Ten years after the Agency had first accused Pieter Wagner, an acclaimed nuclear physicist working at MIT in Cambridge, of spying for the Russians, ten years after they'd leaked the story to the media (lights popping at the front door of their small brownstone house on Beacon Hill, and the constant sight of men waiting outside, yelling questions, never going away), a federal commission had cleared his name, awarded the family close to $10 million compensation, and issued a public apology for the mistake. Which it was. Her father, it turned out, was just the innocent victim of an overzealous employee who thought that a foreign accent and an ancestry in Russian-occupied Poland were, on their own, sufficient grounds for suspicion. The money meant nothing to her, though it would later put her through MIT and pay for a year of research at the Sorbonne. He was gone: wrists slashed with a razor blade in the tiny white-tiled bathroom of the little house by the beach in Maine, the one, she later discovered, they'd rented as some kind of last refuge until the Feds came and broke down the door.
When he was posthumously cleared, she'd sworn she would become a scientist too, had made that oath in her dark, overheated bedroom on Beacon Hill. It was August 1978 and she was thirteen, already developing a prematurely adult beauty, already aware that she possessed something that made other people uncomfortable. In her own mind this was not a form of revenge. It was all a question of balance. When she joined the Agency, there were no favours, no backward glances, not as far as she could see. She was a scientist, and this was a good science job. If people talked, they talked behind her back, and she didn't even think of listening. The name Wagner had lost some of its topicality, to her great relief. She became herself, a person in her own right, not a portion of his shadow. And then, three years ago, her mother had died, struck down by an out-of-control truck. And the job, which swallowed her, consumed everything she put into it, with Belinda helping every inch of the way, like some surrogate mother and father all rolled into one.
She knew every inch of this office. Today it looked bare, bleak, and soulless. Belinda always had flowers and didn't care what the old guard thought of them. S&T was on the map; it occupied a growing part of the new Langley complex, employing close to three thousand bright young people who'd come out of college and found themselves thrust straight into the melting pot of almost every advanced science known to man. Thanks to Belinda's persuasive powers and her impressive academic record at Stanford, S&T had recruited some of the finest scientific brains she could find, plucked from the corridors of Cornell and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, then thrust, without warning, into a world they couldn't hope to understand.
She remembered standing in front of the desk she now occupied, three months into the job, close to tears, telling Belinda she was resigning, that this was no way for any human being to live. The supposed need for there to be a clandestine veil over her life had killed the few tentative relationships she'd started to build. Worst of all was the one fatal time she'd fallen into bed with a fellow agent and discovered that their professional closeness only made things worse, made her more tongue-tied, more paranoid.
And Belinda had smiled, talked her out of it, as Helen knew she would, had spoken of how these crises came and went in Agency life, were just steps in the natural process of growing into the secret world. Helen had listened to her talk, speechless at the grasp this woman had of her own lowly work. Belinda was so high in the administrative structure of Langley that she could hardly be expected to recognize a junior trainee. Yet, when the moment came, she knew every last detail of the cases Helen had handled, was able to comment on them with such precision that this couldn't have been a trick, some quick executive briefing fitted in before the interview just to keep some junior employee on the ball.
When the interview was over, Belinda smiling, extending a hand out over the desk, Helen found it hard to believe she could even have considered leaving Langley. The place was too special. Belinda too. And perhaps, one day, even Helen herself, if she caught enough of her mentor's magic.
It had been around five on a chill January afternoon. When Belinda knew she'd won, she smiled at Helen, nodded across the room, and said, 'You look like you need a drink, honey. Watch this. I'm going to let you in on a secret.'
And then she walked across the room, over to the sealed glass window, looked out at the bare winter trees, and pulled up a grid in the air-conditioning system.
'You know, three years I've been asking those office guys to fix this vent, and three years they just keep forgetting to do it. There are rules about alcohol on the premises, Wagner, and if I ever catch you breaking them you'll be in big trouble, miss. But right now…'
Her hand dived into the vent and came out with a half bottle of Glenfiddich.
'… I'm prepared to bend a little. After all, what's the point in being the boss if you can't be allowed a little discretion?'
They sipped the whisky out of plastic cups, and Helen could still remember how it made her eyes water.
Belinda seemed ageless and indestructible, an icon of goodness in the occasionally murky waters that went with the job. Then one day she walked out of the office and was gone for good. All because some Montana crazy felt like making a point. All because you could pick up the tricks of the bomb-making trade on the Web, go out and buy the right fertilizer, rent a truck from Avis, and place your deadly mix of metal and chemical right next to a suburban garage, wait there all night, then detonate the thing with a cheap amateur radio remote control the next morning.
Two weeks later it still made no sense. The FBI was making noises about ecoterrorists, militiamen, and right-wing crazies, but no one had been arrested, and Helen had a feeling that, as the days dragged by, the case was drifting into nothingness.
The director of the CIA, Ben Levine, had called her into his office on the day the news of Belinda's death broke, given her the temporary deputy directorship of S&T, making her the effective head of one of the Agency's four divisions, all at the age of thirty-five. She should have been flattered. The job tasted like ashes in her mouth. She'd never liked Levine, they both knew it, and she could only guess that he picked her because there really was no choice. S&T, like the Agency, was in the middle of some messy executive regeneration. Larry Wolfit, the quiet, introverted scientist who was Belinda's official deputy, should have been first in line, but got passed over. Helen understood, in an unformed way, why too. Wolfit was a loyal, trusted, diligent S&T executive, but lately had seemed detached from the work, bound up with outside interests that took more and more of his time.
It had taken five days for her to go through the added security clearances, get some briefing on how the structure worked inside Langley when it came to dealing with the three other directorates: Operations, Administration, and Intelligence. She'd already met the assistant head of Operations, Dave Barnside, the principal liaison officer for the Agency's active service arm. He was one of the old school, bright, tough, and cynical, pushing his mid-forties and resigned to the idea that he'd probably never climb the ladder any further. Barnside made her glad she was in S&T. The rest of Langley was new to her, and she almost came to resent the insularity that Belinda had built into the directorate, the way it operated outside the orbit of the rest of the Agency, at least as far as most of its occupants were aware.