Faint murmurs made their way around the sanctuary, prompting Marcus to pause. He caught sight of Janie whispering something to her husband.
“I don’t really know why she stuck with me,” he said. “We didn’t have children. She could have been happier with someone else or on her own. I asked her the question a month ago before I cruelly and unreasonably left her on her sickbed to go back overseas. She told me she thought about leaving me more than once, but she always remembered what we had going for us in the early days of our marriage. She hoped we’d be able to find the spark again. That didn’t happen. It won’t happen. I have a confession I want to make to all of you who’ve come to see Alice off. I didn’t treasure her enough. I put myself ahead of her. The way I saw it, country came first, my career came second, she came third. Can you imagine how messed up that was? When I left her a month ago to return to my post in Paris, I had a notion that I was doing something important and patriotic, but what I was really doing was being a selfish ass. I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. Alice Carpenter Handler. The best person I ever met.”
When the service ended, Marcus hurriedly escaped the sanctuary for the parking lot where he smoked a cigarette beside one of the cemetery-bound limos. The plan was to share a limo with Janie, Bill, and their two teenagers for the ride to the burial. He saw Janie heading straight for him and he was prepared to take the beating. He wasn’t going to fight back. Nothing she was going to say would be untrue.
“Marcus,” she said after a sharp exhalation.
He flicked away his smoke. “Janie.”
“You spoke the truth.”
“I tried.”
“I’ll always dislike you, but it took guts to publicly admit you were a prick.”
All he could say was: “I’m glad someone who loved her was with her when she died. That’s not something I’m going to have.”
*
Marcus reconfigured his study the way he liked it and for the next several months, he sorted through Alice’s paperwork, smoked and drank, and did some professional networking. He had a government pension to fall back on and could have downsized and made do, but he was only in his mid-forties and needed to work to give himself a raison d’être and to keep himself from gutter-level drinking. One day, a call from a headhunter gave him a new trajectory.
“Ever hear of a company called Andreason Engineering?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll send you a package on them.”
“Why?”
“They’re interested in interviewing you in Chicago. They’re looking for a VP of corporate security. What are you doing next Thursday?”
Marcus didn’t need to look at his calendar. “I think I can make it.”
*
When he got out of the taxi and was hit by the February wind blasting off of Lake Michigan, Marcus wondered if this was really such a great idea. They had manufacturing plants in five states, but Andreason’s corporate headquarters was on the Chicago River, near Boeing, one of their largest customers.
His first impression of Mickey Andreason was favorable. He was a compact, nattily dressed man with an elegant Danish accent and perfect English. He was in his sixties, but his fitness regime and passion for some kind of nutritional regimen made him seem younger and healthier than Marcus. Mickey’s lunch—his usual, he said—served up by a white-jacketed waiter, consisted of a green salad with a cloudburst of sprouts and some very small nuts. Marcus hesitated, briefly, before pressing ahead with his order of steak and fries. He was pretty sure the circumstances of his exit from the CIA were going to squash his employment chances, not his menu choices.
Mickey forked a bunch of greens and said, “You know, Marcus, it’s always a pain in the ass hiring someone whose employment history is protected by layers of security clearances.”
“I imagine that’s so.”
“But I’m a well-connected fellow,” Mickey said, not as a boast but as a matter of fact. “If I don’t know people directly, I know a person who knows a person. In government circles, I don’t usually have to go much further than one degree of separation. As it happens, I know two people who worked with you over the years. One of them has direct knowledge of why you left the Agency.”
“You know I’m not going to be able to talk about that,” Marcus said. The steak was delicious. The trip wouldn’t be a total bust.
“Of course not. All I want to hear is a broad-brush, no-names, no-specifics version to see if it jives with what I heard. Humor me.”
He found Mickey’s sparkling eyes and said, “I tried to strangle a Russian operative inside one of their safe houses.”
“And why were you inclined to do that?”
“He royally pissed me off.”
Mickey got caught with a mouthful of health and had to deal with it before he could explode in laughter. Executives craned their necks from other tables. They looked like they’d never seen the big boss that jolly.
“That’s
