Loose Lips Read online

  We boarded the Twin Otter by climbing up a metal ladder. The jumpmaster fastened our static lines to the heavy metal rings on the interior roof of the plane. The static lines connected to the parachute’s deployment bag; when we jumped, we were told, the static line would pull the bag off the parachute. In principle, the parachute would then catch air and inflate.

  We arranged ourselves on the hard, narrow benches against the walls of the plane, tight against each other and sandwiched on all sides by our rigs. Ed had divided us into lifts of three students. One lift would jump each time the plane passed over the field. We sat in the order we were to exit; I was in the middle. Ed checked our rigs once more and tugged our static lines.

  The pilot, a wild-eyed lunatic with terrible teeth, began idling down the runway. He wasn’t watching the road; in fact, he was looking over his shoulder, howling gleefully in the general direction of the passengers, driving with one hand and using the other to light a fresh cigarette from the smoldering butt of its predecessor. He tossed the spent embers behind his shoulder with a flick of his forefinger. I supposed that if he ignited the gas fumes in midair and turned the plane into a fireball, I would for once be prepared. We gained speed and took off with a great deal of groaning from the engines. The small aircraft was cramped and fetid. We were told it had a heroic history of covert missions: Propaganda leaflets and weapons caches had been kicked from its yawning door, just as we were about to be. The fumes were sickening, and the harness was heavy. The pilot turned to us, and over the roar of the engines I heard him shriek maniacally: “Thank you for flying with us today. We realize you had your choice of covert airlines—”

  I looked to Joe at the stern of the plane for reassurance; he looked, as he always did, unperturbed, as if he were taking the crosstown bus to the zoo. He flashed me a brilliant smile of encouragement and gave me the thumbs-up. “You’re gonna love it! It’s beautiful out there!” he yelled.

  We reached altitude, and Jumpmaster Ed, lying on his belly with his head out the door, began dropping ribbons from the plane to check the wind direction. Not satisfied with our position, he told the pilot to circle the airfield again; we tilted and rolled. Through the maw of door I could see the features of the earth. I could see the training camp from the air, and the flares that marked the drop zone. They looked like toys.

  Finally satisfied that our position was favorable, Ed shouted for the first lift to line up. He hollered the commands as we had practiced them. Stand up! Hook up! Check static lines! Check equipment! The words were clear despite the noise of the engines. Joe hopped out first. He was at the door one second, then there was a hideous, unspeakable sucking sound, and he was gone.

  The rest of the jumpers in the lift exited the cabin one by one, their bodies vanishing with a violent lurch at the command—Go! GO! GO!! My lift was next. We circled the field again. I felt a numb sense of disbelief as I stood in line for the door, and, when my turn arrived, sheer horror. I placed my feet on the step beneath the door and my hands on the wing struts. The wind screamed past at eighty miles an hour. Then the command: GO!!

  I leapt.

  Instantly, there was an obscene force and pressure and violence as the wind yanked me into the void, then a sickening, anarchic tumbling. Then the chute opened and suddenly I was caught, and I floated, held tightly by the harness. The canopy was above my head, as it should have been, and all was still and eerily silent as I hung 1,250 feet above the earth. I remembered what I was supposed to do—check the steering toggles, gain canopy control—and somehow made it to the drop zone, landing as I had been taught by curling my body into the shape of a banana. It was all over quickly, much faster than I had expected. Even with a parachute, it doesn’t take long to fall 1,250 feet.

  I was told I would find the experience beautiful and exhilarating. I was told I would be proud of myself for conquering my fear. I was told, in fact, that I would never fear flying again. But that’s not the way it was.

  The experience was hateful. If there was a spectacular view up there, I was too worried about breaking every bone in my body to notice, and when it was over, all I felt was relief. I was glad I wasn’t a pussy, but that was about the only reward in it. And since then, I’ve been even more afraid of flying. It reminds me of jumping out of a plane.

  The first thing I did upon reaching the ground and assuring myself that all my limbs were still correctly attached to my torso was look for my cigarettes, which had departed the plane along with me, strapped to my leg. I figured if the chute didn’t open, I’d surely be wanting one on the way down. The instructors were shouting at me to get up and pack up the parachute, but I ignored them. When I lit up, Nan, who had hit the ground two jumps ahead of me, started waving her arms in front of her face and wrinkling her nose. “Do you have to smoke?” she whined.

  “Nan, shut the fuck up,” I said.

  At the end of it, I was given my jump wings and a certificate proclaiming me to be a qualified parachutist. There is a photograph of me standing by the plane, in my fatigues, with my parachute and helmet, but it is classified and must be stored in a secure facility, so I don’t have it anymore. I sustained only minor bruises from my landing, but others weren’t so lucky; we had a broken nose, several sprained ankles, a serious knee injury, and a tree landing, the jumper winding up in an eighty-foot hardwood and dangling from a branch for several hours. Iris missed landing in live power lines by inches. How stupid, I thought, to risk everyone’s life for a hazing ritual.

  But I did it and I survived. I was a full-fledged member of the secret brotherhood. I had truly joined the CIA.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the end, it wouldn’t matter if we could shoot straight or if we had the cojones to jump out of a plane. They had specialists to do that. We had been hired to convince other human beings to commit treason, and the real education was still to come. In a few months, we would return to the Farm for the bone-crushing tradecraft course. But first we were to go back to Headquarters for the fall, where we would learn to determine whether we were under surveillance. The course was taught there rather than at the Farm because the urban environment was more like those we might encounter overseas. It was the first training exercise that really counted: Anytime a spy meets an agent, he must first assure himself that no one is watching, and if you could not do this successfully, each and every time, you could not succeed in the training.

  I returned to my apartment in McLean on a Friday evening, wishing I had more time before the class started on Monday morning. My bills were on my kitchen counter, unpaid; my plants had died. I hadn’t seen any member of my family in months.

  But the class began immediately, and as soon as it did, blurry-faced strangers began tracking me. I was supposed to identify and describe them, but I kept missing them completely. I saw ghosts. I was certain that one man in a blue parka was tracking me with his eyes and speaking into a hidden microphone, but the instructors told me he was just a casual; his artful pretense of indifference was in fact the real thing. Meanwhile, I missed the real shadows, who slipped in and out of the twilight, merged into the crowd, then produced reports chronicling my every gesture.

  I didn’t seem to improve with practice. A few weeks into the class, I met Morris, my instructor, at our prearranged rendezvous point, a picnic table outside a Safeway. “So,” he asked. “Were you under surveillance?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I didn’t see anything out there.” I had driven through most of northern Virginia, pretending to tour the plant nurseries. I’d traveled long, lonely country roads. I’d wandered in and out of stores alone. I’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  “How sure are you?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Sure enough that you’d have met your asset, gone ahead with the meeting?”

  “I think so … yes, I think so.”

  He picked up the surveillance report and read from it. “Subject entered Gro-n’-Green nursery in Oakton at 1437 hours. Looked at hydrangeas and inqu
ired about price. Did not seem genuinely interested in flowers. Made no purchases. Appeared nervous and distracted. Subject looked over shoulder twice at entranceway for no apparent reason. Subject exited store at 1446 hours. Upon pulling out of parking spot, Subject sideswiped surveillant’s adjacent vehicle, damaging said vehicle’s paint. Subject swore loudly. Subject did not inspect the damage to the other car and did not leave a note. Please remind Subject that hit-and-run is a felony offense.”

  Morris stared at me furiously. “Still think you weren’t under surveillance?”

  “Um … I guess not.”

  “Let me tell you something. If you hit a surveillant’s car like that out in the field, they’ll slash your tires and pour sugar in your engine. On top of it, you just led the whole surveillance team right to your asset. Congratulations. You got him arrested and shot by a firing squad.”

  I had never been so inept at anything before. Every time I got into my car, my inexperience behind the wheel led me to do something only a woman with something to hide would do: I drove too slowly or too quickly. I rode the brakes. I left my turn signals on for too long or not long enough. I took forever getting in and out of parking lots, often scraping my fenders. I was nervous and distracted. I kept looking over my shoulder.

  I told Morris that I wasn’t behaving erratically on purpose, but it didn’t matter. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Hang a sign on your bumper that says, Don’t worry about little old me, I’m not with the CIA, I just grew up in Manhattan and I’m new to this whole driving business?” He spoke as if I were driving poorly on purpose, to humiliate him. He told me that if I didn’t improve, I wouldn’t pass the class.

  Morris tended to speak in clichés and homilies, one after another. “Gotta keep your eye on the ball. Practice makes perfect. Look before you leap.” He carried himself with shoulders hunched, his body compacted, in the manner of a man who had been injured by life and hoped to shield himself from further blows. He had served in Laos and Cambodia. “Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” he said when I asked him how he remembered his time there. I was never quite sure what he meant, but his frustration with me came through—clear as a bell, as he might have said.

  The other students seemed to be mastering the subject much faster than I was. In the supermarket, I ran into Jason, a classmate who was rumored to be related to the Director of Central Intelligence. I asked how the course was going for him. “God, it’s so good to be able to sleep as late as I want,” he replied, running his hand through his pompadour. “I don’t know about you, but I really needed this break.”

  Unlike jumping out of a plane, this class wasn’t optional. I knew I’d never be able to bear it if an asset who had placed his trust in me was shot by a firing squad because I couldn’t do my job properly. The thought of returning to academia, humiliated, because I was a bad driver—of all idiotic handicaps—was unbearable. I didn’t even know if I could return to academia: I’d been off the job market now for too long. I’d published nothing since receiving my doctorate; my name had never been well known among Orientalists, and those who did know it thought I had left the world of scholarship to take a job as a budget analyst. The move didn’t suggest my commitment to Oriental studies, and I doubted they would welcome me back.

  It was a glorious fall; one sparkling day passed after another. The leaves were blazing ocher and crimson. Farmers by the side of the road sold autumn squash and great cheery pumpkins. All I thought about was becoming a better driver. The key to detecting surveillance was knowing whether you’d seen the same car twice, but I knew nothing about cars. The guys in the class could tell the year, make, and model of a car from the shape of its headlights, but I wasn’t even aware of the relationship between a car’s manufacturer and its hood ornament until one of my classmates mentioned it to me. I spent hours in the parking lot at Headquarters studying hood ornaments. I made flash cards and created mnemonic devices for myself: Fords are All-American, like the Gipper. Ronald Reagan liked jelly beans. Fords wear jelly beans. I took to the road day and night, studying Car and Driver at the red lights so I could bone up on the shapes of headlights. Sometimes I didn’t notice that the light had changed until the drivers behind me began honking furiously.

  But as I grew more fatigued and anxious, my skills actually deteriorated; within a month my car had so many dings and nicks that body-work repairmen stopped me in parking lots. I kept getting lost in the dense Beltway traffic, wasting hours trying to find my way home every night. One evening, at twilight, I nearly struck a wandering toddler.

  I recycled dirty clothes rather than doing laundry. I stopped reading, eating, doing yoga. My eyes were bloodshot; I felt haggard. I forgot my mother’s birthday.

  My sister left message after message; I never had time to return her calls. Once she managed to catch me just as I was walking out the door. She asked what was wrong. I told her I couldn’t talk about it. She exhaled sharply and I could imagine her pursing her lips. “I’m your sister, Selena. It’s not reasonable to ask me not to be concerned when I haven’t heard from you in months. Can you at least give me some idea when you plan to return to this astral plane?”

  I told her that perhaps we could discuss it in person one day. She didn’t sound happy. Neither did I.

  In the end, I still failed the class. Morris was terribly upset, he took my failure as his own, and I found myself in the odd position of comforting him. “You did all you could, Morris,” I said. “You were a great instructor; you just can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  Everyone else passed. My classmates got diplomas at a convivial little graduation ceremony with coffee and Krispy Kremes. I got a “Certificate of Attendance.”

  When I got home that evening, I burst into the tears of humiliation and frustration I’d been choking back all day. I would have eaten nails before letting any of my classmates see me cry. Every one of them had passed but me.

  I checked my e-mail; I’d received more messages from my mother and sister, both complaining again that they hadn’t heard from me in ages. Lilia politely inquired whether I had, perhaps, been brainwashed. I replied, telling them both to stop kvetching, because I’d probably be back in New York any day, unemployed and sleeping on Lilia’s couch. I was on the verge of washing out, I wrote rather dramatically. I couldn’t spot surveillance if it came up and bit me on the ass, and it would be for the best when they fired me because I’d just get my assets killed. I remonstrated with my mother. “Why did you waste my time with those piano lessons and ballet school?” I wrote. “Why didn’t you make sure that I learned to drive?”

  My mother wrote back as every mother would: She would love me no matter what happened. She also pointed out, rather tartly, that at the age at which I had taken those piano lessons, I couldn’t have seen above the steering wheel. Lilia, somewhat to my surprise, wrote that she was delighted that I might abandon espionage, voluntarily or not. I suppose I was expecting a pep talk from her, the you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to speech, but I sure didn’t get it. Since I’d joined the Agency, she wrote, she never saw or spoke to me. She resented the fact that when we did speak, I couldn’t talk to her about what I did. “I accept that there’s good reason for all of that,” she wrote, “but from my point of view, my sister’s been assimilated by the Borg.” She asked me whether this was really how I wanted to live my life.

  Lilia was pregnant with her second child. I meant to answer, but I didn’t have time.

  Morris sent me to see Brenda Argus, the head of the Clandestine Service Trainee program, to determine what this meant for my career. She looked at the memorandum announcing my failure and shook her head; her matron’s lips turned down at the corners. “We can’t keep you on if you can’t spot surveillance,” she said. “Maybe you should be working harder.”

  I sat on my swivel chair with my knees together and head bent, hating her with all my heart. I assured her that I was very committed and would work harder.

  �
�Maybe you can make it up when you go back to the Farm,” she said. She decided I would continue there with the rest of the class, but she would caution the instructors at the Farm to keep their eyes on me. From then on, she implied, I was on probation.

  Soon after my talk with Brenda Argus, I came down with a stomachache. It was early winter, a few days before we were to return to the Farm to begin our final marathon of training. I took an antacid and went to bed.

  By the morning, the pain had moved to the lower right quadrant of my abdomen. I looked up my symptoms on the Internet. I checked my temperature: slightly above normal. Pain, swelling, fever, vomiting—I checked off the symptoms, one by one.

  Two hours later, I called a cab and I told the driver to take me to the emergency room. A nurse drew my blood and the attending physician ordered an ultrasound. I watched the screen as the images of my organs flickered. When the results of all the tests came back, the attending physician called the surgeon and booked an operating theater.

  I vaguely remember asking the surgeon if he had done this before, and telling him to be sure to wash his hands. I was wheeled into a cool room by a complement of chattering phantoms in green masks. Sometime later, I awoke in the recovery room. I was told that the surgery had gone well and that I was fine. I didn’t feel fine. I was in pain—not “discomfort,” as the nurse kept calling it. I had a self-administering morphine drip, and I kept poking at the button, but I think they’d rigged it so that I couldn’t accidentally overdose. I couldn’t sit up at all, and my stomach was swollen and purple. I drifted in and out of sleep and fog. My parents called; they wanted to come down from New York immediately, but I talked them out of it. My mother was saying something insane about appendicitis being caused by apple seeds; I thought about trying to explain that it was a kind of infection, but it seemed a terrible effort.