. “I memorized the book in three minutes.”

“It's a gift,” I say.

“No,” Yoder says, shaking his head. “Without it, Claude would have thrown me away years ago. I could have been another person.”

Are we nothing more than the sum of our baggage? Before I can get too depressed about this idea, Theo wanders in holding the box for Connect Four.

“Can we play?” he asks. He is bright-eyed and wearing clean clothes, smelling as fresh as a daisy while I still have puke in my hair.