Abandoned

gender. Women are considered a safer bet as a parent. Why?”

“That’s good, Leo,” I say. “Sounds like you found one of your points of agreement.”

He smiles, showing me that his comments had been more intellectual than passionate. “I saw their side of the argument, but the jury is still out.”

“Who raised you?” Alan asks.

“My father, mostly.” He looks uncomfortable. “Mom was a drunk.”

“How would you feel about incorporating that into your cover?” Alan asks.

“Okay, I guess. Not pleased, but okay.”

“That’s the point. A good cover has just enough truth in it to make it believable. If you can incorporate things that give you real emotional response, response you don’t have to fake, so much the better.”

“Are we ready, then?” I ask Alan. “To build the cover?”

“I think so. I’ve read plenty. Leo?”

“I have a pretty good understanding of it all.”

“You seem to have a pretty strong connection with the child-custody aspect,” I say. “Sorry to get personal, but in the interests of motivations for your cover … I’d guess you object to the bias for the mom based on your own experience as a child.”

“That’s fair. Dad is the one who held the family together, fed us, clothed us, made sure we went to school and did our homework.”

“Good, that’s good,” Alan says. “That’s exactly what you’re going to use for your cover. You are a newly divorced, disillusioned twenty-eight-year-old.”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Right, twenty-nine-year-old with a baby face, got it,” Alan teases. “You were raised by a solid, dependable father and an alcoholic mother.”

“Who physically abused you,” I interject.

“My mother never abused me.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but here is where the narrative veers away from the truth and into the profile we need. Your mother abused you physically. She did it when your father was not around, and you hid it from your father.”

“Why did I hide it?”

“Because you were trying to keep the family together. You still loved your mother, and your father had said, many times, that if things got much worse, he was going to divorce your mom.”

Leo’s face reddens. He looks away.

“Hit a nerve there?” Alan asks.

He seems to shake himself. “Dad always called Mom ‘a woman of trouble and fire.’”

“What did he mean by that?” I ask.

“It meant that she was full of life, and full of trouble, both, together.” He bites his lower lip, pensive. “I remember one Saturday, I woke up and Mom was sober. I guess I was about twelve. I walked into the kitchen and she was awake, not hungover, and she’d made me breakfast. A great breakfast. Pancakes and bacon and fresh squeezed orange juice. I’d never had fresh squeezed orange juice until that morning. I remember drinking it and thinking it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

“After breakfast, Mom asked me, out of the blue: Leo, do you know how to dance? I didn’t, of course. I was pretty geeky, and I told her as much. She grabbed my hand and took me into the living room. It’s never too late to learn! she laughed.” He pauses, remembering. “Mom had a great laugh. Anyway. She put on one of my CDs, and we spent the afternoon dancing. Dad was on a double shift, so we were all alone.” He picks at the knee of his pants, glum. “I wasn’t a great dancer by the end of it, but I’ve danced ever since. Mom started drinking around dinnertime. She was angry by six, crying by seven, and blitzed by eight. Fresh squeezed orange juice and dance lessons, followed by vodka and puking and tears, all in the same day. Trouble and fire.”

“You need to tell that exact story when you’re on that site,” Alan says. “It’s real, son. So it’ll ring true.”

“I understand.”

“The child end of things is more problematic,” I say. “We can’t pull a child into this operation.”

“I have an idea on that,” Leo offers. “Go ahead.”

“What if my ex-wife had an abortion?”

I resist the urge to put a hand to my own stomach. “Go on.”

“What if she got an abortion prior to the divorce to avoid child-custody issues?”

Alan whistles. “Yeah, that could generate some hate.”

“It could tie in with my whole story,” Leo continues, picking up speed as his certainty increases. “My dream was to raise my own child in a good home, with a stable mother and father. She destroyed all of that.”

“It’s a good stressor,” I agree.

“Just the kind of thing to bring a young man out of despair and into a nice, simmering rage,” Alan says. He claps Leo on the shoulder again. “Good work, son. You’re a natural.”

We spend another hour working out the details. A good cover is not so much about the big picture. It’s about what one of my teachers at Quantico used to describe as “moments of undeniable humanity.”

There are things you hear, he’d said, that you know are true. Moments of undeniable humanity. Like when a character in a book admits to us that he eats his boogers, or a husband fakes an orgasm, or a wife adds spit to her cheating husband’s BLT. Perfection is not empathetic. We feel intimate with other strivers and failers; we’re comforted to find that someone else also stole a dollar from Mom’s purse.

“An important aspect of undercover work,” Alan says, “maybe the most important aspect, is patience. Criminals are a suspicious bunch of people. Their first assumption is that you can’t be trusted, period. You prove otherwise by not seeming too eager, by just playing the part. You don’t do anything out of the ordinary, until you do.”

“What’s that mean?”

“People are unpredictable. Being too predictable can be suspicious. The bank manager who slinks off to put on women’s panties is more believable than the bank manager with a drinking problem.”

“Why?”

“People like drama, I guess. Point is, every now and then, you throw a curveball. Not a big one, just enough to show them, yeah, this guy’s human. A key one can be to break an appointment. If he says, Meet back in the chat tomorrow at two o’clock, you agree and then don’t show up ’til four or maybe not until the next day. When he asks why, you say, I fell asleep, or I got too depressed to move, or I went to a movie. It pisses him off, and that’s real, you see?”

“I’m starting to.”

Callie bursts into the office, carrying a stack of documents and with a young woman in tow. The woman is about the same age as Leo. She’s around five feet four, with dirty-blond hair down to her shoulders and a trim figure.

“I have what we need to get started,” Callie announces. I raise an eyebrow. “That was fast.”

“Don’t discount the power of my charm.” She drops the documents down on the desk in front of me, ignoring Alan’s snort. “Driver’s license, Social Security number, bank accounts with a minimum of money in them—you’re not a rich boy, Leo.”

“Good, that’ll make it easier to get into character.”

“Your name is Robert Long. You dabble in freelance computer consulting and are trying to break into day trading—so far unsuccessfully.”

“So I’m a quasi-loser.”

“A dreamer, honey-love, someone who walks the path less traveled. Think positively. This is your ex-wife, the ex-Mrs. Robert Long. Her real name is Marjorie Green. She just started in the financial crimes division. Her cover name is Cynthia Long, nee Roberts. Being smart, as I am, I thought you could come up with a nice story about the serendipity of her maiden name being Roberts while your first name is Robert.”

“Glad to meet you, Marjorie,” I say, extending my hand.