Five years, Andrew thought. Maybe I’m being too easy. Maybe I need more time.
Suddenly wishing for the innocent era of Sodium Pentothal, he pressed another button and watched the prisoner wail.
It seemed the man would never stop.
SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN by Andrew Klavan
I knew why she had come-of course I did-but I fell for her anyway-of course. That was what she’d been designed for and who I was, who they’d made me. I didn’t even question it much, to be honest. I’d come to hate philosophizing of that sort by then. Endless discussions about nature versus nurture or fate versus free will. In the end, what are you even talking about really? Nothing: the way words work, the way the human brain puts ideas together-what we’re capable of conceiving, I mean, not the real, underlying truth of the matter. I’m sure there’s some logic to a person’s life and all that. Some algorithm of accident and providence and inborn character that explains it. Maybe God can work it out, if he exists and has a calculator handy. Maybe even he shrugs the whole thing off as a pain in the celestial ass.
But for me, in the event, it was more poetry than philosophy or math. I saw her and I thought, “Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it?” She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate. And I fell for her, even knowing why she’d come.
I had premonitions of the end as soon as I read about the train wreck. I saw it on the Drudge Report over my morning coffee and suspected right away it was one of ours. A computer glitch on the D.C.-New York corridor. A head-on collision, twenty-seven dead, no one, seemingly, to blame. They were still digging bodies from the smoking wreckage when the FBI announced it wasn’t terrorism. A likely story. Of course it was terrorism. By afternoon and through the two days following, various Islamist groups were claiming credit by way of various YouTube videos featuring various magi with greasy beards and colorful noses and utterly ridiculous hats. That was a likely story, too. Those hate-crazy clowns-they didn’t have the network for it, not in this country.
Which meant it was a genuine riddle. Because we did have the network, but we had no cause.
I worried at it for a day or two, trying to sort out the possibilities. Stein was our man on the eastern railways, and I suppose, after so many decades of silence and unknowing, he might have just flipped and pressed the button. But he was always a stolid character, unlikely to go rogue. And anyway, instinct told me this was something else, something more disturbing. It had the smell of genuine catastrophe.
Finally, the anxiety got to be too much for me. I decided to take a risk. I couldn’t contact Stein himself, of course. If we weren’t active, it would be a useless danger. If we were, it would mean death to us both. Using my cover, I called a contact at the Agency instead-a threat analyst in the New York office-and he and I took a lunchtime stroll around the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.
There was nothing particularly strange about this. There are plenty of gabby spooks around. You’d be surprised. A lot of these guys are just overeducated bureaucrats playing Spy vs. Spy. They graduate with an ideology and maybe some computer skills but no real sense of evil whatsoever. Secrecy doesn’t mean that much to them. Gossip is the only real talent they have-and the only real power they have-and they know you have to give to get. Buy them a drink and they’ll spill state secrets like your Aunt May talking about Cousin Jane’s abortion: all raised eyebrows and confidential murmurs and theoretically subtle hints you’d have to be an idiot not to understand.
But Jay-I’ll call him Jay-was different. He’d been in Afghanistan, for one thing. He’d seen the sort of things people do to one another on the strength of bad religion or through the logic of misguided ideas or just out of plain monkey meanness. He knew the moral universe was not a simple machine in which you pour goodness in one end and goodness reliably comes out the other. All this made him better at his job than the academic whiz kids, more circumspect, more paranoid and thoughtful, less likely to make an easy trade for information. Subtlety, in fact, was the whole point for him. The unsaid thing that left open a world of possibilities. Which was his world-because, the way Jay saw it, you never really knew.
We were on the walkway beside the wreckage pit, moving in slow, measured steps amid a quick, jerky, time-lapse lunch crowd. We were shoulder to shoulder, our eyes front. Both of us in overcoats, both of us with our hands in our pockets. It was a biting October day.
Jay made the slightest gesture with his head toward the damage. Not dramatic at all-barely perceptible. But just enough to answer my objections to blaming the jihadis, just enough to say, They did that, didn’t they?
“That was different,” I said. Muttering, tight-lipped. “Primitive. Plus they got lucky. Plus we were stupid then.”
“Oh, we’re stupid now,” he said with a laugh. “Believe me.”
“Still.”
He looked at me as we walked along-looked until I turned and read his eyes. I saw that he was puzzled, too; he smelled catastrophe, too.
“You know something?” he asked me.
I shrugged. I didn’t. “There was some chatter before the fact,” I said. “They knew it was on the way.”
This was just a guess, but I felt sure it was a good one. It was the only reason I could think of why the YouTube wise men in their absurd hats should have had any measure of credibility with Jay at all. I could tell by his reaction that I’d gotten it right. There had been chatter. They had known.
Jay pursed his lips and let out a breath, a whispered whistle. We both faced front again. I saw him nodding from the corner of my eyes, confirming my suspicions.
“So why are there no fingerprints?” he wondered aloud.
Well, exactly. That was the question. Because the Arabs leave fingerprints. They pretty much have to. They pretty much want to, but even if they didn’t, they would. Because they don’t have the network. They aren’t implanted, integrated, invisible the way we are. How could they be? Think of our preparation, the time we had to establish ourselves here. Time enough, in fact, so that the whole point and purpose of us passed away.
Which brought me right back where I’d started. They had the cause but not the network. We had the network but not the cause. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and it had me worried. I kept circling around it in my mind as I walked uptown on Broadway toward my office.
It was a long walk in the brisk, wistful weather. Soon enough, the useless round of reasoning wore itself out, and I wasn’t thinking at all anymore but had drifted instead into daydreams.
I’d always been like that, a dreamer, all my life. Lately, though, the quality of the dreams had changed. There was an aspect of compulsion to them, maybe even of addiction. They’d acquired a disturbing and ambient realism, too. I was there sometimes almost more than I was here. I wanted to be there more. I found a kind of peace when I was dreaming that I never had otherwise.