been commended in the past.
On the Paris-Washington leg of the flight, Rogers struck up a conversation with an attractive French woman, blond and blue-eyed, in her mid-thirties.
She was carefully coiffed and dressed in an expensive tweed suit. When she moved, Rogers thought he could hear the rustle of her undergarments.
Rogers asked the woman why she was travelling to America. Business or pleasure?
“Pleasure,” said the woman, drawing out the syllables of the word. Rogers heard the sound of silk and satin as she adjusted herself in the seat.
“Any plans?” asked Rogers.
“We shall see,” said the woman.
She was the wife of a French industrialist, she explained. A flat on the Isle Saint-Louis, too many parties, too many responsibilities. She was tired of Paris and wanted a holiday in America.
Rogers found the woman overwhelmingly attractive. When she leaned forward to talk to him, he could see the fine white powder of her makeup, the gloss of her lipstick, and the fullness of her breasts. She had the perfect manners of a woman kept for the pleasure of a refined and wealthy gentleman.
As they were leaving the plane, Rogers, without quite knowing why, asked for the name of her hotel.
The woman blushed and averted her eyes but said quietly, “The Madison.” She handed him a card with her name: Veronique Godard.
“Shall I call you?” asked Rogers, taking the card.
“As you like,” said the French woman, closing her eyes as she spoke.
Rogers was staying at a cheap hotel in Arlington where the agency booked people who were home on TDY. He checked in, called several friends to announce his arrival, and took a stroll across the Key Bridge to Georgetown.
He sat in a bar debating whether to call the woman from the plane. It felt strange even to be asking himself the question. He was monogamous, for reasons of personal sanity as well as security. The conviction that he was happily married was central to his sense of well-being. But he felt a restlessness, a pull toward adventure and doom, an impulse like the feeling one gets occasionally on a high balcony looking out over the edge of the railing.
Jump, said Rogers to himself. He saw the French woman in his mind’s eye, arrayed on a bed of soft pillows and white linen.
He went to the phone and dialed the number of the Madison.
I’ll invite her to dinner, Rogers told himself. Who knows what will come of it? We’ll have a meal together. An innocent flirtation.
“Good evening, the Madison,” said the hotel operator.
“The room of Madame Godard, please,” said Rogers. He felt as nervous as a teenager on his first date.
Ring-ring, ring-ring.
What would he say when she answered? Hello. I am infatuated with you. I can’t get you out of my mind. No, obviously not that. He would think of something when she answered.
Ring-ring, ring-ring.
Rogers’s palms were sweating. He heard a voice. It was the operator.
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no answer.”
Rogers went back to the bar and had another whisky. He waited thirty minutes and called the hotel again.
The same nervous wait. Again, no answer.
He decided to have dinner at his favorite French restaurant, Jean-Pierre on K Street. When he arrived and saw the soft banquettes and the delicate watercolors on the wall, he called the hotel again.
“Madame Godard, please.”
“One moment,” said the operator.
Ring-ring.
“Allo…”
It was a man’s voice. Rogers thought he could hear a woman’s voice in the background, singing.
“Allo?”
The man had a French accent.
Perhaps it’s just the bellhop, Rogers told himself.
“Hello,” said Rogers. “Is Madame Godard there?”
“Un instant,” said the man in French.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice.
“Veronique,” said Rogers. “This is Tom, the man from the plane.”
“Who?” said the voice.
“The man from the plane,” repeated Rogers.
“Oh yes. Hello,” she said in a lower voice. She sounded embarrassed.
“I though perhaps you might be free for dinner this evening,” said Rogers.
She lowered her voice almost to a whisper.
“Not tonight. I am busy. Perhaps another time.”
“Yes, perhaps,” said Rogers, knowing that he wouldn’t call again.
“I am glad that you called,” said the woman in a voice that was barely audible. Rogers pictured her standing in a bathrobe, talking on the telephone in a whisper while her boyfriend jealously paced the room. It was a perverse sort of satisfaction, but not very lasting. The Frenchman, after all, had Madame Godard.
“I think you are beautiful,” said Rogers. What did it matter now? He could say whatever he wanted.
She gave a slight laugh that was, at once, a protest of modesty and a further seduction.
“Goodbye,” said Rogers.
He looked at the phone fondly, a last remnant of the woman, before hanging it up.
“C’est dommage,” Rogers said to the headwaiter as he returned to his seat. The waiter smiled indulgently.
Rogers ordered medallions of venison with chestnut puree, a house specialty. After drinking down most of a bottle of Burgundy, he wondered if perhaps there was an angel in heaven with the task of keeping him faithful to his wife, despite his own flights of desire. He tried to remember the priest’s admonition in school long ago. Was the adulterous wish the same in the eyes of God as the act itself? Surely not. But he couldn’t quite remember. Perhaps he was getting old.
A shuttle bus arrived at the hotel at 9:00 A.M. It had smoked windows, so that any KGB agents who happened to be cruising along the George Washington Parkway couldn’t be sure just who was taking the exit for the Central Intelligence Agency. The bus deposited Rogers in the basement of the building. He passed through security and took the elevator to the wing where the DDP and his minions planned their global escapades. A secretary in a distant outer office welcomed Rogers, gave him coffee, and took him down the hall.
The agency’s headquarters looked so clean and wholesome. Someone had once told Rogers that it had been designed to look like a university campus. A place where people smoked pipes and went to seminars. How distant that image was, Rogers thought, from the world that he inhabited.
“The problem with your operational plan is that there isn’t any plan,” said John Marsh.
Rogers listened impassively. He was seated in a conference room with Marsh and Stone. The room was decorated with photographs of past heads of the clandestine service. A gallery of chiselled features, measured judgments, stiff upper lips.
“I had thought these issues were resolved a month ago, only to find that they were not,” continued Marsh.
Marsh made an interesting contrast to Rogers. He was shorter, neater, tighter, meaner. Where Rogers looked relaxed and informal in his corduroy suit, Marsh was dressed fastidiously, like a salesman at a Brooks Brothers store. He wore a blue pinstripe suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar that rolled just so, a yellow tie, striped suspenders, and a pair of black tasseled mocassins. His hair was combed back tightly against his head. If someone had told Marsh that his head looked as smooth and hard as a bullet, he probably would have felt flattered.
