Finally, Penelope turned to him. “I’m the one who did it. I kicked him out. That was… Sunday? Yeah. A full week ago. He told me he had to go on a trip, so I told him not to bother coming back. I’d had enough.”
“Enough of what?”
“The secrecy. The moods. All the things you can put up with if you really love your husband.”
Tina was staring at him. It was an indecipherable expression-did she want him to shut up? He saw no reason to stop, so he said, “Alan thinks he can set things right once he gets back. He told me that.”
Penelope nodded.
“You think that’s right?”
Penelope raised her glass to her lips.
It felt like a few interrogations he’d run. Coy silences, self-conscious smirks. In those situations, he’d felt the urge to slap the person in question, but now he simply felt confused. What, really, were they trying to get out of her? The key to a failed marriage?
Later, when the women had cracked their second bottle (Milo stuck to tonic water), Penelope turned the questions around. “You should tell me, Milo. What happened in March?”
“You know. The department was shut down. Alan blames himself.”
“Should he?”
Milo seldom thought in terms of blame, or tried not to, and now he had to take a moment to go through the sequence of events that had led to that computer screen and its flickering dots. If the blame had to be put on any one person, he would hand it to Senator Nathan Irwin, but there was no reason to tell Penelope about that. He shook his head. “No. The failures were in place before he took the job, and by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do. But Langley blamed him, which is why he’s having such trouble finding a job.”
“No,” Penelope said. “That’s his fault. He hasn’t even tried. He’s spent all his time in his office, or the bathroom, plotting the end of the world. So you tell me. What happened that screwed him up like this? He’s not the same man he was before he took that damned job.”
Milo wasn’t sure how much Penelope knew, nor how much she should know. He’d shared more than was appropriate, or even legal, with Tina, but Penelope… The fact was that she had gotten rid of her Company man, and who knew what she might decide to say in the midst of an acrimonious divorce? He knew far too little about Penelope Drummond.
So he kept to the minimum of facts. “The department wasn’t made redundant, and it wasn’t closed down. It was liquidated. In the space of two days, nearly all of Alan’s field agents were killed. The way Alan puts it, the department had been running well for sixty years. He took over, and it was wiped out in sixty days.”
As he spoke, he watched her face for signs, and by the time he finished he was sure that she’d known none of this.
“How many?” she asked.
He hesitated, but saw no reason for evasion now. “Thirty-three.”
Her face went slack. “Thirty- three?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well.”
Tina sat in silence, picking at her fingernails. She knew the story. She also knew that their deaths had been orchestrated by a Chinese intelligence officer, though he’d never told her his name.
Penelope finished her wine, then unconsciously wiped at her lip, reminding him of her husband. “That’s why he’s obsessed.”
“Yes.”
“And…” She frowned at the coffee table, then focused on Milo’s eyes. “And are you helping him?”
Tina was watching him again, expectant.
“I’m trying to get him to let it go.”
“Thirty-three people? Is that something anyone can let go of? Could you?”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing Alan can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Someone should be arrested,” Penelope said.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Tell her,” said Tina.
Milo blinked at her. “What?”
Tina sighed, then grabbed the open wine bottle between them and began topping off their glasses. “Tell her what you told me. About China.”
“I’m not sure-”
“Please,” Penelope cut in. “Tell me about China.”
Tina knew what she was doing, but she didn’t care. Things like national secrets and government bureaucracies, for her, paled in comparison to a woman sitting on her couch being ruined by her husband’s deterioration. He wondered what Alan Drummond would do in his position, then knew: Alan would become rude and sullen, climb to his feet, and leave. If Milo did that, Tina would simply turn to Penelope and tell her everything she knew. He could at least make sure she didn’t mix up the facts.
He stood up. “Come on, Pen. Let’s go to the roof.”
“Roof?”
“I had to do the same thing,” said Tina.
Penelope wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. “Why?”
“Bugs,” said Tina. “My husband is paranoid.”
3
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
Milo scratched his freshly shaven cheek, took a long, unsettling look at Redman Transcontinental Human Resources Administrator William J. Morales- just call me Billy, all my friends do — and settled an ankle on his knee. An afternoon headache had struck, like a bad reminder of the previous night’s wine with Penelope, even though he hadn’t drunk anything. “How do you mean?”
“You know,” said Morales, waving a hand around to signify a word he couldn’t find. “Where are you at? Family life, work life. Financial security?”
“How should I know?”
Morales blinked at him. “It’s an imaginative exercise, Milo. No one’s going to come back to test you in a decade. You just say where you’d reasonably like to be.”
It wasn’t Morales’s fault-these sorts of questions were preordained. He’d heard them so many times over the last month at so many private security consultancies, and had even answered them with his vanilla line- Well, I see myself in a more secure position, in a job I love, but with time on the weekends to spend with my family — but so far that hadn’t made a dent in his employment prospects. So he would try a new tact: honesty.
“You never know. Someone might show up in ten years. Ask how your life measures up to your plans. These tests come up all the time. You fail, you get pistol-whipped and two bullets in the back of the head.”
William J. Morales let a twitchy smile slip into his face, then pushed it away. He moved some papers on his desk; he glanced at his open laptop. “Look, if you don’t have an answer, that’s fine.”
“I’ve got lots of answers, Billy. I just tend not to dwell on them, because I know how easily they can disappear. These days, I worry about the next step. It’s hard enough keeping that straight, much less thinking ten steps, or ten years, ahead.”
Minutes later, as he left the building, popping a Nicorette and taking the corner under the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn side, he noticed a small man in a denim shirt on the opposite sidewalk. The man glanced at him and put away his phone. Milo tugged his tie loose, considering his numerous failures in that interview, and tried to ignore both the man and the swelling of gas in his injured gut; he needed to find a toilet.
Milo expected him to cross the street to meet him, but the man in denim just walked parallel, pretending to have no interest, and perhaps he didn’t-perhaps, Milo thought, it was just his famous paranoia. That was when
