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For Lorraine

Sine Quam Non

Sing praise to the Eagle

Praise to the Hunter

Whom she commands

Praise Eagle, praise Hunter

Who restored rightness

Restored peace

Restored life

To Muqqadas

1

NIGHT IN THE PARK

The SUV was traveling so fast it bounced when the driver stood on the brakes. Black, big, eight-seater with a grille between the front and rear seats. The grille signaled law enforcement. No logos on the door panels meant federal.

The people living in the park who saw it arrive retreated behind the shrubbery. Everyone knew someone who’d been picked up for sleeping on the streets.

‘But where are we supposed to sleep if we can’t afford a room?’ Myra had demanded of Elwyn and Joel.

The three traveled, not exactly together, but in an orbit, keeping an eye on one another. Tonight, they watched as two men in sports jackets jumped from the SUV and marched quick-time into the Keeler Arms. That was a grand name for a broken-down building that rented rooms by the day. Keeler Armless, the locals called it.

‘Got to be cops,’ Elwyn said. ‘They come to make an arrest, maybe the manager, seen him bringing teenage girls in.’

‘That isn’t a cop car,’ Myra said. ‘Too fancy for a cop. Maybe it’s a mob hit.’

‘Mob hit?’ Joel was scornful. ‘No mobster would be caught dead in a fleabag like the Armless.’

None of them said, if they could have afforded a fleabag like the tired building on the corner, they’d have been sleeping there instead of squirming on benches in the park across the street, trying to find a place where the slats didn’t cut deep into the shoulder blades, where rats didn’t crawl around their food, and where trees didn’t drop branches on their heads.

‘Hey, look!’ Myra pointed at the back of the building. A third-floor window had opened. A rope snaked out, and then a woman, Myra was pretty sure it was a woman, lowered herself, hand under hand. She got to the end of the rope but was still a good ten feet from the ground.

She looked around, swung wildly, and dropped, landing hard on her left hip. She got to her feet, pressing a hand against her hip, and hobbled across the street into the park. She sat heavily on the first bench she came to.

‘Hey, you!’ Myra cried. ‘That’s my bench, that’s my stuff, you can’t sit here. That why the cops are chasing you? ’Cause you’re a thief?’

Elwyn said, ‘Don’t be a hard-ass, Myra. Lady just fell out of that window over there. We were all watching. Let her rest a minute.’

‘I’m not a soldier in your army, Elwyn. You’re not the boss of me; I’ve told you that a hundred million times.’ Myra snatched a dirty Gucci purse from one of her trash bags and clutched it to her chest.

The woman who’d fallen rubbed her hip again. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I need to catch my breath. I’ll move on in a second.’

‘Why’d you go out the window?’ Joel said. ‘Your room on fire?’

‘Someone was breaking my door down,’ the woman said. ‘I was scared.’

‘What were they doing that for?’ Joel asked. ‘You owe a bookie? Is that who’s driving that Lexus?’ He pointed at the late-model SUV, flashers winking, in front of the Armless.

‘She’s a fugitive, Joel,’ Elwyn said. ‘That’s an unmarked car. US marshals are after her.’

‘Is someone really after you?’ Myra asked as the fallen woman got to her feet. ‘Is it like Joel said? You owe money to a bookie?’

‘Do I look like someone with a bookie?’ She gave a laugh that sounded like a seal’s bark. She was wearing clothes as shabby as Myra’s, although not as many layers of them. She carried a worn backpack instead of a garbage bag, but she was obviously only a step away from the streets herself.

‘So why are they after you? Is it the law?’ Elwyn persisted.

‘My ex,’ the woman said after a pause, her eyes on the building across the street. ‘He’s an ex because of his gambling, and since they can’t get blood from one turnip, they’re trying to see what happens when they squeeze both of us.’

‘That’s harsh,’ Joel said.

He held out his bottle, offering a pull. The woman tilted her head back, bottle to her lips, but didn’t swallow. Even if Joel’s rotgut hadn’t tasted like turpentine, she couldn’t afford to numb her mind.

‘Hey, they found where you jumped,’ Elwyn cried.

The others followed his pointing finger. The two men who’d driven up in the Lexus were peering at the rope hanging from the window.

Myra and Joel went to the edge of the trees to see what the pair would do. Myra giggled. It was like a scene from a 1920s silent movie, the two men looking at the rope, at the ground, at each other, and then vanishing from the scene.

The duo reappeared a few minutes later, charging through the fleabag’s front door. They still looked like Keystone Cops to Myra: they darted around to the side of the building and inspected the ground near the dangling rope. No old woman. All they needed was to lift the powerful flashlights they carried and hit each other over the head.

Instead, they shone their lights up and down the street, trying to decide which way to go. One pointed at the park, the other nodded. Myra and Joel retreated into the cover of the trees as the bookies or mobsters or whoever they were ran into the road, so intent on their search that they didn’t see a boy on a skateboard in their path. They knocked him to the ground.

His skateboard flipped out from under him into the path of an oncoming car.

‘Watch where you’re going, assholes,’ the boy bleated. ‘You just wrecked my board.’

The two men ignored him. They were pointing their powerful flashlights at Myra and Joel, who were scrambling to settle onto their regular benches. Like other rough sleepers, the pair pulled blankets from the plastic bags that held their possessions, used other bags filled with boots or food as pillows.

Everyone in the park was waiting tensely for what the men with the flashlights would do. They marched first to Myra, shone the light straight at her eyes. When she whimpered in a faint protest, one of them stuck a hand inside her layer of sweaters and tugged at skin on the back of her neck.

Myra cried out and tried to bat his hand away.

‘It isn’t her,’ he said to his companion. ‘At least this creature’s ugly face is her own.’

The second man shook Elwyn’s shoulder. ‘Wake up, loser. Have you seen this woman?’ He held his tablet in Elwyn’s face. The screen showed a young woman with a long red-gold braid, laughing, head tilted back. Her face dissolved into that of an old woman, one with short white hair, face wrinkled.

Elwyn blinked, squinted. ‘Is that an actress?’

Joel stumbled over to look. ‘Is that the woman who jumped out of the window? She’s an actress?’

‘An actress?’ Myra sat up. ‘Is she famous? What did she star in?’

‘Actress?’ the man with the tablet said. ‘Yeah, you could say her whole life is one big act. She starred in betraying her country. Was she here in the park just now?’

‘Betraying her country?’ Myra repeated. ‘I don’t know that show. What’s her name? Was she in Survivor?’

‘She’s not a fucking actress!’ the man shouted. ‘She’s a traitor. We’re looking for her.’

‘You said she had a big act,’ Elwyn said stubbornly. ‘Now you say she didn’t. Sounds like you don’t even know who you’re looking for.’

‘Listen, dirtbag. The woman who jumped out of that window is a traitor. We are with the FBI. We are trying to find her. Did she come into the park?’

‘You can’t come around calling people “dirtbags,” or “creatures.” We’re human, same as you. And what do you care about the woman in the window? Why don’t you leave her alone? You drive a fancy car and she’s living in a cheap SRO. You don’t need her money!’

‘I don’t want her money.’ The man seemed to grind his teeth in the dark. ‘I’m a federal agent. She’s wanted for endangering our national security, which, by the way, keeps people like you secure when you want to sleep on the streets.’

‘Federal agent?’ Joel snickered. ‘Good one. Federal agents shake down homeless people all the time looking for traitors because they figure traitors make so much money selling secrets they want to live on park benches. Hey, Elwyn, you commit any treason lately? I did, I pretended I was dead broke and got a lady on Hutchinson Place to give me a ten when I already had five in my pocket. Was that treason or just lying?’

‘Did you see Lily tonight or didn’t you?’ the second man smacked his flashlight against his palm hard enough to produce a loud thwack. Elwyn and Joel seemed to shrink. No violence, please, no violence.

‘Don’t you have to show a badge, if you’re really a federal agent?’ Myra demanded.

‘Not to losers like you. Which way she go?’ the second man demanded.

Joel shook his head. ‘We didn’t know she was a traitor; we didn’t even know her name is Lily. Besides, there aren’t any signs on the light poles, the kind they put up, you know, “Watch out for this old lady, she could be armed and dangerous once her hip gets better.” So, we didn’t watch which way she went.’

The two men went through the encampment, shining their lights on all the people they could find, pinching some at the base of their necks the way they had Myra, and ignoring protests as they’d ignored hers. They even shone their lights up at low-hanging branches, ‘Like they think she’s escaped from the zoo,’ Elwyn muttered.

The boy with the skateboard lay where he’d fallen, near the curb on a deserted stretch of Keeler Avenue. The few cars that passed ignored him.

When he heard the two men arguing with the people on the park benches, the boy pushed himself standing, inch by inch, checking his bones: the sidewalk took a toll. He moved cautiously into the road to collect his board, but all that remained of it was the wheelbase and some splinters.

He tucked a splinter up the sleeve of his windbreaker and shuffled along the sidewalk, heading to the front of the apartment building where the SUV stood, flashers still pulsing, showing the liquor store across the street, the three boarded-up storefronts next to it.

A small crowd had gathered to watch the two suits, some from inside the building, others who’d been lounging in the park. Live entertainment, way better than the dreary thoughts that ground away their minds.

When the boy went up to the SUV, some on the street corner turned to look at him, but his face in the flashing lights was so disfigured by acne that they looked away again. The boy hunched deep inside his windbreaker, hiding his face in the collar.

None of them saw the boy slip a key fob from a pocket and press the button in its center. On the fifth try, the SUV locks snapped open. The boy sat in the driver’s seat; head still hunched into his collar. He looked in the glove compartment and center console. The only thing he found besides antacids was the registration and proof of insurance. The Lexus was registered to the FBI, but that wasn’t exactly a news bulletin.

He slipped out of the car, but when he’d locked it, he took the splinter of skateboard and gouged the paint underneath the door handle.

‘What are you doing, you little creep?’ The two men had been walking back up the street, but when they saw the boy near the driver’s door, they sprinted over to him.

‘You fucking vandalized my car. You’ll pay for this!’ the taller man cried.

He grabbed at the boy’s windbreaker, but the youth ducked under his arm and darted into the street.

‘You trashed my ride, I’m paying back the favor,’ he squawked. His voice moved in that embarrassing adolescent space between treble and baritone.

The man grabbed at him again, but one of the onlookers yelled, ‘Leave him alone.’

‘Yeah,’ someone else called. ‘You think you’re tough beating up kids and drunks? You want to show you can fight, come over here and pick on me.’

This got a round of applause and more threats.

A northbound bus was pulling up at the stop across the street. While the suits backed away from the jeering crowd on the corner, the boy boarded the bus through the rear door.

The driver bellowed at him to get off – he was tired of punk kids riding for nothing. The boy left at the next stop, head still hunched deep into his jacket, hiding his acne. The bus shelter was empty, but he walked past it into the cover of an unlit storefront.

He pushed his hands inside the back of the windbreaker, to the same spot where feds had pinched Myra’s neck. He found the edge of a thin silicone mask and rolled it up, catching his baseball cap as it fell. With the same motion he slid out of the windbreaker and reversed it, holding mask and cap under what was now a shiny black rain jacket.

When a southbound bus pulled up, a seventy-something woman, face lined and weary under a tangle of white hair, showed her senior citizen pass. The whole switch had taken forty-three seconds, almost double what it used to. She was pretty sure no one had seen her, but she needed to change her route a few more times to be sure.

It was at a stop on Belmont Avenue that her luck ran out.

2

LETTER FROM TS’GALI

That was Lily, on the run from the FBI. Her flight had actually begun months earlier, on an ordinary day in her dull retirement life. She’d been at an orthopedist’s office for an appointment that had taken four months to schedule. The appointment had been for two fifteen. At three, she’d gone up to check with the receptionist.

‘Doctor is tied up with other patients. You’ll get your turn.’ The woman barely glanced at Lily.

‘Maybe you could start the process? Get me a form for PT so that if Doctor can’t see me today, I can at least start getting treatment?’

The woman’s face swelled with anger. ‘I don’t bend rules for you or anyone. If your time is more valuable than Doctor’s, make an appointment for another day.’

Lily debated escalation. Not worth it. The receptionist was like a woman in Kashmir she’d wasted eight months wooing. What had her name been? Rabia something.

She was tempted to reschedule, but it had been difficult to find this doctor, get this appointment. She’d been ignoring her shoulder pain far too long. If she stomped off, she’d be the only loser.

Anyway, why was she fighting a receptionist? She used to be more patient. She’d wait months for a potential asset to decide whether to make that first leap into working for America. She’d wait hours for drops, hiding in caves or forests even during blizzards or skin-cracking heat.

She knew it was retirement that was making her edgy. For forty years she’d had an active career in some of the world’s most dangerous countries. Since retiring, she couldn’t find enough to do. She also didn’t feel connected to the United States, where she hadn’t lived since she was twenty-two.

When Langley made it abundantly clear that they wanted Lily to quit, she’d gone to Chicago to visit her mother, whom she also scarcely knew. Her mother had abandoned her when she was eight, but she was ninety-one now and lonely. Her two sons from her second marriage didn’t want her, so she begged Lily to move in for a longer stay.

Lily had been debating a move to the West Coast when her mother suddenly died, unexpectedly leaving Lily the condo and a piece of her substantial portfolio. At first, Lily thought she’d sell the condo and move to the Rockies or the Sierra Madres: she’d spent the bulk of her career in the mountains of Asia and missed them in Chicago’s flat landscape. An exploratory trip showed her that a place in California or Colorado would cost more than she’d get if she sold the condo. Besides, she’d moved seventeen times in her forty years with Uncle Sam. She was tired of packing and unpacking.

She stayed in Chicago. It took time to find her way around the strange city in the unfamiliar country. Her sore shoulder grew worse and so she finally found this orthopedic specialist.

One thing she thought she’d never get used to in America was television screens in every waiting space, including hospitals and doctors’ offices. The one in the orthopedist’s waiting room was tuned to an especially annoying talk show. No one was watching. Everyone in the waiting room was hunched over their devices, or looking fixedly at something no one else could see.

While Lily waited, she’d been translating English texts into Russian for some high school students she was tutoring. After her altercation with the receptionist, there wasn’t anything else on her tablet to occupy her.

She turned to her mail. It had arrived as she was leaving home for the doctor, so she’d stuffed it all into her handbag. She pulled it out now and quickly riffled through the usual selection of junk. The one unexpected piece was a padded mailer, no return address, postmarked Dallas.

It held a two-month-old copy of The New Yorker, with a typed unsigned note stapled to the cover: You need to read this.

She looked at it, bewildered. She’d never cared much for The New Yorker. It was too smugly right about politics, or maybe too smugly left. Too knowing about music, dance, theater, too full of cute vignettes about Important People. When she’d attended dinners at European embassies, the diplomats would rave about the magazine – they felt it made America seem more like their own worlds.

Lily would scoff at them. She’d grown up in a small town outside Detroit, nothing like London or Paris, but America, nonetheless. ‘You should talk to the people who build your cars for you, or who put their lives on the line time and again, and never get any public thanks,’ she would say, thinking of her own family, her own career, and of friends she’d lost to bombs or torture.

The note had been stapled in a way to ensure she opened it at the centerfold. ‘Letter from Ts’gali’ jumped out at her.

She stared, dumbfounded. Ts’gali was the capital of Hayalistan. That had been her first assignment as a field agent, and the place she’d served the longest. Of all the places she’d worked, that was the only country that had felt like home.

When she first arrived there, the country, like all the Stans, was a republic in the Soviet Union. She’d served long enough to witness the fall of the USSR, the rise of Al Qaeda, Hayalistan’s efforts to build a government independent of Russian control.

Hayalistan was a geopolitical pivot point. It lay on the route between Russia and Afghanistan and shared seventy kilometers with Iran’s northern border. Iranian threats, Al Qaeda cells, drug cartels, mining companies eager to possess Mount Muqqadas’s riches, kept agents from every intelligence service on their toes.

Lily had been assigned there initially because of her impeccable Russian, which had been the official language of all the Soviet Republics. She’d embraced the country, the people, the great mountain that shadowed over their lives, and she’d mastered Hayali. That mastery turned into one of the dozens of grievances the Hayali station director had nursed against Lily: she was the only CIA employee who spoke Hayali. No one could double-check her version of local chatter; she could easily be undermining US interests.

Bruce Weyrich kept sending complaints to his immediate boss, Jason Tedros, but he also violated protocol by writing to US senators and business leaders who shared his view of women as field agents.

Tedros hadn’t been likely to act on Bruce’s complaints, because he had recruited Lily. He’d been head of Ankara station then. Lily had been bumming around Europe, teaching English in different countries, picking up local languages along the way.

Russian was her first language after English, but that was because she’d grown up speaking it. Her Russian grandmother – her mother’s mother – her babulya – lived with Lily and her father. After Lily’s mother fled to Chicago with an art teacher, Babulya Katerina folded Lily in her arms. Babulya assured Lily that she was safe, well-loved, and that it was not Lily’s fault her mother had run away.

Babulya herself had grown up in Russia, her life scarred by the Revolution and years of near starvation. With millions of others, she had moved across the countryside looking for food. Unlike most, she wriggled through the Belarus border. From there she found her way to a port city and an America-bound ship. She ended up in Detroit, pregnant with Lily’s mother, looking for the baby’s father, who’d claimed to be a Buick engineer. She raised Lily’s mother on her own.

Lily grew up with a wanderlust her grandmother couldn’t understand. Every time Lily wrote her from a new country, Babulya would beg her to come home, settle down, avoid revolutions, famines, and especially lying, cheating men.

When she crossed paths with Jason Tedros, he watched her for months before approaching her to make sure she wasn’t a Russian agent. It wasn’t just her languages that made her a potential agent, but her way of listening to people, getting them to reveal more than they intended because of her interest in their stories.

Lily became one of his best recruits. He moved her from Hayalistan to Delhi, Kashmir, and on to a dozen other posts in Asia. She’d ended in Mongolia, but none of these other countries ever appeared in her happy dreams. In these, she was swimming naked in Lake Sakin’s glacier waters.

In fact, a two-page photo of Lake Sakin filled The New Yorker centerfold. The Ts’gali region of Hayalistan was dotted with lakes, but Sakin was the most important. Fed by water from the streams pouring down Mount Muqqadas, Sakin stretched some hundred miles from the capital to the farmlands in the east.

When Lily had been stationed in Hayalistan, she’d spent a lot of time in and around the lake. The water was as clean and clear as the mountain sky. In summers, she joined the local women at the base of one of the streams, scrubbing clothes on the rocks on laundry day.

She’d also bathed with Hayali women in one of Sakin’s sheltered coves, swimming under the full moon, participating in the ceremonial presentation of a day’s flow to the lake spirit. Hayalistan was a Muslim country, but ancient beliefs, ancient practices, survived both Islam and Communism.

Swimming in the summer, watching the full moon appearing over Mount Muqqadas, she’d never experienced a deeper joy. Even women as old as she was today, long past their time of bleeding, took part in the ceremony. She’d never been part of a female community like that, one where the bonds went so deep. When she was transferred to Delhi, that community was what she missed most, at least as much as Rani.

Lily had used her connections from the moon ritual to build a strong intelligence network. Women married to important men who beat them, women clerks saving their bosses’ butts, underpaid nannies in wealthy homes, they all shared secrets with the American who learned their language and listened empathically to their troubles.

In the doctor’s waiting room, with the magazine open in her lap, Lily didn’t think about the times she’d scooped the British or the French or the men on her own team who belittled her. What came to her was the first time she’d seen Rani. It was during Hayalistan’s brief summer, when the clans built great bonfires on the outskirts of the capital. Men and women in traditional dress chanted the country’s epic poems. There were contests over who could remember the most verses.

Rani, as imperious as the eagle he carried on his forearm, won for chanting ‘The Hunter and the Eagle’ all the way to its poignant ending. He laughed at the applause; teeth white in the darkness. At later bonfires he would pull Lily, the pale American, from the cheering crowd, to dance with him.

Anta was always somewhere in the background, her anger like a force field that pushed the crowd from her side.

Lily thumbed through The New Yorker pages, studying photos in the hope she’d see a face she knew – in fact, hoping to see Rani. Instead, she came upon herself, blurred but unmistakable.

She was in Lake Sakin with twenty or more Hayali women. They all were dark skinned, with straight black hair. Under the silver moonlight, her pale breasts and long red-gold braid were instantly recognizable.

The ceremony was sacred, not open to the male gaze, nor to photographers. The women performed their rites inside a shallow cave so that rocks screened them from view both overhead and around the sides. After the chanting and the offering, they would swim within the cove. They weren’t visible from the land. In that pre-drone era, the photographer must have crossed the lake by canoe and silently watched them.

Everyone who took part was sworn to secrecy. Even while Lily built intelligence connections among the women, she never betrayed their private lives. And yet, here she was, naked in a photo in a magazine seen by tens of millions of people all over the world. Not too recognizable today, with her long braid replaced by coarse white curls, but still, her privacy violated along with all the women of Hayalistan.

And then she read the sidebar.

As protests build over foreign ownership of land and resources, the US comes in for the heaviest criticism, even though Russia and China have been players in Hayalistan for centuries. Some point to the American pictured in the lake. Locals say she infiltrated private ceremonies on behalf of US companies, giving America access to Hayali decision makers other countries didn’t know about.

A red mist rose between Lily and the page. She didn’t hear the receptionist calling her name. It wasn’t until the woman was standing above her, saying, ‘You wanted this appointment. Are you keeping it or not?’ that Lily came back to the present.

She stuck the magazine into her handbag and stood so quickly her head bumped the other woman’s breasts. She left the room without speaking, ignoring the receptionist’s demand for an apology, and ran to the exit, her sore shoulder forgotten.

3

SO SECRET YOU’D BE BORED TO DEATH

Lily usually got around Chicago by bus or L, but she was so angry when she left the doctor’s office that she flagged a taxi. When she got home, she jumped out, wanting to run inside and rip apart the story, the writer, the magazine itself.

Instead, August McBride, the doorman at Lily’s building, waylaid her. He gestured to the curb. A teenaged girl was sitting there, her hair a mass of uncombed black curls. She was wearing a man’s checked shirt, haphazardly snapped, over baggy jeans.

‘She showed up about a half hour ago. I told her you couldn’t talk to her, but she wouldn’t leave.’

Before Lily could react, the girl got to her feet and lumbered up the walk. ‘You said to talk to you if I didn’t get a role and you’d help me be part of the show. Well, I didn’t get a role, but you didn’t even bother to show up. You pretend me and the other kids are important, but when you get down to it, you don’t give a shit.’

Adolescent rage. Lily was never in the mood for it, but especially not this afternoon when she had her own narcissistic wounds to tend to. She kept her voice steady with an effort.

‘We talked about this two weeks ago, Keira. What did I tell you then?’

Keira’s scowl deepened. ‘To talk to you if I didn’t get—’

‘Yes, that. But what did I advise you about your approach to an audition? Did I say, swear at me and the director, tell us we don’t care about the students? Did I say, put on your oldest sloppiest clothes so we have to guess whether you care about the show?’

Keira drew a circle on the walk with the toe of her boot. ‘I guess not,’ she muttered, but then said loudly, ‘I told Renee I’m not like Isabella or Mindy. Of course, they got the Witch and the Baker’s Wife, their moms started grooming them to be stars when they were, like, two. Well, I never had those classes.’

Renee Skinner ran the after-school theater program where Lily volunteered.

‘This is what I tried talking to you about two weeks ago,’ Lily said. ‘You show up with a six-foot-high chip on your shoulder, and the directors will say, “Girl with that attitude, she’s going to be hell on the set.” So even if you could sing and dance Mindy into a blubbering heap on the stage floor, they wouldn’t take you on.’

Keira brushed away tears with an angry hand. ‘So does that mean you won’t let me be part of the show?’

‘I said I would help you, and I will. You know I work with makeup and special effects, not with casting or directing, and that’s where I can find a spot for you. But that offer depends on you not fighting with me or other people in the group. That isn’t going to happen tonight. For now – I’ve just come from the doctor. I’m tired, I need to lie down.’

Keira’s face shifted from sullen to alarmed. ‘Are you – did they tell you – is it cancer?’

‘Nothing life-threatening. I injured my shoulder in my last job. It leaves me tired. I hoped the doctor could fix it but, in the end, I wasn’t able to see him.’

Fieldwork took a fair amount of acting ability, taking on different personae to make yourself sympathetic to potential assets. It sometimes involved makeup or silicone masks so you could change your appearance, often while sliding into an alcove for twelve seconds. Lily had connections with the Hollywood special effects team that had outfitted her and other agents. She’d kept in touch with them when she retired. The Hermes Studios in particular were willing to donate supplies to the drama program.

A certain glamour clung to Lily because she knew Hollywood people. A number of the students wanted her attention and support, not just Keira. Most, including Keira’s bêtes noires Isabella and Mindy, dealt with poverty or homes with drugs, or missing or abusive parents, but none were as hard to work with as Keira.

Renee wanted to ban Keira from the program after she’d punched Mindy. She hadn’t heard Mindy and Isabella’s whispered chant, ‘Your mom’s a skag, she’ll sell you for a bag,’ but Lily had.

She persuaded Renee to give Keira another chance, but she took Keira away that afternoon, tried to give her some coaching on handling girls like Mindy. After that, Keira attached herself to Lily. There came a time when Keira was picked up in River Park for a curfew violation.

At one in the morning, when Keira’s mother still wasn’t answering her phone, Keira called Lily, who signed her out and brought her back to her own building while she tried to reach the mother.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ Keira said. ‘She has a gross boyfriend, he corners me and – anyway, what if he’s there now? That could be why she isn’t answering, because she’s so wasted.’

Lily asked after other relatives. Nana had died, Auntie Jackie lived in Bismarck, North Dakota, where Mom grew up, but the two fought all the time.

Lily let Keira crash on her living room couch. She called the mother, but first thing in the morning the mother’s speech was already slurred.

‘You know your boyfriend, or dealer, whoever he is, tried to rape your daughter?’

‘She says. Little bitch would say anything—’

‘Little bitch is fifteen, she needs your support. I’m a volunteer with the Chicago Public School System and have a legal responsibility for students. I’m reporting you to the Child Abuse and Neglect hotline.’

Health and Human Services, the parent agency, sent an investigator. They threatened Keira’s mother with arrest if her lover or dealer or anyone else assaulted her daughter, and at least for a few weeks, the girl’s home life calmed down.

Lily didn’t want Keira to be her full-time project, but she did keep an eye on her at the theater workshop and took her out for bubble tea now and then, just to let her know someone was watching.

Tonight, though, with her shoulder throbbing, and her anger roused by the New Yorker story, she couldn’t pay attention to Keira’s woes. She gave her a push toward the street, but added, ‘You go on home, and for pity’s sake, don’t get arrested. I’m too beat to bail you out.’

Keira started to scowl again, then realized Lily was half-teasing her and left, still slouching but not frowning.

August McBride had listened to the whole exchange. ‘Why do you encourage a girl like her, Lily? You never should have brought her here. She’ll tell her loser friends, and they’ll come around, figuring you’re an easy mark to scam, or even beat up.’

‘Thanks for the warning, August. If any of them try to break in, let me know. I’ll pull out my old badge and let them think I can arrest them.’

‘Can you?’

‘Nope. You know I was with the CIA. We don’t have any arrest powers, anywhere in the world.’

‘Secret agent?’

She dredged up a grin. ‘So secret I can’t tell you what I did.’

‘If you did, you’d have to kill me. We all know that line.’

‘The truth is, if I started telling you, you’d die of boredom before I finished listing the museum shows, horse races, dances, village craft fairs, poetry contests that I had to attend. After more than forty years, it adds up to about eight thousand.’

Her day job, her cover, had been as a cultural attaché. Like most field agents, she did her cover job on top of her fieldwork. Like the best field agents, she’d blended both roles, but she’d still worked a lot of eighty-hour weeks.

August held the door for her, and gave her a sympathetic pat. ‘You’re a hardworking lady. You deserve to take it easy in retirement, not look after losers like Keira. I know you bailed her out that time – I was on duty when you brought her back from the lockup, remember? I know how she talked to you that night.’

‘She’s fifteen,’ Lily said. ‘At that age, she gets a break to see if she wants to be a punk or a person, although I agree that she puts the punk side forward too much of the time.’

4

ROLLED INTO RETIREMENT

Lily usually walked the five flights up to her condo, but Keira’s anger, her own anger over the magazine story on top of her bad shoulder, had worn her out. She rode the elevator, trying to work on her breathing, her posture, all those things you’re supposed to do to keep your blood pressure and spirits under control.

Her shoulder was a constant reminder that she’d had to retire before she wanted to. Her last assignment had been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The CIA was watching assets there disappear into torture chambers and death camps at an alarming rate. Lily was brought in to drill the local team in evasion techniques.

After two training runs with a young colleague, she’d had him drive her on a live roll-out drop. For roll-outs, you’re in a car, traveling a route that you’ve used enough times that your watchers aren’t paying close attention. You have a short window, under fifteen seconds, where the route is away from all surveillance. Your driver slows, you slide out from the passenger side and roll across the road to the drop point. In this case, Lily was supposed to leave a camera concealed inside a soiled newspaper. Later, their Mongolian asset would collect it when he, too, was free from surveillance.

The op takes perfect timing. When it goes well, your car moves on without stopping. You take care of the drop and find your way back to base on your own.

That last day, the operation was not smooth. Lily’s partner accelerated as she was leaving the car. She was flung to the ground. She managed to protect her head but landed on her left shoulder. The damage never healed completely.

The station chief, who was half her age, refused to believe the driver had accelerated. He said Lily’s timing and judgment were off; time for her to take a desk job at Langley. She protested up her chain of command to no avail. Everyone seemed to agree that Lily’s successes as a field agent were the stuff of legend, but they also agreed that she didn’t take direction well, and, worst of all, she made younger, often male, agents look bad by picking up assets and intel they’d overlooked.

She spent six months at a desk in Washington before bowing to management’s opinion that it was time for her and the Company to part ways.

She’d let the magazine article get under her skin because it dealt with a time in her life when what she did mattered. True, she’d been part of a large government agency with the usual problems of a woman working in a bureaucracy. Even so, she’d beaten her male colleagues to a story, along with French and British intelligence, enough times that she left with a strong reputation.

She’d thought about working in the private security sector, but her age was against her. She also recoiled from violating people’s privacy to serve some private company. In the CIA, she’d dug into people’s phone records, correspondence, and so on, but she’d believed she was serving her country, not making some millionaire even richer.

And so, like many older, useful people, she was ending her active life as a volunteer. Besides working with the drama program, she used her Russian to translate for students who were refugees from Putin’s war. The work was valuable, she supposed, but didn’t give her the rush that fieldwork used to.

The thought rekindled her anger at the New Yorker story, blaming her for all of Hayalistan’s contemporary woes. As if someone at her level in the CIA had that kind of power, anyway! She took the magazine out of her handbag and looked again at her young self in the water, and at the caption.

She tried to dial back her outrage so that she could think more clearly about the story. She sat cross-legged on her living room floor, going through the article page by page. As she frowned over the Lake Sakin photo, she realized she’d been ignoring the biggest question: who had sent her the magazine?

She looked for any sign the sender might have left behind, but couldn’t find anything, not as much as a crumb from a sandwich. The mailer, which she’d shoved into her bag, also offered no clues.

Was someone going through her personnel file looking for missteps? The current director of all the intelligence services was a political appointee, someone who’d given hundreds of millions of dollars to elect the current US president. If the CIA was fumbling major missions, the bosses would be looking for scapegoats. The best scapegoats would be people like Lily: retired, without access to sensitive information that could be used to blackmail the bosses into leaving them alone.

Even so, why had Lily become a target? She hadn’t been in Hayalistan in over two decades, so she couldn’t have current enemies there. She’d stepped on plenty of toes in all her postings, but who could be bearing a grudge after all this time? It was the same question she’d asked about the photo that had angered her: why post it now?

Her ugly-spirited boss, Bruce Weyrich, might have taken the picture, but he would have used it on the spot to get her fired. When Lily started producing important information, particularly about Russian troop movements, he refused to read her reports and wouldn’t send them up the chain to the US policy makers.

It was Bruce’s secretary who made it possible for Lily to survive. Gayla had had to rewrite too many of Bruce’s reports, cover for too many of the things he’d ignored with his drinking pals. As Lily started picking up choice information from the women or the mountain people, Gayla would attach her findings to the reports that went each month to the Central Asian director in Pakistan.

Gayla was in charge of putting Bruce’s rambling thoughts into coherent sentences. She would add, ‘Lily is picking up useful info from the locals. Russian troops are bivouacking in the mountain passes; possible invasion of Chechnya on the horizon.’

Bruce had his own powerful protectors in the Company, the bros of that era, who shared his boozing and his dislike of women agents. They kept him in his job but couldn’t help him get promoted to a bigger station. That meant that for all the years Lily served in Hayalistan, Bruce was her boss. He despised her more as time passed and worked harder to undermine her, until Jason finally moved her to Delhi.

Then there was Anta. It was some months into her Hayalistan tour before Lily met Anta, some months before she realized how much weight Anta’s word carried with local women. Lily tried to court her, but Anta was hostile from the beginning. She opposed Lily’s joining the monthly moon ritual, but the younger women were excited to have an American in their midst. That was the only time they overruled Anta. They certainly couldn’t overrule her antagonism.

As Lily became fluent in Hayali, she came to see that Anta was close to Rani. Not a wife, as she’d first thought, but a cousin. When his mother died, Rani’s father sent him to live in Anta’s family compound; she’d been a kind of surrogate mother. Among the Hayali themselves, everyone knew that the road to Rani lay through Anta.

When Rani was killed in the coup a year after 9/11, Lily had already been posted to northern India. She wanted to return to Hayalistan so she could mourn Rani alongside the Hayali she’d worked with. She told her Delhi station chief that the Company should send her. As a fluent Hayali speaker, she could pick up chatter on how the coup unfolded.

Her boss said they had all the intel they needed on the coup. He forbade her to go.

‘If your name shows up at any immigration crossing, you will be fired on the spot and forfeit your pension.’

Lily sneaked into Ts’gali through the mountain trails, but in the chaos around the coup, Rani’s body had disappeared. Street gossip warned her it would be a mistake to approach Anta, who was blaming Lily for Rani’s death. The other women she’d worked with were too afraid of the new government to be seen with her. She left as surreptitiously as she’d arrived.

The next decade had been a blur: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, America’s invasion of Iraq, the threats from Iran and Syria as the region fell into chaos. Lily lost track of Hayali affairs, except for the briefings that everyone got: the new government, the US claims that the election had been free and fair despite many cries that Gambrey Minerals and Mining had bought off election judges.

Lily knew that after Rani’s assassination, Steve Gambrey had gotten the concessions to mine lithium from Mount Muqqadas he’d been after for years. She knew that the post-coup prime minister, Agajan, was a puppet who did what Gambrey wanted, but she didn’t know much more than that.

‘But how much do you know?’ she demanded of The New Yorker. ‘Is this one of your “I’m smarter than the rest of you” stories?’

The writer’s byline said Thom Kolchak was writing a book on opioid addiction in mining communities. Kolchak wrote that he had spent three weeks in Ts’gali. ‘And that made you an expert,’ Lily said, lip curled.

He started with basic facts: population, nine million; capital, Ts’gali; languages, Hayali and Russian; government, parliamentary; major export, lithium.

Kolchak described conditions in the mines and the pollution in Ts’gali and across the Sakin plateau. The miners had gone on strike two years earlier, protesting the lethal conditions. Hayali militia had fired at the picket lines. When the students at Ts’gali University took over the Gambrey Center building in support, the militia dealt summarily with them as well. A number were shot, others were imprisoned.

Lily had followed the events as best she could from the limited coverage the Agajan government gave Western media. Al Jazeera provided more detailed reports, but she still hadn’t known about the abortive student uprising.

Some of the student protestors had spoken to Kolchak, on condition of anonymity, but none of the miners would talk to him. Neither Gambrey nor his staff answered his questions, Kolchak wrote.

A big section of the story was devoted to the way drugs were destroying the clans that had held Hayalistan together over the centuries.

‘What Communism and Islam couldn’t destroy has been undone in a generation by the most ruthless form of capitalism,’ Kolchak intoned. He talked with staff at Ts’gali’s only rehab clinic, talked to farmers who were switching from rice to poppies, photographed addicts lying almost naked in Ts’gali’s streets.

It doesn’t take long to destabilize a country. Lily had seen it many times in her years in South and Central Asia. But to see that it had happened in Hayalistan! The country hadn’t been a democracy when she worked there, but the clans were so embedded in people’s lives they gave the society coherence.

Now, according to Kolchak, there was garbage on the shores of Lake Sakin. That never would have happened in the old days, nor had Lily ever seen addicts lying on sidewalks in downtown Ts’gali.

Was his story accurate? Hayali experts were thin on the ground. Who had verified his reports about conditions in the city?

The article included a photo of the Gambrey Center building taken when the students had briefly occupied it. They’d lowered protest banners from the window, demanding, ‘Yankee Go Home.’

The banners included text in Hayali, but the print was too small for her to make out. She found a magnifying glass in her desk and held it over the page, translating the words out loud as she picked them out.

Down from Muqqadas the Eagle flew

Down from Muqqadas ran the Hunter

A blur of motion

Two figures, one will:

To drive away from Sakin—

She who was wife

To Mighty Muqqadas—

To beat away from Sakin—

The holy source of life—

The barbarians

This was from the final section of ‘The Eagle and the Hunter,’ where the two have become lovers, companions, who protect the realm.

Kolchak hadn’t included a translation. Maybe he didn’t realize there was Hayali writing on the banners – the script was an elegant set of loops and whorls that might look like embroidery to an uneducated eye.

Below the picture of the protest banners was a photograph of the dead students in the center’s upper hall after the army shut down the protests. Next to that, like a slap in the face, the magazine included a picture of Steve Gambrey himself meeting with Agajan.

It had been taken at a public event, the Central Asian Horse Games, which Hayalistan had hosted the previous year. Gambrey was in the front seat of the ministerial box at the arena. He and Agajan were blurry – whoever had taken the picture had focused on the people in back.

A small woman in a traditional embroidered jacket was identified as the minister for Economic Development. Next to her, his arm across her shoulders, stood the Gambrey company’s number two, Arnold Sylvester. He was tall, with a bulging waistline and a shock of graying hair.

Lily stared at the picture a long time. She thought she knew that face. It was something about the eyes, but she couldn’t remember where she’d seen them. She held her magnifying glass over his face, but it didn’t tell her more. She tried searching for Arnold Sylvester, but all she got were pages of hits about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, nothing on a man named Sylvester in Steve Gambrey’s operation.

She skimmed the rest of the story, including Kolchak’s report on Steve Gambrey. Since joining the billionaire’s club, he’d also joined one of their obsessions – how to keep living forever.

‘Gambrey has built a 145-acre Longevity Ranch in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. He is spending most of his time overseeing research into doubling the human lifespan. Board members say off the record that he’s no longer paying attention to the company’s core mining and mineral business. They quote Gambrey as saying that when he’s cracked the aging code, the company’s profits will exceed the paltry fifty-three billion they recorded in the most recent fiscal year, but he won’t reveal what his researchers are showing.’

Gambrey had been a frequent visitor to the embassy during Lily’s time in Hayalistan. She never met him alone, but everyone in Hayalistan back then knew he was determined to gain control of the country’s lithium. He often joined her boss for his boys’ nights out, sometimes in Ts’gali, sometimes taking Bruce in his private jet to Athens or Istanbul.

Lily’s lip curled. Now Gambrey needed to undo all those years of booze and whatever else he’d consumed, so he could live forever.

She flung the magazine aside and went to bed.

5

IMPULSE CONTROL

Lily couldn’t sleep. She railed at the writer in her head: of course, she’d worked for US interests when she’d been an agent. That was her job, and her counterparts from Germany and Britain and so on did the same for their countries’ businesses.

She wouldn’t have been good at her job if she’d viewed the Hayali or Indians or Mongolians she recruited as chess pieces. She was good at her job because she respected them. In turn, they confided in her.

Don’t you understand? I did valuable work, I did not betray the women of Hayalistan – but you did it casually, by publishing that one picture.

Plenty of people who’d known her when she was stationed there were still alive. She’d visited mountain villages to learn indigenous crafts, she’d brought in American quilt makers, writers, dancers to forge international ties. She’d watched far too many bouts of buzkashi, the game where teams vie to put a dead goat on the opponent’s goal.

And all the time she’d been working her cover, she’d been setting up networks to gather intel for the American government. The people she’d worked with would mostly be retired or dead by now, but America’s reputation was tarnished by claims that Lily had violated her oath to the Hayali women. Kolchak was implying she’d joined the full moon ritual solely to exploit the people she met.

Finally, at four, when nothing helped, no deep breathing, no hot bath or herbal tea, Lily looked up Thom Kolchak, who’d written the article.

He was protected online – you had to contact him through his agent or lawyer – but Lily still had access to some Company databases through one of her cover identities. You’re supposed to hand in all those passports and log-in codes and so on at your exit interview, but no one in personnel could track every identity an agent used during a long career.

Lily had hung on to some, just in case. She’d never used them before, although she renewed their internet privileges every three months, and their passports every ten years. She used her cover ID of Judith Migelli to log in to get into the CIA’s search engine, looking for more of Thom Kolchak than could be found through Google.

Kolchak had grown up in rural Illinois, but he lived now in Brooklyn with all the other cool writers. Langley had his private email address, which Lily used to write him.

In ‘Letter from Ts’gali,’ you used a photo of women performing a full moon ceremony in Lake Sakin. I was the US cultural attaché in Ts’gali when that picture was taken. The ceremony was a private gathering. Everyone who took part vowed not to reveal either the location or the ritual itself to outsiders.

Publishing this picture is a betrayal of Hayali women. It can also do great damage to US-Hayali relations. Who gave you this picture? Did the giver include the name of the person who took the photo?

She sent it through her encrypted server, which blocked her name and location finder. She went back to bed, but sending the message had only increased her agitation.

It was after five now. Lily tried to start her morning routine, news feed, answering messages, followed by exercise and breakfast, but she got as far as the news feed and couldn’t focus. She lay down for a third time and fell into turbulent dreams of mountains and avalanches, where she lay buried under rocks as an eagle poked at her eyes.

6

THE ANALYST

Lily woke stiff and headachy four hours later. She should have been at the North Side high school where she tutored Ukrainian refugees two hours ago. Even if she went by taxi instead of the bus, she’d have missed another hour. She called the school to apologize; she was under the weather.

She took a cup of black tea to the balcony overlooking her building’s back courtyard. In the small garden below, a toddler was bouncing a ball while his nanny sat nearby, scrolling through her phone. She had earbuds in, Lily noticed; would she hear the child if he started to howl?

Lily watched them, watched the child become increasingly frustrated at having to play alone. That’s me, she thought, playing alone.

She abruptly pulled out her own phone and typed Marissa Hockney’s number. Marissa was at Langley now, heading the Analytics Division, but she and Lily had overlapped in Delhi when Marissa first joined the Company. She’d been a new-minted computer science PhD, assigned to head the South Asia analytics team.

The analysts were almost all women and they’d been excited to have a woman manager – that was a first, a signal that career paths were opening up for them.

Lily was in field operations, but as the only other senior woman in Delhi, she and Marissa became friends. More than that, they were allies, supporting each other’s findings in their own reports. After her years of harassment by Bruce and the bros in Ts’gali, Lily had loved having a woman colleague. The two shared personal issues as well as intelligence, until an unpleasant trip to Kolkata soured the relationship.

Today, Marissa answered the phone herself, but warily: Lily’s name must have popped up on her screen. Marissa had come to Lily’s retirement party four years ago but hadn’t lingered. Marissa had moved up the ladder, Lily had been a highly lauded field agent but never trusted to head her own station. After Kolkata, Marissa learned to hang out only with winners.

‘I’m well, Marissa, thanks – and you? You’re flourishing?’

‘You’ve called during work hours, so this is work, right, Lily?’ It wasn’t a very subtle warning. Of course, the call was being recorded. Marissa was making sure that the third ear on the call would know she wasn’t encouraging Lily in whatever favor Lily might be trying to ask.

‘Got it, Marissa. It’s the article about Hayalistan in The New Yorker.’

Lily could hear Marissa’s keyboard clicking.

‘Lily, you’re a slow reader; that story’s two months old. It’s dead and gone.’

‘It’s alive to me,’ Lily said. ‘I only saw it yesterday, thanks to an anonymous friend sending it in an unmarked envelope. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

‘No, Lily,’ Marissa said, her tone one of exaggerated patience. ‘I’m busy here. I don’t have time or interest in keeping up with your friends.’

‘Of course not,’ Lily said. ‘I know you’re important, two steps down from the head of security agencies. The story doesn’t mention me by name, but they ran a picture of me with Hayali women, which violated everyone’s privacy – mine along with the Hayali women.’

‘That’s right, you were in Hayalistan, weren’t you,’ Marissa said slowly. She was apparently pulling Lily’s personnel file up on her screen, because a moment later she said, ‘Oh, I see. Your cover was always cultural attaché. You were posted to India from there, right about the time I joined the Company. Why are you so worried about an old photo? Who can it harm today?’

‘That photo is porn: women showing off their breasts, all dark-skinned, except for me, pale as a ghost. But still valued for my tits. And it’s an international magazine that a ton of people read.’

‘It doesn’t mention you by name,’ Marissa said. ‘And no one’s going to recognize you now. You’re taking old news way too personally. Is that what retirement’s done to you? You were always a free spirit, not someone to brood in corners over insults. How many years since you were in that country, anyway? Is there a special reason you care so much?’

Special reason. Coded language for a personal attachment, in this case, Lily’s rumored affair with Rani. That must also be in Lily’s personnel file, along with the nude bathing picture.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Marissa, you know damned well if I was corresponding with some old lover in Central Asia his name would be blinking red on your computer screen. But aside from the pornographic aspect of the picture, running it jeopardizes networks that took years to put in place. Women trusted me because they knew I would honor their privacy.’

‘Lily, leave it alone. Don’t you realize those networks are a thing of the past? The whole country, the whole region has changed since you were working there. Even if all the women you used to work with hadn’t died or moved on, those one-on-one kaffeeklatsches are a waste of time to build.’

Lily put a hand over her stomach, as if she’d been punched. She was about to give a vehement comeback on how much the Company had missed in Iraq by relying on cyberspying, when a training session came vividly to mind. She was a newbie, getting ready to ship out. In those days, Hayalistan was one of the Soviet Republics, so Langley role-played an interrogation if she was caught without diplomatic cover.

‘You speak good Russian for an American. You learned it because you knew it would upset your mother, and you were trying to prove you were better than her.’

‘That’s not true!’ Lily had been indignant. ‘My mother abandoned—’

‘The Russians are master interrogators,’ her instructor interrupted her. ‘They pick the low-hanging fruit first, the stuff you blurt out because they touched a nerve.

‘Rule number one of interrogation: do not react. Once you do, it’ll be like a tooth abscess for them – they’ll keep pricking it to see how much they can goad you into revealing.’

‘Clever and cost-efficient,’ she said now to Marissa, voice light, almost mocking. ‘The drones don’t drink coffee, or tea, which is what people prefer in Hayalistan, so there’s a savings right off the bat. You save time and money we used to spend recruiting sources, and you have the plus that AI can tell if people are lying. Unless the AI is lying, which seems to happen pretty often.

‘I expect you don’t have an American on staff who speaks Hayali. I know I was the only one when I was there. The drone flies by, like an eagle, and tells you exactly what people are saying, so you don’t have to rely on locals to translate as much as they feel like telling you, the way you did in Delhi. The drones will tell you everything.’

‘Are you trying to tell me something, Lily? If so, can you be direct?’

‘You’re right, Marissa – I’m stuck in the past. The past where I watched eagles flying down from Muqqadas and landing on the hunters’ forearms. It’s a magnificent sight, but not as informative as what you’ll get from a drone.’

‘That’s a beautiful image, Lily. Thanks for sharing. I’ve got a meeting, so I have to run.’

‘Of course you do, Marissa. Those endless meetings, why I couldn’t take being desk ridden. By the way, I suppose you vetted young Kolchak? You know he’s not playing for the other side, right? Although these days, what is the other side?’

‘He’s just a reporter with an obsession about opioids,’ Marissa said.

‘Got it. If work or pleasure bring you to Chicago, let me know. It’s not as sophisticated as New York, but there’s a lot to enjoy here.’

7

READING THE SCRIPT

Lily hung up abruptly, before Marissa could come up with an appropriately sardonic reply. Instead, she was left with the tight neck muscles Lily always gave her. I’m here in Langley, head of Analytics, and you never even had a station to manage, but she’d never really felt triumphant in any encounter with Lily. To soothe herself, she switched her computer to the video feed of her horses. She owned two, along with a small ranch seventy miles southwest of Langley. She couldn’t get down there often, but they were her safety valve.

Her inbox kept dinging at her. Crises in Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela. She switched away from her horses, back to the present, one last look at the New Yorker story. The reason Lily always made her tense was because in the field she’d almost always seen things Marissa overlooked.

When they were in Delhi, Lily had picked up Hindi in the easy way she seemed to learn all languages. She’d come into the office one morning while Marissa’s male Indian staff were speaking in Hindi. They were discussing conflicting accounts of the groups behind an attack on Parliament but hadn’t reported the chatter to Marissa. Lily had stepped in to translate, shocking the men, who’d thought their conversation was private. She’d also helped Marissa write a deeper, more nuanced report.

Had Lily brought up that old episode, thinking she could goad Marissa into giving her more support now? Or was she mocking Marissa for overlooking something in the New Yorker story?

Marissa clicked through the magazine’s photos again. The only eagles were in a picture from the horse games, where people in traditional dress held their birds on their forearms. An insert showed an eagle mid-flight.

Marissa called Halina, the most skilled analyst on her team, and asked her to find a Hayali expert in the Company. ‘I need someone to look at photos and tell me if there’s something about eagles I’m missing. I’d like to hear from US personnel – two years ago there were student riots in Hayalistan, with ugly reprisals. Locals may not tell us the whole story.’

She texted Halina the link and got back to her current main headache, the leadership crisis in Bangladesh. Marissa was responsible for analytics on countries where war, famine, and food insufficiency threatened local governments. Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, the list was appalling. You could collapse under the weight of the suffering you were studying, so you had to treat the disasters as mathematical charts, showing connections to key players, showing where the US could intervene, where we had to stand back, where China or Turkey or Russia were taking advantage of a crisis.

When Halina, the young assistant, called back a little after eight, Marissa had forgotten sending her on the Hayali mission.

‘I talked to people at Ts’gali station. They don’t think there’s anything unusual in the photos. I couldn’t find a Hayali speaker on our current staff, but someone suggested a retired agent, Lily Sedako. I called her, but she said she’d been retired a long time and that her insights were too out of date to be reliable. She asked if you had sent me to her, so I guess you know her? Are her insights out of date?’

Marissa felt her scalp tighten again, as if someone had soldered an iron band around her head. She wanted to howl or throw something, but Halina couldn’t have known about her conversation with Lily, let alone their old relationship.

‘We used to work together a hundred years ago. She didn’t adapt well to cyber-intel. Go back to Ts’gali station and ask them to run the picture by a local speaker.’ She looked at the clocks on her side wall, telling her the time in Kabul, Delhi, Shanghai, Tokyo. ‘It’s four thirty am there now. Not urgent enough to wake someone but get on it at the start of their business day.’

That would be midnight in Washington, but at the Company people were used to working long hours. In fact, if they finished at six pm, they worried they were being cut out of important events.

Like all Marissa’s staff, Halina stayed at her desk well into the early morning, catching a few hours’ sleep on a couch in one of the women’s toilets. She had a report in Marissa’s inbox by the time she opened it in the morning. A Hayali man on staff at the US Embassy in Ts’gali had looked at the student banners; underneath the red paint demanding that the Yankees go home, he’d seen the Hayali text about the hunter and the eagle.

‘It’s apparently from an old poem. There’s an elderly gardener at the embassy who told our staff about it. He says they used to teach the poem in school but not many people know it anymore. He said it’s a poem that builds pride in Hayali culture.’

Halina included the translation about the eagle and hunter driving the barbarian from Lake Sakin.

So that was what Lily had noticed in the photo. Besides speaking Hayali, she must have learned to read the difficult script.

Marissa vividly remembered the Company’s embarrassment over intelligence failures in Iraq ahead of the 2003 invasion. They hadn’t had a single American on the ground there who knew Arabic. Marissa herself had been in Islamabad at the time, where there had been plenty of angry finger-pointing over 9/11. A group of women analysts had been tracking Osama bin Laden for years, but no one had paid attention to their reports.

Marissa debated escalating the Hayali poetry to her boss and decided against it. Gordon Alford had not risen to the top spot in the Company because of a love of a poetic imagery.

Marissa played back her conversation with Lily several times. Lily had called, angry about the photo of herself naked in a lake. She’d ended the conversation on a mocking, brittle note. Not because of anything Marissa had said, but to protect herself when Marissa ridiculed Lily’s way of building intelligence networks.

Perhaps Lily gave the oblique hint about Hayali words on the banners to remind Marissa that she could always embarrass her if a situation hinged on knowing a target country’s language.

The situation was puzzling, though: Lily said she’d been sent the magazine through the mail, anonymously, with a note directing her to the ‘Letter from Ts’gali.’ If it had come from a friend, someone who knew Lily’s connection to the country, surely they would have signed it? Someone wanted to get Lily involved with something – but what?

Marissa trawled through a quarter’s worth of Occurrence Reports for Central Asia. Because Hayalistan shared a short border with Iran, there were always bulletins about troop movements, or Hezbollah or Houthi leaders crossing the Ts’gali Pass into Russia or Iran. There weren’t any signs that students had reached out to radical Islamic groups, or to anyone else who might back them with arms.

The one thing worth noting was that students had started meeting again in the teahouses. After the ferocious crackdown that left some dead and the surviving leaders in prison, the rest of the radicals had behaved with great circumspection, meeting only in the classroom, or in study groups with many other people present.

These were people who’d been held for a week or two, given enough taste of beatings and rough labor to keep them in line when they were released. They must have known they would be under surveillance, both by the Hayali secret police and by foreign intelligence services, but this spring they had started gathering again in public spaces.

The few conversations the Ts’gali CIA station had managed to record looked innocuous to Marissa. The students were excited that an important American magazine was writing about them – they thought this would get their message to the world, which might force the government to release the students doing long sentences in a labor camp.

The Occurrence Reports included an angry memo from Steve Gambrey to Warner Oliphant, head of all American Intelligence Services, demanding that the US take action against the students before they roused the miners to going on strike again.

‘That New Yorker piece is making the students sound like heroes instead of the Marxist punks they really are,’ Gambrey concluded.

Oliphant’s reply wasn’t in the file. Marissa thought he probably phoned Gambrey for a billionaire-to-billionaire chat over possible extrajudicial action.

Marissa wondered how the New Yorker journalist had hooked up with the students. Someone had brokered that introduction. Maybe the Agajan government itself had created the opportunity – a chance to show the outside world that they weren’t as oppressive as everyone thought.

Halina confirmed that with the report she gave Marissa the next day.

‘I also asked Ts’gali specifically about the eagle poem. They said it was an old myth that young people no longer were taught. If the students thought an eagle was coming to their rescue they hadn’t talked about it.’

Marissa almost wished she could ask Lily about what the poem meant to Hayali people. She could hear Lily’s sarcastic put-down – now human intel matters? She didn’t include the theory that the eagle verses were a call for rebellion in her report to Gordon.

Two days later, Gordon brought the matter up himself. The entry-level grunts, working on obscure events in places no one cared about, were teasing Halina for reading The New Yorker on Company time. ‘They pay you double for laughing at the jokes?’ one said.

Gordon’s secretary heard the chatter. She brought the matter to his attention, and Gordon strode into Marissa’s office, his Michael Douglas chin jutting out. Marissa was on a conference call with the governor of West Bengal, which was absorbing Bangladeshi refugees. Gordon told her to finish the call later.

‘When were you going to share that something’s boiling in Central Asia?’ he demanded. ‘I had to learn about it from Gracelyn, who picked it up in the toilets.’

Like a case of syphilis, Marissa thought. Gracelyn was Gordon’s secretary. The Agency was a gossip mill, but no one shared information directly with Gracelyn, unless they were trying to pass something discreetly onto Gordon. Gracelyn knew everything, but didn’t tell anything.

‘A two-month-old New Yorker story has a two-year-old photo from the student takeover of the Gambrey Center. We have a retired agent who reads Hayali; she saw there was Hayali text in the photos that we overlooked when the story ran.’ Marissa put the picture up on her computer.

She added, ‘I’ve checked with Ts’gali. The key student leaders are either dead or in prison. Ts’gali station isn’t hearing anything, except the students are excited to be featured in an American magazine.’

Gordon demanded a copy of the issue, no, not the electronic copy she had on her screen, the actual magazine.

Halina nodded when Marissa asked for the print magazine, although she didn’t know anyone who read print. She started with the magazine’s office; they obligingly overnighted several copies to her. Marissa had them put on Gordon’s desk, with a note giving credit to Halina. When Gordon had absorbed the basics of the story, he wanted to know why Marissa hadn’t alerted him to it when it came out.

You’re running the whole CIA. If we dumped every story about every place we work on your desk, you’ d scream at us for burying you under a trivia mountain. She didn’t say it, of course, just looked at him with an expression of alert interest.

‘Have you vetted the writer, what’s his name?’ Gordon asked.

‘Thom Kolchak. Shouldn’t Domestic Ops be doing that?’ Marissa asked.

‘They should have been,’ Gordon said. ‘Since they didn’t, I want you to take it on. Who’s the retired agent? How did she get in touch?’

‘Lily Sedako. She was a field agent in Hayalistan.’

Gordon shrugged. The name didn’t mean anything to him. ‘She must be pretty sharp if she made out the Hayali writing on the photo of those banners. And that brings me to the point. I want the original of that photo. We need to see if this reporter doctored the image. Or maybe he was given a doctored image. Gracelyn ran the print edition past the tech department. They don’t think it was altered but they need the original to be sure.’

‘A warrant would help,’ Marissa said.

‘Make nice with him. You know how to do that, right?’

His tone suggested Marissa was too hardened, too much of an aging, childless horse-lady to know how to be charming, but if she raised a protest, he would throw his hands up in wounded innocence: since when was it an insult to tell a colleague she knew how to be charming?

‘Working on it, Gordon, working on it,’ Marissa said.

‘This retired agent – if she knows Hayalistan, maybe you should take her along to vet the writer.’

‘She knew Hayalistan before the 2002 coup. She hasn’t been there since and she has a tendency to live in the past.’

Gordon fingered his Adam’s apple. ‘Okay, okay, maybe best talk to the guy on your own.’ He switched gears. ‘What’s the arrest total in Bangladesh this morning?’

Marissa gave him a number and told him the details were in his inbox. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until he left her office. She’d been afraid he’d order her to bring Lily along to interview Kolchak. She would have hated that quite a lot.

8

MARISSA DOES MANHATTAN

When Marissa called Kolchak, he did what you’re supposed to do, but most people don’t. He hung up and phoned the main CIA switchboard, asking for her. When they finally connected, he was angry that Marissa had been able to find his secure unlisted phone number, but he agreed to meet her. She would go to New York instead of summoning him to Washington. He’d be more relaxed in his own space, which meant it could be easier to get him to slip up, reveal things he wanted to keep hidden.

The next Tuesday, Marissa was on the early train to New York. She used the journey to read Lily’s old personnel file in greater detail, trying to get information about Hayalistan she could use in talking to Kolchak.

The Company used to run two separate career tracks: management and fieldwork for men, clerical for women, although highly educated women, like Marissa herself, were also hired as analysts.

When she and Lily were friends in Delhi, Marissa had complained that her reports were ignored. Lily had sympathized but said how much better Delhi station was than Ts’gali. Reading Lily’s file on the train, Marissa was staggered by the intensity of the Ts’gali station chief’s hostility.

It had started before Lily arrived, when Bruce Weyrich sent scathing memos to Langley complaining about being a guinea pig for ‘girls who think they’ll find a glamorous husband if they become field agents.’ He wasn’t going ‘to run a whorehouse for needy, nerdy girls.’ Lily was thirty and had never married, ‘so she must be a dog or a dyke, right?’

When Lily arrived in-country, he didn’t even meet her for her first week. As she began finding her feet and submitting reports, Bruce dismissed them as ‘flimsy, unsubstantiated girl talk.’ Some of the criticism was justified – she was a newbie, she was learning – but given that her boss and his drinking buddies wanted her to fail, she had to teach herself how to sort valuable intel from teahouse gossip. Her success was impressive, Marissa grudgingly acknowledged.

Lily’s break came with her prediction of the first war between Chechnya and Russia. She had been ahead of the French, British, and other US agents because she learned about Russian troop movements from the goatherders and smugglers who moved across borders along secret mountain trails. This only added fuel to Weyrich’s campaign against her.

By the time her train pulled into the Moynihan Train Hall, Marissa could see that Lily’s early years with Weyrich had colored her whole career. She operated in secret much of the time, springing information and sources on her superiors without prepping them on what she was doing. She’d present a twenty-page report like a conjuror, but she wouldn’t readily share her sources or the groundwork that led to the rabbit hopping out of the PowerPoint app.

Marissa grimaced. She’d seen exactly how Lily operated when they served in Delhi at the same time. Marissa had wanted to see how Lily developed her intelligence sources in unlikely places. She’d persuaded the head of the Delhi station to let her travel with Lily to interview a potential source in West Bengal.

The two women had taken a bus from Delhi to the West Bengal capital, Kolkata, or Calcutta as it had been known then. ‘Bus’ didn’t mean air-conditioned interstate transport. It was a thirdhand school bus, spewing diesel fumes as it bucked through the landscape. Marissa had been motion sick for the entire forty-hour ride, but the bus didn’t stop for things like that. The smell of her own vomit had embarrassed her, but since the bus also held chickens and goats, no one else noticed.

In Kolkata they’d stayed in a local hostel, sleeping on floor mats. In the morning they’d gone into the mountains on a smaller, even more crowded bus. They’d met with Lily’s contact on a small farm where the source felt safe meeting with an American.

Lily spoke Hindi with the man. Marissa was a complete outsider whom he didn’t trust, but when it became clear she understood nothing, he agreed to continue the meeting.

Lily hadn’t shown any empathy for Marissa’s discomfort. She’d made a point of eating whatever food they were served, while the mere smell of it made Marissa throw up again.

‘You wanted to come,’ Lily said when Marissa demanded they spend the night in a proper hotel. ‘You said you wanted to see how it’s done. It isn’t magic, it’s patience and seeing the world through the eyes of the people who live in it. And you know I needed to get reams of approval from my chief to include you.’

The next day, Marissa took a plane back to Delhi, leaving Lily to spend another week in the hill country alone – in itself a breach of protocol, which earned both women a reprimand.

After that, she tried to avoid joint assignments with Lily, but none of her tactics helped. Women were a lump sum in their director’s mind. Finally, about a year after Kolkata, Marissa took a lateral transfer to Dakar.

When Lily was at Langley in the last months of her career, Marissa had let her sink or swim as best she could. As she left the train hall, both memories, Kolkata and Langley, made Marissa acutely uncomfortable. She’d planned to take an Uber to Kolchak’s Flatbush apartment, but when she saw the signs pointing to the subway, she followed them, out of some obscure determination to prove she could see things through local eyes.

Marissa made a face at herself as she passed the drunks sleeping in the passageways. We are all such complicated and simple creatures, she thought, taking the subway as proof that she, too, could navigate a world outside limousines and four-star hotels.

She found the right train, and the right stop, and the street that Kolchak lived on, all with some simple Google assists. Not magic, just patience. Lily’s message to her all those years ago. The memory did not bolster her confidence.

9

MARISSA DOES BROOKLYN

Kolchak’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a six-story building, which was so narrow it was hard to see how they’d fit two units on each floor. He buzzed her in. When she got off the elevator, Kolchak opened his door the length of a chain and asked for her ID.

She smiled. ‘Of course, Mr Kolchak. It’s smart to be careful.’ She held it at eye level, keeping it on her side of the door.

He had a lawyer with him, a woman in skintight jeans and high-heeled boots. Penelope Loewenhoek was Kolchak’s personal attorney; she was not with the magazine. They all exchanged business cards and agreed that everyone would record the conversation.

‘You know the magazine goes through an excruciating process to vet articles,’ Loewenhoek said. ‘Sometimes I think counsel even inspects the periods.’

‘I hope they do,’ Marissa said. ‘I once sent a cable from Dakar where a period was put in the wrong place. We were a thread away from an incident involving weapons.’

‘I hope you’re not expecting a talk with Mr Kolchak to involve weapons,’ Loewenhoek said.

‘What was it Oscar Wilde said – nothing to declare but his wits?’ Marissa said.

‘His genius,’ Kolchak supplied, correcting her as she’d hoped: always good to let the mark feel superior. It made people careless.

‘I won’t claim genius. You know I’m here following up on Mr Kolchak’s story about the problems facing current-day Hayalistan. He thinks he found evidence showing that America caused some of those problems. If we did, then of course we need to start doing some serious repair work.’

‘My client reached out to the CIA before going to press,’ Loewenhoek said. ‘No one returned his calls.’

‘That makes it all the more gracious of Mr Kolchak to see me today,’ Marissa said.

‘We want to make sure you know my client won’t support any article giving the CIA a platform for their version of the environmental and cultural destruction in Hayalistan,’ the lawyer said.

‘If the Agency wanted to argue that case, my boss wouldn’t have sent me here. We’d have lawyers talking to the magazine about letting us publish a response,’ Marissa said. ‘I wanted to ask about one of the photographs you used. Actually, two of them. One showed women bathing naked in Lake Sakin. Someone violated the women’s privacy in taking the picture, and you violated it further by giving it international circulation.’

‘You’re not accusing Mr Kolchak of taking it?’ Loewenhoek was supercilious.

‘He would have been a precocious four-year-old if he had,’ Marissa said, ‘And I gather his family didn’t go in for international travel.’ She spoke deliberately, making it clear that she’d dug into Kolchak’s history enough to know his childhood had been spent below the poverty line, with a father who was in and out of prison for manufacturing meth.

Kolchak shifted in his seat, eyes angry, but Loewenhoek had a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Then what are you accusing him of?’

‘Not an accusation, more a need for information. As a journalist, Mr Kolchak was a sympathetic listener when he was talking to students and other younger Hayali. For older women, running the photo eroded trust between Hayalis and Americans, trust that our diplomats spent decades building.’

‘If Americans built trust so they could get mineral concessions, then it’s just as well the younger people are opening their eyes to how they were exploited,’ Kolchak said.

Marissa nodded, as if acknowledging the force of his argument. ‘You could be right. I just find it hard to believe the Hayali women wanted their bodies shown to the world. Did the person who gave you the picture say that they had permission from the Hayali women?’

‘They said the picture was so old and blurry that it wasn’t possible to trace the subjects.’

‘Except for the lone American?’ Marissa asked.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, ‘I wondered if you read Hayali, Mr Kolchak?’

‘No. I don’t speak it, either.’ The question surprised him into answering without waiting for his lawyer’s permission.

‘Did you know there were messages in Hayali on the banners in the photo you used?’

He shook his head. Loewenhoek once again put a hand on his arm. ‘Be direct, Ms Hockney. What was written on the banners and why do you need to know if my client was aware of it?’

‘It’s taken from a poem, from an epic that defines the Hayali people much like – I don’t know if we have an equivalent. I was going to say, “Shakespeare,” but Shakespeare doesn’t unify us the way “The Hunter and the Eagle” unites the Hayali people.’ Marissa spoke glibly, as if she’d spent her life on an epic she’d heard of only a week previously.

‘I knew about the epic,’ Kolchak said. ‘People talked about it, but I couldn’t find an English-language copy, so I only know the outline of the story.’

He looked at Loewenhoek, not Marissa. ‘A hunter falls in love with an eagle. When she rejects him, he tries to kill himself by jumping off their highest mountain. She catches him in her talons before he dies and carries him to her nest.’

‘That seems like an exotic but harmless romance for you to spend my tax dollars exploring,’ Loewenhoek said to Marissa.

Marissa handed Kolchak a blown-up copy of the banners from his photo, with the Hayali text outlined in black. Attached to that was a transliteration of the text and an English translation.

‘I agree it can be hard to know you’re looking at words here if you aren’t familiar with Hayali writing. This is a small section, describing their descent down the mountain to drive barbarians from Lake Sakin.

‘This verse has historically been a call to arms among the Hayali. You wrote about the protests that included students taking over the Gambrey Center building and hanging these banners. We’d like to see the original of the photo.’

‘Why?’ the lawyer asked. ‘Do you want to find fingerprints of people in Hayalistan who touched it?’

‘There’s a thought that hadn’t occurred to me,’ Marissa said. ‘We’d like to see if the text was on the banners when they were hung from the window, or if it was added later through something like Photoshop.’

‘No,’ Kolchak said. ‘Maybe you want to check for fingerprints, maybe you want to check for altering, or maybe it’s something you won’t reveal, like destroying all the evidence of the student protest movement. Whatever your real agenda, I can’t support it.’

‘The journalist in you doesn’t want to uncover my real agenda?’ Marissa asked. ‘It’s actually simple. Our job at the CIA is to provide the American government with the best information we can gather on what’s happening in countries around the world. Your article and your photos are only a small piece of what we’re studying in Hayalistan. A serious uprising there would have repercussions throughout the region, including Iran, Russia, and Afghanistan. Anything we learn now can help us prepare for greater instability in a part of the world that’s already unstable.’

Kolchak smiled. ‘The journalist in me says that’s a wonderful speech but it doesn’t tell me what actions you would be prepared to take if, say, Steve Gambrey’s lithium mines were in danger.’

Marissa smiled back. ‘For that you’d have to talk to the State Department. We just provide information. They decide what actions we should take.’

Before Kolchak could respond, Loewenhoek cut in. ‘We’re not going to give you the photo. Is that it? Are we done?’

Marissa said, ‘Who gave you the pictures? I’m especially curious about the one of the women’s ritual because it’s at least thirty years old. Did someone in Hayalistan give it to you, or someone here who’d worked there?’

Kolchak said, ‘You should talk to your own people. Last week, I had an email from someone who claimed to be the US cultural attaché in Hayalistan when the bathing picture was taken. We all know cultural attaché is a standard cover identity for CIA spooks, so I assume you knew this woman had written me before you ever called me to set up this meeting.’

Marissa said, ‘We all use the language John le Carré gave us for talking about spooks, including the word “spook.” Did you check who this person was?’

‘My replies were bounced back to me through their encryption system. That’s why I agreed to talk to you – so you could tell me who in your agency was writing me.’

Marissa shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything about this correspondence.’

She tried to get Kolchak to show her the email, but Loewenhoek forbade him to let Marissa see, let alone touch his machine.

Marissa gave in gracefully, but said, ‘Even if your correspondent was an agent, what could someone who left Hayalistan years ago tell you that you didn’t learn through your own research?’

‘There are rumors about a CIA agent’s involvement with Rani when he won the first – the only – open election after Hayali independence,’ Kolchak said. ‘Many people mentioned this, but we couldn’t print it – no one would speak on the record, and we couldn’t find evidence to back up the rumors, not even the agent’s name.’

‘And you think this person who emailed you could tell you?’ Marissa got to her feet. ‘You’d have to believe the person who wrote you really was an American cultural attaché, really was a woman, really took part in Hayalistan’s women’s rituals. Those are a lot of layers of “if.” Believe me, the chances are that you had an email from some lonely person who watched too many episodes of Homeland.’

Although she kept her tone light, mocking, she was furious with Lily. What an insane thing to do. Not even a rookie mistake. Maybe she was developing dementia – that was always a worry with retired undercover people, that they might start babbling secrets because they thought they were briefing the president.

She was cutting it close to catch the 1 pm train to DC, but she stopped in an electronics shop near the Flatbush subway entrance. She bought a cheap phone and called Lily.

‘What were you thinking to email that reporter?’ she demanded. ‘We’re trying to keep a low profile on this story, but now he’s looking for you. If you start talking to him about anything, those women’s baths, Rani, the Gambrey Center, or even the weather forecast, the Company will have you in a locked room faster than you can spell national security. Comprendes?’

‘Maybe I need to let the poor boy know you’re tapping his phone and his email,’ Lily said. ‘Or are you counting on what you learn from my outbox?’

‘Lily, you are retired. You cannot get involved in Agency business. Since you don’t know what’s going on, you can do an enormous amount of damage trying to play an active role. I get it, you loved Hayalistan, you loved Rani, you loved the women, you know the language, you ate disgusting food out of filthy dishes to prove to locals how cool you were. But you are not cool today.’

‘Sheidzleba arts’ ivma amogglijos guli,’ Lily said.

‘What?’ Marissa demanded.

‘Take it to one of your tame linguists,’ Lily said. ‘I’m sure you’re recording me. You must have a Hayali speaker somewhere in that mausoleum.’

Of course, Marissa couldn’t record her, not on a cheap phone, but she didn’t need a translation. It was an insult, typically childish of Lily, saying something crude in a language she knew Marissa wouldn’t understand.

She returned to Washington and reported to Gordon that she couldn’t get Kolchak to give her the photo or tell her where he’d gotten it.

‘He’s definitely a sympathizer with the students,’ she added, ‘but I don’t think he’s doing anything active to support them.’

‘We need the original of that photo. What is Ts’gali saying about it?’

‘They didn’t get a picture of the banners – everything happened too fast – the kids took over the Gambrey building on campus, hung their banners, and were shot before the embassy even knew something was going on.’

‘Typical useless third-world staff,’ Gordon snarled, as if any American in a third-world country was automatically native to the place. ‘Fucking get the picture from Kolchak if you have to break in and steal it. And get taps on his email and phone and his girlfriend, his lawyer, his mother.’

She didn’t mention that Kolchak’s mother had died of breast cancer because there were no hospitals or clinics within eighty miles of her tiny Illinois town. Or that his father was doing twenty years for running a meth farm. Or that Kolchak was gay. She just said, ‘On it, Gordon.’

She also didn’t tell him about Lily writing to Kolchak. She thought Gordon was making unnecessary work for her team. If student rebels had been fomenting unrest in the two years since the military shut them down, some word would have filtered into Ts’gali station.

More than that, ugly memories from the past were gnawing at her. She’d let that old wound from her Kolkata trip with Lily fester. She’d fed the grudge by undermining Lily when Lily was fighting retirement. The memos she’d sent the CIA director then were in both their private files.

10

A WALK IN THE PARK

May an eagle tear your heart out. Lily made a face. It’s throwing stones from a safe distance to hurl curses at people in a language they don’t know. The refuge of the impotent.

She’d been on the bus when Marissa called, riding home from the school where she helped Ukrainian high schoolers understand their classwork. After she hung up, she couldn’t face her condo alone. A childless lady without even a cat to keep her sane, could anyone be more pathetic than that?

She got off the bus at the next stop and walked to Devon Avenue, the hub of Chicago’s Central and South Asian groceries and restaurants. She sat for an hour drinking tea and eating the spicy noodles that were a staple throughout the Stans.

She was homesick for Asia, for the food, the easy welcome the mountain and village people gave strangers. The hunter is at home only on the hunt, a Hayali proverb about the nomadic mountain life. She’d retired from the hunt and so she was never at home.

After she finished her meal, she decided a walk might ease her melancholy. Marissa had been right about one thing – Lily used to be a risk-taker, someone bold and resourceful.

In the old days, when her boss’s hostility or the office Animal House culture got to her, she’d hike up Mount Muqqadas, carrying a light tent in her backpack. She’d spend two or three days exploring the trails, persuading local women to teach her how to recognize and prepare edible forest plants.

‘You wouldn’t have lasted half an hour, Marissa,’ she said out loud. ‘The leaves from the Hayali nettle tree would have made you vomit onto your Gucci shoes.’

She’d been transferred to India three years after Rani took office. They’d sweetened the move with a promotion to senior field agent, which Bruce had never supported, despite four medals of commendation in her twenty years.

She’d tried to protest the transfer. ‘I’ve set up all these networks with people in the Ts’gali region. The city women brief me about local politics. The mountain people pay attention to strangers and soldiers coming through the Ts’gali Pass. They don’t know any English – there’s no one else on our embassy staff who speaks Hayali, no one who can communicate with them.’

She hadn’t been arguing with her immediate boss, but with Jason Tedros, who by then was head of both the Middle East and Central Asian divisions. As he’d risen through the ranks, he’d kept an eye on her. Without his support, she would have been fired a dozen times in her first five years.

‘I’m going to be blunt, Lily,’ Jason said. ‘Your presence in Hayalistan is causing friction. I don’t mean with Bruce Weyrich, who’s never going to love you. I mean with the local clans.

‘We want Rani to succeed. We want stability here, with the immense mineral wealth Hayalistan is sitting on, and with their proximity to Iran, Russia, and Afghanistan. If the locals see Rani talking to you in private, they’ll think the US is dictating how their government should act.

‘There’s already gossip going around the embassies that he’s too close to you, or the other way around. People are questioning your loyalties. If you love America as much as you love Hayalistan, now’s the time to show it. Take this promotion, which is long overdue, given the quality of your work, and let the Hayalis run their country without you.’

The rebuke stung. Of course she loved America – she was serving her country, wasn’t she? Most of the American diplomatic and intelligence staff lived in Western-style apartments close to the embassy. They socialized with other Westerners, while Lily brought in scraps of information about Hayali government concerns, gleaned from the people who shared kitchens and bathrooms at the hostel.

However, she knew Jason was right. If people were gossip-ing about her, that ended her usefulness. Worse, if they were gossiping about her and Rani, she could endanger him.

She didn’t try to see Rani before she left. No farewell texts, no thanks for letting her witness the eagle hunts. Instead, a distant formality as befit a junior foreign worker attending events where he appeared as head of state. The last one was a wild party hosted by the French embassy for Bastille Day. Rani appeared, Anta in the background of his entourage. Lily spoke to him only long enough to shake his hand in the receiving line. She left for Delhi the following day.

Six months later, his government fell. People disagreed on whether the Russians or the Americans were behind the coup. Russia wanted control of Hayalistan as it did of all the Stans that used to be part of the Soviet Union; Rani was standing up to them. The mountain people said the Americans were angry – they’d put him in power and then he wasn’t giving them the mineral concessions they wanted. Both superpowers were angry that Rani was accepting weapons from Iran.

After her secret trip to Ts’gali in the wake of the coup, Lily never returned to Hayalistan. She wrote to one of the mountain women she’d been close to but never heard back. After that, she had kept her mind firmly on the problems in whatever country the Company sent her to.

She was walking fast now along Chicago’s streets, fueled by an anger she didn’t realize she’d been harboring all these years. She’d been so absorbed in her internal churning that she hadn’t paid attention to her route, until she saw she’d come to a park she’d never seen before. She hadn’t even noticed that her backpack straps were cutting into her sore shoulder. As soon as she felt the pain, her whole body felt depleted.

She collapsed onto a bench near a man who was explaining to the world at large how the Chinese were controlling the weather.

She couldn’t sue The New Yorker. Besides looking ridiculous, she’d be violating the Espionage Act.

‘Are you a Chinese spy?’ the man asked Lily.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Just a woman who needs to rest her feet.’

‘That’s okay,’ a man behind her said. ‘Benches are free. You don’t need a license.’

‘Better get yourself a blanket if you’re planning on staying the night,’ a woman chimed in, ‘but don’t go to sleep with that purse you’re carrying. Anybody could hit you over the head and run off with it.’

Lily thanked her for the advice. She’d put her bag in her lap to ease the strain on her shoulder, but she slipped the strap back over her neck.

She’d come to rest in a corner of the park facing a street as chaotic as her mood – houses and six-flats that badly needed repair, an SRO on one corner flanked by derelict shops. The only one still functioning was Bright Night Liquors. Drunks were sitting on the curbs, nursing the day’s second or third bottle.

She sat for a time, murmuring sympathetically when someone spoke directly to her, but letting the talk flow around her. This was how she’d often begun her pursuit of contacts in a new country. Listen to the talk, hear who was bold, who was disaffected, who knew more than they were saying.

The woman who’d advised her about her handbag abruptly demanded if Lily had a roof over her head.

Lily said, ‘I do for tonight. Perhaps tomorrow as well.’

‘You live with a daughter who accuses you of every sin committed in human history?’

‘No daughters,’ Lily said.

‘You’re ten times luckier than me,’ the woman said. ‘Number one, roof over your head, even if it’s just for tonight. Number two, no daughters. No hypocritical hyena throwing you out for having one little drink while you’re babysitting your own grandchild.’

‘Give it a rest, Myra,’ a white man on a nearby bench said. ‘She don’t care about your life story.’

‘Don’t go ordering me around like I’m a soldier in your army, Elwyn. Like, you had to follow so many orders you think everyone else needs to salute and jump to attention?’

‘He didn’t say that, Myra,’ a soft-spoken Black man behind Lily said. ‘Just, this lady’s a stranger, let’s not wash all our dirty clothes for her first time we see her, okay?’

‘Joel’s right,’ Elwyn said. ‘Keep it in the platoon, we’re all facing the same battle.’

Before Myra could carry the fight further, another woman arrived with reports that there was a big bag of discarded shoes at a Dumpster three streets away. A dozen or so people shambled off to see, but the trio near Lily stayed.

Myra kept bickering with Elwyn for trying to be the boss of her. She re-hashed old grievances – the times Joel and Elwyn had ignored her advice and they’d all been caught a mile from a shelter in the pouring rain, the time that, the time that. Elwyn was justifying himself while Joel kept saying it was no big deal. Finally, Myra marched off; she was going to spend the night in a women’s shelter, thank you very much.

Half-listening to them, Lily thought they sounded like every group of workers she’d ever been around, arguing over who’d given the best ideas, who was ignored.

Lily hadn’t quarreled with her coworkers. When she realized they weren’t going to pay attention to her work, she stopped paying attention to them, went off on her own.

Her email to Thom Kolchak, her phone call to Marissa, those had been actions whiners took; look at me, help me. What did you expect? she asked herself scornfully. That Langley would suddenly pay attention to you after decades of putting you down? Go to Hayalistan. See what is happening there. See if you can find the students, see if you can understand why your photo popped up out of the blue.

11

ARTWORK

Wherever she’d been stationed, Lily had collected art created by local artisans, especially by local women, usually done with fabrics. She’d hung some of her favorite pieces throughout the condo. When she got back from the park, she fingered the beautiful wall piece hanging in the living room.

Women in Hayalistan had imagined the sky over Mount Muqqadas, with their own faces reflected in the clouds. The colors were vivid. Every time she felt the stitches in the appliqued figures, Lily was astonished anew at the careful work. All done by hand, every stitch a tiny replica of the ones on either side. There were a few places where the craft wasn’t as careful, as if the women had given a young girl learning her art a chance to sew. None of these less skillful stitches had been tampered with.

She laid the hanging across her dining room table and cut the clumsier stitches. Underneath the felt appliqués for Mount Muqqadas and Lake Sakin were passports, driver’s licenses, codes for bank accounts.

She fanned the identities out on top of the hanging and selected Cinda Mallick. All the other documents belonged to cover identities created for Lily, but Cinda Mallick had been real.

Cinda was an analyst with DSMM, the Australian mining and mineral giant. She sought out local embassy staff, hoping to get inside information on what other big mining players were planning.

Lily and Cinda met swimming in Lake Sakin. Cinda had never been part of the monthly lake ritual, but she and Lily both liked to swim as deep into the fall as they could stand the water temperature. Local children would gather on the shore to laugh at them. Cinda had missed an Olympic spot by some fraction of a second and even her recreational swimming had a competitive edge. Lily didn’t try to keep up. She would head back to the hostel to bathe and change while Cinda swam an extra mile.

One day when they’d swum out to the point where Lily usually turned around, Cinda turned on her back and floated next to Lily.

‘Tell me about Steve Gambrey,’ she said.

‘Is this twenty questions?’ Lily kicked her legs to stay afloat. ‘Is he animal, vegetable, or mineral?’

‘Very clever,’ Cinda said. ‘Not vegetable, but how much is animal, how much mineral?’

Lily was aware of Gambrey in the vague way that she tracked any US businessperson whose interests affected relations with the Hayali government, but she didn’t deal with him personally. She’d heard Gambrey was sniffing around the Hayali lithium deposits, but she’d never spoken with him.

Cinda’s question told her something she should have realized from day one: they hadn’t met by chance. Cinda had sought her out, tracked her as a swimmer, used the lake as cover.

After that, Lily met Cinda at official events with every sign of friendliness. That was her own cover, so to speak, but it let Cinda know Lily knew Cinda had been using her. She turned down all invitations to swim, for drinks, for anything that fell outside work requirements, but did so with exaggerated regrets.

She watched Cinda from the sidelines as the Australian pursued not just Gambrey, but the clan leaders, the Russians promoting their own mineral and mining interests, and the geologists who were working for all the different consortia. Cinda learned that Gambrey liked to act like one of the locals at the buzkashi matches, so she found a way to give him access to the post-match celebrations. She photographed him in the arena with his hand on the dead goat the victors were hoisting aloft.

Watching her was like watching a dancer on a tightrope crossing above a mountain gorge, Lily thought. Cinda was even dancing around with a Russian colonel. The Russian embassy listed Viktor Zokurov as an economic attaché, but everyone in intelligence knew he was part of the FSB, the organization Putin built to succeed the KGB.

That was a summer when Lily was in and out of Ts’gali. It was a bittersweet time. Rani, who’d entered politics to give the mountain villagers and nomads a voice, had been pushed into a leadership role. He was on track to become prime minister, and that meant an end to his and Lily’s time together.

The last time Lily saw Cinda was on an October day as dark and bleak as Lily’s own mood. Cinda stopped her as she turned up the street leading to the hostel. She’d become so thin Lily almost didn’t recognize her.

‘Please, Lily – I know you’ve kept your distance. You should have, you did the right thing, only – I need help. I’m in so much trouble – it’s – I did it all myself, I can’t blame anyone, but—’

Lily moved her into the doorway of an abandoned building and let Cinda pour out her terrors. She was barely coherent.

‘I know the mining and mineral business. I’ve worked in it for fifteen years. It’s a ruthless world, murders, blackmail, everything. I saw things, heard things – then they knew I’d seen and heard and so I ran away – but I can’t get out of here on my own.’

‘Your ambassador can’t help?’ Lily asked.

‘They think – I tried – I can’t leave on my passport! The ambassador won’t see me. His secretary says I’m a traitor. I’m not, I’m not, but – I don’t know who’s following me. You’re the only person I trust.’

Each time a shop or apartment door opened, Cinda would shrink into Lily’s arms, sure someone was there with a gun. Lily promised to do what she could. Lily had to leave the next day to help run an op in Kazakhstan. She told Cinda to lie low until she got back.

Back in her own room, she tried to think of a way to get Cinda out of Hayalistan. The problem wasn’t so much leaving the country, actually, as being able to get into another country. She finally decided to get Cinda a US passport. She could send her to Langley, have them sort out whether she was in danger, and whether she knew secrets that could help the US.

She knew this was an extreme step. It was reserved for people who’d provided high-level intel to America, and whose lives were in immediate danger from their own governments. Lily thought Cinda was genuinely afraid – she didn’t think it was an act designed to compromise Lily in some way – but to exfiltrate someone whose country was a close ally was a career-ending risk. Worse than that, it could have terrible repercussions for America’s South Pacific security if the Australian government protested.

In the morning, she used Agency makeup tricks to change her appearance. It didn’t matter that she didn’t look like Cinda, it was only important that she not look like Lily. She went into the Central Market and had a passport photo taken.

Field agents requested new identities from Langley frequently enough that Lily knew what paperwork to fill out. Of course, a passport took a number of layers of approval. However, Bruce was notoriously sloppy with paperwork. Lily filled out the forms in between handling all the equipment requisitions she needed for the Kazakhstan trip. She glued in the photo, used her own address in Ts’gali, and slid the form in with requisitions for other agents’ undercover ops.

If Bruce’s secretary noticed the addition, and the not-quite accurate forgery of his signature, she said nothing to Lily or anyone else.

Jason Tedros had to approve the request before it went to State. He might have looked at Cinda’s name and guessed Lily had put it in. Still, he didn’t try to stall the passport, so maybe he hadn’t noticed. Or maybe, sitting in Pakistan, running all the Central Asian networks, he’d known secrets about Gazprom and DSMM and Gambrey that would explain Cinda’s fears.

Cinda’s passport was waiting in Lily’s personal mail when she returned to Ts’gali from Kazakhstan. By then Cinda was dead. She’d been found on Lake Sakin’s shore by a young kayaker, not far from the rocky beach where she and Lily used to meet.

Cinda’s body was sent back to her family in Australia for burial. Jason Tedros flew in from Islamabad. It was one of his periodic visits to all the stations under his command. He spoke to all the Hayali agents, and so no one thought it odd when he took Lily into the bug-proof conference room to talk.

‘Good job in Kazakhstan,’ he said. ‘We got exactly what we needed from the safe while you distracted the guards.’

He didn’t expect an answer but went straight to the main point: he’d had a message from the Australian ambassador to Hayalistan.

He eyed Lily, who tried to keep her breath steady. She knew the pulses in her neck were throbbing.

‘How much did Cinda confide in you about any trouble she was experiencing?’

‘Was she in trouble?’ Lily asked.

‘That’s what the ambassador, and I, want to know, Lily. How much did she confide in you?’

‘We swam off the same beach for a while.’ Lily chose her words carefully. ‘She was a strong swimmer, could go a half mile or more when I was already done for the day. It wasn’t fun for me, so I stopped swimming with her.’

Jason nodded; he’d picked up the implication – Lily was staying away from a danger that Cinda might have welcomed.

‘When did you speak to her the last time?’ he asked.

‘I don’t remember.’ She didn’t embroider. If someone had seen them together near Lily’s hostel, she didn’t want to volunteer any information that might hang like the loose thread from a sweater, ready to be pulled on and unraveled.

‘Would you believe she took her own life?’ Jason asked.

Suicide. The easy out – not for Cinda, but for her ambassador. Nothing to see here, folks.

‘I didn’t know her well enough to have an opinion.’

‘What about her work? Could that have been a source of trouble?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you remember anything pertinent, the Australian ambassador would like to hear about it. But anything you remember, you tell me and no one else, especially not anyone in Australia’s diplomatic corps. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Jason. I have no desire to talk to the Australian ambassador about anything.’

Jason returned to Islamabad without speaking to Lily again. She assumed that meant no one had seen Cinda confide in her. Even so, Lily was pretty sure Jason thought Cinda had been murdered. He must have had some inkling of the trouble that had made her run away from the Australian compound.

The head wound made no sense. You didn’t dive off the rocks in that part of the lake. The rocky shoreline gave way to a soft bottom. It was impossible to believe that Cinda had dived to her death, but it was also impossible for Lily to investigate it.

She put the passport she’d acquired for Cinda in a hiding place she’d created in the wainscotting in her hostel room. When she left Hayalistan, she carried it with her, renewing it every ten years, along with the other passports she’d hung on to. She used her own photograph, with the cheeks doctored, first darkening her red-gold hair to muddy brown like Cinda’s, then turning it to silver.

Now in her Chicago living room, her fun-fair face stared back at her from Cinda’s passport: chipmunk cheeks, hair styled into a bob, not her own wild tangle of curls. Cinda deserved to return to Hayalistan. Lily would take her there.

12

TIME OFF FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR

In the morning, Lily stopped to talk to August McBride on her way to the bus. ‘I’m getting stale and dull. I’m going away for a few weeks to see if I can open my mind a bit.’

‘No one on the block is as lively as you, Lily,’ August said. ‘I can’t believe you’re ever dull.’

She laughed. ‘You know, this is the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I was forty years old? I’m going to Australia, while I’m still fit enough to do all the sightseeing stuff I never had time for when I was working – scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, hiking in the outback.’

‘If you need someone to come along, help you carry your bags or rub your feet when you’re done hiking, you know where to find me.’

They kidded a little longer, although Lily could see the wistfulness in his face, how much he wished he had the money and freedom to jaunt off on a whim.

She did her morning stint at the high school so that she could tell the principal and children she’d be away for a month. The principal was dismayed: they didn’t have anyone whose Russian was as good as Lily’s, or who was as inventive as Lily in thinking of ways to engage the students. The teens themselves, and their parents, accepted the news with the blank stolidity of refugees who are used to losing people and support at a moment’s notice. Lily herself was also used to abrupt goodbyes, new placements with a scant hour to shred vital documents before getting on a Marine helicopter ahead of a seething army.

When she left the school, she rode the bus all the way downtown to use the computers at the public library, where each user’s history is wiped clean when they log off. On her way she stopped at an electronics store to buy a few disposable phones and extra SIM cards.

At the library, she booked a round-trip ticket to Australia, in her own name. She made hotel reservations in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. She added side trips to tourist attractions – to the Great Barrier Reef, a few days at a resort in the wine country, a hiking trip in the outback.

Using Mallick’s passport and a credit card in her name, she set up an itinerary for Cinda Mallick, traveling between Perth and Ts’gali. The shortest route was twenty-three hours, including a seven-hour layover in Dubai.

Lily studied online maps of Ts’gali, looking for landmarks, and for an inexpensive hotel. The city and the Lake Sakin shoreline had both changed dramatically since she’d last been there.

Ts’gali had originally grown up around the western end of Lake Sakin. As the city became important, it sent fingers around both sides of the lake, but most of the development had been on the south shore.

The city used to rely on ferries to cross the lake. In the long Hayali winters, icebreakers sometimes got locked in the middle of the water, and so the north shore remained a semi-wilderness, where poorer clans built shanties and made a living from fishing, or from hunting on the lower slopes of Mount Muqqadas.

Since Lily had left, the engineers who created the tunnel under the English Channel helped Hayalistan tunnel underneath the lake. The lake was at its narrowest here at the western end where Ts’gali had grown up, but the north and south shores were still several miles apart.

As a result of the tunnel, the north shore had been developed beyond recognition. All the big international chains had hotels there and the lakefront was dotted with gated communities. The embassies had moved there, as had the big financial institutions.

Lily enlarged the map as much as possible, looking for the cove where she joined the Hayali women for the full moon ritual. After all these years she couldn’t be sure of the topography, but the little inlet seemed to have disappeared into landfill.

Lily pulled up an aerial view of the new US embassy. Like every place she’d served near the end of her career, it seemed to be a giant fortress, occupying acres of land along the lakefront.

The old embassy had been a modest building, created when Hayalistan was still a part of the Soviet Union, when America needed only a consular office. The original embassy had been a short walk from the old market district, where Lily had found a room when she was starting out.

That area still had small, cheap hotels, which was what she wanted. Besides being vastly more expensive, the north shore, with its banks and embassies and expensive homes, would be filled with surveillance cameras. Lily hoped to move unobserved through the city.

To her surprise, her hostel was still standing. It advertised itself now as a hotel, with plumbing in every room. In Lily’s time, toilets and baths had been shared spaces. On a nostalgic whim, she booked a room there for Cinda.

On cigarette paper, she carefully wrote down confirmation numbers, phone numbers, and URLs for the airlines and hotel she’d chosen. These she tucked into a thin plastic sheath attached to the band of her bra.

Her shoulder injury was throbbing from sitting at a computer too long. She took a break, walking to the lakefront, stretching her arms as far as the pain would allow. She’d never rebooked an appointment with the orthopedist.

While she walked along the lakefront toward the museums, she started constructing a cover story for Cinda. She gave her a youthful experience in Hayalistan as a mountain climbing enthusiast, gave her a nephew who’d read the New Yorker story and been inspired to go to Ts’gali as a volunteer.

Lily went back to the library and searched social media until she found the face she needed – reddish hair, but a cheerful nondescript face. A youth who could be anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five but who would be memorable only because of his hair. She fiddled with his face to make it less identifiable – she sprinkled a line of freckles across his cheeks, and gave his nose a retroussé tilt that made him look younger. Lily’s Cinda carried only a flip phone without storage space for a lot of pictures, so she printed a half dozen copies before leaving the library.

The work took most of the afternoon. When she finished, she rode the bus up to the building where the drama group met. It had originally been a bank, one of those giant temples of Mammon that had been abandoned when branch banking drove neighborhood banks out of business. It had been converted to artist studios and venues for not-for-profit programs. The building held an auditorium, used for things like board or investor meetings in the old days, and that was where the theater program met. Conference rooms across the hall were used for costumes and scenery. One had been turned into a computer lab where the group’s techies built sound and lighting effects.

Lily sat on a bench across the street from the building, reading a book, waiting for the kids to emerge.

When Keira slouched out, last of the group, Lily crossed over to meet her. The girl’s face brightened at once. Lily took her to a local snack bar, bought her what she wanted, not what she needed, and told her she’d be gone for a few weeks.

‘It’s your heart, isn’t it?’ Keira blurted. ‘Or you have cancer and don’t want to tell me.’

‘I’m fine,’ Lily said, voice gentle. ‘I’m taking some vacation time, that’s all. I’m going to Australia, so please don’t get arrested or do anything dire because it will be impossible for me to get back to Chicago in time to help you.’

Keira shook her head. She was covering a desire to cry with anger.

‘My nana died of cancer, and every day she’d say, “I’m fine, nothing wrong, baby,” and the next thing I know, my mother shows up just to say, “Put on your black dress, we have to go to Nana’s funeral.” Who’s going to tell me to put on my black dress and come to your funeral?’

13

BACK AT THE RANCH HOUSE (1)

After she set up the taps on Thom Kolchak that Gordon requested, Marissa turned monitoring them over to Halina. She returned to her own report on global hotspots that could explode while no one was watching. The president and congressional leaders had their eyes on China, Venezuela, and Greenland, but war and famine in Sudan had killed ten million people. Somalia was facing similar destruction and the riots in Bangladesh had spilled over into India.

In Yemen, 380,000 people have died of hunger while the Saudi-financed Houthis are waging war on our ships. This instability affects American economic and political power in the region. China is paying attention and taking advantage of our lack of interest to acquire vast swaths of farmland and mineral resources in Africa.

Hayalistan, Lily, and Thom Kolchak’s story were in a remote recess of her mind, until Gracelyn summoned her to Gordon’s office a week later. He demanded an update on Kolchak.

‘Do you have those photos yet?’

It took a moment for her to realize what photos he was talking about. ‘I talked to Legal. They said a desire to see original photos wasn’t adequate grounds for a search warrant.’

Gordon’s eyes narrowed in an ugly way. ‘I don’t remember asking for a search warrant. I asked for the originals of the pictures.’

‘My team and I are outstanding at acquiring and sifting data. No other agency has our threat assessment track record. My team has inspected the intel coming out of Ts’gali, as well as the other Stans, and they’re not picking up any signals suggesting an uprising is brewing.’

‘I’m impressed, but I still want the pictures, Marissa.’

‘Give me some reasons that we’re so desperate to see the originals and I’ll go back to Legal.’

‘National security, Marissa. That’s what this agency is about. National security. If your team isn’t picking up signals, they’re not looking in the right place.’

‘Has someone picked up signals from Hayali students in exile?’ Marissa asked. ‘I thought we’d covered them, particularly the kids studying in Germany and Canada, but we can double-check. Where else are agents hearing chatter?’

‘It’s your job to provide me with intel, Marissa, not the other way around.’ He made a shooing motion.

When she got back to her desk, Marissa pulled up all the reports out of Hayalistan and its immediate neighbors generated in the past forty-eight hours. There were hundreds of them, not surprising, since two of the hottest spots were on Hayalistan’s borders.

Marissa looked for troop movements, for visiting Russians or Russian surrogates, for arrests of dissidents, for trials of dissidents. She had a momentary wish to call Lily. She remembered a time in Delhi, before Marissa felt she’d lost face, when Lily looked through a stack of reports and pointed to one name: This man, she said. You think he’s just a low-level rug salesman from Samarkand, but you see him here and here and here. She tapped locations on the big wall map. And two days after he left each place, a major bombing occurred.

Had someone been showing up in Hayalistan’s neighborhood, leaving a trail of destruction behind them? She checked for members of Rani’s clan, the Elurbar – Snow Leopards. In the years after his government fell, some of the Snow Leopards had tried to mount a counterrevolution, but these had fizzled before they got started. They’d never had a leader with Rani’s charisma, and they’d never received essential funding or weapons from any of the superpowers, including the US.

Marissa checked what the young generation of Snow Leopards was up to. Government jobs, academic jobs, a handful who were carrying on the family tradition of mountain climbing and hunting with eagles, although now they were more often guiding tourists up the mountains to prime ski resorts.

Marissa couldn’t spot anything unusual in the reports she’d generated. She summoned Halina.

‘Gordon thinks there’s something going on in Hayalistan that isn’t showing up on standard radar. He doesn’t have specifics, just a gut. I’m not seeing it, but your eyes are young and fresh. See if you can find an outlier, some person or action that wasn’t there a month or six months ago. Someone or something that seems so ordinary that our team in Ts’gali wouldn’t have noticed it.’

‘Is that why Gordon was meeting with Steve Gambrey?’ Halina asked.

Marissa nodded. ‘Probably. Of course, Gambrey owns the lithium leases there. He seems to own the government, too. See what you can find.’

She hadn’t known Gordon had met with Gambrey, but she didn’t want her assistant to know. If Halina realized Gordon didn’t share information with Marissa, it would make her unattractive to work for. You want your own boss to be in the inner circle to boost your visibility for promotion.

No one outside the Company could come into headquarters for a meeting, but junior staffers met for drinks after long workdays and exchanged gossip. Someone on Gordon’s personal staff – someone other than Gracelyn – would have reported seeing Gordon wherever it was he’d met Gambrey.

Billionaires made the CIA’s work harder. If they thought their investments were at risk, they demanded a military presence in an unstable country, or economic sanctions against a country burrowing into their market share. Gambrey had economic interests across the globe, but if he was lobbying Gordon for help in Hayalistan, something was making him think his leases were vulnerable.

She sent Halina a follow-up text, asking her to look at China and Australia’s activity around lithium. They might be in secret negotiations with Prime Minister Agajan for taking over the leases when they came up for renewal later in the year. Prime Minister Agajan, always a sucker for a beautiful new plane or Lamborghini, was getting increasingly erratic as he aged.

The thorny question closer to home was why Gordon cared so much about the New Yorker photos. Why was he so desperate for the originals?

What ate away at the back of her mind was Gordon’s willingness to send her or her staff into Kolchak’s apartment without a warrant. We mustn’t descend into total lawlessness, otherwise why are we doing this work?

Still, she pulled the pictures up on her screen and studied them again, blowing them up, cutting them into squares, and examining each square. Because she was looking at reproductions from a magazine, the blowups were blurry. If the photos had something to tell, the originals might show it.

Like Lily, she stared a long time at Arnold Sylvester, Gambrey’s number two. Like Lily, she searched for him online. She couldn’t find much personal information. An undergraduate degree from a small Kansas school forty years ago, jobs at a midsized investment bank, an MBA from Wharton right after lockdown and then he was tapped by Gambrey to take a lead role at his company.

Marissa couldn’t find anything about Arnold’s personal life. She forwarded the picture to someone she knew in the US Marshals’ office. Is this someone who should be keeping quiet in a backwater?

Marissa closed The New Yorker and looked at the taps on Thom Kolchak’s phone and email. His only mentions of Hayalistan were in emails to his literary agent about the horrors of the opioid crisis there. Marissa now had enough background on Kolchak to know he came from an Illinois mining town which had died when the coal mines dried up. Gambrey’s company hadn’t owned those mines, but Kolchak might think all mining companies were equally culpable. He hadn’t crossed any lines yet, but good to keep an eye on him.

Because of the email Lily had sent Kolchak, Marissa had also requested a tap on her phone and email. She saw that Lily had booked travel to Australia.

Was that important? Marissa looked at all the different routes you could travel to get to Hayalistan, but Lily’s travel was strictly Chicago to Sydney and back, with bookings to Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, and Perth inside the country.

Maybe retirement wasn’t such a bad thing. You could go sightseeing, you didn’t have to jump and kick your heels for a boss who didn’t trust you – and whom you didn’t trust in turn.

14

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

Marissa’s call, when she was leaving Thom Kolchak’s place, had included a threat to put Lily in a locked cell at Langley if she even thought about Hayalistan. After that, Lily figured Langley was reading her mail and listening to her phone calls. Probably Marissa didn’t think Lily was threatening enough that she needed humans tracking her, but best not to take chances.

‘Langley interrogators would snap me in their soup like crackers,’ she murmured to herself. They would want to, anyway.

Lily had been held in Pakistani and Uzbeki prisons. Both were terrifying, crawling with vermin, a bucket for a toilet, filthy water when the guards felt like supplying it. The interrogators had no interest in answers to their questions. They weren’t even interested in the questions they asked. All they wanted was to terrorize people in custody and ultimately kill them. Both times Lily had diplomatic cover and was released after a short stay. She knew that she would have cracked, maybe not after one more day, but soon.

She didn’t really want to know how Langley would compare. The prison would be newer, but no cleaner and the treatment would be brutal, especially since Lily wouldn’t have diplomatic protection. Unless she could rouse Jason Tedros, her old mentor, from his retirement on Long Island, there wouldn’t be a soul connected to the Company who would even want to save her.

Every op was a leap of faith, that you’d done the right planning, had the right backup, had a back door to escape through. She grimaced: not much planning, no backup, no back door.

Impulse control, Lily. Jason’s voice in her mind. You’re jumping into a country you haven’t seen for twenty-five years, using the name of a woman we’re sure was murdered, despite the sanitized police reports. If you poke the hornet’s nest and they swarm to attack you, no one will help you.

Stir the water until the sausage pops up, she argued back in her head. Her Russian grandmother used to use that expression from her time in one of Stalin’s camps, when the communal soup pot held one piece of meat. Using Cinda’s identity was a way to find the sausage.

Cinda’s name wasn’t her only tactic. She planned to visit the teahouses where she might encounter some of the students Thom Kolchak spoke to.

My final op, she thought, boarding the flight to Sydney. Find out why I’m being used, and who’s doing it. She spent ten days at a four-star hotel in Sydney, recovering from jet lag, getting facials, going to musical events, visiting friends from the Australian diplomatic corps she’d schmoozed with in Asia, taking a side trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

From there, she took the train to Perth. She signed up for a trip to Ayers Rock and a few days hiking in the outback. When she reached the hiking expedition’s meeting point, she checked into a cabin in a place without cell or internet service. She told the expedition leader that her age was catching up with her.

‘I’ll stay here and take short walks on my own.’

The leader was concerned, but Lily signed a waiver, and, really, he didn’t want an old woman who might collapse on the trail.

As soon as the expedition bus had disappeared up the road, Lily hitch-hiked back to Perth. With her Lily passport stitched into a pouch in the back of her bra, she used Cinda’s to board the flight to Ts’gali, via Dubai.

The flight from Dubai landed at two in the morning, a time when no one wants to be at work. The passengers were shunted into the arrivals hall to wait until five, when customs and immigration staff would come on duty. The signs explaining this were above the booths in Russian, Chinese, Hayali, French, and English, but that didn’t stop the passengers from crying out in rage, and trying to push pass the soldiers who guarded entrance to the baggage claim area.

Lily had only her lightweight suitcase and a backpack with her. She unfolded a coat and lay on the floor, backpack under her head. After an hour or so, one of the soldiers approached her and said in halting English, ‘Grandmother, you need chair?’

She sat up and smiled, saying in Hayali, ‘My nephew, you are most kind. A chair would be welcome.’

He smiled back, a surprised grin, demanding to know how she knew his language. She explained that she’d worked here, but so many years ago she had forgotten too much of the language.

And he said, no her accent was perfect, and she said, how had he learned English, and so it went, with him escorting her to the guard station, fetching hot tea for her, while the other passengers watched resentfully.

If he’d asked about her work, she would have said she’d been a secretary at an American company, but young men aren’t interested in the history of old women, and Cinda looked old. Plumpers over her gums pushed her mouth and cheeks out, accentuating the lines around her eyes. A small pebble inside her left shoe gave her a limp. The local CIA station would have cameras inside the airport, tracking all incoming passengers; even if her face didn’t match what they had for Lily in their database, her normal gait might give her away.

When the immigration officials arrived, fifteen minutes late, the soldiers wanted Lily to be first through the line. She didn’t want that kind of visibility; she pointed to the teacup and made an apologetic gesture. They escorted her to a toilet.

When she finally limped outside, she looked for landmarks but couldn’t spot any. She shouldn’t have expected them – the new airport was forty kilometers east of downtown Ts’gali. It had been built long after her final visit to the country.

The old airport couldn’t handle the big transcontinental jets. When Lily first came to Hayalistan, excited by her new job as a field agent, the route had been from Dulles to Frankfurt and then Istanbul. She’d waited seven hours in Istanbul for the propjet that took her across the Black Sea and up the Ts’minda mountain range to the plateau where Ts’gali lay.

The propjet was old, with stairs that unfolded from the side. When she climbed out, the dust from the neighboring fields blew across the tarmac. She stood on the bottom step, backpack slung over one shoulder, squinting into the dust as if trying to see her future.

When she finally jumped to the ground, she pulled her scarf over her mouth and nose. Hayalistan was Muslim. At Langley they’d told her to keep her head covered: Follow all the local customs, do not make waves. You’re going to Hayalistan to help us keep an ear to the ground, not to foment uprisings. Lily’s training supervisor had repeated that about six times a day the last month before she left the country. It was only when she’d been in Hayalistan a few weeks that she realized most local women didn’t wear hijab. That was when she started letting her long red-gold braid swing free.

Her braid was a dramatic color in a country where the hair of every local person was some shade of black or brown. When she needed to go unnoticed to a drop or a meet, she’d pin her braid close to her head and put on one of the local conical hats that fit snugly over the ears.

That first morning, she was trudging across the tarmac to the terminal when she saw Mount Muqqadas rising beyond the far side of the runway. The mountain was immense, so overwhelming that it seemed about to topple across the airfield and crush her. She stopped, awestruck, and unconsciously held out her arms in supplication.

She learned later that she’d felt the power of the mountain pulling her to it. That was the phrase Hayalis used for the feeling she’d experienced. Mount Muqqadas dominated the landscape, controlled the crop cycle and the storms, and defined Hayali emotional life. When they learned that the mountain had summoned Lily as she left the plane, people spoke to her more openly than to other Westerners.

In her years as an agent, she’d learned to navigate the mountain, followed the yak and sheep paths to the upper grazing meadows, found the caves where shepherds holed up during storms, and where she herself could park someone fleeing for their life, but she’d never lost her awe for the mountain.

She’d been sure that when she exited the terminal now, in her older age, she’d feel Muqqadas at once, pulling her to him. It was with a terrible sense of loss that she realized she felt nothing.

Was I gone so long? Did I betray you with my absence? Am I a deserter?

She didn’t know she’d spoken the words aloud, and in Hayali, until a porter bent over under a load of suitcases said, ‘Grandmother, your family hasn’t come to meet you?’

‘I am a wanderer in my mind,’ she apologized. ‘I must find the tram to take me into Ts’gali.’

He looked at her in concern, while the man whose bags he was carrying shouted at him in Russian to get a move on.

‘You’re speaking to a person who is doing you a service,’ Lily snapped, switching to Russian. ‘Don’t add bullying to the miserable reputation Putin is creating for you in this world.’

The Russian looked as though he might slap her, but too many onlookers were clapping their hands. The porter scurried to the terminal entrance with the bags, but he reappeared as she was studying the signs, looking for transit into the heart of the capital.

‘My brother will drive you, Grandmother. Tell me where you are going.’

Lily tried to protest; she was used to riding buses and trains, but he insisted, and in a few minutes, she was in the front seat of a battered Chevy Cobalt. When the driver learned how long it had been since she was last in Ts’gali, he insisted on driving her around to show her all that was new.

From the airport on Lake Sakin’s south side, he crossed the lake using the great tunnel created by the Channel engineers. Traffic was thick in all six lanes, another change from the days when few Hayali could afford cars.

The Cobalt came up to a four-lane road that hugged the north shore of Lake Sakin. The mountain loomed on their right, to the north, so close that you couldn’t actually see it, only the hanging valley where the wealthy mansions and high-rises stood. Close to them were the big international hotel chains.

Her driver suggested she should find a room in one of them. ‘In this season, there are vacancies. I can help you change your reservation. You are staying at an old-fashioned hotel, why not go to Hilton or Four Seasons?’

‘I like small and quiet,’ Lily said.

‘Small, yes, but quiet? Not in these days. And the air in the old city, you will see, it’s not healthy.’

She smiled. ‘I like what I can afford to like.’

‘Of course, Grandmother. We always think Americans climb over mountains of dollar bills to get in and out of their homes. We don’t imagine anyone in your country needs to think about what they can afford.’

‘I wish that were true,’ Lily said. ‘In America, we, too, have people who live in the streets because they can’t afford a home or a meal for their children.’

They passed an exit for Ts’gali University. She was too tired to ask for a detour, although she wanted to look at the Gambrey Center. She scanned the coast for landmarks, but the shoreline had been turned into landfill, including the rocky stretch where she’d swum with Cinda. Nothing she remembered was visible among the golf courses, skyscrapers, and gated communities.

‘When I lived here many years ago, we would swim in this part of the lake,’ she commented. ‘Where are the beaches now?’

‘Oh, Grandmother, the lady of the lake is wounded by the mines. There is no swimming at this end, only further to the east, where the water is still clean, can people swim.’

The air was getting heavier as they neared the west end of the lake, where the original city stood. A yellowish cloud floated over it. Lily squinted, trying to make out the buildings of the old city, but the air was too thick.

Traffic had slowed; they were stuck behind a convoy of trucks heading toward the Ts’gali Pass. Most of the mine entrances were on that road.

Troop movements between Russia and Georgia, Chechnya and Afghanistan had followed that route. Lily herself used to dress as a goatherd and hang out in the tea shops at the top of the pass, listening to Russian soldiers gripe and guess about where they were going to be deployed.

How did Russia deal now with traffic to the mines clogging the route? Although maybe it was a help – with so many trucks up and down all day long, a dozen spies could slide unnoticed into the country.

Not my problem anymore, Lily reminded herself. I’m Cinda Mallick, revisiting a country where I worked in my youth.

As they rounded the west end of the lake, it occurred to her driver to ask how she spoke such excellent Hayali. She even knew to address him as ‘nephew.’ Most Americans – most foreigners – didn’t try to speak Hayali, one of the most difficult languages for Westerners. Some visitors stumbled through a few words of Russian, still an official language here.

‘I worked here as a young woman. I was looking for adventure and I loved mountain climbing, so I was a secretary for a company that led expeditions up Muqqadas. Now I’ve come back to see my nephew, Ronnie. He came here to volunteer in some clinic that the Student Clan Committee set up. We haven’t heard from him for months. We’re terribly worried. Since I spent time here before, my sister asked me to fly over to look for him.’

‘I have never heard of any clinics run by students,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Your nephew was probably working in a restaurant or a grocery store and was ashamed to tell his family that. And if he called himself Rani, then he was stupid or he was tool of thieves and criminals.’

‘He calls himself Ronnie because that is his name.’ Lily sounded bewildered. ‘Ronnie is an English name, a family name for Ronald. He has red hair and freckles.’

She pulled one of the pictures she’d created of a red-haired youth with freckles from her carry-on bag. ‘He looks very American.’

The driver refused to look at the picture. ‘You must be careful who you talk to. Maybe you have a nephew who is a young idealist, or maybe he came here to be a criminal. If he’s here and you find him, you must make sure he leaves the country or he could end up in prison.’

They had pulled up in front of the hostel. Lily thanked him in a meek voice for his counsel. ‘When you are eight thousand miles away, how can you know what the young people are doing? It is good that I’ve come, so that I can help him if I find him.’

The driver nodded approvingly. ‘But you must be careful. This is not like the old days. Now, people want drugs and they will attack a grandmother like you, an American, to steal your money. I can drive you where you need to be.’ He handed her a card with his name, Sergo, and his cellphone. ‘I will come even from the airport.’

She offered him a choice between Australian and US dollars. He chose American. Of course. America was floundering these days, but the dollar continued its rule.

It was still early when Sergo dropped her, but the desk clerk assured her the room was ready. He handed her a card warning her against drinking tap water, urging her to lock her valuables in the safe, and assuring her that the hotel was prepared to buy tickets to any cultural event in Ts’gali; she had only to ask.

When Lily booked her room, she’d requested a view of Mount Muqqadas. They put her on the top floor, five stories up, the same height as the other decaying buildings in the old town. The mountain was several miles to the north, but the cloud of yellow fog Sergo had driven her through blocked Muqqadas. She held out her arms, as she had outside the airport this morning, but the mountain still refused to speak.

15

TEA PARTIES

When Lily had lived in the hostel as a field agent the communal baths had splendid plumbing. Geysers of hot water filled the tubs in minutes. Two young women scrubbed all the toilets and baths on the five stories every day until the fixtures sparkled.

Like everything else she’d experienced in Ts’gali so far, the change in the hostel to in-room plumbing was for the worse. They’d installed a cheap tin shower in the corner closest to the window. Lily stood under a thin trickle of tepid water for fifteen minutes, trying to scrub travel out of her skin and hair. The threadbare towel was wet through when she finished rubbing herself dry. Fortunately, knowing that late April in Ts’gali was still technically winter, she’d packed her fleecy long janes.

Despite these discomforts, despite her sadness over the mountain, she was happy to be in-country and at work. She fell instantly asleep on the thin mattress. She woke in the early afternoon and set out to explore the streets near the hostel.

She puttered along the small streets, watching people’s legs and feet – if you’re tailing someone, the hardest things to change on short notice are your shoes and trousers. When she was sure she was alone, she went into a computer store. She’d brought a thumb drive from Chicago with the New Yorker story loaded on it. Now she printed out a dozen copies, stapling them so that the centerfold of Lake Sakin was on top.

She stopped at a stall selling pelmeni, crisp fried dumplings filled with yak’s milk cheese and tomato jam, and ate two with a cup of tea, thinking she was really home now.

‘Grandmother! You have jam on your coat!’ The stall owner sent her daughter into the hut attached to the stall for a rag soaked in hot water.

‘Thank you, daughter,’ Lily murmured. ‘My mind was too far away, worrying about my nephew.’

She repeated what she’d said to her taxi driver about her nephew volunteering in one of the student-run clinics. Like the driver, the mother stiffened and ordered her daughter to return to the hut. When the girl was inside, the mother repeated the lecture Sergo had given Lily. Those clinics could get you in prison. Don’t talk about them, if you find your nephew, stay away from them.

Lily nodded a solemn thanks. ‘Still, everyone talks about unusual strangers. If you hear anything about a red-haired American boy, my name is Cinda Mallick, staying at the Megogrobis Hotel up the street.’

She tried to show the woman the photo purporting to be her nephew, Ronnie. Again, like Sergo, the woman brushed it aside without looking.

Lily wandered on, pausing at different stalls, once to buy cream for her dry face and hands, another for a map of the trails up Muqqadas. In mountain country, you couldn’t count on Google to guide you.

As she was turning up the narrow lane that led back to her hostel, she heard someone running behind her. She drew back into a doorway, but the runner called out, ‘Shen Cinda, Shen Cinda!’

It was the daughter from the food stall. When Lily stepped back into the street, the girl stopped, panting heavily. ‘Shen Cinda – the clinics – my mother – the old people are afraid – but the clinics were a good thing.’

‘Take a breath, daughter,’ Lily said. ‘I don’t want you to face your mother’s anger by speaking to me, but tell me what you know.’

‘The students want to heal the country. In the old times, the clans provided health care and food for their people, but that was ended so that everyone must use the services of the main government. Only the government gives no services, so the students started clinics in the names of three of the old clans – Elurbar, Eel, Reindeer. And then there was the uprising and students were shot and put in prison and the clinics were closed. But still, if you are a girl who needs—’

She looked uncertainly at Lily.

‘If you need special female health care,’ Lily suggested.

The girl nodded gratefully. ‘Yes, that. There are still places to go. In the Central Market, there is a farm collective that sells food for little money and gives away what is left at the end of the day. Perhaps they will know your nephew. Also – there is a tea shop where university students meet to study and sometimes to make plans. It’s near the Central Market, on Didi Khani Street. I must go back, or my mother will be frightened.’ She turned and ran back the way she’d come. At the bottom of the street, she stopped to wave shyly at Lily before disappearing into the throng of homebound workers.

Lily went back to her hotel to rest. It was frustrating to have to cater to the body’s whims, but the flight and altitude were affecting her as they never did when she was younger.

When she got up again, it was almost nine. She needed something to eat. Food stalls at the Central Market would still be open, as would nearby teahouses.

She walked into the heart of the old city. The Central Market sprawled there, not far from the Great Mosque on the south shore of Lake Sakin. She found Didi Khani Street, which had a dozen or more tea shops. She wandered in and out of several, anonymous as an old woman. She pulled a wool hat in a dull tan over her hair – always a marker, red-gold in youth, wild white curls now, in a land of straight black hair that turned iron gray with age.

The fourth shop she went into seemed to be the one the stall keeper’s daughter was thinking of. Young people were crowded around the tables, smoking, drinking tea or beer. Some were hunched over tablets, some just hanging out. She found a place on a bench at a communal table.

The shop had a waitress, a plump woman who threaded the tables delivering orders, joking with the male students but not stopping to chat. Lily was invisible in this sea of young people. She finally walked up to the counter to order a bowl of noodle soup and a cup of ayran, the yogurt drink popular all through Central Asia. While she waited for them, she studied the tables around her, looking for likely quarry.

Not the couples draped around each other, or the boisterous men making their presence known. When her meal arrived, she’d decided on a working quartet in a far corner, two young men with two young women, all four leaning over a single laptop.

When she finished her soup, she wandered over near them, looking at a picture of Mount Muqqadas on the wall behind them. One of the youths was explaining some kind of electrical layout, pointing at the screen with a hand that also held a cigarette. One of the women ordered him to put the cigarette down.

‘That’s my keyboard you’re ruining with your ash, you idiot!’ The tone was indulgent.

‘And you’re ruining it in vain, Azam,’ the other youth said. ‘You haven’t paid attention to the volt—’

‘Watch out,’ the smoker said, and all four looked up at Lily.

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you,’ Lily said. ‘I can tell you’re hard at work. But – I don’t know if you’ve seen this story about Ts’gali that an American journalist published in an American magazine.’ She laid one of the New Yorker printouts on the table.

They looked from the printout to Lily, expressions wary. People at other tables turned to stare, wondering who she was – one of the elderly poor, trying to sell some cheap family treasure? Or a grandmother trying to bring the girl home to her mother?

Lily explained again about her nephew working at one of the clinics and disappearing. ‘He met with the writer from this magazine, and perhaps you did as well? Ronnie, that’s my nephew’s name, he’s disappeared. I’ve come from America hoping to find him. I’m worried, because the article says people are blaming Americans for the problems in Hayalistan. I’m scared that he was arrested. He was just trying to help. If you’ve met him’ – she added one of her photographs – ‘you’d know him because of his red hair.’

‘Grandmother, we know nothing about clinics or American students,’ the smoker, Azam, said. ‘An American cannot disappear in this country: Americans have many protections. No one will put them in prison or harm them.’

‘Still, if you mention him to your friends? My name is Cinda, Cinda Mallick, and I’m staying at the Hotel Megogrobis while I look for him.’

‘If your nephew is bold, perhaps he thought he could climb the mountain. Many foreigners die on Muqqadas because they are arrogant and do not respect the mountain’s powers,’ one of the women said. ‘It’s the nature of Americans to think they can buy or—’

‘Mika!’ the nonsmoker warned her.

She glared at him but fell silent.

Lily nodded. ‘When I was young, I climbed that mountain, and I swam in the waters of Lady Sakin. I know their powers and would not challenge them today.’

‘Is she an American?’ the second woman asked her companions. ‘What kind of American speaks our language so skillfully, and with the same accent as my own grandmother?’

The nonsmoker eyed Lily narrowly. ‘Duruna is right. We know you have a job to do, but it’s a sad time in our country when an old lady like you has to work for the police, hoping to trick students into going to prison.’

‘You honor my skill in Hayali,’ Lily said. ‘However, I am truly an American. I lived in this country for many years and learned your language, but I am Cinda Mallick, here on a short visit, hoping to find my nephew, Ronnie.’

She unzipped Cinda’s passport from an inner compartment in her backpack and held it out for the students to examine. A half dozen other young people crowded around the table, along with the waitress. Even in these times, an American passport was a valuable commodity, seldom seen.

‘Yes, it looks like a good copy,’ Mika said. ‘We do not underestimate the skill of Hayalistan’s artists. But to come up with a nephew named Rani – that is clumsy. Not worthy of our government.’

‘Ronnie, not Rani.’ Lily repeated the two names twice, slowly, to show the difference in vowels. ‘Ronnie is a common name in America, a pet name for Ronald. We had a president with that name.

‘As for my own speech, I learned Hayali by listening to Rani, the Elurbar, before he was prime minister, when he chanted “The Eagle and the Hunter” at the community bonfires.’

Her bold mention of Rani’s name silenced the entire room, until the proprietor emerged from behind the samovar. ‘It is enough, American. We thank you for your business and now ask you to leave us in peace. If your nephew has disappeared, it’s probably because he moved elsewhere and forgot to tell his auntie. No, don’t try to pay me. We can give a gift of aryan and noodles even to a rich American.’

16

STUDY ABROAD

Lily lay awake for over an hour when she got back from the teahouse. Her cover story about a nephew named Ronnie had stirred everyone she talked to, but she worried it was the wrong cover. If she was going to discover what made her the poster child for the destruction of Hayalistan, maybe she should have traveled under her own name. But if Langley was interested in Hayalistan, her own name could get her booted out of the country before she had a chance to speak to anyone.

She went round and round on the problem without getting anywhere, until travel and altitude caught up with her and she fell into an uneasy sleep.

In the morning, she decided to go to the university, to see what she could learn about the Gambrey Center itself. She rode the tram to the campus, bringing along her walking poles in case the day turned long.

Ts’gali University stood on the northwest shore of Lake Sakin, where the Ts’gali Plateau started rising to the great mountain. A creek fed by the mountain’s waterfalls meandered across the campus.

In Lily’s day, the school had been so small that British and French diplomats barely hid their smirks at calling it a university. It had been one of Stalin’s projects, its classrooms and dorms concrete cubes.

The campus had expanded now, and the grim Soviet blocks were gone. The geology department apparently attracted international talent, the Germans had funded an ethnology program, and American money had built the big center The New Yorker had featured.

It was a severe, almost brutalist structure. To Lily, the cube offered an uncomfortable echo of the old Stalinist architecture. Dictator chic, you could call it: massive buildings that proclaim, We can crush you. When she tried walking around the building to see if there were gardens in the back, or paths toward the mountain, two guards appeared to block her way.

She said in English, ‘My sister’s son is attending lectures here. Maybe you know him? Ronnie, Ronnie Barr.’ She started to fish out one of her photos, but the men waved it away and demanded her ID.

Lily produced Cinda Mallick’s passport. The guards photographed it and sent the picture to someone else.

Lily was astonished. ‘Is my nephew in trouble? We haven’t heard from him in weeks. Is he in the hospital? Did he have a fall while he was climbing? I warned him that this was a treacherous mountain.’

The guards looked at her disdainfully and stepped away, still holding the passport. A handful of students who were approaching the building stopped to watch, but they kept their distance. A foreigner in trouble wasn’t worth risking trouble themselves. Lily looked at the group, but didn’t recognize any of the faces from her teahouse visit the previous night.

A text pinged on the guard’s phone. He read it, showed it to his comrade. ‘She’s not on anyone’s list,’ he said in Hayali. ‘She arrived four days ago; a tourist who claims she climbed Muqqadas when she was a girl. Hard to believe.’

They gave her back Cinda’s passport and told her in English if she had questions about her nephew, to ask them at the front desk inside the center.

‘And you are too old to climb this mountain, even if you did it when you were a girl,’ one of them added.

Leaning on her walking poles, Lily moved slowly into the building. While the exterior evoked Stalin, the interior shouted oligarchs with money and no taste, with its white marble walls and floors, Versailles-style chandeliers, and a wide curved staircase carpeted in red.

Along one wall was what Lily first thought was a giant mural depicting Lake Sakin the way she remembered it. As she watched, though, the images shifted and she realized it was a projection, an idealized version of the lake with people swimming, laughing, picnicking. The geography had been rearranged so that the mines appeared nearby. They, too, were full of joy-filled workers, and the air was clean. English words flashed periodically onto the screen: We turn dreams into reality.

‘And you turned reality into a nightmare,’ she muttered in English.

‘Can I help you, ma’am?’ a young woman who had popped up next to Lily asked brightly. She wore a blazer with ‘Steve Gambrey Center’ blazoned over the breast pocket. ‘Did you say “nightmare”?’ She was speaking English.

Lily cursed herself: she hadn’t noticed the woman until she spoke. Focus! Stay in the moment.

She sighed heavily. ‘My nephew. My sister’s boy, Ronnie. He came here as a student, wanting to study something about politics, I don’t know what, it’s not like he couldn’t study politics at home. Anyway, he’s a good, decent person, so he started volunteering at a free neighborhood clinic, a place for drug addicts, but then this magazine article—’

Lily fished the New Yorker story from her handbag and held it out, but the young woman didn’t try to look at it.

‘Well, anyway, this article says people in Hayalistan blame America for their drug problems. And Ronnie, my nephew, he says he heard that a lot, that the CIA caused your country’s problems. So, we’re worried that he’s been arrested. I can’t find anyone who knows how to find him, but he talked about this building, that he took classes here, so I’m hoping you can help me.’

She pulled out one of her photos of the young red-haired man and pointed to his name on the bottom of the print. ‘Ronnie Barr.’

Like everyone else, the woman paused at the name, staring at Lily as if her white hair might conceal a bomb-carrying radical.

‘I’ve never seen this person,’ the woman said. ‘How did he come to have this name?’

‘Why do people care?’ Lily cried. ‘Everyone thinks it’s such a strange name. Thousands of Americans are named Ronnie. Look at Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake!’

The outburst alarmed the young woman. She looked around, eager for help, and signaled to an older woman in a trouser suit with the Gambrey Center logo on her jacket. ‘Ishana! This lady is visiting from America. She says her family is worried about one of their children who’s been studying here. Do we have an American named Rani? She says they called one of their presidents after him.’

She added to Lily, ‘Ishana Vazh works for the Gambrey Center’s director. She can tell you anything you want to know. I’m new here, so I’m not a good guide.’

Ishana put a hand on Lily’s back and steered her toward the great curved staircase. ‘I’m going to take you up to our library. You can wait there while I get some information about this missing student.’

As they climbed the stairs, Lily made a great show of supporting herself with her walking sticks.

‘This is a beautiful campus,’ she said. ‘When I worked in Ts’gali – that was years ago – the university was just a handful of ugly concrete buildings. I guess Mr Gambrey can afford to hire the best architects. He sure has enough money, although the magazine says he’s not too interested in his mines and stuff anymore, now that he’s old. They say he’s spending all his time trying to stay young forever. What will you do with this building if he stops giving money to the school?’

Ishana faced Lily, her expression stern. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘I didn’t, at least I don’t think I did, but it’s Cinda. Cinda Mallick.’

‘And why are you here? Are you an investor?’

Lily stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘Do I look like I can invest in a billionaire’s project? I’m here on account of my nephew.’ She blathered through her script – the nephew’s social conscience, the family’s worry.

Ishana pushed Lily to an alcove by a window. Her mouth was set in a thin line – anger or worry, Lily thought. Maybe both.

‘Sit here, Ms Mallick. I need to talk to the director.’

Ishana took the picture with Ronnie’s name printed on the bottom. She was wearing a pencil skirt and pencil heels, but she moved across the marble tiles so quickly that her heels clacked like an old-fashioned typewriter.

Lily leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. Acting frantic and confused took as much energy as actually being frantic and confused. What a good actor you are, Lily!

The way people reacted to Rani’s name made it sound as though he were still alive, waiting somewhere in the shadows until he could retake control of the government. Lily wished she were still with the Company, still had access to urgent intel. She wished she were still forty, laughing with Rani in a shepherd’s hut.

Ishana’s tap on her shoulder roused her from a light doze. ‘Ms Mallick! Professor Sauermeer is the head of our economics program. He will talk to you about this missing nephew.’

The professor bent down, big head close to Lily’s. ‘Mrs Mallick, is it?’

Lily struggled to her feet. ‘What have you learned? Where is Ronnie?’

‘Mrs Mallick, what kind of story are you trying to tell us?’ Sauermeer said. ‘We have no record of any Americans named Barr, or Mallick for that matter. If you have a nephew, he must have misled you deliberately—’

‘What do you mean, if I have a nephew?’ Lily was furious. ‘You’re pretending you don’t know him because something has happened to him! Maybe you don’t have his name because he wasn’t a student – he didn’t enroll in your university, he just sat in on classes. Did you check with your professors?’

‘Even if he sat in on a class, he would have to register with the center and the university. Perhaps you’re mistaken about the country he’s visiting. Many more Americans go to Kazakhstan than Hayalistan.’

‘You think I’m a stupid old woman who doesn’t know the difference between a country name with k’s and z’s in it and one without them?’ Lily cried. ‘I bet you really do know where he is. I read how you put students in prison for running a free school, and maybe you thought Ronnie trying to help addicts was just as bad. Is he in prison and you don’t want to tell me? I need to go to the American embassy and report this!’

She started for the stairs, but Sauermeer put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘She is a problem for the Americans to solve,’ he said in Russian to Ishana. ‘Call their embassy, see what they know about this woman. Call Immigration to see if the nephew ever entered the country. Keep her here until we get some answers.’

Ishana shut Lily in a small room off the director’s office. After half an hour, when Ishana released her, Lily subjected her to a full barrage of her anger and her fears. Ishana didn’t answer, but frog-marched her down the marble staircase. Lily was stumbling, unable to keep up with Ishana’s pace, tripping over her walking poles, but Ishana didn’t stop to help her.

Sauermeer appeared at the bottom of the staircase. He and Ishana again conferred in Russian.

‘The Americans never heard of a Ronnie Barr,’ Ishana said. ‘Neither did Customs and Immigration. This woman is just a fool. I don’t think she has a nephew. I think she got taken advantage of by some rip-off artist and now she wants to find him and get her money back.’

‘But what about the free school and the clinics?’ Sauermeer asked. ‘She couldn’t make that up.’

Ishana shrugged. ‘She could make anything up. She read the New Yorker essay. Probably something in it stuck to her and she transferred it to this boy toy.’

‘Okay.’ Sauermeer agreed, just as happy to not have to deal with Lily any longer. ‘Give her back her passport, let her go. Make sure the guards give her a good talking-to.’

The guards did their job. They put Lily into a taxi and told her she was not welcome on the Ts’gali University campus. If she showed up again, they would lodge a complaint with the American embassy.

17

CONFUSED OLD WOMAN

A young man from the embassy was waiting for Lily when she got back to her hotel. He handed her a card, which she studied. Leland Moorhouse, Second Secretary, US Embassy.

‘Ms Mallick? We had a call from the Gambrey Center that you were disturbing their operations.’

‘I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t even pick a flower from the roadside,’ Lily protested.

‘The director of the Gambrey Center says you disrupted their staff with pointless inquiries. I have a car waiting outside. We’d like you to come to the embassy to discuss their concerns.’

Lily was indignant. ‘What about my concerns? What about my nephew? No one wants to talk about him. I bet you’re hiding him.’

‘You can talk all this over at the embassy. If you don’t come with me now, I have been instructed to help you pack your suitcase and take you to the airport. You will be deported.’

‘First the guards at the university take my passport and keep it for hours, and now my own government wants to throw me out of someone else’s country?’

‘Ms Mallick, we Americans are all guests here at the pleasure of the Hayali government. If you – or any visiting American – cause an incident, they can throw all our diplomats out of the country. If you really once lived in this country, as you told the Gambrey Center staff, you know that we Americans must put our own wishes and needs behind the wishes of our host country.’

The desk clerk was watching, worried. His guest, an old lady who always smiled and spoke to him in fluent Hayali, might be in trouble. If the Americans were angry with her, then he would have to ask her to leave; they could shut down the hotel. Lily saw his expression and waved at him, putting on a cheery smile. He buried his head in his phone but watched her leave out of the corner of his eye.

Security at the embassy was tight. Marines at a guard station outside the high walls checked the car, examined her backpack, and studied Cinda’s passport before letting the car through.

‘Looks like you waste a lot of taxpayer money here, young man,’ Lily said.

‘There are terror threats everywhere, Ms Mallick. No one wants to be the person who has to tell a family their loved one died because we skimped on security.’

‘No one wants to die, for that matter,’ Lily said, ‘but I’m think-ing this big building must cost a fortune to heat, I don’t see any solar panels. Maybe they’re hiding where terrorists can’t see them.’

Moorhouse didn’t try to reply. Cinda Mallick was the worst kind of assignment, truculent and talkative. He was glad to hand her over to the CIA agent tasked with interviewing her.

The two women sat in a small room set up with a table and two chairs, not obviously an interrogation room, but Lily noted the cameras and the one-way window.

‘Cinda – can I call you Cinda? – I’m Jordan Clay with the embassy. We’re trying—’

‘No, you can’t call me Cinda,’ Lily snapped. ‘How old are you? Twenty? Do you want children calling your grandmother by her first name?’

‘Ms Mallick, then,’ Clay said. ‘We’re trying to figure out why you were on the Ts’gali University campus today.’

‘I must have missed the signs saying you needed an appointment to look at the campus. Like I told everyone I talked to, I wanted to find my nephew. Ronnie Barr – Ronald Barr. Everyone in this country jumps in horror when I say his name, so I want to know what’s happened to him. Is he in a prison here? A hospital? Is he dead?’

‘We don’t show any record of Ronnie or Ronald Barr entering the country. Maybe you thought he was studying here, but he was really in one of the other Stans?’

‘This article explains why he came to Hayalistan!’ Lily pulled one of her New Yorker copies from her backpack. ‘The pollution, the drug addiction. The article blames some woman in the CIA for causing these problems. Ronnie said if our country created the problems, American citizens have a duty to fix them!

‘If you’re saying you can’t find Ronnie, I bet he’s in a prison and the local authorities have erased all trace of him being here. I read how they put their own young people in jail for running a free school and a free health clinic. They probably picked up Ronnie for being a Good Samaritan.’

Clay was supposed to conduct the interrogation, but her training hadn’t taught her how to silence a belligerent old woman. She finally said, ‘We didn’t find anyone named Barr related to you. Are you sure you have a nephew?’

Lily’s mouth dropped open, shock, anger. ‘What? Are you some genealogy nut that you’re looking for everyone related to me? If I looked up Jordan Clay, what would I find? A drawer full of career criminals? Or there’s no one by that name anywhere on planet Earth?’

‘There are thousands of people named Ronald Barr,’ Clay said. ‘Just not related to you.’

‘Shows how much you and your electronic friends know, then, doesn’t it?’ Lily pulled herself up to her full height, eyes burning bright with anger. ‘It makes me sure you know where Ronnie is, and you’re pretending he doesn’t exist so you can make me think I’m crazy. They call it gaslighting, you know. That’s what Ronnie and his friends say when they’re trying to make me believe something I know isn’t true. Just gaslighting you, Auntie.’

‘We have databases that list every American who’s traveling anywhere in the world,’ Clay said. ‘There’s a Ronald Barr traveling in the Philippines, seventeen Ronald Barrs in western Europe, thirteen in South and Central America. None at all in Central Asia.’

‘So, you are the CIA.’ Lily’s stiff erect pose embodied anger. ‘Then tell me this, Ms Know-Everything. It says here in this article that some American woman twenty-five years ago or so started all the problems with drugs and pollution that Hayalistan has today. The magazine didn’t print her name, which means the CIA is hiding her identity from the rest of us. If you can do that, with all your fancy databases, then you can for sure erase any trace of Ronnie from the Hayalistan immigration records.’

Lily thumbed through the article and pointed at the place that blamed the anonymous CIA agent for Hayalistan’s woes.

‘We didn’t plant that article in the magazine,’ Clay exclaimed, rattled. ‘The magazine did it themselves. We have no idea who they were talking about when they made that accusation, or where they got their information, so we can’t defend ourselves from the attack. That doesn’t change the reality here on the ground that no one named Ronald Barr came into this country in the last year.’

Lily became more belligerent, lobbing accusations at Jordan Clay that her father had made when she told him she’d joined the Company.

‘Everything the CIA does is against American values for freedom and self-determination. You assassinate people if they don’t go along with what we want! Your babulya’s parents were executed by Stalin’s secret police because someone fingered them. It would have broken her heart to know you’ d joined the secret police.’

Now she was pushing Jordan Clay into the same uncomfortable corner. Use the tools you have at hand, Jason Tedros used to counsel her. Not all of them can be washed in bleach.

Finally, Clay left the room. Lily stayed in character: she knew she was visible through the two-way glass. ‘You can’t keep me here!’ she shouted. ‘I’m an American citizen, I have rights, I’ll call my senators when I get home and let them know how you do your job when you think no one’s watching.’

After five minutes or so of ranting, she slumped back in her chair, fumbling in her backpack for a tissue. It was almost an hour later before Clay returned, accompanied by a Marine corporal.

‘We’re going to let you go, Ms Mallick.’

That meant they’d searched Lily’s hotel room and questioned the desk clerk and hadn’t found anything incriminating.

‘About time!’ Lily snapped.

Jordan’s face was tight with anger, but she merely said, ‘We will be keeping an eye on you for the rest of your stay in Hayalistan. If you create any more disturbances, we will put you on the first flight out of the country, no matter its destination, and leave you to find your way home on your own.’

No matter its destination. That could be Moscow or Teheran. Hayalistan had diplomatic relations with a number of countries the US didn’t deal with. Time to be sedate as befit an old woman.

The Marine corporal drove her back to the hostel without speaking. Lily didn’t try to talk, either. She was worn out from embodying Cinda’s emotions.

It didn’t surprise her that the embassy responded to a call from the Gambrey Center. Gambrey Minerals and Mining likely gave millions – or these days, hundreds of millions – in political contributions to the current US administration. If Gambrey stubbed their toe, their hired senators and cabinet officers would cry in reflected pain and make sure that nothing jeopardized Gambrey’s mining operations.

Lily wondered if she’d been stupid to bring up the magazine article’s veiled claim that she herself had been responsible for the destruction in Hayalistan. She didn’t think Jordan Clay would wonder about it, but someone else watching the recording of the interview might.

Back at the hotel, her injured shoulder was throbbing in a red-spiked fury of pain. She managed to smile at the desk clerk as she collected her key. ‘Everything’s okay. The embassy was helping me with a visa problem.’

She was more exhausted than hungry. She lay down, easing the muscles with some liniment she’d been given by a woman from Odessa who’d been a pharmacist in Ukraine before the war, before she became a refugee whose daughter Lily tutored. As the pain receded, Lily fell deeply asleep.

18

PIECES OF THE HEART

Lily had a personal errand in the country that she’d been dreading. She could not leave Hayalistan without seeing Tania Iremi. In the morning, she decided she’d better visit Tania that day, in case the embassy forced her to leave on short notice.

Tania lived in Muq’tsu, the first village you came to on the trails up the mountain. She was the woman who had first befriended Lily. Tania was famous for her yak and goat hair yarn, which she spun and dyed herself, and then wove into everything from lightweight cloth to heavy rugs. Lily had showcased her work to visiting Americans and Europeans. As demand for her art grew internationally, Tania had started a collective among the villages that dotted the mountainside. Lily had helped them set up marketing plans and had brought over quilters from the States to exchange ideas.

This work added to her boss’s annoyance. (‘You’re the cultural attaché, not the women’s lib attaché!’)

Lily and Tania had developed a personal friendship on top of the work they did together. Tania had helped Lily become fluent in Hayali. She’d vouched for her with villagers and nomads on Muqqadas’s higher reaches, giving Lily the entrée she’d needed for learning about Russian and Iranian activity in the border regions.

Lily’s transfer to India had happened at such short notice that she had no time for farewells. Leaving without saying goodbye was a terrible breach of such a deep friendship. Lily had spent hours on the letter she finally sent from Delhi. She never heard back, so she couldn’t know if Tania had never received the letter, or if the wound went too deep to allow for a response.

After a light breakfast, she went to the market and put together the traditional gift of a suppliant to the head of a clan: salt crystals in an intricately carved wooden box, and a plain wood box holding ashes and a horsehair brush.

Many of the mountain villages belonged to the Snow Leopards, but Muq’tsu was part of the Reindeer clan, and so Lily bought a box decorated with reindeer leaping across the high peaks of Muqqadas.

A cold driving rain was blowing down from the mountain when Lily boarded the ferry at the Great Mosque landing station. Her yak-hide boots and coat were waterproof, but she covered them with a yellow poncho she’d also bought in the market. Bright yellow made her easy to spot, even on a cold, wet day.

When she left the ferry, Lily went into the big hall where people were waiting to board or simply waiting out the storm. She paused for a cup of weak, bitter tea at one of the stands. A group of a dozen mountain women were approaching, laden with the goods they hoped to sell at the K’tali market a half kilometer farther to the west. As they passed the tea stall, Lily bent, pulled off the yellow poncho, and turned it inside out. It was gray when she stood up, the same color as the janitors’ smocks.

The hall had two big doors, one on the south for boarding the ferry, the second on the west, leading to the K’tali market. There was a third, small entrance on the east that led to the trails up the mountain. Lily left through the east door, passing another group of villagers bringing their wares to the market. In ten minutes, she was well away from the clamor of the ferry landing. No one was following her.

As she climbed to Muq’tsu, the rain turned to snow. She had to stop frequently to catch her breath. After an hour, she came to a shepherd’s hut, where she rested for half an hour.

Away from the wind she could open her paper map to check her route. Avalanches and fires had altered the trails since she’d last climbed here, but the main trail remained as she remembered. She left the poncho in the hut. Without its skirts catching her legs she was able to move more easily, but she was so tense about the visit that her pace remained slow.

When she’d been a frequent visitor to the mountain villages, Muq’stu had been a prosperous place of perhaps two hundred households. Visitors were greeted at the entrance by the headman’s yurt, festooned with Reindeer banners.

The flags were gone. Part of the felt covering the headman’s yurt had disintegrated, and the latticed struts underneath had broken. Some mangy goats were wandering in and out of the yurt’s missing door. Lily thought they were eating the felt walls.

It used to be that even in winter, children would be playing in the communal gardens or looking after the goats and chickens. On a snowy day like today, the men would have headed to the headman’s yurt for checkers and beer, while the women gathered for tea and quilting. Today, Lily couldn’t see anyone outside.

While most of the houses still stood, the whole village had a sense of fatigue. Only a few homes still had animal sheds or active chicken runs.

The lanes that ran between the homes hadn’t been kept up. Lily kept tripping over frozen mounds of dirt, but she made it to Tania’s home in the third lane from the village entrance. Smoke rose from the chimney. At least here the yurt’s felting was well maintained.

Lily knocked on the door, and then called out, ‘It’s Lily, Tania, Lily the American. If you are at home, I beg you will speak to me.’

She stood still in the snow. Behind the door she could hear voices, and then realized she was listening to a television. She knocked again, called again, and then the television was muted, the door opened.

Tania stood there, old now, but holding herself erect, staring at Lily with a fierce eagle eye. ‘Lily the American, Lily the CIA agent as we know you were, I should throw hot water on you and send you back into the storm.’

Lily held out the box of salt, but Tania refused to touch it. Lily laid the box at Tania’s feet and opened the box of ashes. She used the horsehair brush to paint her forehead and cheeks with ashes.

‘I am a suppliant,’ she said. ‘You are ten times the woman I am, and so I am calling on your great spirit to forgive my weakness.’

‘You left without saying goodbye. That is a violation of friendship which cannot be mended with a pretend gesture twenty years beyond the act.’

‘This isn’t a pretense. I am truly sorry. My elders moved me too quickly for me to climb up Muqqadas to say goodbye,’ Lily said. ‘I wrote you a letter.’

‘You never obeyed your country’s rules when you thought they were wrong, so I can believe you could climb this mountain if it seemed important. A letter is like a kick when you have been too cowardly to say goodbye.’

‘They had a Marine guard watch me pack my suitcase. I was not even allowed to speak to Rani,’ Lily said.

‘You left, and then the suffering began. Your country began to attack the mountain. They made Muqqadas breathe out poison, but it’s us who are suffering, not you. You see what’s left of Muq’tsu? The poison from the mines made it hard to grow crops or feed our chickens and so people left for Ts’gali, and then they had to find work to feed their families, and the work was in the mines. The rest of us stayed, but it has been a hard staying.

‘People blame you, Lily. Everyone knew you were CIA, but we thought you were also a true friend. But you left and the destruction began.’

Lily stood silent. She knew Tania was reciting a speech she’d rehearsed in her mind many times over the past twenty-five years. The speech did not have a place in it for Lily to answer. Anyway, Lily couldn’t justify herself, or the destruction brought on by the mines.

At least now she knew how she’d come to be seen as the cause of Hayalistan’s decay. It wasn’t a person spreading rumors, it was a collective sense that she’d abused the friendship shown her.

She took off her hat and emptied the rest of the ashes onto her head, then turned and headed back down the village street toward the trail. She felt an impulse to go inside the headman’s dilapidated yurt, to sit there and let the weather rock her to sleep in the arms of the great mountain.

She was staring through the broken door when Tania came up behind her and grabbed her shoulder.

‘You came all this way; you covered yourself with ash. We are both old women, let us find a way across this chasm.’

Tania’s husband Yuri was sitting by the stove, carving something. He nodded at Lily, but didn’t speak. Lily’s relationship had always been with his wife, and this was his wife’s business. Tania brewed tea and took Lily to her private space, where she handed her a basin of water and a cloth.

‘Before we speak, wipe your face, comb your hair. I want to see what old age has left of Lily.’

When they were settled on the rugs Tania herself had woven, Lily told her tale, her years crisscrossing Asian countries, her final return to her own country.

‘When Rani was killed, I was sure you would return,’ Tania said.

‘When I was sent to India, the man who was my elder said he would put me in prison if I returned to Ts’gali,’ Lily said. Hayali had no direct word for ‘boss.’ The closest they came was elder – not the word she would have chosen for Bruce.

‘My new elder in Delhi sent me on a mission to a remote place in their mountains. I left and rode a bus to the border and then came in on foot, through the shepherd’s trails. I had two days to be here before they knew I was missing. I wanted to lay an eagle feather on Rani’s eyes. I knew I couldn’t approach Anta. She was in a rage of grief. Then I heard in the markets that she was blaming me for the coup and for Rani’s death. And so, I had to return with my feather still in my hands, and my grief sewn into my heart.’

Tania didn’t speak for a long moment. Lily could feel her debating what to say next and so she retreated into her accepting listener pose – whatever you say, I listen and do not judge.

‘There was never a funeral for Rani,’ Tania said at last. ‘The Elurbar were crazed with grief and anger. They demanded his body, demanded Agajan perform the full rites of the Snow Leopard clan, but no one ever saw his body.’

‘Did he live, then?’ Lily cried out. ‘If he lived – if he’s alive – surely we would have known years ago!’

‘Everyone has a different story,’ Tania said. ‘Some say that Agajan had his soldiers carry Rani’s body to a ravine and dropped him for the scavengers to eat. Some say the mountain Elurbar took him in and healed him, but that he refused to lead an army against Agajan and the American Marines. For five years after his disappearance there were risings, people claiming to be Rani, and then when they saw it was a fool pretending to be Rani, the whole country became weak and listless. On top of that, the mines were opening and the air and water were turning yellow. The clans became weak. Villages like ours fell apart.’

‘What do you think happened to Rani?’ Lily asked.

‘I think the Americans took him. They knew if he were alive, there would be constant risings. If he were dead, and people knew his burial place, that would also be a center of risings. So, the Americans made it easy for Agajan and took him away. If he was still alive, they killed him.’

Tania stared defiantly at Lily, daring her to contradict her narrative. When Lily didn’t answer, Tania said, ‘I believe you when you say you love the mountain and our people. I believe you felt a true kinship to me and to the other women. But you are not from here, this is not your blood. At the time that our lives were becoming more and more difficult, you were in some other country, making yourself feel a kinship with those people. I don’t know where your heart is, Lily. Is it in America? Is it cut into little pieces with each of us getting a small part of it?’

Lily bowed her head. It was a fair criticism.

‘When you leave here, when you return to America, will you forget us again? Muqqadas is a great mountain who ruled our lives since before we Hayali peoples knew there was time, knew there was place. But America is a bigger mountain. America has cut into Muqqadas and made the great mountain ill and made his people ill. Can you go back to your big mountain and cut a small hole in it, a hole just big enough to let our mountain out, and restore Muqqadas to us?’

The storm had ended by the time Lily left. When she explained to Tania that the American embassy was watching her, and that it would be hard for her to return to the hotel unseen, Tania found a neighbor with business in Ts’gali who would go down that night in his yak-drawn cart, with Lily hidden under the straw. They made it in time for the last ferry of the day.

The neighbor refused payment for a night’s lodging. In the mountains, people still helped each other; he was doing this for Tania and Yuri, not for Lily.

She made her way back to the hostel on foot. She had retrieved the poncho from the shepherd’s hut and stopped several times in the Central Market for food, or to rest on one of the benches. If the embassy was tracking her, they’d have no trouble finding her.

19

THE FISHERMAN’S TALE

Lily woke before sunrise the next morning, roused by the call to prayer from the local mosque. She’d slept for almost twelve hours. It took a moment to remember where she was, what name she was using.

She went to the window to see as much as she could of the weather. When she leaned out the casement, the air was cold, but there was a warming edge to it. Yesterday’s storm had blown through. It would be a good day for sightseeing.

The call to worship echoed down the narrow alleys of the old city. On an impulse, Lily dressed and walked to the Great Mosque. She would offer thanks for the restoration of her friendship with Tania.

The mosque was more than a mile away, on the southern shore of Lake Sakin. By the time she got there, the sun was starting to pierce through the fog and smog hovering over the lake.

She sat on a bench in the mosque’s courtyard, facing Muqqadas. For decades, she had disciplined herself to keep thoughts of Rani in a narrow political box. Now, looking at the mountain, she couldn’t or wouldn’t keep at bay the memory of their climbs up Muqqadas.

She would leave her lodgings when mist was still on the water. In those days, it was true mist, not a cloud of pollution. She would wander through the bazaar collecting tea and b’yani, the crisp fried buns stuffed with dates and yak cheese, and start up one of the trails. Sometimes she would find Rani, most times not. The only way to see each other free of surveillance was to leave all their meetings to chance.

A weekend in the hunter’s hut when she was supposed to be on leave in Ankara had been a high-risk mistake. She’d returned to the station with a glib report about getting an unexpected intelligence tip on her way to the airport. She submitted a report based on tidbits she’d actually gathered the previous week.

Her immediate boss, Bruce Weyrich, was also on leave, one of his drunk holidays in Greece. Lily had sent her report directly to Jason Tedros, by then Central Asia director, with Turkey and the Stans all reporting to him. Jason’s ironic acceptance of her lie suggested he knew where she’d really been. He’d brought it up in the interview when he told her she needed to accept the posting to Delhi because she was causing friction for the new Hayalistan government.

This morning, she leaned back against the bench with her eyes closed. She let herself feel the sun’s warmth on her face as if it were Rani’s hand stroking her.

She heard voices behind her. The prayer service must be over; people were leaving the mosque, making tea or coffee dates, fussing about work schedules or childcare. In her time here, not many people paid attention to the five daily prayer ritual, but this was a substantial crowd, with a lot of young people, including women in hijab or niqab.

Lily didn’t get up until most of the crowd had passed. As she started onto the esplanade, a group of young men in hoodies, faces covered by scarves, suddenly turned and swarmed around her, forcing her back into the courtyard, yelling anti-American sentiments in English and Hayali.

Lily couldn’t keep her footing. When she fell, the group dispersed. A woman in a niqab hurried to her side, helped her to her feet, apologizing in halting English for the ‘rude boys.’

Under her breath, she added in Hayali, ‘Duruna from the tea shop. Take the ferry to the north shore this afternoon, the K’tali market. Go out through the back of the large yarn tent and head toward the mountain.’

She helped Lily back to her seat on the bench. ‘Grandmother, I am shame. Rude boys, very much rude.’

She walked briskly through the courtyard gates and disappeared.

A trio of women off to one side were speaking in German about the attack. They were shocked, but it had happened too quickly for them to intervene. Now they came over to Lily to make sure she was all right.

‘We photographed the incident,’ one of them said in English. ‘We can text the pictures to you but no one’s face is visible. Can we get you a taxi, or telephone a friend?’

Lily thanked them. ‘Nothing’s broken, just the shock unnerved me.’

The women insisted on walking with her as far as a tea stall near the mosque, even buying a cup of smoky Hayali tea for her. Lily drank it perched on the stall’s one stool.

She’d been careless, stupid, mooning over Rani as if she were in a romance novel, not running an op. The CIA agent who’d interrogated her yesterday had threatened to keep a watch on her, but she’d still not taken ordinary precautions when she set out this morning. Four years as a civilian and she’d forgotten forty years of training.

Okay, then, start thinking like an agent again. The group that knocked her down had planned their own op carefully. They’d dressed like observant Muslim youth, staked out their quarry, approached her at a point where they could make an easy getaway.

That meant they’d been watching her at the hostel. What had she overlooked? A change in the clerk at the noodle stand on the corner? The skate-boarders changing places in the plaza behind the mosque?

Duruna from the teahouse. She’d been part of the foursome of serious students at the café Lily had visited on her first night in the country. Mika had been scornful and blatantly rude. The one youth had followed her lead but the other two, Duruna and Azam, Lily thought his name was, had been more cautious. And now they wanted Lily to cross Lake Sakin for a meeting.

It could be a trap, but Lily didn’t think so. The German women had shown her the video of the assault. It lasted seventeen seconds, including Duruna’s whispered instruction. If they wanted to kill Lily, they could have done it right there on the esplanade and fled just as they’d done when they knocked her down.

Back at the hostel, Lily asked the desk clerk for information about boat tours on Lake Sakin. The question seemed to reassure him: Lily was going to behave like an ordinary tourist, not bring the Americans or the Hayali secret police into his hotel. He entered enthusiastically into Lily’s interest in local crafts.

‘The best place is the K’tali market. The women from the mountain villages spend the winter creating wall hangings and rugs with beautiful colors and designs. You will love it! And now the farmers from the plateau have their new cheeses, and the snow berries.’

He booked a ticket for her and showed her on a map where to pick up the ferry. ‘You should take a taxi from the hotel. It is a long walk from here to the landing place and you will be walking around the market all afternoon.

‘Forgive my saying a personal thing, Grandmother,’ he added, ‘but perhaps you would like our laundrywoman to clean your jeans and your jacket for you.’

Lily looked down. Her jeans were dirty from where she’d landed on the ground. Her sore shoulder was aching, too, from the impact. She agreed her clothes needed cleaning and handed them over to an elderly housekeeper. When the woman saw the dollar bills tucked in the jacket pocket, she promised to have them back by the end of the day.

With more liniment on her shoulder, clothes that were shabby but not dirt-stained, Lily went down to catch her taxi. The desk clerk handed her in in person.

He had taken the liberty of packing some b’yani and fruit for her. ‘You need your strength, Grandmother.’

The boat landing was half a mile east of the old city, in a spot where the prevailing winds blew the air more or less clean. Lily stood on deck, letting the winds blow through her, thinking of nothing in particular. There was no point planning for her meeting, since she had no idea what the students were thinking.

Yesterday she’d taken the ferry straight across the lake, but this was a tourist boat, making stops at landmarks on the north shore, before landing at K’tali. Ts’gali boasted dozens of markets, but K’tali was the biggest, bigger even than the Central Market in the city center. Its closeness to the mountain meant villagers could bring their woolen and leather goods down to sell, while the easy route from the eastern plain brought in farmers who wanted to avoid government price controls.

Lily explored in a haphazard way, to see if the embassy was making good on its promise to follow her. Don’t look around, keep moving, stop only for tea or to admire the felt hangings. She wished she had room in her luggage for another to go with her Muqqadas hanging in Chicago.

She finally came upon the yarn tent Duruna had specified. Most of the market shops were single stalls, some with weatherproof coverings, most open-air. This one was unmistakable. An outsize canvas tent, with ventilation fans for summer, housed several dozen vendors. A sign in Russian, Hayali, and English announced it as the ‘Muqqadas Collective Wool Gatherers.’

In English it sounded like a pun, but it was a literal translation from the Hayali, where the same verb could mean to gather or to create. Still, it wasn’t inappropriate – there was a dreamy quality to the dimly lit displays. Stalls ranged on either side of narrow walkways held sweaters, knit hats, wool rugs and hangings, and thousands of skeins of yarn.

Lily moved from one stand to another, admiring the yarn that hung over the bars lining the room. Some were goat hair, some sheep, some yak, all dyed from plants native to Hayalistan.

Even though she herself didn’t knit, Lily couldn’t resist buying several skeins, one in a deep purple that evoked the night sky, another in the green of the old pine tree. She took the skeins to a folding chair she’d spotted at the rear of the stall and started to arrange her purchases on the back of the chair. She knelt to fuss with her bags, which she put behind the chair.

When she got up, she was wearing a traditional Hayali hat and vest, made from yak hide. Her American jacket and walking poles were tucked beneath the chair. She passed briskly through a slit in the stall’s back curtain, exchanging greetings in Hayali with passersby, walking up the trail away from the market with no trace of a limp.

The trail wasn’t the one most villagers used on their way into the city. It passed through rocky terrain that was hard to build on. She saw a shepherd’s hut, where she stopped to pee, but there weren’t any other houses. The trail was also overgrown with junipers and cedars. Lily found a bush thick enough to shelter her from anyone on the path and sat on the ground behind it to eat the b’yani and fruit the hotel clerk had packed for her.

She had folded the paper the snack was wrapped in and put it in her pocket when Mika appeared on the trail. Duruna and the two young men who’d been at her table in the tea shop trailed behind her.

‘So, you came,’ Mika said, lip curled. ‘Duruna said you would; I thought you would not. Now you are here, we need to know who you are and what you’re doing here,’ Mika said. ‘You’re putting all of us in danger. Not just my friends and me, but all the students in Ts’gali. Some already spent time in prison for running the free school and community health clinics. A wild American running her mouth like a sea bass spouting water brings attention back on us. What is your real reason for being here? Are you truly an American? Are you a saboteur?’

‘I am truly an American,’ Lily said. ‘I am not a saboteur.’

‘And your name? We know it is not Cinda Mallick, even if you have created a passport that fooled our customs agents.’

‘And how do you know that?’ Lily asked.

‘Duruna knows that Cinda Mallick is dead.’

‘Tell me how she died,’ Lily said.

‘So you can contradict her?’ Mika was scornful.

‘I know how Cinda died,’ Lily said. ‘I want to make sure Duruna really knows.’

Mika thought for a moment. ‘Grigo – take her behind that tree, have her whisper to you.’

Lily followed him to the tree a few yards from the trail and told him that Cinda had drowned in Lake Sakin. When they came back, Grigo nodded at Mika.

‘Now explain why you are telling these lies!’ Mika demanded.

‘Before I tell you anything, I must hear what Duruna knows and how she knows it,’ Lily said. ‘She was not born when Cinda Mallick died, and her mother was likely still a teenager taking part in pony races. What does she know and how can she prove it?’

The four held a muttered conference. Lily couldn’t hear the conversation, but she could follow the body language. Mika didn’t want Duruna to speak, but she was overruled by the two men, who beckoned Lily back to the group.

‘My grandfather worked at the Australian embassy,’ Duruna said. ‘He did the kind of work Hayali people do for foreigners – he was a cleaner. He didn’t speak English, except the words for his job, but he knew the lady, Shen Cinda. She created the special shirts for the buzkashi matches. My grandfather was with the Lake Otter clan and when Shen Cinda learned this, she gave him one of the Lake Otter clan shirts.

‘Something went wrong between her and the men with power. There were many arguments and much shouting, and when that happens, the Hayali know to stay out of the way, because we will be blamed for the problems. But then Shen Cinda disappeared. Grandfather thought she had been sent to her own people in Australia.

‘Then came the time when Grandfather was fishing in Lake Sakin, just before the sun rises, as the Lake Otter people used to do – in those days, they could speak to the Lake Otter spirit, but now the pollution in the lake has driven the spirit away from us. A truck arrived about fifty meters from where he stood in the lake shallows. A man took a small boat with a motor from the back of the truck and ran it out into the lake.

‘Grandfather was angry that he would use a motor, which would scare the fish. He was going to protest, but something about the man made him nervous. He heard the sound of something heavy being thrown into the water, and then the man came back to shore.

‘He spoke in English to someone inside the truck as he was putting the boat onto the back. Of course, Grandfather didn’t know what was said, and he was too far away to know who it was in the dark, but when the truck left, he swam out to where the boat had been. He found Shen Cinda and brought her back to shore, but she was dead.

‘Grandfather never fished in Sakin again. Eating a fish that witnessed a murder can destroy you from within.’

‘Your grandfather didn’t know who took Cinda’s body out into the lake?’ Lily asked.

‘It was too dark. The man spoke to the truck driver in English, but many people speak English. The death took away Grandfather’s spirit. He stopped working at the embassy. He said he would forever be uneasy, wondering if he was cleaning up after a killer.

‘My grandfather died when I was fourteen, haunted by the spirit of Shen Cinda. And now, here you are, a woman of Shen Cinda’s age, claiming her name. I don’t believe her spirit has risen from Lake Sakin, but I do believe you mean no good for Hayali people if you are using the name of a murdered woman.’

Mika and her friends nodded angrily.

‘Then I must trust you with my story,’ Lily said. ‘I must trust that your anger will not rise so high that you report me to your own police or to the Americans.’

‘We are not informers,’ one of the young men said.

‘I must trust your words, too,’ Lily said dryly.

‘Azam speaks for us all,’ Grigo said. ‘It is not an empty promise.’

‘Very well. My name is Lily Sedako. I worked in Hayalistan for the American government for many years. I learned your language, I worked with people in villages up and down the mountains, sharing their music, their artwork, and their stories with my country. I worked also with Rani, the Elurbar, before he became Hayalistan’s prime minister.’

‘We have heard your name,’ Mika said. ‘We know you were with the CIA, working to destroy our country.’

‘And that is why I’m here,’ Lily said. Her legs were starting to ache from standing so long, which made it difficult to focus on the right words, the right words in a language which after all was not her own.

‘An American journalist printed that story in an American magazine,’ Lily said. ‘He included a photograph of me bathing with Hayali women in the full moon ceremony, and that photograph was a violation of a sacred place. Did you tell him I was with the CIA? Did you blame me for Hayalistan’s problems? Or give him that photograph?’

‘We gave him the photograph,’ Mika admitted. ‘An old woman in a burka came up to me in the market, two days after we first met the journalist, and gave me the picture. She said to give it to the reporter and tell him it proved the CIA sent agents to spy on private gatherings.’

‘How did she know you were talking to a journalist?’ Lily asked.

Mika and Grigo stared at each other.

‘How did she know?’ Grigo asked the others.

‘She couldn’t be with the secret police,’ Azam said, tone uneasy. ‘If they wanted to arrest us, that would have happened for speaking to the foreign journalist.’

‘Did she give you the name of the agent she said had infiltrated the hi’ leko ritual?’ Lily asked. ‘That is to say, did she give you my name?’

‘No,’ Grigo said slowly. ‘Maybe she would have, but I had to leave quickly; I saw one of the police who arrested me two years ago. I needed to leave before he recognized me. They will take students like us, protestors, in for questioning on any or no reason.’

Mika stared at Lily with hard, angry eyes. ‘You see why we love you.’

‘We did wonder how the woman had the picture,’ Duruna said.

‘We worried it was a trap, but, still, we gave it to the reporter. He wanted your name, he wanted proof that you were with the CIA, which we weren’t able to give, but still, we see he used the photograph, and wrote there was a rumor about you.

‘And now you have told us the rumor is true: you were with the CIA. You abused our hospitality to destroy our air and water!’ Mika’s face twisted with anger.

Lily felt her age move up her legs to the small of her back, which had never ached before. ‘Please think one step at a time,’ she said. ‘Step one: I was with the CIA. Step two: I respected your hospitality. I never repeated anything any woman said in those meetings.

‘I worked hard for Hayali artists, bringing their work to the eyes of people around the world. I would have happily spent my life here, but eight months before Rani’s death, one year before the leases were signed, my government sent me to India to work there. That was step three – I wasn’t here when the Agajan government came to power and gave the leases to the Gambrey Company.’

‘That was convenient!’ Grigo said, lip curled.

‘Grigo, let her speak,’ Azam said. ‘Otherwise, how will we know who to believe?’

‘Now I have returned and find Lake Sakin filled with garbage, the air poisoned by the mines, and the Great Mountain himself scarred. I know two years ago students rose up in protest against the government. I know many were shot or sent to prison, but I don’t know what made you rise up then and not today. After all, now is when the lithium leases are due for a twenty-year renewal.’

‘If you work for the Americans, you know the answers,’ Grigo said.

‘I no longer work for the Americans. I traveled here in Cinda’s name because my own government doesn’t trust me. If they saw my name on a flight to Ts’gali, they would not let me leave America. Cinda had applied for an American passport. It came after she died and I kept it.’

Grigo hunched a shoulder. ‘You know so much; you must know the miners went on strike.’

‘Yes, I read about it at the time.’

‘The conditions in the mines are brutal. The Americans care nothing for the lives and health of the miners. If one man drops dead, there is another who needs a few pieces of silver to feed his family,’ Mika said savagely.

‘When the miners went on strike, the government closed the free clinic and free school, where the four of us worked. We thought if we joined the miners, the whole country would rise up,’ Azam said.

‘We were wrong,’ Mika said. ‘Our friends were shot. Grigo also spent three months in prison.’

Lily recited the verse the students had written around the border of their banners in the New Yorker photograph. ‘When I saw those lines in the photograph of your banners, I thought a real revolution might be starting.’

‘How do you know this poem?’ Mika cried.

‘I learned to chant it from Rani himself,’ Lily said. She described the communal bonfires, the chanting contests, the eagle hunts. She kept her voice flat, dispassionate, to stop her insides from tearing open at the memories, when she lay under the stars in the Idumali meadow, Rani’s hands on her breasts, or when this, or this, or—

‘So, you know our poems, you love our art, but you will return to America and Sakin and Muqqadas will still be polluted,’ Mika said.

‘I came here on one path,’ Lily said. ‘I wanted to learn why I’m being blamed for the destruction of Hayalistan. Me, personally, Lily Sedako, not just the USA and the CIA. In fact, this is the only time in my life that I told my true name to strangers.’

That was part of the CIA’s protection of its agents, to make it hard for them to be tracked by people who might bear a grudge. Only Rani had her true name, her father’s name, whom to call if she died in the mountains.

‘Perhaps that means nothing to you, but I offer my actual name as sign that I am changing my path to one that might be the start of some healing here. I am one woman alone. By myself I can’t undo the harm the mountain and the lake are suffering, but perhaps I can help begin the undoing.

‘For that, I will need someone here who can talk to me and tell me what the politicians and the students are doing, where I can help, where I need to be careful. Can one of you trust me enough to give me a phone number?’

Mika looked disgusted. ‘A call from an American phone number? That is a fast route to prison.’

‘Not a call to the Anglo-American Club,’ Duruna said.

‘That’s brilliant!’ Azam was heavily sarcastic. ‘The place rich foreigners gather to buy and sell us, she’ll call and you’ll say, “Oh, Lily Sedako, so happy to hear from you.”’

‘I work there,’ Duruna said. ‘I’m not like you, from a family that has money to put me in an apartment. I answer the phone from six until ten in the morning, when the wives are calling to see if their husbands are really safe in bed, or out with an expensive woman. Lily can call to ask something that makes sense only to me if I’m the one answering the phone.’

Lily said, ‘If the caller number shows up on your screen when you answer, phone me back when you can speak privately.’

‘It’s ludicrous and dangerous,’ Mika said to Duruna. ‘You could lose your life for a crazed old American.’

Azam said, ‘I think it’s a good plan. What should Lily say?’

‘I could ask if eagle is on the menu today,’ Lily suggested.

‘Eagle is never on any menu!’ Grigo said. ‘It’s a sacred bird.’

‘That’s how Duruna will know it’s me,’ Lily said.

Mika grabbed Duruna’s arm and took her up the path. The two had a vehement argument, but they were too far away for Lily and the young men to make out the words. At the end, though, Mika shouted, ‘She said Lily could hypnotize people into betraying themselves, their families, even their clan! Lily has hypnotized you, but not me! I can see she is a grandmother filled with delusions!’

20

LIMPING ALONG

Mika strode down the mountain, Grigo trotting behind her, urging her to slow down before she twisted an ankle. Azam and Duruna followed more slowly. Lily waited for them to disappear around a bend in the trail before starting down herself.

She used to know the spidery trails the smugglers and herders used, routes that would take you deep into the mountain, or down to Ts’gali without being spotted. Looking around at the dense growth of trees and bushes, she felt a kind of panic, as if she were seeing a group of friends whose faces and names she couldn’t recall. She had to stay on the main trail, and walk it carefully, especially since she’d left her poles in the wool tent.

When she finally reached the K’tali market, her poles and the yarn she’d bought were still where she’d left them in the back of the wool tent. She collected them, returned her Hayali hat and coat to her backpack, and limped out between her two walking poles. The limp was feigned, but not her fatigue.

She found a noodle shop and sat on a bench, creating in her head a list of the things the students had told her. Duruna had given her the switchboard number at the Anglo-American Club; Lily made sure she had memorized it.

Then there was Duruna’s claim that an English speaker had murdered Cinda. Of course, Duruna hadn’t been a witness, only her grandfather, who’d died at least a decade ago. This secondhand testimony had two men in a truck, one who stayed in the cab, one who rowed Cinda out into the deep water. They’d spoken English, but that didn’t tell her anything about them. Cinda had been afraid of her own government, so maybe the men had been Australian. English wasn’t a clue, Lily realized – the two men could have been native speakers, but they might have been from anywhere, with English their only common language.

All the big mining consortia had offices in Ts’gali. Any of them could have watched Cinda’s gyrations in annoyance as she played one clan and one country against another. Gambrey, Bruce, any of Bruce’s drinking buddies – and he found those among the geologists and anthropologists, not just inside Ts’gali’s station.

Too many possibilities to trace Cinda’s killers, especially a quarter century after the fact. Best focus on the things where information was more or less public.

She got up, back and legs stiff. The past two days she’d been climbing for the first time since retirement and her muscles had frozen up. On a whim she went into a tent advertising therapeutic body oils. Lily pointed ruefully at her calves and lumbar spine and said, ‘Lord Muqqadas took his revenge on me for being away for so many years.’

The woman nodded: she knew those pains in an old body, and she had the right treatment, a salve made from the mountain’s pepper berries. She rubbed it into Lily’s back and told her to massage her legs with it when she returned to her hotel.

‘And drink this.’ It was a tisane made from the grasses of the Idumali meadow, which had special healing qualities.

While the stall owner was massaging her, Lily saw the same shoes stopping outside the tent that had twice walked past the bench where she was eating lunch.

She walked back to the ferry, casually, pausing to admire different artwork along the way. The shoes didn’t pass her, but when she boarded the ferry, she saw them walk around her to the last row of seats. American. The embassy was paying attention. Whatever she wanted to do in Hayalistan she’d better finish quickly before someone more experienced than Jordan Clay decided to interrogate her.

She needed to lie down when she got back to the hotel. She could no longer will her body to keep going when she’d depleted its reserves. Her shadow had stayed with her all the way to the hotel entrance. She thought it was just the one person but was too tired from her outing to double-check.

Tomorrow would be her last day in Hayalistan, and she would spend it resting quietly.

21

MIDNIGHT VISITOR

In her dream, she was trying to put her heart back together. It had been cut into little pieces that were floating on Lake Sakin. She found a piece with Rani’s name, another with her grandmother’s, a sliver belonging to Jason Tedros.

‘Until you find the piece labeled “Lily,” all these other pieces will float away,’ her grandmother said.

Suddenly she was struggling in the water. Cinda’s killers had returned and were trying to drown her. She fought back, punching so hard in her sleep that she woke herself. A hand across her throat was pinning her to the bed. Her legs were tangled in the quilt and she couldn’t move them. She jerked her head and bit the arm holding her. The hand eased its pressure and she sat up quickly, butting her head into the intruder’s stomach.

‘Mad dog! You think a bite will drive me away?’ A woman’s voice, speaking Hayali.

Lily slid shoulder first from the bed. She grabbed the woman’s legs and pulled hard. The woman didn’t fall, but in the seconds until she regained her balance, Lily scrambled to the door and yanked it open.

‘Leave now!’ she shouted.

‘Ah, yes, American. I will leave you. But not until you answer my questions.’

The naked bulb in the hallway gave enough light that Lily could make out the woman’s chiseled cheekbones, black eyes narrowed in angry contempt, black hair turned an iron gray.

‘Anta! Have you come here to kill me?’

‘I came here to see the American who has been wandering around the city asking for Rani. My friends at the university told me the woman was called Cinda, Cinda Mallick. The European named Cinda Mallick was dead many years ago, drowned for her stupidity and greed. I should have known it was really Lily, sneaking into the country under the skin of a dead woman.’

Lily left the door open but came back into the room and turned on the desk lamp. She gestured to the wobbly wooden chair, but Anta refused to sit. Her rage had a steadying effect on Lily.

‘So, someone drowned Cinda Mallick? I was always told it was an accident, but you were close to the centers of power, you surely know the truth. What form did her stupidity and greed take? Who felt so threatened that they murdered her?’

Anta gave a raucous cry that was more shriek than laugh. ‘Oh, Lily, you do the innocent bride act so skillfully that I would be fooled if I hadn’t seen your performance so many times in the past. What form did Cinda Mallick’s greed take? What form did it not take? You Americans were feeding it, and now you want to pretend you never knew about it? I am not a newborn kid on the heights of Muqqadas to follow your lies as if they were my mother’s milk.’

‘It was you, wasn’t it, Anta, who gave that photo to the young students to deliver to the American writer? You dressed in a burka and so not even Mika and Duruna knew you. Why now, after all this time?’

‘Is that why you came back, Lily? To accuse me of making your life uncomfortable? You should experience discomfort; you should experience much worse for the destruction you sowed in my country!’

‘I didn’t bring this destruction to Hayalistan, the defiling of lake and mountain. Nor the drugs that are leaving so many to lie dying in the streets and fields.’

‘Liar!’ Anta spat. ‘You tried to make us think you were in love with our art and our poems, you tried to make Rani think you cared for his success and well-being, but all you wanted was money and power for your American friends. When he died, where were you?’

‘Leave that lie to die in the dirt, Anta. When I read the news, that Agajan had taken over the government and Rani had been killed in front of the ministerial palace, I came at once, traveling on fake papers along the smugglers’ trails.

‘My government threatened to arrest me if I set foot in Hayalistan after the coup, and I risked that arrest for the chance to learn Rani’s fate. I heard from the streets that you were spewing lava against me – you were saying to everyone you’d get Agajan to imprison me or shoot me if I showed up. Do you remember that?

‘What was Rani’s fate, Anta? The mountain Elurbar wanted to bury him on Muqqadas with his eagle and his arrows, but no one knew where he was. And so I was sure you had smuggled him out of the country. I thought he was in Iran or Turkmenistan and that we would see him return with an army, but the years passed and there was no trace of him.’

‘You could always tell a sweet tale,’ Anta said. ‘But don’t try to tell me one tonight. Tell me instead why you were rubbing salt into our pain by asking for Rani.’

‘There are so many stories,’ Lily said. ‘He was in a Russian labor camp, he was dead, he was in Iran. But no one said, Anta took him home. Anta is hiding him in the Elurbar compound. She won’t let anyone see him because his brain was too damaged in the beatings he got after the coup.’

Anta lunged toward her, hand out to strike, but pulled back when Lily didn’t flinch. ‘That is a lie, American. That is the kind of lie the CIA trained you to make up so that we didn’t know whom to trust.’

‘What is happening, Anta, to make all that old past rise up and become the present day? There is the article in The New Yorker magazine. Who persuaded the writer that Hayalistan’s problems were worth exploring?’

‘Not you. You’d like to keep those problems wrapped in a goatskin where no one could see what you did.’

‘Oh, Anta, please! Someone wanted everyone in the world to look at me. The students told me they got the pictures from an old woman in the market-place, who conveniently vanished without identifying herself. But she made a special point of saying the photo of me at our hi-leko ceremony proved the CIA was infiltrating private meetings to spy on them. Only one old woman in Hayalistan would bear that kind of grudge.’

‘Our?’ Anta interrupted, her voice a menacing whisper. ‘There is no “our” for you. You came as a spy for your CIA and you let them take that picture.’

‘That is a complete lie,’ Lily snapped. ‘I never repeated a confidence told in those rituals, I never shared our location or the time of meeting. Yet someone came on us by stealth and took that photograph. It wasn’t you: if you had it you would have used it to destroy me back when my work mattered.’

‘When your work mattered, yes, it mattered to you, to all the Americans, but not to us. Ask anyone who saw those big planes of yours unloading tanks in the middle of the night!’

‘What planes? What tanks?’

‘Oh, yes, you were conveniently in India by then, weren’t you? What a clever plan, get you out of the country a few months ahead of the weapons shipment.’

Lily felt like someone on a fun-fair ride, whipped around at such speed she couldn’t keep her eye on the horizon. She looked away from Anta’s contorted face, looked at a crack in the wall that resembled a ram’s head. Don’t get sidetracked by whatever Anta meant by the weapons shipment. Focus on the pictures that The New Yorker ran.

‘I don’t believe you held that picture of me in Lake Sakin all these years. You would have used it back them, to poison me in Rani’s eyes. So someone else, some other person playing a very long game had it, and for their own reasons gave it to you. If the aim was to divert attention from current corruption, now would be the ideal time to blame me and the CIA for Hayalistan’s problems.’

Anta gave way to another burst of fake laughter. ‘Oh, very good, CIA tale-spinner, very good. “Someone,” you don’t know who, even though you arranged it? You were his precious darling, he would do your wish, even coming by canoe to take our picture!’

‘Rani?’ Lily was astounded. ‘Rani took that photograph?’

‘You cannot be as ignorant or as conceited as you are pretending. You were not Rani’s darling, ever, you were his Western toy that he played with to amuse himself. No, you stupid creature. Your up’rosi.’

‘Bruce Weyrich? He despised me!’

Anta gave another mock laugh. ‘You have not lost your skill, CIA, you have not lost your sweet innocent look as you weave one lie after another.’

Lily was bruised by Anta’s words, as if they were sticks pounding her body. Did she mean Jason Tedros? He had protected her more than once – but they had never spent a night in the same building together. Was this a widespread rumor, that Lily had been his toy, his lover in exchange for the care he gave her career?

Even in the Pakistani prison, where she’d feared for her life, she had stayed calm under the barrage of insults and beatings. She must not cry in front of Anta; she must not react. The lessons she’d given Keira back in Chicago on surviving interrogation came to her and balanced her.

Your training, your training, interrogators try to knock you off balance, they know your weak spots and exploit them. Change the subject.

She said, ‘That photograph of Steve Gambrey at the Central Asian games, standing with the prime minister – don’t tell me my up’rosi took that picture. He doesn’t travel anymore.

‘But this year Agajan faces an election and the mineral leases are up for renewal. Agajan is old, he’s feeble, maybe he’ll lose. You wanted to get the world to pay attention to see if someone, maybe the French or the Australians, would come to rescue you.’

‘Very good, American, very good. You can take that message back to your CIA in Washington and tell them to leave us alone, because the country is tired of being their property.’

Lily smiled. ‘Perhaps no one told you that even I, darling of the CIA as you think me, have grown old and without power, or connections. You can tell me the eagle is coming to peck out Steve Gambrey’s eyes, but no one in Washington will listen to me. Best find a young person with her life’s work in front of her.’

‘Oh, please,’ Anta said. ‘No lies, Lily, no lies. Maybe you are no longer an active worker for your government, but we know the CIA never lets anyone go. You were so clever that you disappeared from sight the day the Americans sent Rani up the mountain.

‘You thought you could dazzle him, fool him, pretending to be an eagle to his hunter, sending him secret love notes, but he was the Elurbar, not the toy of an uts’min! He recognized your betrayal the moment he heard about the explosion.

‘Now you pretend to be a tired old woman, but you are as full to the eyes with cunning and venom as the cobra of the Caspian. I will make sure you release no poison on this visit.’

Anta swept from the room. Lily went to the door, watched her get onto the elevator, watched the elevator wheeze to the ground without stopping. She walked to the stairwell and leaned over the railing so she could see the lobby. Anta stopped at the front desk and handed a room key to the night clerk. She crossed the lobby to the street doors and disappeared into the night.

Anta was an Elurbar, a Snow Leopard, closely related to Rani. Of course the desk clerk gave her a key. Lily returned slowly to the room. She wedged the wobbly chair under the doorknob and made a nest of her blankets on the floor behind the door.

As she lay there, the dizziness returned. Had Jason Tedros taken the picture of her with the other women? If he had, how had the copy fallen into Anta’s hands?

Anta was so angry she might well go to the American embassy and tell them Cinda Mallick was really Lily undercover. Time to leave while she still could.

She packed her carry-on bag and her backpack and left the hotel through the kitchen, out of sight of the desk clerk. The sun wouldn’t rise for two more hours, but it was five am; the trams had started running. She rode to the airport and booked herself onto the first flight that would take her back to Perth.

During the long journey, looping back and forth between countries and time zones, she tried to make sense of her short week in Hayalistan. Her body felt battered, as though she’d been tossed by every wind that blew down Mount Muqqadas.

The students, Tania, Anta, all had a different version of the country, and of Lily’s role in it – not her place in it. She thought she’d understood the people she worked with as a field agent. Unlike other agents, she learned their languages, promoted their art, was sensitive to their culture. If this trip had taught her one thing, it was that she had always been on the outside, looking in, thinking her gaze made her belong.

When she finally landed in Perth, finally cleared customs, she thought she’d also always been an outsider at the CIA. No matter how good her work, she’d never been one of the boys, or girls – except for that brief time of camaraderie with Marissa in Delhi. Maybe as the quintessential outsider she was the right person to dig into the CIA’s past in Hayalistan.

In the women’s toilet on the far side of customs, she cut Cinda Mallick’s passport into small pieces. On her way to the taxi stand, she deposited them in the different trash cans she passed. By the time she reached her Perth hotel, she was Lily Sedako again, showing her passport to the night clerk, falling into bed.

22

BACK AT THE RANCH HOUSE (2)

Marissa was in a meeting about a cybersecurity crisis when Gracelyn interrupted. The meeting was in the room nicknamed the bubble chamber because once you were in, only someone with facial rec could get you in or out. All phones and smart watches were stored in an antechamber, so no texts or phone calls could be exchanged, even with one’s own team.

Gracelyn, as the director’s PA, had been cleared for facial rec. ‘There’s a situation in Hayalistan,’ she murmured to Marissa. ‘Gordon needs you.’ Her tactful translation of, ‘Where the fuck is Marissa?’

The cybersecurity meeting was dealing with a data breach in Indian payroll systems which affected both India and the United States. It could compromise the high-tech operations the CIA conducted in South Asia, but Marissa excused herself to the chair and followed Gracelyn.

‘What’s happened? We didn’t turn up anything when we were looking six weeks ago.’

Gracelyn gave her a ‘you know I don’t gossip’ smile. ‘Gordon will tell you.’ She relented enough to add, ‘Isaacs sent him a level-four encrypted message.’

Nevil Isaacs was the Central Asian director, based in Islamabad. He oversaw all the Stans, along with India and Bangladesh. Marissa had been video-conferencing with him about the hacking crisis the previous evening and he hadn’t mentioned Hayalistan. Either the crisis had erupted in the last ten hours, or she hadn’t been on the need-to-know list.

The Central Asian desk was one of the trickiest assignments in the CIA, easily as complicated as the Middle Eastern or Eastern Europe. Marissa thought Isaacs was smart and competent, but not especially creative. Of course, he’d taken over from Jason Tedros, impossibly big shoes to fill. Also, to do Isaacs justice, the current director of the intelligence services frowned on creativity.

The walk from the bubble chamber to Gordon’s office took thirteen hundred steps. Since she wasn’t going to make it to the gym today, at least the summons could help her meet her fitness goals.

Gordon was scowling at his computer screen when Marissa reached his office. ‘There you are,’ he growled, not looking up. ‘Who is Cinda Mallick and why was she fucking around in Ts’gali two weeks ago?’

Marissa turned his monitor around. The text disappeared, Cheshire cat–like, as she looked at the screen. Translations of level-four encryption disappeared after five minutes.

‘You’ll have to reload for me,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know Cinda Mallick.’

When Gordon fumbled with the translation key, Gracelyn slipped her hand underneath his arm and typed in the code. The text, from Warner Oliphant, the head of all the security services, reappeared, line by slow line.

As you surely know, the Gambrey Center is vital to American interests in Hayalistan, both economic and political.

In other words, Marissa privately translated, Steve Gambrey is a billionaire who gives money lavishly to the administration’s political campaigns, so listen up. She skimmed through the page displayed on the monitor.

There has been a disgraceful intelligence failure in Hayalistan. Student insurgents took over the Gambrey Center two years ago and tried to foment nationwide unrest. The army was called in, some ringleaders resisted orders to evacuate and were shot, others spent time in prison. We thought this episode was over and done with.

Two weeks ago, an old woman calling herself Cinda Mallick, traveling from Australia on an American passport, created a scene at the Gambrey Center. She repeatedly asked for a phony nephew named Ronnie, in what center staff say was a blatant attempt to stir up unrest by making native staff think she was asking for Rani. His name is still a flashpoint among students and mountain people.

The Gambrey Center staff reported this old woman to Ts’gali station, who did not do the first speck of intelligence work. They decided the old woman calling herself Mallick was mentally unstable but not dangerous.

They should have found her name in their files: Cinda Mallick was an Australian economist who drowned as we were getting Operation Gold Dust underway. She was a flashy woman, a nympho, who stuck her oar in where it didn’t belong.

Either you or Ts’gali station should have briefed me on this as soon as Cinda Mallick’s name crossed your screen. This is a serious misstep. I learned about it only through Arnold Sylvester, Steve Gambrey’s CFO. Sylvester arrived in Ts’gali two days ago to help the Agajan government run their reelection campaign.

Find out who the fuck is using Mallick’s name and passport. Do it ASAP or all of you are going to be on the street tomorrow.

Marissa read the message twice before it faded again from the screen. ‘That’s shocking. What does Ts’gali say?’

‘They’re blubbering,’ Gordon said. ‘They know they screwed up majorly and they don’t have a fig leaf big enough to cover their butts.’

‘Has Ts’gali gotten Agajan to pull in the student radicals to see what they know about this Mallick person?’

‘The Hayali secret police have taken in the ringleaders for enhanced interrogation, to see what new actions they’re planning, but we don’t have any word yet on what they’ve learned,’ Gordon said.

‘What about Cinda Mallick?’ she asked. ‘Who is she? How did they decide the nephew was a phony?’

‘When Arnold Sylvester heard about Cinda Mallick, he was furious that no one connected this woman to the person who stirred up trouble around Operation Gold Dust,’ Gracelyn said in her quiet voice.

‘Yeah,’ Gordon said. ‘Arnold speaks fluent Russian and they say his Hayali is good enough. He interviewed the Gambrey Center staff who interacted with the Mallick woman. He also went to the hotel where she was staying and got more skinny than the station bothered to find out. According to Arnold, Mallick was constantly meeting with radical students while she was in the country.’

‘Did we double-check Arnold’s report?’ Marissa asked.

‘Oliphant says he’s reliable,’ Gordon said stiffly. ‘I won’t order a separate investigation.’

Warner Oliphant was director of US security services, which included the NSA, CIA, and some half-dozen lower profile agencies. Oliphant had made his billions using AI to target real estate investment opportunities. He golfed regularly with the president, which apparently showed he had the right skill set for heading a major agency. As director, he used AI to predict the outcome of intelligence operations. He wouldn’t approve ops that the bot gave less than 75 percent certainty to.

Marissa felt a grudging sympathy for Gordon. She knew Oliphant had appointed him because he wouldn’t fight back even if he disagreed with a directive, but at least Gordon had spent his work life in intelligence. He knew good intel from shoddy. However, in a case like this, where Oliphant had decided to trust Arnold Sylvester’s report, Gordon would never try to double-check it.

‘Who is this person calling herself Cinda Mallick?’ Marissa repeated. ‘If she’s a genuine threat, how did she make it into the country undetected?’

‘We don’t know,’ Gracelyn supplied. ‘There wasn’t any reason for her name to be either in the Hayali border control database, or our own, especially since the original Cinda Mallick died before those files were automated.’

Marissa looked up Mallick on her phone. Australian Olympic hopeful, in Hayalistan working for the Australian mining giant DSMM, drowned in Lake Sakin’s treacherous currents, body sent back to Perth for burial.

‘Do we have the home address on our woman’s passport?’ Marissa asked Gracelyn.

‘It’s in Perth,’ Gracelyn said. ‘She apparently lives there as an ex-pat. I’ll send it to you.’

‘What does Perth station say?’ Marissa asked. ‘This is a confusing setup – American passport with a Perth address, while the dead Cinda Mallick’s home was in Perth. Almost as if she never died but had a nationality transplant.’

‘It’s more confusing than that,’ Gracelyn said. ‘Perth confirms an Australian national named Cinda Mallick lives at the address on the passport. Supposedly she’s a niece of the woman who died. As far as we know, she hasn’t traveled outside of Australia for six years.’

‘Sort this out, Marissa,’ Gordon said. ‘See who the fuck this Mallick woman is and how she’s connected to the Hayali insurgents.’

23

SNIFFING OUT AN OP

Marissa didn’t return to the cybersecurity meeting. Fire in the hole, she texted the chair’s secretary. Let me know my team’s assignment.

She texted her staff, putting them on standby for Ts’gali-based action. Back in her office, she sent a crisp memo to Ts’gali station, demanding the report they’d created after interviewing Mallick.

Marissa’s first thought when she finished reading Ts’gali’s report was that the entire station should be sacked. They’d interviewed Cinda Mallick only because the Gambrey Center called them, flustered by her demands to find Rani, or Ronnie.

Three days later, Arnold Sylvester sailed in, firing all his torpedoes at the embassy.

There were too many billionaires driving the American foreign policy train these days, but Ts’gali station still should have found the dead Cinda Mallick’s name in their files if they’d done more than a superficial check. Marissa had never heard of Gold Dust, but it was local to Hayalistan, and Hayalistan itself wasn’t a country most people thought about.

When she dug up the archive on Gold Dust, she thought the Ts’gali team should have remembered it – it was one of those destabilizing ops, designed to force a local government into adopting a policy Uncle Sam favored. In this case, the US wanted to control the lithium ore deposits, estimated to be the largest in the world. The Rani government didn’t want the mountain to be mined, but some of his ministers, led by Agajan, who was then the economic policy minister, thought Rani was holding back Hayalistan’s growth. When Rani wouldn’t budge, the CIA began backing Agajan as someone to run against Rani in the next election.

The files were hazy on what happened next. Rani wouldn’t budge, but Agajan couldn’t build a coalition. Meanwhile, the Australians, who were the world’s leading lithium miners, were using Cinda Mallick to wine and dine the local clans to get them to favor Australia.

And then she was dead, drowned in Hayalistan’s big lake. The report mentioned that Cinda and Lily had a relationship. Jason Tedros had flown in from Islamabad to interrogate Lily after Cinda’s death and reported that she and Cinda knew each other casually through a shared love of swimming, but not well enough for Cinda to have confided any problems with her. In any event, Lily had been in Kazakhstan when Cinda died.

Marissa wasn’t sure she trusted Tedros’s evaluation – but that was because any time Lily’s name cropped up in a report, she had an irrational feeling that Lily was taunting her behind the scenes.

Marissa scribbled a timeline. Mallick died in 1999, the same year that Rani was elected prime minister. Lily wasn’t transferred to Delhi until March 2002. In late 2002, American tanks appeared in the big plaza around the ministerial palace. The Hayali army rose against Rani, aided by mercenaries whose country of origin wasn’t identified. In one week, Rani was dead, Agajan was in office, and Steve Gambrey was given control of the lithium leases, with 75 percent of profits to flow to Gambrey Minerals and Mining. A copy of the original contract was attached. Gambrey got the lion’s share because they were shouldering all the development expenses.

Marissa sat back in her chair. The reports were written in the passive voice: it was decided, tanks were delivered, mercenaries were dispatched. Who gave those orders? Who besides Gambrey benefited from control of the leases? Whoever wrote the final Gold Dust report was careful not to connect any dots that would indicate responsibility.

Arnold Sylvester’s name didn’t show up on Gold Dust. He’d joined Gambrey six years ago as an analyst, but he’d risen fast. He apparently spoke fluent Russian, which would have helped in Hayalistan where Russian was still one of the official languages.

Marissa couldn’t find any record of him among either the State Department or CIA files, but the US Embassy in Ts’gali jumped into action when he showed up. It was Sylvester who claimed that the old woman using Mallick’s name had met with student radicals. How did he know? She’d left Hayalistan before Sylvester arrived.

On the surface, Mallick looked harmless. According to her passport, she was seventy-seven. According to the chatter Ts’gali reported – after the fact! – she had worked in Hayalistan as a young woman; this was her first trip back in decades. The nephew she talked about had come to Hayalistan because of the New Yorker article. He supposedly wanted to help solve the addiction crisis America had – allegedly – helped create.

Marissa frowned over the reference to the New Yorker story. In Analytics, you learn to distrust coincidence. That was the story that made Lily call her two months ago. Now here was another old woman talking to people in Hayalistan about that same article. Marissa wrote Lily’s name on her paper and circled it with big stars.

She called in her staff and began handing out assignments. Marissa gave Halina the job of digging into Arnold Sylvester’s history.

‘He’s not the CFO, but everyone agrees he’s the number-two decision maker at Gambrey. See if you can ferret out his relation to Gambrey, whether he’s trying to engineer a coup with the board that would push him to the number-one spot. The New Yorker story says Steve Gambrey is spending the bulk of his time at his longevity ranch in New Mexico. Check out the Gambrey board, tell them they’re not on the record, we’re testing the water.’

Marissa herself looked up the Australian records of Cinda Mallick’s death. She saw photos the government had taken of her in the morgue at Perth. The face was slack in death, so impossible to compare to the photo Hayali immigration had taken of the Cinda Mallick who’d flown to Ts’gali in April.

Arnold Sylvester had been right about one thing – the nephew story was bogus. None of the Cindy or Cinda Mallicks in the CIA’s vast databases had a nephew named Ronnie. This woman had gone to Hayalistan to wave Rani’s name around and see who would react.

The concluding section of Ts’gali station’s report on Mallick covered their surveillance of her. They hadn’t put a large crew on her, but they had followed her to the Great Mosque, and across Lake Sakin to the K’tali market. They had lost her for several hours, until she came to light inside a large tent that had shut down for the day. She claimed to have fallen asleep and said the stall owners decided not to disturb her.

That could be, or it could be she’d used it as a cover to meet with her contacts or handlers. Marissa scribbled another note. Ts’gali needed to do deep background on the stall owners.

Mallick must have completed her assignment, whatever it had been, early: she’d left Hayalistan a day before her scheduled departure. She’d paid a premium to change her tickets, so either she had money or her handlers did.

Who was she acting for? Australian mining interests were the most likely, but there were a lot of countries and a lot of mining companies that wanted that lithium. There were too many unknowns to speculate, but Mallick’s behavior smelled strongly like an op. What serious player hired an elderly American woman to conduct their espionage?

If it was an op… Marissa shut her eyes. If it was an op, Marissa knew the person conducting it.

Lily had taken a vacation in Australia. After two weeks of following Lily’s tourist adventures through her cell phone pings, Marissa had decided Lily actually was taking a vacation. She’d kept the watch in place, but she’d stopped reading the reports.

Marissa asked her PA to get Lily’s whole itinerary. After Sydney and the wine country, Lily had gone to Perth, where she signed up for a hike in the outback. She’d apparently canceled the hike, claiming a shoulder injury meant she couldn’t carry a backpack the size the hikers needed to use.

Lily had returned to her Perth hotel a week later – on the same day that Cinda Mallick cleared immigration at Perth airport. Lily had taken the train across country to Sydney and flown back to Chicago.

‘Sounds like your op, Lily,’ Marissa said. She spoke aloud, startling her waiting assistant, who ventured, ‘I’m Halina.’

‘Of course you are,’ Marissa said. ‘My apologies – juggling too many things. Get onto Perth station and ask them to pay a visit to the woman living at the address on the old Cinda Mallick’s passport. Find out if she has any Hayali connections. They say she hasn’t left Australia for some years, but maybe she has family in Central Asia – that could be the inspiration for using a bogus nephew as semi-cover.’

Halina was in charge of coordinating Sudan intel and had stayed up most of the night preparing her weekly report, but it was typical of the Company that priorities changed every hour, if not every minute.

As if reading Halina’s mind, Marissa said, ‘Sudan is a major priority. I know over two million people there are close to death from starvation. I just hope the RSF doesn’t launch a new attack on Mogadishu while we’re dealing with this uproar. But whatever is happening in Ts’gali is going to take a lot of time as well. Tell the rest of the team we’ll meet at eight tomorrow morning for weekly reports before Ts’gali eats us up for a second day.’

These constant interruptions were why nothing got done on time: everyone was always on program-interrupt, which meant you never could focus properly on anything. Maybe that was why Ts’gali hadn’t taken Cinda Mallick seriously.

While Halina talked to Perth station, Marissa reexamined Lily’s personnel file. The most recent photo was from her exit interview four years ago. Lily had been almost seventy, posture still erect, eyes bright. Her chin line had softened only slightly with age.

The photos both the US Embassy and the Gambrey Center staff had taken of Cinda Mallick were in the attachments to the Islamabad memo. Marissa dragged them onto her desktop and placed Lily’s retirement photo over Cinda Mallick’s face.

The shape was similar but not an exact match: Mallick’s cheeks were rounder, more chipmunk-like. Lily still had the high cheekbones Marissa used to envy when they served together. The shape of the eyes was different, the hairline was different, and yet… and yet…

Field agents traveled under different identities depending on the op. Marissa could see Lily hanging on to her passports, even though they were all supposed to be handed in at an op’s end. What was strange was for an undercover op to use the name and address of a real person. There are coincidences, and there are total impossibilities. Two unconnected people using the same Australian name and address was impossible.

If that had been Lily using the Mallick passport, when had she met and connected with the younger woman who was also using the Mallick name? And if that had been Lily in Ts’gali, why had she gone? What was she trying to do? She didn’t have power or connections in the US. Was it possible she had kept in touch with her old Hayali networks? Could she be taking part in a coup?

It was a ludicrous thought. Almost. Lily had resented retirement. She’d also been angry when Marissa pooh-poohed her reaction to the New Yorker story. Lily’s personnel file included repeated critiques for her disregard of authority. Could she be acting out of rage, determined to make the Company look bad by stirring up radical students to overthrow the Hayali government?

She’d been insulted when Marissa told her modern intelligence depended on electronics, not the human networks that Lily recruited. Perhaps Lily went to Ts’gali to show Marissa how wrong she was by reestablishing her old intelligence channels.

But if she was doing that, what was she trying to accomplish? According to old reports in her file, Lily’s relationship with Rani was the subject of a lot of rumors but no proof. Rani was dead. Maybe Lily felt she owed it to Rani’s memory to help students rise up in his name.

Marissa operated with data. All these speculations without any data were giving her a headache.

She wrote a short memo to Gordon, telling him about the real Australian named Mallick.

‘We’re trying to find how someone using her name and address acquired a US passport. Ts’gali dropped the ball all over the court on this. They didn’t get a DNA sample from the Cinda Mallick they interrogated, they didn’t take fingerprints, and the biometrics from Mallick’s photo at both Ts’gali and Perth Immigration and Customs don’t match anyone in our databases. If it wasn’t for Arnold Sylvester showing up in Hayalistan and rousing Ts’gali station, we wouldn’t even be asking these questions.

‘It would be prudent to get an American speaker of Hayal into Ts’gali – someone who can start listening in at student hangouts. We’re flying blind here.’

Right after she sent her summary to Gordon, Perth pinged her. Lily had checked into a cabin near the trailhead after she bowed out of the hiking tour, but it was a place without housekeeping or dining services. Perth had no idea what she’d done there or even if she’d stayed put; the cabin had only intermittent cell service. They couldn’t tell her movements from her phone records.

‘Perfect, Lily, perfect,’ Marissa said. ‘You planned this down to the last dotted i.’

She was sure it was Lily, but she’d been in the agency long enough to see dozens, maybe hundreds, of situations blow up because a senior analyst turned a hunch into data certainty. She sent a message to Chicago asking for a check on Lily – what was she doing, who was she seeing, any foreign visitors.

‘And get someone into her apartment. We need to know if she has documents in the name of Cinda Mallick, particularly if there’s a passport.’

That long-ago trip to Kolkata haunted Marissa. Lily had been insufferable, showing off how easily she picked up local customs. She’d also been right about the people she recruited during that trip.

If Lily had been masquerading as Cinda Mallick in Hayalistan, she could be tracking something the Company needed to know. Something about Gambrey, or his Hayali-speaking number two?

She’d sicced Halina on getting background on Sylvester, but she took a moment to look him up herself. Hundreds of hits about Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger popped up, but nothing on Gambrey’s chief financial officer.

Was Steve Gambrey, America’s third-richest billionaire, really getting advice from someone with a name that bogus? And were State and the Company both paying attention to him? Her headache grew more severe. No wonder American foreign policy was a mess.

24

LOOKING HER AGE

August McBride was shocked by how frail Lily looked when she returned home.

‘Not Covid,’ she said. ‘An older bug that doesn’t respond to drugs.’

McBride insisted on taking her luggage upstairs, despite her protests. ‘Lily, you can’t carry a cup of tea right now. You need a doctor. Whatever they were feeding you in Australia didn’t agree with you. You must have lost ten pounds.’

‘The travel wore me out more than I thought it would,’ Lily admitted. ‘I’ll be all right in a day or two.’

She unzipped one of the side compartments to her bag and pulled out a stuffed koala. ‘I brought this for your granddaughter – I think you said she’s seven? They look adorable and cuddly but in person, or maybe I should say, in bear, they can be a bit nasty.’

He was pleased, of course he was – how many other tenants even asked if he had a family, let alone remembered his granddaughter’s age? – but he still tried to talk Lily into getting medical care. To get rid of him, Lily promised she’d call someone.

Call whom, she wondered when he finally left. She didn’t need a doctor, she needed someone to confide in, someone who wouldn’t judge her actions, past or present, but would help her figure out what to do next.

She had no children of her own. She had two half brothers, one in Rhode Island, one in Portland, but she didn’t know them. The summer Lily was eight, her mother ran away with a Chicago artist who’d been visiting Detroit. She left Lily with Eddie and her own Russian mother and started a new family in Chicago.

The brothers came to Chicago for Irene’s funeral, with their wives and children and grandchildren. Lily treated the event like a diplomatic function: smile, shake hands, say nothing that could upset anyone’s feelings. She didn’t bother to write down the names and ages of siblings she’d never met.

With Irene’s death, she had a permanent home, which she’d never had before, but no family to care whether she was alive in Chicago or dead on a mountain in Central Asia.

That hadn’t bothered her until now, when her recent trip to Hayalistan had left her confused. She felt a wound in her chest – her heart cut to pieces – and wished she knew someone who could hold her and tell her she’d done a good job, she hadn’t exploited her contacts, she’d had true empathy for the people she worked with. She didn’t have as much as a goldfish to share her life. As a field agent, you needed to have massive reserves of strength to get you through setbacks, loneliness, betrayal. Lily was tired of being her own best friend.

When August finally left, Lily started to unpack but found herself engulfed in lethargy. She left her suitcase on the bedside chair and lay down. She was entitled; the travel had been exhausting, after all: forty-seven hours flying, only a few days after her long flight from Ts’gali to Perth. She needed to rest.

The business of travel had kept her from thinking about Anta. Now, back in her mother’s condo, lying in her darkened bedroom, Lily couldn’t shut Anta’s early morning tirade from her mind.

Of course, when she was working in Ts’gali, Lily had known Anta disliked her. Anta tried to undermine Lily’s work with the women weavers, had tried to keep Lily from visiting Hayali schools or promoting local music festivals. But it was as if all that anger had been fermenting for decades, waiting to be uncorked so she could drown Lily in it.

Was that the only point? Or had something else lain behind it, perhaps guilt? Had Anta turned her back on Rani? Or even cooperated with his opponents?

‘You were so clever you disappeared the day the Americans sent Rani up the mountain,’ Anta had said.

In Hayali culture, when the end of your time comes, the spirit of Mount Muqqadas calls you. But if you died before your time, killed by an enemy or in some accident, Hayalis said you had been sent up the mountain.

When Anta spat those words at her in Ts’gali, Lily thought Anta meant that Lily got herself transferred to Delhi ahead of the coup that killed Rani.

Now, taking apart the angry accusations, Lily saw Anta might have been thinking about something completely different. ‘The moment he heard about the explosion,’ Anta had said.

In the coup, of course there had been bombs, explosions of all sizes, but Rani was there, he would have heard them directly. An explosion he heard about – the hydroelectric plant a thousand feet above the Ts’gali Pass. Of course.

25

RECOVERED MEMORY

Rani had been in office about two years when the American embassy buzzed with importance. A US congressional delegation was coming to visit. This was the first time Washington had paid attention to the country in decades. The American ambassador held a joint meeting with Bruce. Attendance was mandatory for all personnel. The ambassador explained that the secretary of state and senior members of Congress were arriving as a signal to Rani that his government had America’s complete support.

Their offices/cubicles were to be immaculate; they were to present a PowerPoint summary of their current assignments and recent successes; they were to dress professionally – ties, jackets for the men, tailored suits or dresses for the women. No cleavage.

‘Wouldn’t want Dunwoody to get his nose stuck in my bra,’ a senior embassy woman muttered to Lily.

That was Jack Dunwoody, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He famously traveled with a blond secretary, replaced every few years as they aged out. Despite that, or maybe because of it, when he visited a diplomatic or CIA station, staff were always ordered to make sure his every need was met. The secretary of state might be the guest of honor at state functions, but back home everyone knew that Dunwoody was the man with real power. Cabinet secretaries come and go, but senators are forever.

News that Dunwoody would be in the delegation meant entertainment had to be constant and carefully thought out. Everyone at both the embassy and the CIA station was assigned a job. Some were to take spouses on tours of Ts’gali cultural highlights; other, more senior staff were to host dinner parties. There would be photo ops with Rani’s personal staff and the US delegation. Bruce volunteered to show interested men highlights of Ts’gali’s nightclub culture.

Lily had put together a schedule of music and dance performances, visits to local artisans, and even a day trip up the mountain to the women who wove goat and yak hair into designs that rivaled Persian rugs. She was startled when Bruce called her a week before the delegation was due to arrive.

‘You’re needed at the hydro station. We’ve had a report of a potential terrorist attack.’

‘But what about the cultural tour you and the ambassador asked me to arrange?’ Lily said.

‘Anyone can do that. Not everyone can see if there’s terrorist activity at the hydro plant.’

His statement was almost a compliment – closer than anything he’d ever said in her years in Ts’gali. She stared at him, puzzled, until he barked that Gayla would give her the details; he had too much to do to waste time with her.

‘Give Gayla your tour details, too. She’ll show the wives around.’

Gayla had become frosty since rumors of Lily’s connection to Rani began swirling. ‘You’re a fool to sacrifice your career for an affair with a local, and that’s what it amounts to. No matter how much Jason Tedros respects your intel, your butt is out the door as soon as word gets to him that you are fucking Rani.’

‘There is no word to get to Jason Tedros,’ Lily said. ‘If there was, Bruce would already have kicked me out. Anyway, he’s kicking me up the mountain and asked me to turn over the cultural tour to you.’

Gayla had seen the program Lily put together, with cultural events beginning with sunrise prayers at Ts’gali’s great mosque and ending with a chanting of ‘The Eagle and the Hunter’ at a community bonfire. It would mean a lot of extra work on top of her regular job of running the station under Bruce’s cavalier supervision.

‘Even if you’re not having sex, you’re way too close to a foreign head of state. People say you act like you know more than the ambassador, and besides, an affair makes you blind to Rani’s weaknesses. And he’s got more than one.’

‘Way too close to a foreign head of state?’ Lily echoed. ‘Can you possibly be insinuating that I am betraying my country’s secrets, and her safety, when I have put my life on the line a dozen times to protect those secrets and that safety?

‘Since Rani became head of Hayalistan’s government, I neither see nor communicate with him except at official functions. If you, or anyone at the embassy or the station think you’ve seen me with him in a private meeting, please give me a list of the times and places. It means someone is impersonating me, which is a serious breach of American security.’

Gayla topped her by almost a head, but Lily stared at her until the other woman muttered an apology.

Yes, she had been breaching security, protocol, all those things with Rani, but that ended when he ran for office. They had known from the beginning that a life together could make both of them outcasts, but after she recovered from the avalanche, Rani told her he needed to end the affair.

She was suffering from frostbite and was delirious from hypothermia, so Rani had taken her to Idumali, a meadow high on the eastern side of Muqqadas. Idumali was warmed by hot springs that kept it green year-round. The grasses and meadow flowers had strong healing powers. The nomads who traced paths across the mountain’s upper reaches would harvest the grasses and sell them in the K’tali market. They were dried and used as tisanes to heal stomach ills, and to help women recover from miscarriages. The nomads claimed that Idumali grasses gave their ponies greater stamina and longer lives. They didn’t allow their animals to graze there, though, because the meadow wasn’t big enough to survive active grazing. They cut and dried the famous grasses, then mixed them with the mashes they gave their animals.

Rani held Lily close through three nights, and every morning brewed her Idumali grass tea over a spirit stove. On the fourth day, when she had essentially recovered, Rani told her about his vision from the Elurbar.

‘It’s time for me to take my role seriously. I have been a performer, as if “The Eagle and the Hunter” were a public entertainment, but people look to me for leadership. I cannot be a leader and have a life with you. I could recite a poem about you, about your eagle’s heart underneath your Western body, but that would be a kind of insult. I will merely say my country needs me, and that is more important than my need for you or yours for me.’

Lily didn’t argue. You can’t argue with a vision, but the vision’s language was only a different form of saying what she already knew – that a foreign woman in Rani’s life would cost him the trust of the Hayali people. She could resign her job and dedicate herself to the Hayali, but Anta would make sure everyone thought of her as the American. If they knew she was also CIA, then Rani would never be able to build a coalition.

Two years later, to have Gayla try to smear her with the rumor of an affair, made her more depressed than angry. She’d done her duty, working for her government, just as Rani had done his. Now the gossip was floating around long after it could have any substance.

‘Is there a credible terrorist threat to the power station?’ Lily asked Gayla. ‘I haven’t heard any chatter.’

Gayla shrugged. ‘I’m just the PA, not an intelligence officer.’

‘And so you see every report, email, cable, text, that goes to Bruce. Should I wear body armor?’

‘If you don’t, it could solve a lot of problems, at least for Bruce.’

Lily nodded. She wasn’t going to wear body armor, not on a climb up Muqqadas, but she would take different precautions.

The hydroelectric plant had been the darling project of Hayalistan’s farmers. It would dam the Ts’gali River and provide a regulated flow to the east end of Lake Sakin, where the mountains gave way to farmland. The US had a stake in the project – a lot of the earth-moving equipment and cement was being supplied by American companies.

The mountain people were opposed – the dam and the roads that were being built were wreaking havoc with summer grazing for reindeer, and for their own nomadic lives.

Rani, along with other eagle hunters, was also opposed to the dam. Both the construction and the diversion of the mountain streams were drying up the forests. By the time he took office, construction was well underway. He had ordered a halt to the work, to reevaluate its utility.

When Lily left Gayla, she was both angry and frightened. Gayla’s insinuendos made her fear she might be fired and fired in such a way that would cost her her pension and make it hard for her ever to work professionally again in the States.

That possibility meant she needed to make a success of her trip to the dam. Neutralize a threat if there was one. Of course, proving there wasn’t a threat would be much harder. You can report all you like on how you’ve found no evidence of a plot to blow up a dam, but no one will think you’ve really done your job. And then if there was an explosion, after she reported not finding a credible threat, Bruce would really have grounds to fire her.

As she walked back to the hostel that day, she wondered if Bruce was engineering an explosion, timing it either so Lily got blown up on top of Muqqadas, or so that the mountain blew up when she was back in Ts’gali, making her look incompetent.

She got a woman in her hostel to cut off her braid. ‘Your beautiful hair,’ the woman mourned in Turkish. ‘If it was mine—’

Lily laughed. ‘It’s getting thin and scraggly. It will grow out thicker, but maybe it will grow out gray – my hair is starting to change color.’

She picked up black dye at a market stall, and bought a secondhand ber’tuk, the baggy thigh-length jacket that Hayali goat and yak herders wore. The ber’tuk was a kind of wearable backpack, with deep interior pockets to hold food, a flask of water, and other essentials for a week on the slopes.

She headed up the mountain, hitching a ride on a yak-drawn wagon. These were people who didn’t chat idly with strangers, so she sat quietly on the board that served as a seat. When asked, she said she belonged to the Eel clan but was going up the mountain looking for work. The Eels didn’t have many relatives among the mountain villages, so she didn’t worry about being asked if so-and-so was her grandfather.

She changed wagons several times as her rides went in different directions. A half-day’s walk from the hydro plant she stopped riding. When the wagoner took off to the west, she slipped into the shelter of trees east of the track, where she waited for a wagon heading down to Ts’gali.

When the right wagon finally came in sight, she stepped out and hailed the driver. ‘I have a message for the Elurbar,’ she said. ‘The American woman gave it to me for him, but I can’t leave my flock.’

Rani, head of the Snow Leopard clan, was the Elurbar. Whether the American woman meant Lily in the wagoner’s mind she had no way of knowing, but it didn’t matter: he would know the Elurbar meant Rani. She handed the drover an eagle feather tied to an arrow tip, wrapped in a thin piece of bark peeled from a red birch.

Before he became a political force, when Rani introduced her to the woods, he’d shown her the red birch, shown her how mountain people cut messages into the thin bark. This became their private code if they were trying to meet. Eagle and hunter, with a notch in the bark indicating how high up the mountain the sender would be. Her gift to the Elurbar was notched near the top of the bark: I am high up the mountain.

After the wagon disappeared down the dirt road, Lily followed one of the trails into the forest. She’d crossed these trails many times, usually with a local guide who helped her get close to Russian army outposts or Chinese work camps. She would hang around drinking fermented yak milk at the dairy bars that sprang up on the fringes of the camps, absorbing local talk and jokes. She’d never cut or dyed her hair before, but she’d often worn the baggy men’s clothes she had on now. She passed as a youth, a teenage boy respectful of his elders but with an occasional story to share.

This time she made sure she was on her own, unobserved.

When she reached the construction site, she was stunned by the size of it. Great cuts in the side of the mountain, rocks the size of apartment buildings blasted into smaller but still massive chunks. Mud everywhere. Broken trees, dead animals, omnipresent trash from crews who ate from Styrofoam trays and tossed them aside.

It took her three days of moving carefully in the dark to overhear the plan to blow up the field where the heavy machinery was stored. A group of five, two women and three men, all young Hayali, had managed to get into the locked warehouse where the explosives were stored. They talked about how hard it had been to burrow under the security fence around the machines, and how difficult it had been to attach explosives and timers in the dark. They hoped to time the destruction of the machines with the state dinner for the American delegation the following night.

Lily didn’t know much about engineering, but she worried that an explosion that destroyed so much equipment would trigger a major avalanche. Hundreds of people in the work camps would be obliterated, and the damage to the villages and forest below could be a catastrophe.

She moved as quickly as she could through the pitted landscape to the tents where the foreign workers were housed. Outside the barracks for the soldiers overseeing the camps she found an ATV with a key in the ignition and headed down the mountain.

When she reached the Ts’gali Pass, she used a pay phone outside one of the bars to call Jason Tedros in Islamabad. She wanted him to act before she got back to Ts’gali, before she could report to Bruce. She didn’t trust Bruce’s reason for sending her up to the dam, and she couldn’t possibly trust any actions he might take.

In the end, when she reached the embassy she reported to Gayla: Bruce was at a men’s entertainment venue, drinking with Dunwoody and other members of Congress.

All that night, lying sleepless in her bed in the hostel, she could hear helicopters taking off, heading up the mountain toward the dam site. She knew as soon as people have weapons in their hands, they can’t wait to use them. She hoped no one would be killed because she’d sneaked around in the dark doing her job.

26

RANI’S ANGER

A week after the American delegation left Hayalistan, Rani summoned her to the presidential palace. In her early days in Ts’gali, when Lily realized Bruce Weyrich would give her only the most grudging support, she’d never bothered to tell him who she was meeting or where they were going. He’d been happy for her to disappear into the forests, or the small towns on the agricultural plain.

Now that her own job was on the line, especially now that Rani was prime minister, she dotted every protocol i. She showed Bruce the formal summons Rani had issued.

‘I don’t know why he wants to see me,’ she said when Bruce interrogated her.

‘We all know Rani values your’ – Bruce broke off to stare suggestively at Lily’s crotch – ‘insights. I want a witness to anything you say to him.’

He sent Corporal Mittlin from the embassy’s Marine detachment with her. It wasn’t Lily’s fault that Rani’s chief of staff detained the corporal, telling him that the prime minister insisted on seeing Lily alone.

The meeting was formal. Anyone could have witnessed it. Rani sat behind his great ministerial desk; she faced him, standing, arms at her sides.

‘I have seen you in the forests and on the mountain, Lily, and while you are no eagle hunter, you are skillful and careful for one who grew up far from my lands. No one saw you at the dam, but why else is your beautiful red hair cut short and colored black?’

She said nothing. He let the minutes tick by, patient hunter waiting for the rabbit to move, but she made no response.

Finally, he said, ‘Do not think I am grateful to you for stopping the destruction of America’s earth movers. I will pin no medal to your chest, unless I use the pin to stab your breast hard enough for you to share the suffering your country is bringing to my people.’

She still didn’t speak, bewildered by the accusation.

He sneered, ‘At least you don’t try to deny America’s acts.’

‘I’m not sure which acts Your Excellency means,’ she said. ‘Are you talking about the dam? I know you and many others think it a – an error.’ They were speaking Hayali and in the face of his anger her language faltered. The word for ‘disaster’ wouldn’t come to her.

‘Error? Is that what the destruction of the mountain and the forests is? The death of the snow leopard’s habitat? The drowning of villages that existed before the Great Khan conquered this land? Their loss is a mistake? But your government will make sure the mistake gets completed on time.’

‘I’m sorry, Excellency. I know nothing of what acts my government proposes.’ Calling him ‘Excellency’ made her lips feel wooden, like a puppet’s that couldn’t speak clearly.

‘Anta is right. You are a spy and a clever one, who stands there like a fawn newly separated from its doe, blinking as it tries to make sense of the big world.’

‘You have seen me these many years, working inside your country.’ She tried to steady her voice. ‘You know I work for the United States, and that I will not betray my country, but when did I leave you to trip in the mud along Lake Sakin?

‘You are the most skilled of all the hunters on Muqqadas, and your instinct for safety and for danger are without equal. In these years, you surely could have seen my second face if I had one. It is true, I stopped a group of young people from blowing up the equipment at the hydro plant. Explosions have many unpredicted outcomes, some of which could have been grave disasters. Why should halting this one earn me your rage?’

Instead of answering, he placed a digital recorder on the desktop and pressed the ‘play’ button.

There was a cacophony of speech in Hayali, Russian, and English, and then a husky American voice demanded that the translators get to work and do their job.

Lily stood for half an hour, listening to the meeting that the American ambassador had held with Rani and the visiting congressional delegation. Senator Dunwoody was forthright on the question of US aid for infrastructure – roads, a new airport, hospitals. ‘I can make that happen, Mr Prime Minister, but you know there’s always a quid for the quo.’

And then the translator put this into Hayali for Rani, who never tried to learn English. Quid pro quo. You let someone kill a sheep for you and then you must give them something back. The senator was impatient with the long translations and demanded whether anything was being added that he hadn’t said.

Of course things were added, cautions to Rani not to let his temper ride him with the powerful Americans, Rani growling that he could take them up to their precious dam and see if they could bribe or threaten mountain villagers to lead them back down the mountain to their luxury hotel and private airplane.

Another American, not identified, reminded Dunwoody that mining leases needed to be discussed.

Dunwoody ended the meeting by saying if Rani couldn’t protect America’s two-hundred-million-dollar investment in the hydro plant, he would send a detachment of Marines to protect the dam. ‘I hear you had a group of terrorists ready to blow up the top of that mountain, and the only thing that stopped them was a phone call from the prime minister of Pakistan.’

‘Turkmenistan,’ someone corrected Dunwoody.

‘I don’t care if it was Stan the Man. Point is, your own army didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We have Marine advisors who can take care of that for you.’

The Hayali translator stumbled through the words, unable to translate ‘Stan the Man,’ and unwilling to translate the threat of the Marines.

Rani switched off the recorder. ‘I did not order my army to take apart those explosives. Some men in no country’s uniform were there. The mountain Elurbar tell me they were private contractors owned by the Americans. So, I am not allowed to run my own country in the way I think best.’

Lily shook her head, overwhelmed by the recording but not knowing how to respond. Rani smacked his desk. ‘Your country is bringing its military into my country, and you still stand there like a baby deer? You couldn’t warn me?’

She had trouble controlling her voice, but she said, ‘Excellency, I know nothing about the private contractors, or about American Marines.’

‘And yet a Marine came with you to this meeting!’

‘My up’rosi fears what I may say outside his hearing. He sent the Marine to report back to him. He is like you, angry with me and not wanting to see me here in your country. And he is angry I came back to Ts’gali instead of staying by the dam while engineers took apart the explosives.’

Bruce had chewed her out with a viciousness that set a record even for him. He’d sounded as though he wanted her to stay on top of the mountain in the hopes she’d be blown up with it. Instead, Jason Tedros was nominating her for an internal CIA medal for averting a major crisis.

Rani stared at her for a long moment, then dropped his head onto his cupped hands. ‘Oh, go. Go.’

‘On my way to the hydro, I – I sent Your Excellency a gift from Muqqadas, an eagle feather and an arrowpoint, wrapped in red birch, showing I was high on the mountain. I’m sorry they failed to please.’ The words trembled in her mouth.

She blinked back tears, but they still blinded her and she tripped on the edge of the carpet. As she got back to her feet, she saw Anta emerge from behind a curtain and then disappear when she realized Lily was still in the room.

Lily didn’t know, couldn’t know, that when the door had shut behind her, Rani turned on Anta. ‘What happened to the feather and the arrowpoint?’

Anta said, ‘She’s poison, and any gift from her would poison you.’

‘She tried to tell me she was on the mountain. She tried to alert me to a potential danger, and you kept it from me.’

‘She blinds you by pretending she understands “The Eagle and the Hunter.” She wants you to believe she thinks of you as the hunter, she the eagle, but she knows nothing of our ways and cares nothing for them. Why do you even now let her spin a web across your eyes?’

He dismissed Anta as forcefully – more forcefully – than he’d sent Lily away, but Lily never learned about that.

Lying in her Chicago bed decades later, Lily realized Anta knew of her gift. What had she said in the middle of the Ts’gali night? You thought you could dazzle him, pretending to be the eagle to his hunter, sending him secret love notes, but he was the Elurbar, not the toy of an uts’min!

Lily swore under her breath. ‘Anta, you prize bitch – whoever brought in my little bundle, the arrow tip and eagle feather wrapped in bark, they delivered it to you. After all, you were the Elurbar’s cousin, the councilor on his right hand! And you kept it from him.’

Anta had spewed another accusation that rankled: she claimed that Jason Tedros had taken the photo of Lily with the other women.

‘That cannot be,’ Lily said out loud.

Jason lectured her and other agents constantly on the need to respect the customs of the country where they were serving. The thought of him sneaking up on women in a canoe seemed too ludicrous to imagine.

Another less comfortable thought hovered behind that one. Jason had been her mentor, protected her from the worst outcomes of her decisions. If he’d been a voyeur – if she hadn’t noticed – she couldn’t complete the thought.

One way to find out – ask him. When she retired, Jason had called to wish her well. She’d kept the phone number he’d used and called it now. A young man answered, brusque to the point of rudeness. Pitching her own voice high, she asked for Jason.

‘Who are you and what do you want?’

‘Medicare Advantage,’ Lily said. ‘He can save up to—’

‘He’s covered. Don’t bother him again.’

She terminated the call. Even though she’d logged into her VPN, she wasn’t going to take a chance on Langley listening in. She debated calling Marissa, to see if something had happened to Jason – was he in a nursing home? Or worse still, had he died?

She finally fell asleep, where her tangled thoughts gave her equally disturbing dreams.

27

RECONNECTING WITH OLD FRIENDS

The next day, Lily had a message from an old friend in Sydney, one of the people she’d caught up with while she’d been in Australia.

It was great to see you at the opera. I’m not crazy about Jake Heggie’s music, but the set was stunning. I saw other old friends the next day who are eager to catch up with you. Give us more notice the next time you come and we’ll make a real Australian evening out of it.

Lily hadn’t gone to the opera with this friend. She looked up Heggie. He hadn’t had an opera staged in Sydney while Lily was there, but his most recent production was, in fact, about spies. ‘Other old friends eager to catch up with her,’ was almost too direct a warning, but the message hadn’t been blocked.

Good thing she’d squelched the impulse to call Marissa. Someone from the Company had been talking to people she’d seen in Australia. They were fishing, Lily thought, looking for anything and everything she was doing. This meant senior staff at Langley had learned about Cinda Mallick’s visit to the Gambrey Center, and that someone had done enough research to think Lily might be connected to Mallick.

The email underscored that everything she read, wrote, spoke, heard now had a second set of eyes and ears on it. If she wanted to talk to Jason, then she’d have to see him in person. If he was ill, if some rough caretaker was answering from a nursing home – she’d deal with that when she encountered it.

Since Marissa was checking up on her, she’d have to use someone else’s name to travel. She didn’t want to start burning her other passports if she could help it.

She’d spent the day at her volunteer stints, first interpreting for the Ukrainian kids on the North Side, then helping with the theater group. She arrived home at the same time as one of her neighbors. Glenna Rothstein was an exuberant woman who loved the social clubs that met at the condo. Like Lily’s mother, Glenna was an enthusiastic bridge player, disappointed that Lily didn’t share Irene’s enthusiasm for the game.

This afternoon they exchanged the usual social platitudes. Glenna said she hadn’t seen Lily for a while.

‘I’ve been traveling, but I overdid it. I’ve been recuperating.’ Lily produced the quavering treble that made her sound old and feeble. ‘Are you still playing bridge?’

‘We’re meeting tomorrow night. Stop by! It will be good for your morale.’ Glenna spread her arms wide in welcome.

Glenna was a woman of enthusiastic gestures. When Lily had gone to the bridge games with her mother, she’d seen Glenna fling her purse to the floor as she tried to toss it onto a chair. Glenna could help her travel without any bother.

Lily showed up the next night as the hands were well underway. Players filled two tables, with a leftover watching the play, waiting for a turn. Glenna’s massive bag was hanging on the back of an empty chair.

As Lily approached one of the tables, she bumped into the chair, dislodging the bag. Glenna and two of the other players briefly looked around as Lily apologized for her clumsiness.

‘So sorry, I’ve got this.’ She managed to empty most of the bag in the process of trying to restore it. As she stuffed in lipsticks, compact, a change of shoes, a bottle of ibuprofen, she slid Glenna’s Real ID out of its folder.

That sleight-of-hand was tricky. Lily had been taught at Langley but it had been years since she’d done it. She’d been practicing all day and tonight managed it quickly enough not to attract attention.

Lily watched for another twenty minutes to cover herself but left as Glenna’s table argued over the play of a three no-trump hand. The group gave her a perfunctory farewell but didn’t watch her leave.

She took the L to the airport early the next morning. She left her smart-phone behind, to foster the illusion that she was still at home.

To the world at large, one old woman looks much like another. The agent at the ticket counter couldn’t wait to be rid of the garrulous old woman who went into excruciating detail about why she paid cash for her ticket. Her son was so concerned about scam artists, and he was right. Glenna’s own sister gave away a credit card number on the phone and could you believe it? Every penny she owned was drained from her bank account.

The ticket agent moved her along as quickly as possible, remembered to say, ‘Enjoy your flight,’ and went on break ready to share her loathing of the flying public with her coworkers.

The TSA agent had Lily slip down her mask, looked from her to the driver’s license.

‘I know,’ Lily said unhappily. ‘I used to have beautiful long hair, but after Covid it keeps breaking off at the roots. My doctor told me it’s normal after Covid, but it’s been eight months. I’ve tried everything, even soybean extract, but nothing—’

The agent sent her through at high speed.

28

OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD

It wasn’t until she landed at LaGuardia that Lily realized she didn’t have Jason’s address with her. Like everyone, she was so dependent on her phone for information, it hadn’t occurred to her to write down his details. She remembered the town name, Sargo Point, and went to an information desk to find out how to get there.

Since she wasn’t driving, they told her to take the Long Island Railroad. She used some of her small cash hoard to take a taxi to the nearest station instead of using the buses from the airport. She made a rueful face: she had navigated Mongolian mountain passes on her final field assignment, and now she was daunted by New York City’s public transit?

At journey’s end, though, she figured the ride had punished her enough to make up for the taxi. The train took almost three bone-jarring hours, on a hard seat with an even harder headrest. She tried to get comfortable, tried to doze, but the train lurched from one tiny station to the next, seeming to stop at each of the hundred miles to the tip of Long Island.

The Sargo Point station was right on the water, which was lapping peacefully against the pilings, as if the very idea of hurricanes and sea surges and walls of water twenty feet high was absurd. Lily walked slowly along the pier, following a sign to the town center. The houses were square-built, clapboard-sided buildings, without ornamentation that a high wind could rip away.

She went into a small deli to get lunch. A half dozen customers, all more or less her own age, were clustered around the deli’s tables, chatting with each other. The middle-aged woman behind the counter joined in freely.

The talk died down when they saw Lily. They watched her pay for a cup of chowder. All the seats were taken, but no one offered her a chair, so she leaned against a wall while she ate. When she finished the chowder, she asked for directions to the library. The group brightened – they were eager to share local knowledge.

The library was great. If Lily was moving to Sargo Point, the librarians would hook her up with book clubs or other activities that would help her connect to the community. Sargo Point was the best place in America to live, they assured her.

They were so friendly that Lily told them she wanted help from the library in locating her uncle, Jason Tedros. ‘I didn’t realize until I got on the train in New York this morning that I’d left my phone at home. I can’t remember his address.’

The atmospheric pressure in the deli plummeted. A sixty-something woman with wiry black hair stepped forward. ‘An uncle? On your mother or your father’s side?’

‘Do I need to pass a DNA test to visit him?’ Lily asked.

‘Something like it,’ the woman said. ‘Jason has dozens of nieces, and I know all of them. We grew up here together on the water. I’ve never seen you before. What’s your name?’

‘I’ve never seen you before, either. I’m Louise Page. And you are?’

In the bad old days, when women in the CIA could serve only as secretaries or, at best, analysts who were barred from the top Civil Service ranks, Eloise Randolph Page had been the lone exception. She’d never helped other women break into the upper Civil Service grades, but her own achievement had made her a legend.

‘We don’t have any Page relatives,’ the woman said.

‘That you know of,’ Lily said, voice cold.

‘We all live here,’ the woman said. ‘We look after Jason and make sure he isn’t bothered by outsiders.’

‘Jason bothered by outsiders?’ Lily echoed. ‘Jason always welcomed newcomers to his circle. That’s how come he accepted me, unlike the rest of the family.’

Everyone in the small shop seemed to gasp in unison. The wire-haired woman looked flustered for the first time. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Men get married, they have children who carry on the Tedros name. Some of those men get married but have children with a different woman. But then they’re scared the rest of this tight-knit group of cousins and nieces and so on will learn about us. And so they pretend they never met our mothers when they show up hoping for child support.

‘Jason never minded acknowledging me, but that was when he was out in the big world. I used to visit him in Pakistan, but I guess now that he’s back in his hometown it would ruin him if he talked to me.’

Jason’s niece stood wide-eyed, unmoving, as if Lily were a Gorgon who’d turned her to stone.

‘Call Jason, Bea,’ one of the other women said. ‘Ask him if he knows – what did you say your name was? Louise Page.’

Bea nodded mechanically. One of the other women took her arm and steered her outside. The others watched through the deli window, saw her gesture with her right hand, expression angry but bewildered.

Back inside, she spoke so rapidly that Lily had trouble understanding her. ‘Jason says he’s surprised to hear from you after all this time, and that if you want money you should go back to New York, but otherwise he’ll see you for fifteen minutes.’

‘Thank you, Cousin Bea,’ Lily said. ‘I promise I won’t ask him for money – he’s been much too generous in the past. Can you tell me how to find his house?’

‘I’m not your cousin,’ Bea said. ‘And not because Uncle Ilidio stepped out of bounds, but because you and I don’t have a relationship.’

Lily knew that Jason was the youngest of five brothers, but she hadn’t known their names. She guessed Ilidio must be dead, unable to challenge her story.

Somehow the whole little group in the deli ended up walking farther up the waterfront. Jason’s house was near the end of a street that faced the water, where a small park separated the houses from a private dock. The house was well kept, clapboard and trim both freshly painted, with a widow’s walk built onto an attic window and a front porch framed by utilitarian pillars.

A man was waiting for them on the porch, good-looking in a rugged, young Clint Eastwood way. Lily thought his pose contrived – one hand on a pillar, the other on his hip, ostentatiously revealing the holster under his leather jacket.

‘So, you have a new cousin, Beatriz?’ he asked.

‘Not new, Rush,’ she said. ‘Just new to me. Jason’s known her forever.’

However suspicious Beatriz was of her, Lily saw that she actively disliked Rush.

‘She can have fifteen minutes. He’s out in the garden. He doesn’t want you panhandling, Miss New Cousin.’ That was the voice that had answered Jason’s phone. Lily hoped she’d disguised her own voice skillfully enough that he wouldn’t recognize it.

Lily followed Beatriz up the steps. Before Lily went into the house, Rush thought he needed to search her. Lily tripped over his cowboy boots. As he tried to feel her waist, she stumbled, grabbed his arm to right herself and landed hard on his instep.

‘Goddamn it! If you can’t walk, get a wheelchair.’

‘I’m so sorry, Rush,’ Lily said. ‘You caught me by surprise. Next time you want to cop a feel, give me a heads-up, like a wink, and a “you’re old but you still have something I want to touch.”’

He backed away. ‘You’re disgusting.’

‘We panhandlers are born that way,’ she chirped.

Beatriz was waiting for her at the end of the hall, by the kitchen door. ‘Welcome to the family, Cousin Louise.’ She added under her breath, ‘Been wanting to do that ever since that creep showed up here.’

‘How long ago was that?’ Lily asked.

‘Eight months. The FBI sent him. They said there’d been threats on Jason’s life and he needed protecting.’

‘Threats on Jason?’ Lily echoed. ‘Who by?’

‘You girls going out to see Jason? Clock is ticking.’ Rush came up behind them.

Beatriz led her through the kitchen to a small, well-tended garden. Jason was sitting on a bench at the back, shaded by the canopy of a tall tree in his neighbor’s garden. From a distance, he looked the same, except that his hair had turned completely white. When Lily got up close, though, she saw he’d lost weight, and that there were deep grooves in his face.

He produced a sardonic smile that made him look more like the old Jason. ‘So, you two cousins have finally met. Stupid business, keeping you a secret from all these Long Island Tedros – you could have had a real family if Ilidio had the guts God gave a goose. The things people used to care about! Beatriz, give me a minute alone with Louise here – I haven’t seen her since I retired.’

Beatriz tightened her lips but backed away.

‘Louise Page, huh? You still sail close to the wind.’

He didn’t move his head, but he rolled his eyes upward. A listening device in the tree, be careful.

‘Beatriz said there’ve been threats on your life, that’s why that muscular gunslinger is here. Who’s threatening you?’

‘No one I know about. I told them at my age it’s a compliment to have people think I’m doing something worth killing for, and that I didn’t want the – what did you call him? – muscular gunslinger. With Bea and her sisters and cousins occupying most of eastern Long Island, a hitman wouldn’t get very far, but they weren’t impressed. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘You know, same as I always did. Bumming around, looking for new things to try. Challenges that an older woman without a lot of money can try. I had to go to New York City today, and I remembered Mom told me my dad’s family all lived out here, and I thought, if you retired back to your hometown I’d just go out and see you.’

She gave a self-conscious laugh. ‘You always told me I needed more impulse control. If someone had told me it was a three-hour train ride on a bumpy road-bed, I probably wouldn’t have made the trip.’

‘Glad you gave into the impulse, Louise, glad you did. High time you saw where your dad spent his life. You have about forty cousins spread around the towns out here. Your mother tell you about the family? The fishing?’

‘Not much,’ Lily said. ‘I guess she was bitter that they never helped out when we really needed help.’

‘Everything changes. The Tedros family – local WASPs treated us like dirt. We stank of fish, of course. I worked summers on the boat, but I was the baby, so I got to go off to college while the other four stayed here until the fish disappeared. Then they retooled as machinists and so on. Anyway, I’m glad your mother reached out and sent you to see me all those years ago in Pakistan. What were you doing there? I forget.’

‘Just junketing around,’ Lily said. ‘I loved climbing. If I found a place where I wanted to hike or climb, I’d get me a job washing dishes and stay for six months.’

‘That’s right, I remember now. I remember all those bruises you used to get, climbing, falling down. Seems like most times I saw you you were covered with bruises.

‘They told me in Islamabad that you got trapped by an avalanche on one of those Central Asia mountains. I was afraid we were going to have to send in a search and rescue crew, all for a tourist too stupid to travel without a shovel and flares, but the locals heard you shouting and dug you out. And you were black and blue that time. I flew over to visit you when you got to Ts’gali.’

The episode he described had really happened. Lily made regular trips along Muqqadas’s middle slopes, meeting villagers, picking up gossip. The avalanche remained a tender memory, tender like a sore muscle that flinched whenever you tried to use it. The mountain people had finally heard her and dug her out, but by then she’d been trapped for three days. They took her to their village. Rani had heard about it on the whisper network and sent a yak-drawn sled to carry her to Idumali.

Jason had just been appointed as Central Asian director then. When her immediate boss fired her for being AWOL, Jason flew in from Islamabad to make Bruce retract the dismissal.

‘You should write a book,’ Jason said. ‘Those books by people who survived mountain-climbing disasters are big sellers. I bet you survived plenty of disasters. You could make a fortune and then all these Tedros cousins would be dying to be your best friend.’

Lily made a face. ‘Some people have adventures that they turn into books and movies and make a fortune, but I never learned how to put one sentence in front of another. What about you, Jason, working in Asia all those years? You must have a ton of stories to tell.’

‘Every agent thinks they have a book in them, thinks they’re going to be the next John le Carré. I wrote some pages, but people thought they were unpublishable.’ He jerked his head toward the house, toward Rush.

‘Can I read them?’ She spoke softly, prison mumble, leaning forward to make sure he heard her.

Rush strolled up before he could answer. ‘Don’t let her touch you, Jason. She damned near broke my foot on her way into the house.’

Beatriz joined them. ‘I’m going to collect your laundry, Jason. Is there anything that isn’t in the hamper?’

‘You’re a good girl, Bea, you and your sisters, looking after my clothes. Can’t ask Rush to do it – he might get his gun caught in the mangle, shoot himself in that foot Louise stomped on. Then he’d really be in pain.’

‘Jason!’ Beatriz cried. ‘When did you last see a mangle? Louise will think we’re shanty people who can’t afford a proper washing machine!’

Rush wanted to know what the fuck a mangle was. Jason struggled to his feet. Under cover of the other voices he said, ‘Yep,’ to Lily, adding that she was a good girl, just like Bea, to come all this way to see him.

‘You girls will get along just fine. You stay in touch now.’

‘Jason, you know we’re grown women,’ Beatriz expostulated.

‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘To me, you’re my girls.’

29

WATER IS THICKER THAN BLOOD

The next New York−bound train was an hour away, Lily saw when she’d walked to the station. She was heading back into town to pick up a snack at the deli when Beatriz pulled up next to her in a dusty SUV.

‘Get in. Jason told me to drive you back to New York, or wherever you’re headed.’

Lily climbed in, grateful. LaGuardia by train and bus would be an exhausting journey.

‘I’m surprised we never heard about you,’ Beatriz said. ‘Of course, Jason’s job kept him overseas most of the time, but still – you’d think he would have said something on his home leave.’

‘Maybe he thought it would upset his mother too much,’ Lily suggested. ‘I can see how close your family is.’

‘How did you even find him in the first place?’ Beatriz asked.

‘I never settled down to real work,’ Lily admitted. ‘I loved hiking and climbing. I dropped out of college to bum around the Asian mountains – I’d do scut work for expeditions and they’d pay me by letting me join lower-altitude climbs.

‘On one expedition in Pakistan I lost my passport, so I had to go to the embassy. When I saw Jason’s name on the hall directory, I took a chance. I knew my father’s last name, see, even though my last name is my mother’s. Tedros is pretty unusual.’ She gave a self-conscious laugh.

‘Jason told me later he had the embassy investigate me to see if I was a scam artist. When we got to know each other better, he said it was ironic that I was Ilidio’s child – he said Ilidio was always laying down the law on sex to the other brothers.’

It was a mistake to embroider too much. Liy was afraid she’d overdone it, but Beatriz said, ‘I guess that makes sense. Growing up, we weren’t supposed to know that Jason was gay, but Ilidio felt like he was the whole morality police rolled up in one. He didn’t even want our grandmother to include Jason at Christmas dinner when he came home on leave during the holidays. Maybe Jason felt he owed him one back, so he took care of you in Pakistan. But then he wasn’t brave enough to bring you home.’

‘He helped me when I really needed it,’ Lily said. ‘That’s what matters to me, although I do feel a little envious of you, getting to be part of a big family. How many cousins live near you?’

Lily got Beatriz talking about the ways the family found to make a living, and how three or four of the cousins had been smart about real estate, and become super rich, while three or four had been stupid about money, so it all balanced out.

‘How about you? No husband? No children? Where do you live?’

‘Albuquerque,’ Lily said. ‘On my own. All my years of cooking for climbing expeditions paid off: now I manage a diner.’

As they got close to the airport exit, Beatriz stopped talking. She seemed uncomfortable. Lily wondered if Jason’s riposte, that Lily shouldn’t ask for money, was making her think Lily might put the bite on her. It wasn’t until they pulled up in front of the Southwest bay that she spoke again.

‘You know we do Jason’s laundry for him – my cousins Claire, Faith, and me. He started having a nosebleed after you left. It got all over his shirt.’

Lily waited; not sure what response would work well.

‘I never knew him to have a nosebleed before. Maybe it took him by surprise because he actually wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve, and usually he’s very tidy, very – I can’t think of the word, but careful with his appearance.

‘Maybe it was your visit, knocking him off-balance. Anyway, I went up to his room for a clean shirt. When he got out of the bathroom after changing, he handed me the bloody shirt and whispered that I should find you and give it to you. Why would he do that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lily was startled.

Beatriz was staring through the windshield, mouth in a flat, grim line. ‘I think he wants you to do a DNA test, to prove you’re really part of the family, but I couldn’t ask him anything else because Rush came back into the hall just then. Rush is a terrible menace. He’s not keeping Jason safe; he’s keeping him away from his friends. If he could keep Claire, Faith, and me out of the house, he would, but the family has a lot of connections with local LEOs. Not enough to make the FBI take Rush away, but enough to make sure we can visit.’

‘How’s Rush keeping Jason’s friends away?’

‘He tells them Jason isn’t feeling well. Then they call me or one of the other girls, and we say Jason is fine, but lonely and they should visit, but Rush won’t let them in. I’m surprised he let Jason talk to you as long as you did today.’

‘But Rush can’t be with him twenty-four seven,’ Lily said. ‘He must have to sleep or run errands.’

‘A couple of guys come at night to watch the house,’ Beatriz said. ‘Us cousins decided to surprise Jason for his eighty-fifth. Forty-seven of us showed up with a band and everything, and these guys with badges and guns wouldn’t let us into the house.

‘His oldest friend was there, Sam Evans, who was an admiral with the Coast Guard. We thought for sure Sam could get past Rush and his gang, but they actually shoved him to the ground. He called someone at the Pentagon the next day and they said the only action they could take was cutting off Sam’s pension because Homeland was dictating what happens to Jason.

‘We went to the local police, and then to the county elder care department, but they said he was being protected! Protected from foreign agents who want to kill him for work he did at the CIA. So, we went out on the dock and set off sparklers, and sang, but it was really horrible.’ Her voice shook with a mix of grief and anger.

A cop came along and rapped on Beatriz’s window, telling her to get moving.

Beatriz nodded at the cop. ‘Anyway, here’s the shirt, Cousin Louise.’ She handed Lily a plastic bag holding the bloody shirt. ‘Send me the results if you get that DNA test.’

With the cop glowering over the driver’s window, Beatriz rummaged in her bag for a pen. She wrote a phone number and street address on the back of a receipt from a hardware store.

Lily moved the bag from hand to hand, as if testing its weight. The cop got out her ticket pad.

‘Get out, Louise,’ Beatriz barked, ‘unless you want to pay for a parking ticket.’

‘Can you make a circuit of the terminal? There’s something I’d better tell you.’

Beatriz started to protest, but a look at Lily’s face made her put the SUV in gear and move off.

‘Well?’

‘Pull into that cell phone lot,’ Lily said. ‘This will take more than thirty seconds.’

By the time Beatriz had pulled into the lot, Lily could feel heat radiating from her – anger moving from her heart down her arms and into her face.

‘You’re the niece Jason trusts the most,’ Lily said. ‘That’s why he sent you to drive me. There’s probably a message for me inside the shirt, but the big message is for me to trust you, too.’

Beatriz stared at her, speechless.

‘I’m not your cousin. My name is Lily Sedako. I used to work for Jason when he was the Central Asian director for the CIA.’

Beatriz started to swear at her – how dare she, and so on. Everyone in Sargo Point would think Ilidio had cheated on Aunt Rhoda when he never had, and so on.

Lily let her vent it all. When she finally came to a halt, Lily said, ‘You have a right to be angry. But if I hadn’t told a phony story, Rush would have kept me from talking to Jason. Rush will report my visit to the FBI, who in turn will share it with Langley – with the CIA. If had I used my real identity, this would end very badly for both Jason and me.’

She waited for a grudging nod from Beatriz before continuing.

‘Something is going on in Hayalistan that has made the CIA put Jason under house arrest. It has to do with lithium mines there, upcoming elections, and the billionaire who holds the mining leases. I don’t know all the pieces or how to put them together.

‘I hoped Jason could tell me why Hayalistan is attracting high-level attention. I tried phoning Jason. I guess it was Rush who answered, but when I heard a voice I didn’t know, I hung up.’

Beatriz scowled. ‘In Maude’s deli, you said you were Jason’s niece, and you didn’t know then that he was under house arrest.’

‘I didn’t know. When Rush answered my phone call, I thought maybe Jason had caregivers living with him. I wanted to check on him. If he needed help, I wanted to make sure he was getting the right help. I didn’t know he had this whole network of nieces and so on.

‘I worked for him for decades and relied on his judgment. I need help because I’m flying blind on a… a mission, I guess I can call it. I thought he’d know what’s happening behind the scenes. In fact, I’m sure he knows – but since he can’t tell me, I am going to have to create a plan to force people to reveal their secrets. If my plan is good enough, it should also make it possible to get Rush out of Jason’s house.’

She took a deep breath, but spoke to the windshield, not Beatriz. ‘I may need help. I’m hoping if I call on you, you’ll be able to step up and provide support.’

Beatriz squeezed her eyes shut, a childhood gesture – if she didn’t look at the monsters, they didn’t exist.

‘I know this is a shock,’ Lily said, ‘A lot to absorb, but if I need help, can I call on you?’

‘I – I should talk it over with Faith and Claire.’

‘No,’ Lily said. ‘It’s a hard thing to hold on to a secret like this. If you talk to Faith and Claire, they’ll talk to their partners or their children or whoever they go to with troubles and that person will talk in a shocked undertone to Maude in her deli. In a town this size, everyone will know within a day. And then Rush will know. If he gets the least whiff of who I am, and what we propose doing, I’ll be in an interrogation room in Langley within the hour. They will probably take cruder steps with Jason.’

‘Kill him, you mean?’ Beatriz whispered.

‘Kill him, I mean,’ Lily said. She waited a minute and then repeated her request. ‘If I call on you, will you be willing to help?’

Beatriz massaged her temples. ‘It’s a lot – I promise I won’t talk to anyone, but I need to think – can I call you?’

‘I’m using a VPN and burner phones to stay off Langley’s radar,’ Lily said. ‘If you decide to help, post something positive on Sargo Point’s Tripadvisor page. Maybe, “Everyone in my family is eager to visit Sargo Point this summer.” If this is too big an ask, post, “We came during hurricane season, a mistake.” If I get the positive message, I’ll call you from a burner and log you into my VPN.’

Beatriz nodded slowly. She drove back to the terminal. As Lily opened the door, she said, ‘I don’t need to go through all that nonsense with Tripadvisor. Of course I want to help Jason. Let me know as soon as possible.’

Lily stuffed the bag with the shirt into her carry-on case and hustled into the terminal.

When she was past security, she went into a toilet stall and opened the bag. The shirt was wadded up and the bloody sleeve had stuck to itself as it dried.

Jason wanted her to see something in the shirt. If he’d managed to slip a message onto the sleeve, she might obliterate it by tugging the sticky layers apart. Best to wait until she was at home and had a few tools at her disposal. She lifted the shirttails to fold them over the sleeve. And saw a number written clumsily in blood with a fingernail.

30

SECOND SIGHT

How had she not known he was gay? As the plane lifted off over Long Island, Lily thought more about that than the bloody shirt.

Married agents, both male and female, brought their partners along on assignment. The Company recognized spouses – especially wives – as unpaid extra staff. The fact that Jason didn’t have a wife wasn’t that unusual, though – working for the CIA broke up marriages. But in the culture of raunch that lingered in the field, someone like Jason who wasn’t interested in boozing and broads must have raised eyebrows.

Not mine, Lily thought. When Beatriz casually announced it in the car, Lily had to grip the sides of the bucket seat to keep from crying out, her astonishment was so great. Jason had always had male friends, but female ones, too. Like all closed groups, the Company was a relentless gossip cauldron, but no one Jason was seen with had ever triggered backroom rumors. Or at least, no one had ever passed the talk on to Lily.

Lily herself had occasionally been his plus-one at diplomatic functions, although he preferred women with a better fashion sense than hers. That wasn’t because he acted out some gay stereotype. Other countries’ diplomatic corps, particularly the French and the English, placed a high value on appearance. Showing up at a formal dinner with a woman who stumbled in the lowest high heels would have made Jason as well as Lily a target of ridicule.

Ever since she’d read Thom Kolchak’s story in The New Yorker, Lily felt she’d been getting unpleasant lessons about her skills. She’d been a good agent, but she’d also been blind in many ways. Tania’s lecture to her on how she gave away pieces of her heart had hit Lily where she was most vulnerable. And now this – not sensing that Jason had painful secrets. Not sensing anything about his life.

She was lonely. She’d loved Rani, but it was an impossible relationship. Lily wondered if she herself had always skated on the surface of relationships, not committing to anyone for some psychobabble reason – fear of lovers rejecting her as her mother had done, as her babulya’s lover had done. Her passion for Rani had after all been with someone who had rejected her for his country – a nobler reason than choosing a new lover, but rejection all the same. And now here she was, in her seventies, ready to plan a new op, but still without anyone to come home to.

A spasm of jealousy twisted her. She was jealous of Jason, Beatriz, and the rest of the tight-knit Tedros family. For a moment, she wished she’d kept her real identity secret from Beatriz. We could be cousins. I’d have a family! She made a face. Until Jason was free from surveillance. Then it would have become impossible to assuage Beatriz’s anger.

At least Jason thought she had skills; thought she could be trusted to act on his behalf. He’d produced a gush of blood in order to send her a message.

It’s not hard to start a nosebleed. It was something Lily had learned to do in a Kyrgyzstan prison – the guards were disgusted by menstrual blood. Kyrgyzstani prisoners showed her how they scraped their noses raw to get enough usable blood to smear on their crotches so they could gross out the guards. She’d told Jason about this when he debriefed her after her release. He’d remembered it, some filing system in his brain: I may be able to use this down the road.

She had memorized the number he’d put on the shirttail. Now she repeated it to herself. Never write anything down, but in the age of smartphones, she’d stopped remembering phone numbers. She drew a grid on the back of her napkin and wrote in the numbers, turned the paper over, recited ten lines from ‘The Eagle and the Hunter,’ and then silently recited the numbers. She did this several times until the flight attendants came through for the final garbage haul. She poured water into the napkin, shredding it, before sticking it in a trash bag.

No one was watching her – surely. But she was moving back into a full op mentality. Take no chances. Assume everything you do is watched by someone.

31

BACK AT THE RANCH HOUSE (3)

‘I found only one person at the Wharton School who would say anything about Arnold Sylvester,’ Halina reported to Marissa. ‘A woman in their multinational management program says he was a remote student who wrote on how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine created economic opportunities in Central Asia.

‘She said Arnold submitted detailed economic data to bolster his theory, but he wouldn’t explain the sources for it. She downgraded his paper, which made him threaten to sue Wharton for defamation. The school backed her, but he behaved horribly, doxxed her, put out lies about her sex life on social media, and then he suddenly withdrew his suit. Everyone else I tried to talk to pretended they never heard of him. Anyway, he was a remote student. Really remote – he was living in rural Idaho and had to go to the Boise Public Library to get Wi-Fi for his classes.’

‘Where in Idaho?’ Marissa asked.

Halina hunched a shoulder. ‘The Wharton registrar named a town, Cartapiste, that I can’t find a record of. And then, his application to Wharton said he’d been born in Topeka, Kansas. I couldn’t find a birth certificate or parents in Kansas, so I searched the whole country. I couldn’t find him. It’s like he only half exists.’

‘Yes,’ Marissa said dryly. ‘The half that showed up when he went to Wharton and then joined Gambrey Minerals and Mining.’

She typed in a search on her desktop and displayed the screen on her wall monitor. ‘Piste’ was Finnish for map dot.

‘He apparently has a sense of humor,’ Marissa said. ‘Or an arrogance that assumes he’s so much sharper than we are he can flaunt it publicly. He sounds like someone with a new identity that hasn’t been fully backstopped.’

‘A Russian agent?’ Halina asked.

‘An agent of some kind. I’m going to ask the US Marshals if he’s in their witness protection program. And if he is, what he’s doing prancing around Hayalistan.’

She reported her suspicions about Arnold’s identity to Gordon. ‘I want the marshals to vouch for him. We need a more complete history.’

‘ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!’ Gordon wrote back within seconds. ‘He’s doing valuable work for our country. We can’t go digging around in his life.’

An hour later, Gracelyn called to say Gordon wanted to see her.

Marissa used to think she wanted Gordon’s job, but when she walked into his office, his bloodshot eyes and pasty skin made her decide that running Analytics was a good gig.

‘Someone at the Wharton School called Arnold to say they’d gotten questions about his time there as a student. Did you make those calls?’

‘Yes, Gordon, but that was yesterday, before you told me how important Arnold was to our national security. He exists as only a shadow of a person. He has no birth certificate and no parents, at least not under that name. He attended Wharton remotely from a town that doesn’t exist.’

‘You don’t need to know more than that,’ Gordon said.

His voice was thick and he couldn’t look at her.

‘Does Warner Oliphant want you to fire me?’ Marissa asked, her voice dry, oddly detached. Gordon’s boss, the head of America’s myriad security agencies, had been known to dig into Company or NSA files and demand that an agent be fired for reasons no one was ever told.

‘No, not exactly.’

Marissa tried to figure out what it meant to be ‘not exactly’ fired. ‘He wants me to keep working but without pay?’

‘Our job is to provide the president with the best possible intel and looking into important members of the – we need to be giving our major business leaders intel, not asking them for it. If we can’t do that then we’re not up to the job we’re being paid to do.’

Gordon glanced up, then turned back to shredding his cuticles. His fingers were raw and bleeding, Marissa saw. It was unnerving to see him miserable, not as an obstacle to her doing her job, but something worse, a person who felt helpless.

‘Do you want us to back away from Hayalistan?’ she asked, voice determinedly brisk.

‘No. We need to find out what’s going on, who this Cinda Mallick is and why she was threatening the Gambrey Center.’

Gracelyn came in to put a Post-it on Gordon’s monitor. ‘Marissa, can you stop at my desk on your way out?’

Marissa followed her from Gordon’s office.

‘None of us has a secure job,’ Gracelyn murmured. ‘Oliphant told Gordon he would be fired if he bothered Arnold Sylvester again. You need to know Gordon didn’t name you, so – can you try to color inside the lines for a few days? And on that subject – did you ask Chicago to go into Lily Sedako’s apartment?’

Marissa nodded.

‘Everyone knows we’re looking for Cinda Mallick, so it wasn’t especially subtle to ask them to look for her documents at Lily’s place. Why didn’t you tell Gordon?’

‘I didn’t want to shine a spotlight on her when I was on a fish-ing trip,’ Marissa said. ‘You’re right, though: it wasn’t bright to ask them to look through her place and think I was below the radar.’

‘You worked with Lily at the start of your career, didn’t you?’ Gracelyn knew everything, so of course she knew that. ‘If you think Lily is behind the unrest in Hayalistan, you need to tell Gordon. It would get pressure off him – off the whole Agency – if Oliphant sees we have someone, well, expendable, in our sights.’

‘Expendable?’ Marissa’s mouth was dry. ‘I hope we don’t sacrifice Lily without some data.’

‘Of course not, Marissa. Lily was away from home today – she apparently does volunteer work – so Chicago put in some mics and cameras. We’ll see who she talks to and what she talks about before we do anything.’

32

A WHOLE HEART

Lily had a simple way to test her door locks. She had a lock whose tumblers switched left to right every three turns of the key. This meant that if the third turn when she locked it had been to the left, then the opening turn should be to the right.

This wasn’t an easy lock to pick, but someone had done it. It should have opened to the right, on the third turn, but it didn’t.

If her place had been tossed, she didn’t have the energy to confront it tonight. If someone was lying in wait for her, she definitely didn’t have the energy. She went down to the common room, where she dropped Glenna Rothstein’s Real ID on the floor near the door. She took the stairs down to the basement, went out the back and through the alley to a hotel a few blocks away.

Her own ID and a credit card were tucked into her bra; she checked in under her own name. She stacked bottles and glasses from the minibar next to the door as an improv burglar alarm, took a long, hot shower, and fell asleep. A gift leftover from her years in the field – sleep when you have the chance. Fret and second-guess yourself when the op is over.

It was noon when Lily returned to her condo. She’d woken from a dream where Rani was chanting ‘The Eagle and the Hunter.’ He looked as he did when she first saw him, eyes bright in the firelight, body alive with the intensity of the poem. In the dream, tongues of fire shot out and wrapped around him, pulling him into the heart of the blaze. He held his arms out to Lily and she joined him in the middle of the fire, where they began to dance.

I’ve found my heart, she said in the dream. Not a little piece but the whole thing.

She’d been reluctant to leave the dream. Waking up, getting up, meant dealing with whoever had violated the privacy of her home.

‘What is going on, Lily?’ she whispered at the bathroom mirror. ‘You’re in your home country. Do you have to worry about surveillance here as if you were in Moscow or Shanghai?’

She didn’t like the face she saw in the mirror. It looked old, and even worse, scared. ‘Is this the person who exfiltrated a KGB colonel from under the advance of a Russian battalion? That was some other Lily! Get that one back on duty!’

She brewed a cup of bad tea from the supplies in the room. Before she went back to her home, she wanted to identify the number Jason had traced into the tails of his shirt. That meant a trip to the library. Since she’d left her phone and laptop at home when she flew to New York, both were undoubtedly now full of spyware.

She rode the bus downtown to the main library and went to one of the computer stations. She waited for a machine at the end of a table, as that made it easier to tell if someone was trying to see her screen. She logged into her VPN, and then into a telephone database. Assuming the digits in Jason’s blood were a phone number, the numbers belonged to someone who worked for the Carnegie Literary Agency in Boston. She found the agency website, which listed film, TV, and streaming experts, digital and social media experts, branding experts, and even some people who handled books. We’re with you from that first draft to your streaming contract, and beyond.

The number Jason had scrawled in blood belonged to William Sessil, one of the book agents. When Lily called it, though, she got a ‘number not in service’ message.

She tried the agency’s main number and asked for Sessil. ‘Are you one of his authors?’ the receptionist asked.

‘I’m an independent researcher helping one of his writers,’ Lily said. ‘I was asked to get in touch with William Sessil to clarify a few points in the manuscript.’

‘Bill – Mr Sessil – he was in a serious accident. They don’t think he’ll recover. We moved his clients to other agents. I’m sorry we didn’t get the message to the person you’re working for but tell me their name and I’ll connect you to the right person.’

‘A serious accident?’ Lily echoed. ‘A car crash?’

‘He was running in the woods near his home and a car veered off the road and ran into him.’ The receptionist’s voice was low, the tone people use for shocking news. ‘It’s a mercy he wasn’t killed outright, but another runner came along and called an ambulance. They say he may never speak again, and he was so brilliant, and funny, and—’ Her voice trembled. ‘Who did you say the client is? I don’t know why we didn’t call them.’

Lily murmured condolences. ‘My writer is so far behind schedule you probably thought they’d never finish the book. That’s a terrible tragedy.’

She hit the ‘end’ button and stared blankly at the screen in front of her. Jason must have been writing a book, if he had found a literary agent. The agent had been run over while running in the woods – a car veered off the road into the woods? ‘Please!’ she said. ‘That is fucking sloppy, even for Langley!’ She spoke out loud, so vehemently that everyone nearby turned to stare.

She mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ and dug through news sites looking for William Sessil. The story hadn’t been big enough for national attention, but a newspaper in his suburban community had covered it. Seven months ago, William Sessil had been hit by a car while he was jogging near his parents’ home in Andover, Massachusetts. He had suffered a head trauma that had cost him his memory.

‘He was visiting our parents over the weekend,’ his sister had said in an interview. ‘He was running on a path in the woods where cars aren’t allowed. The police say a Jeep ran him over, but what was it doing in the woods? Another runner came along a few minutes later, and found him in time to save his life, but he may never fully recover. He can walk and look after himself, the basics, you know, but he was so brilliant – he could quote reams of Shakespeare, and then he’d turn Hamlet’s soliloquies into limericks – we don’t know if that will ever come back.’

Rush had shown up to control Jason eight months ago, if Beatriz’s timeline was accurate. One month after that, William Sessil had been injured.

She went into the hall outside the reading room and found a quiet alcove to call Beatriz. ‘Sorry to bother you so soon, but when I was out in Sargo Point, Jason said he’d started writing a book. Do you know about that?’

Yes, Beatriz knew, and it was the biggest reason that she hated, hated, hated Rush.

‘Jason was writing his memoir, mostly about his life in the CIA, but also what it was like growing up here when the town was a fishing village and how hard it was for a Portuguese immigrant to get into the CIA to begin with. Rush threw out all Jason’s notes and everything. He sent someone into our houses. They looked at all our computers, even the grandchildren’s! We didn’t know what was in the book, because when he was writing it, he said we’d have to wait for him to finish it.’

‘He didn’t give you any idea why the Company thought the book was so threatening?’ Lily asked.

‘He said confession was good for his soul even if it wasn’t always good for other people and we’d learn all his secrets when we read it. It made him happy to work on it but when we protested to Rush and tried to demand that he give Jason back his computer and his files, Rush said he could have Jason put into a locked Alzheimer’s ward. Rush said if we wanted him to stay home, we’d forget about the book.’

Lily drew in a sharp breath. The cruelty – it was monstrous, not just directed at Jason, but at Beatriz and her cousins.

After a pause, Beatriz said, ‘How do you know about the book? Have you found a copy?’

‘No. The shirt – he’d scrawled a phone number in his blood inside. I traced it to the literary agent he was working with. Only that man was almost killed in a hit-and-run and has lost his memory. Be careful who you talk to and what you say. Someone – probably someone in the CIA – does not want Jason’s secrets to become public knowledge.’

‘Oh, why did he think he had to tell his secrets?’ Beatriz cried. ‘We were living so happily with him back in the family. And the CIA – what kind of monsters are they?’

‘They are behaving monstrously, but we don’t have time to cry about that now. We need a plan to get Jason out of there. Does he ever get to leave the house? Doctor’s appointments, anything like that?’

‘Rush lets him sit in the garden with that camera up in the tree. They took him for a heart checkup with an armed guard, so no matter what your plan is, it can’t be done.’

‘I don’t have a plan yet, but I promise you I am making one. There’s a first step you can follow. You have a lot of relatives out there. Get the kids to start playing in that little bit of a park across from Jason’s house. Jump rope, soccer, anything that will bring eight or more kids there. Rush will protest, but it’s public property. If the kids are there all the time, he’ll start taking them for granted. When the time comes to get Jason out, use the kids as a distraction.’

‘You can’t do anything to hurt the children!’ Beatriz cried.

‘I promise I will do nothing that hurts the children. And we’ll talk it through before I act, because I want to save Jason, but not at the expense of the rest of the family.’

Beatriz was reluctant to end the call. Lily understood: Beatriz was essentially an asset, someone who had agreed to work in secret against her own country’s interests. It’s terrifying and lonely. Lily stayed on the phone with her until Beatriz said she guessed she needed to think about what she was going to make for dinner.

‘You’ll get the kids out to play, though, won’t you?’ Lily said.

Beatriz said she would. If nothing else, it would give Jason a chance to see his nieces and nephews, even if only from the front windows.

When they hung up, Lily gave way to her own bout of fear. Despite trying to keep his book secret, the Company had found out, shut Jason down ruthlessly, the agent even more ruthlessly. The threat to put Jason in a locked Alzheimer’s ward shook Lily to her bones.

They could do that to you, too, missy, if they got hold of you. The wantonness of it all, the greed for money and power and who knew what else. A betrayal of the work she’d spent her life doing.

She went into the women’s toilets and bent awkwardly over the sink to bathe her face. She had to pull herself together, think it through, come up with a plan.

That copy of The New Yorker and the story linking her to the lithium mines had goaded her to act. Could that be connected to Jason? In fact, was it Jason who figured out how to get someone in Dallas to send her the magazine?

Say it was. What was the timeline?

Rush had been planted on Jason eight months ago, so last September. Poor William Sessil had been assaulted a month later, last October. Kolchak’s story was published this past February. How long before publication would he have written the story?

She hadn’t tried to reach Kolchak since firing off that angry email right after reading his article. She had his private email address in her own mail folder on her computer. Langley cyber-ops no doubt had seen that, but Marissa had called to chew her out over this all the way back in April when this horrible tangle started. It wouldn’t matter if they read that email, but it would hurt both her and Kolchak if she went into a machine they were watching to find the address again. Way too risky. Instead, she looked up his public website. All queries were to go through his personal attorney, Penelope Loewenhoek.

Lily left the library and walked over to the lake. She found a rock to sit on behind the planetarium, away from the tourists. She had a burner phone with her, but she still logged into her VPN to call the lawyer’s office.

Yes, this was so urgent that even if Loewenhoek was talking to the Dalai Lama Lily wanted to interrupt. She was with the CIA and had a query about Loewenhoek’s client, Thom Kolchak.

Loewenhoek came on the line, voice cold enough to turn boiling water directly to ice. ‘We have nothing to say to the CIA, certainly nothing over the phone.’

Lily said, ‘Give me thirty seconds, don’t cut me off mid-sentence. I was with the Agency for forty years, but I’m retired. I am the person your client mentioned by reputation in his article about Hayalistan. That story sent me back to Hayalistan, where I hadn’t worked since 2002, to try to understand why I was singled out as the person who caused the country’s opioid crisis and environmental woes.’

‘I have even less to say to you.’

Hostile target. Lily slipped easily back into the role of sympathetic interrogator. After another barrage from Loewenhoek, Lily said, ‘I need to know if your client met with a literary agent named William Sessil, if Sessil persuaded him to go to Hayalistan.’

‘What business can that possibly be of yours?’

‘Because Sessil had a client whose memoir about his own work in Hayalistan has been obliterated. A month after that, Sessil himself was nearly murdered. He survived with significant brain damage. I wondered if in that month he looked for someone to tell his client’s story. And if that brought him to Thom Kolchak.’

Loewenhoek was silent for a long count. Lily also kept quiet, waiting for the target to talk herself into cooperating.

Loewenhoek finally told the story. Kolchak had been at a meeting of investigative journalists in Philadelphia. After a session on how journalists were covering opioid addictions, Sessil came up to Kolchak. He talked to him about Hayalistan, and suggested parallels between the dirt-poor part of Illinois where Kolchak had grown up, and this remote mountain country.

‘Sessil told him he’d had a client who’d been a geologist there in the 1990s, that he’d done key work in discovering Hayalistan’s lithium deposits. He was having what Sessil called a come-to-Jesus moment, guilty about pushing the mines onto Hayalistan. Sessil said the geologist died of emphysema without writing more than about thirty pages. Sessil said he was looking for someone to take over that part of the story, how the US was involved.

‘Thom talked to me about it, and we agreed that moving the story from Illinois to Hayalistan would give him a marketing edge. So he flew out there, and did the research, met with students, met with some of the miners. That’s how he came up with the CIA angle, but we couldn’t get a name for – you, I guess. And your name is?’

‘Anonymous for now,’ Lily said.

When Loewenhoek protested, Lily said, ‘I could give you a backstopped cover name and you’d be satisfied, but you’d still be ignorant. Until I get this whole saga figured out, the fewer people who can talk about me the longer I’ll live.’

Loewenhoek said, ‘Oh,’ in a small voice.

‘I don’t remember anything about a geologist in Kolchak’s story,’ Lily said.

‘He never learned the geologist’s name. A few weeks after Sessil sent him the material he had, his number stopped answering. The agency where he worked said Sessil had quit without leaving a forwarding number. Which is strange if he was a literary agent, because he would have had other clients.’

‘Not strange,’ Lily said. ‘The CIA was disappearing Sessil. They probably told the agency owners Sessil was a national security risk and they shouldn’t talk about him, except the firm didn’t bother to swear their secretaries to silence. That’s how I was able to find him.

‘Can you tell me about the pictures? How he got the one of Gambrey with Agajan at the Central Asian Games? And the one with me in Lake Sakin?’

Loewenhoek told her that the Gambrey-Agajan photo had been with the documents Kolchak received from William Sessil. ‘The one of the women in the lake, that was strange. The students he met with in Hayalistan gave it to him. He couldn’t get a provenance – they said it came from an anonymous old woman – but the magazine decided to run it because it showed the lake when it was clean enough to swim in.’

That was what Mika had said. Lily was sure the woman had been Anta, but she didn’t know how to prove it.

‘It is absolutely crucial for Thom Kolchak’s safety that he not mention Sessil’s name to anyone, in any form,’ she said. ‘Certainly not in a phone call from you unless you’re using a VPN at both ends. I’m surprised Kolchak is still walking around, but maybe he didn’t put Sessil’s name into his phone or computer.’

‘I see.’ Loewenhoek continued to be subdued. ‘I’ll make sure. If something happens – if I need to reach you?’

‘Use this burner number. Don’t leave a message – I’ll see your number pop up on the screen and get back to you.’

She hung up and made the most difficult call of the day, to William Sessil’s sister, Patricia. Lily explained that she was the researcher on the book one of Sessil’s clients was writing. ‘I’ve been out of the country, and only just learned of your brother’s injuries. Can he have visitors?’

‘Absolutely not!’ the sister said. ‘Who are you, anyway? He can’t have visitors; he’s just starting to recover some language. And you can’t have his address. My parents and I have been through enough hell without wannabe writers showing up to harass them and William.’

‘Of course,’ Lily said. ‘I’m just a researcher. My own client was writing a book about Hayalistan, and your brother was making valuable comments about the text. Now my client is incapacitated, too, but his family wants me to find a ghostwriter to finish the project. I was hoping you might have some of the manuscripts your brother was working on.’

‘Someone came out from the Carnegie Literary Agency – that’s where William worked. They were really harsh – they demanded all his papers, threatened to sue us for holding on to them.’

‘That is brutal,’ Lily said. ‘I’m sorry to add to the heavy load you’re carrying, but my client’s family is in the same boat you are – their loved one suffered a stroke, he’s unable to finish the project. If there’s any chance a thumb drive, or part of the manuscript, survived the agency’s search…’ She let her voice trail away.

Patricia gave a noisy sigh. ‘The woman who came out from Carnegie took back everything she found, but I guess I can check one more time. I’m over there every afternoon, anyway. There isn’t enough money for a proper facility or someone to care for him at home.’

‘It would be very kind of you to look while you have so much on your mind,’ Lily said, still meek. She created a name, Eleanor Tanney, and an email address and hung up.

She’d been on the phone too long. Even with a VPN, nothing was completely private these days – including her condo. She’d been absorbed enough by William Sessil’s story that she’d pushed her own troubles to the back of her mind. She needed to go back to Elm Street to see what the Company had done to her home.

33

GASLIT

‘Lily! Where have you been?’ August McBride sprang from behind the concierge desk and grabbed her backpack, as if it was a burden too heavy for a frail person.

‘Were you looking for me?’ she asked.

‘Yesterday afternoon the gas company got an alert from the building. I had to let the man in to check your pipes, to make sure the leak wasn’t coming from your place. You didn’t answer your door, and I was afraid maybe you’d been overcome by the fumes.

‘But I don’t use gas – you know the building switched to electric the last year my mother was alive.’

‘I know,’ McBride said, ‘but the old pipes are still there. The guy said it was possible they hadn’t been drained properly when service to the building was cut. Besides, the boiler for the building still runs on gas. If there was a leak it could come up through the vents into your place.’

‘Did he detect leaks in anyone else’s home?’ Her voice seemed to come from a great distance, not from her head but from a train tunnel in a mountain. The voice sounded calm, conversational.

‘He looked at the Lissam place. He said he wasn’t getting a reading on the lower floors, so he just checked the two of you.’

Elizabeth Lissam lived across the hall from Lily. She was a prickly neighbor who’d twice made Lily come before the board for infractions of the condo’s rules. If Lily came out of her unit when Elizabeth was waiting for the elevator, Elizabeth would pretend she’d forgotten something, run into her own condo, and wait for Lily to ride down before she emerged again.

‘The thing is, Lily, I had to let him in when you didn’t answer your door or your phone,’ August was saying. ‘And then when I saw your phone and your computer were here, and no trace of you – that made my heart stop in its tracks! I thought maybe you’d had a dizzy spell, maybe the gas had gotten to you, so we had a look through the place.’

He saw her stiffen and said, huffy, ‘I know you think I violated your privacy, but what if you’d been lying there passed out in your bed, or even worse, in the bath, where you could drown!’

She forced a smile. ‘Of course. I’d have done the same thing. When did the gasman show up?’

‘Right around four thirty. That’s when the Sahni twins come in from their band rehearsal, close enough, anyway.’

Four thirty in Chicago, five thirty in New York. She’d been at LaGuardia by then. Had Jason blown her cover? Maybe Rush had bullied him into explaining who Louise Page really was? She dismissed the thought as soon as she had it. Jason wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to write a message in blood for her, only to out her two hours later.

The likeliest scenario was that they’d connected her to Cinda Mallick. She’d used Cinda’s passport to stir the waters in Hayalistan, so she shouldn’t be astonished, let alone frightened, that she’d succeeded.

‘Did you watch this gasman when he was inspecting the kitchen and so on?’ Lily asked August. ‘If there is a leak, I hope he did a thorough job.’

‘I couldn’t stay with him. I’m sorry, Lily, but he showed up out of the blue and I didn’t have any backup downstairs. But when he was leaving, I made him come back up with me while I looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. I inspected his toolbox to make sure he hadn’t added anything to it, if you know what I mean.’

‘I do, indeed. You’re a good friend to go that extra mile for me!’

‘But where were you, Lily? If you go away, you need to let me know. When I saw your phone, I didn’t know what to think – that you’d been attacked on the street, maybe by that crazy high school girl you spend too much time with? Or had a dizzy spell and wandered off.’

A polite way of suggesting incipient dementia.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I decided to consult a – a specialist. I haven’t been feeling a hundred percent since I got back from Australia, but I didn’t want to worry you. They kept me overnight.’

‘Lily, you’re like my mom, too proud to ask for help even when you need it. If you need help with your shopping or anything like that, I’m here, and I’ll be angry if you don’t call on me.’

‘I’ll hold you to that, August.’ Lily teared up, another thing she never used to do. A sentimental field agent would not last long.

Lily tried to keep August from coming with her to inspect her apartment, but he couldn’t be put aside. She was acting for two audiences as they inspected her rooms, August and the Company. It was like some kind of experimental play that Renee wanted the high school students to try, where the audience knew more than the actors.

Still, she managed to smile, to chat, to assure August that none of the small statues she’d brought with her from India had been damaged. She wanted to inspect the Hayali hanging where she stored her extra passports, to see if Marissa’s searcher had found them, but she couldn’t do that until she’d bought a bug sweeper and rid the room of unwanted eyes and ears.

At the door, August hesitated, picking his words. ‘Are you – maybe you need someone checking in on you, spending a few hours a day with you, until you’re through this illness.’

‘I need to get back to my volunteer work with my students,’ she said. ‘Working with young people will cheer me up.’

When the door finally shut behind him, she started to shake. She was freezing. Shock, of course. The best thing to do was make a cup of tea, wrap up in blankets, and wait it out.

She took the tea and a quilt to the small balcony outside her living room and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. Wrapped in the quilt, she rocked herself, sipping the tea, until the cold sweats passed.

It wasn’t until the next day that Lily was able to get out to a security shop and buy a decent bug sweeper. She needed to use cash, since the credit cards she had in her cover identities’ names were stitched inside the Muqqadas hanging. She found listening devices in her light switches, in her living room sofa, inside her television connectors. There were cameras strategically placed in each of her five rooms – including over her bed. Was that contemporary protocol? Assume even a seventy-something woman will spill secrets during pillow talk?

What was the point, Marissa? You must have known I’d figure you’d been in my space with your bogus gasman. And you’d figure I’d dismantle everything.

She hoped she’d found everything. Of course, her phone and computer were hopelessly contaminated. No over-the-counter bug sweeper was as clever as the tracking software the Company could install. At the shop where she found the sweepers, she stocked up on SIM cards, bought a new tablet that she didn’t connect to the internet. She kept her smartphone for anodyne use, plumbers, carryout, volunteer work contacts.

She took one of the cameras she’d discovered out to her balcony. She trained it at a nest in a nearby tree where grackles were tending to their eggs. That would be a restful sight for whatever analyst was monitoring the feeds.

As an additional gesture, Lily called her two sisters-in-law. Both women were startled, since they knew their husbands never had any contact with their half sister.

‘No special reason,’ she told each in turn. ‘Just wanted to catch up – I sometimes wish I hadn’t spent so much time overseas; wish I’d been more part of family life.’ She spun each conversation into close to an hour of banal family news – were her brothers thinking of retiring? What were the grandchildren doing? This one was in college, that one had just had a baby of her own! Another making amazing strides at the law firm where she was a junior associate.

When Lily hung up, the sisters-in-law called each other, baffled – Lily must be sick, they decided. A life-threatening illness that she didn’t want to talk about. They’d always thought she was standoffish, but now she was old and ill, Lily needed family. The sisters-in-law agreed to let bygones be bygones. They would phone Lily once a week.

34

FAMILY TIES

Chicago station duly forwarded Lily’s phone calls to Langley, including the hour she’d spent with her sisters-in-law.

‘We’re running Codebreaker on these,’ the Chicago chief wrote in his cover note. ‘And we’re running checks on the two half brothers’ families.’

‘Don’t bother with Codebreaker,’ Marissa wrote back. ‘And it’s a waste of resources to start monitoring the family. Lily’s baiting us. Whoever installed the monitors left a track that was easy for her to read. She wants us to know she knows we’re watching.’

She reported the correspondence to Gordon, along with her belief that Lily was taunting them.

‘Maybe, but we can’t take chances on this. If you’re wrong, and the brothers or their wives are working for the other side, it will mean both our jobs. Your team needs to get deep background on all of them.’

‘Gordon, what is the other side in this?’ Marissa asked. ‘I haven’t seen any intel, and nothing is coming to suggest China or Iran are trying to destabilize Hayalistan.’

‘It’s need to know, Marissa. You don’t need to know.’ The words were offensive, but his voice was exhausted, barely audible.

‘Okay, on it,’ Marissa said. She left before giving in to an impulse to pat him on the shoulder.

‘Sudan has to go on the back burner again?’ Halina said, when Marissa once again summoned her team for scutwork. ‘I’m trying not to be disrespectful, but Lily is retired, and she’s old. Is she really a threat?’

‘I don’t know what Lily really is,’ Marissa said. ‘Gordon thinks we need to take her seriously. He’s the boss and so we will take her seriously.’

She hesitated, then added, ‘I personally don’t think these phone calls hold any secrets. I looked up her personnel file – the women she called are in fact married to her two brothers. Half brothers. They grew up separately, Lily with her father and her Russian grandmother, and the two boys with her mother – their mother. We didn’t keep track of the brothers’ children when Lily was in the field, but I’m willing to bet if you do a search, you’ll find that all the people the women talked about are genuine relatives, and that all the things they describe are really taking place. Maybe as she’s gotten older, she’s become lonely – Lily doesn’t have her own family.’

Neither did Marissa, neither did Halina, but neither woman commented on that.

‘Run Codebreaker on the content of the calls to be on the safe side,’ Marissa added. ‘I’ve been in this business long enough to know that it’s a mistake to overlook something you yourself think is bogus – that makes you careless.’

When Halina finished a high-level analysis, Marissa forwarded it to Gordon and sent Halina back to the vexing problems in Sudan. The Chinese were becoming an ever-larger presence in Africa, but neither the White House nor Congress was interested. She and Halina were trying to describe civil war and famine in the Sub-Sahara in language that would make the Senate Intelligence Committee take the region seriously.

Gracelyn interrupted them a little before five to say Gordon needed to talk to them ASAP. She came to Marissa’s office in person, instead of texting, which was unusual.

‘You can go home,’ Marissa told Halina, but Gracelyn shook her head.

‘Halina did the threat assessment on Lily’s phone calls. Gordon wants her in the meeting.’

Gracelyn kept a hand on Marissa’s arm to hold her back while Halina walked ahead of them. ‘Chicago says they didn’t find any documents relating to Cinda Mallick in Lily’s apartment. Gordon wants to know why you asked for the search.’

She didn’t wait for Marissa to reply but trotted back to her desk.

Gordon had nine division heads, but only Marissa, head of Analytics, and Brian, director of Cybersecurity, had been summoned, along with Halina and two of Brian’s team.

Gordon looked even more depleted than he had in the morning. ‘I spent the afternoon with Oliphant and Dunwoody. They want deeper background on Lily and her family. Dunwoody told Oliphant he doesn’t trust the Codebreaker program.’

Dunwoody chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was known as the technology senator – not because he had any understanding of what powered the phone in his pocket, but because Big Tech lavishly rewarded him for keeping government regulators out of their products, particularly out of their apps.

Dunwoody was close to ninety now. It was anyone’s guess how much he understood of the tech bills he sponsored, but he was still alert to any threat to his biggest campaign donors. Oliphant, as director of all the security services, relied heavily on the senator for his own opinions.

‘I see,’ Marissa said, voice devoid of all expression.

She saw more than she wanted. She was sure Gordon had euphemized whatever Dunwoody had actually said. Brian was one of the few African Americans in a senior intelligence slot, and Dunwoody’s racism had been riding rampant lately. Brian was responsible for the Agency’s most successful code-cracking software, but Dunwoody would trust it only if he could believe white male engineers had written the actual programs.

‘What additional information would make the senator and the director accept Codebreaker’s results?’ Marissa asked.

‘They want facts,’ Gordon said. ‘They want to know what deep game Lily is playing. Oliphant gave the Senate committee all the footage from the taps Chicago installed. Dunwoody said he watched Lily take a shower, take a nap, and now he’s watching birds outside her apartment take turns sitting on their eggs.’

‘Perhaps that’s a code in itself,’ Marissa said. ‘She wants us to know that she’s not going to sing like a bird.’

Halina was sitting with her hands clasped so tightly that the veins were popping out, but at Marissa’s comment she relaxed infinitesimally. Even Brian smothered a smile.

‘Marissa!’ Gordon snapped. ‘No levity today. Lily is smart, everyone keeps telling me that, so she’s doing something smarter than our software can track.

‘The only words we have on record from the taps in her condo are her talking to the building super the day after we installed our devices. We have software in her phone and her computer, but the only calls she’s made besides the brothers’ wives is to some high school drama program, saying she’ll help with costumes for the end-of-year production, and to another school where she translates for immigrant families.

‘Dunwoody wants detail on both these groups, to see what they may be doing under the radar. He thinks Lily is indoctrinating students into disrespecting our laws. You – what’s your name?’ He pointed at Halina.

‘Halina Roman.’

Despite her nervousness, she said her name clearly. Marissa smiled at her – good job.

‘You’re the girl who examined the transcripts of Lily’s phone calls, right?’

Woman, woman, woman. Marissa thought the word so hard she was sure it must be on her forehead in neon lights.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want you looking at the high school where Lily is volunteer-ing. If she’s helping illegals or undocumenteds, we can pull her in. Dunwoody sent the recordings of her calls with her sisters-in-law to Vijay at the NSA, and Vijay said you could pull Cinda Mallick’s name out of the cover-babble about some baby’s first tooth.’

Marissa studied her hands. She’d stopped getting manicures when she began riding seriously, but she should moisturize them more often.

‘I expect Vijay could get Oliphant’s name, or Stalin’s, or even yours, out of the cover-babble if he were looking for them,’ she said. ‘Did Vijay do a voice analysis? If Lily was calling women who were masquerading as her sisters-in-law, it should be possible to detect that.’

‘Your job, Brian,’ Gordon said. His mouth relaxed slightly; he was glad to have a way to score a point over Vijay, but he still said to Marissa, ‘If those were genuine calls, why aren’t we hearing her talk to anyone else?’

‘Lily apparently knows we’d been in her home,’ Marissa said. ‘Even though our guy’s cover was good – he went in as someone from the gas company – she was still suspicious when she got home so she swept the apartment and found our devices.’

‘How do you know?’ Gordon demanded. ‘If she’s been in touch with you—’

‘No. Gordon, she’s retired, we haven’t spoken for months. Lily was an experienced field agent. She probably had some kind of manual security in place – toothbrushes facing a certain way, something like that – and the tech installing the devices overlooked it.

‘She figured out we were in her home and decided to yank our chain. She made two long, dull phone calls hoping we’d waste resources in analyzing them. And then she called the programs where she volunteers, which tells me there’s nothing unkosher about them. She’ll suspect we have malware in her phone, so she’ll only use it for calls that don’t reveal her real agenda.’

Gordon frowned. ‘Dunwoody said she hasn’t spent more than ten minutes max on the phone with those women since she moved to Chicago. He points out—’

‘Gordon! I’m a hundred percent for poking holes in every intelligence assessment. It’s the only way to make sure we’re making the most reliable possible analyses. But what you’re saying makes it sound as though Dunwoody’s getting reports from Hayalistan that we’re not seeing. If that’s the case, we are in serious trouble as an agency.’

Gordon rubbed his eyes. ‘Christ, Marissa. I don’t think it’s that deep a problem. I hope it isn’t. Dunwoody and Oliphant’s big fear is a regime change. We need those lithium mines. It’s the only way we can compete with China in the EV market. If there’s a regime change, control of the mines could change. We need to make sure we maintain control.’

‘I hear that, Gordon, I even agree with it. But someone calling herself Cinda Mallick was there almost a month ago, and we haven’t heard a peep from Mallick or about her since she disappeared in Perth. Have NSA or FBI heard anything that says Mallick is working with, or even organizing, a Hayali resistance? Can you ask Oliphant that?’

‘Yes, Mallick,’ Gordon said. ‘Why did you ask Chicago to look for documents about her in Lily’s apartment? We covered Mallick when Sylvester raised the roof about her last month. And why did I hear about it from Dunwoody, instead of you?’

‘It was a long shot,’ Marissa said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘I wondered if Lily had somehow got hold of her papers and was using them.’

‘But that Mallick was Australian,’ Brian said.

‘I know,’ Marissa agreed. ‘And facial rec on Mallick’s face going through Hayalistan customs doesn’t turn up Lily. There are points in common, but not a match. That’s why it was a long shot to think Lily was traveling under Mallick’s name.’

And yet Lily had been in Australia, Lily had been MIA for the week Cinda Mallick had been in Ts’gali. Marissa kept that to herself, not out of a thread of loyalty to Lily as much as not to subject herself to an interrogation in front of Dunwoody’s committee: You knew of the connection between Lily and Mallick and kept it to yourself? Explain that away if you want to keep your pension.

‘Maybe we should bring Lily in, send her to the Farm for some serious questioning,’ Gordon said.

‘Get Jason Tedros to interrogate her,’ Marissa said. ‘He was the only person who could ever bring Lily to heel when she was in the field.’

‘Marissa, that’s an outrageous—’ Gordon cut himself off. ‘You three, go home!’

He pointed at Halina and Brian’s two assistants. When they were out of the room he glared at Marissa. ‘I told you, no levity! Why the fuck did you bring up Tedros’s name? On top of your unilateral decision about spreading Cinda Mallick’s name around the Company?’

‘Gordon, what line did I cross? Jason, he isn’t dead, is he?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know!’

She shook her head, wide-eyed, as did Brian, when Gordon looked at him.

‘He’d be dead if he didn’t still have a lot of friends in high places.’ Gordon breathed heavily. ‘He’s under house arrest in the godforsaken fishing village he calls home.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Marissa stammered. ‘What – why – ?’

‘He started to write a memoir. Fortunately, we learned about it in time and got it stopped.’

Marissa knew this was the time to scuttle away from the subject, but she couldn’t stop herself saying, ‘Lots of agents, and even Company directors, write memoirs.’

‘Not like his. He wanted to throw dirt over our most important allies. He never finished writing it. He had an agent but no publisher, so it was easy to take steps to make sure there were no copies floating around. The FBI is baby-sitting him to make sure he doesn’t talk out of turn. Do not suggest we involve Jason! Put that out in all caps and a fire siren if you have to.’

Gordon brooded for a moment, massaging his Adam’s apple. ‘What’s Lily’s connection to Jason? You say he could control her when she was in the field.’

‘I’ve been reading her personnel file,’ Marissa said. ‘Jason recruited her, and he was her godfather. The Ts’gali station director hated her, kept trying to find grounds to fire her, but Jason supported her. Eight months before the coup that ended Rani’s government, Jason pulled her out and assigned her to Delhi.’

‘Were they lovers?’ Brian asked.

‘Hardly,’ Gordon said. ‘Tedros is gay. He would have been fired forty years ago if Langley had found out. It’s a pity he wasn’t – it would have saved us a ton of trouble around the damned memoir he started writing. Even now, we can’t be sure there aren’t copies out there somewhere.’

‘What about that New Yorker story?’ Marissa asked. ‘You had someone do a deep dive into Thom Kolchak, didn’t you? Is there any evidence Kolchak was in touch with Jason?’

Gordon took a minute to go into his tablet, looking at the report. ‘No. Kolchak was clean. He was someone interested in opioids, went to Hayalistan off his own bat. The big question was about the pix. Hayali LEOs say the photos were circulating among the students and we know Kolchak talked to students. There’s been no communication between them and Jason. However the students got the photos is a Hayali problem, not ours.’

‘Is the FBI sharing Jason’s phone calls and visitors?’ Brian asked.

‘They’d better be – we asked the Bureau to put their guy in.’ Gordon’s mouth was tight.

‘Could Lily have been in touch with Tedros?’ Brian asked.

‘Even if they’re not sharing, we’d probably hear about that,’ Gordon said. ‘At a minimum, I’d be getting a reprimand for not keeping tabs on a retired field agent. Marissa, go to Chicago, check out Lily. Take your girl Halina, get her to investigate these high school programs Lily is working with.’

‘Will do. Gordon, I know DEI is dead, but just to cheer me, would you refer to Halina as a woman?’

35

BIRD’S NEST

Lily felt she’d been bouncing like an angry kangaroo since she first read Kolchak’s story. She’d been angry enough that she bounced from Australia to Ts’gali and then Long Island, but she hadn’t had a clear plan. She needed to start constructing one. Jason under house arrest, the Company bugging her, time to act purposefully.

She sat at her dining room table, writing on an old legal pad. One thing she’d learned in her recent trip to Hayalistan was that Rani’s name still had enough power to rattle the Gambrey empire’s chains. Otherwise, they would have dismissed her and her bleating for her nephew Ronnie/Rani as an annoying but harmless old woman. She’d also learned that the Gambrey Center was powerful enough that they could order the Ts’gali CIA station to bring her in for questioning.

She listed the insults Anta had screamed. The biggest was that Jason had photographed her and the other women in Lake Sakin. Lily had hoped to tax Jason with that, but of course that hadn’t been possible.

Stop obsessing about the photo, Lily lectured herself. You don’t have any way of finding out who gave it to the students, or who put those particular students in touch with Thom Kolchak. Focus on what you can actually discover.

The one thing she knew definitely was that Gambrey’s lithium leases were up for renewal this year. If Steve Gambrey was paying more attention to his longevity quest than to his mining company, China and Australia would know; they must be working flat out to undercut American relations with the Agajan government. American foreign policy was in shambles these days; it would be easy for other countries to exploit any weaknesses. Lily felt a twinge of pity for Marissa, trying to conduct analyses and recommend policy to a government that valued neither.

Her fingers itched to open her laptop and dig into the global mineral companies, see what they were doing in Hayalistan. Any searches she did would show up on the Company’s tracker. To make sure she didn’t give in to the temptation to go online, she wrapped the computer in a towel. Took a hammer from her utility closet and pounded on the machine until its solid state innards splintered.

She was sweating and panting when she finished, but she felt better for smashing something.

She brewed a fresh pot of tea and thought back to the beginning of the leases. When she first arrived in-country, Hayalistan was poor. The world’s big money men hadn’t thought there was anything to exploit, although the mining companies sent in geologists to poke around.

Lily noted their work when she started visiting the mountain villages, since geologists were often taking core samples in remote places. They were non-committal when she asked what they were looking for.

‘Gold,’ they usually said. ‘Isn’t that what everyone wants?’

It was ten years into her posting that they discovered the major lithium seams on the west slope of Muqqadas. Rechargeable lithium batteries were still a decade in the future, but the big mining companies would have been watching Sony and Nissan’s research into them. Even if it was a gamble in 1995 to think lithium batteries could be commercially viable, Gambrey would have wanted lithium for automobile window glass, one of his subsidiaries. All the mining companies were handing out bribes, most to Agajan, who had been the economics minister in the pre-Rani government. He’d lost his cabinet post when Rani was elected, but still had his seat in Parliament, still representing the farm districts at the east end of Lake Sakin.

Once Rani was gone, the post-coup government made it clear that the country was open for business.

Lily felt her intestines twist in grief for the Hayalistan that existed so briefly. After decades of Russian control and corruption, they’d had four brief years of daylight, and then it was back into the muck of oligarchy, corruption, and desolation.

Lily bumped into the couch. She’d been pacing the living room, unseeing, the towel-wrapped computer innards in her arms. She took them out to the balcony and laid them like an offering in front of the camera pointed at the birds.

The male grackle was bringing food to his mate, who shifted position over her eggs. She wished she had a vision and a mission as clear-cut as theirs. Lay eggs, hatch them, prepare your fledglings for flight, and if you were lucky, do it again.

One question she hadn’t asked herself about was Anta’s role. Yes, Anta hated Lily, but was that the only reason she’d barged into Lily’s room last month?

Hayali women used to talk about Anta and the special influence she wielded over Rani. Even when Rani became a celebrated eagle hunter, it was Anta whom people approached for a chance to hunt with him.

Rani moved into his own home a few years after Lily started work in the country. He was still living in the Elurbar compound, but in a separate house, with its own entrance.

‘Don’t you see, Lilyuka,’ the women in the mountain villages told her. ‘He started dancing with you, and reciting “The Eagle and the Hunter” for you, and Anta lost control over his actions. Of course she hates you.’

‘He didn’t chant the “Eagle” for me,’ Lily objected. ‘He was taking part in the clan rituals.’

‘Oh, American, American, you come here with your foreign knowledge, but you don’t understand the most basic knowledge of human life.’

‘She blamed me for losing control over him,’ Lily explained to the grackles. ‘But what did that lead her to do?’

She’d spoken aloud, forgetting for a moment that she’d trained one of the spy-cams on the nest. What would she do next? Strip naked outside Marissa’s office and beg to be arrested?

Perhaps Anta’s rage would have extended to Rani. The women in Hayali clans had power, but it was limited to the family sphere. They didn’t run governments. Today, the economics and finance minister was a woman, but thirty years ago, that would have been impossible.

36

NERVES

Even though she’d cleaned out the bugs, Lily felt exposed and vulnerable in the Elm Street condo. She needed to remove her other backup identities from the Hayalistan hanging, but she worried she hadn’t found every watchful eye.

She took the hanging down and laid it on the dining room table, directly under the overhead light so she could more easily see if someone had been tampering with the needlework. The stitches seemed intact, but when she removed the metal rods that weighted top and bottom, another mic fell out. The metal apparently had confused the sweeper.

Sweat broke out along her neck and shoulders. Old Soviet hands used to talk about the omnipresent surveillance that made it hard to stay sane in Moscow. The Russians put devices inside the walls, phones, typewriters. When Americans left their apartments to go to work or the store, Russian operatives would let themselves in and sew trackers in the hems of their clothes.

Lily had never appreciated how that constant surveillance would make you crazy, not until she saw how unnerved she’d become. She took off her clothes and ran her tracker over the hems and buttons of her pants and jacket.

‘You’re clean, girlfriend,’ she assured herself, but she still felt exposed.

She took the hanging down to the laundry room. These days most people had washers in their own units, but the condo kept big machines for common use, along with an iron for people like Lily, who never ironed anything. She ran it over every inch of the hanging. If she’d missed something, the heat would disable it.

‘Enough!’ she cried out loud. ‘Either get back in the game or admit defeat.’

She laid the hanging across a card table in the corner of the room and carefully undid the stitches around the quilted patches where she’d stored her remaining identities. Everything was there: the credit cards, passports, and cash in both euros and pounds. Her best-backed identity, Judith Migelli, also had a modest investment portfolio and a few CDs, assets Lily had bought when she retired. She tucked the cash and documents into her handbag. She left her sewing kit on the table and went out through the back exit with the hanging, which she carried up the street to her dry cleaners.

From there she rode downtown. At one of the big downtown banks, she rented a safe deposit box where she stowed all her documents. Her field experience made her reluctant to be remote from her identities – if you need to run, you should have everything close at hand. But if Marissa or Gordon sent someone to search her condo again, Lily couldn’t risk them finding her cache.

She went into the main branch of the library to do a preliminary search for a safe house. She needed an inexpensive neighborhood, but not derelict. Easy egress, close to public transportation. After an hour, she had created a list of four neighborhoods to explore.

She paid to print out the maps and the real estate listings. Such a drag to be cut off from the internet.

‘I am so tired of lies, secrets, subterfuge.’

The guard at the library door, who was going through her backpack to make sure she hadn’t stolen a book, looked at her in surprise. ‘I think we’re all tired of those things, ma’am. You have a good rest of your day.’

She smiled at him, but was cursing herself: once again, she’d spoken out loud without thinking. She wanted to look at the neighborhoods she’d ear-marked. First, though, she should see Renee Skinner, the director of the theater program. She’d ordered silicone masks and professional makeup before she flew to Australia; she hoped they’d arrived by now.

Renee was relieved at her reappearance. The kids had voted for Urinetown, an ambitious project for a high school group, especially this group. Renee wanted a production that would show private donors that her work was worth supporting. Lily’s help with costumes and special effects – especially the silicone masks her Hollywood connections provided – would give the group better visibility.

Lily found a package from her friend at the Hermes Studio on a shelf in the junk room behind the auditorium that the group used for makeup and storing sets and special effects. Her friend at Hermes had shipped masks that were suitable for Urinetown, but there were others that Lily took for her own use, along with more gum plumpers and a wig, thick black hair turning gray. She tucked these into her backpack where she could get at them easily.

She brought the remaining disguises to Renee but cut short her thanks.

‘Something difficult has come up in my personal life. I’m not going to be available to work on the Urinetown production.’

Renee looked stricken. ‘Lily – is it something I can help you deal with? I really need your support for this show.’

Lily apologized. ‘I’m sorry, but a violent abuser from my past has come back to haunt me. Anyone I spend time with these days could be at risk. If I can get them out of my way before the school year ends, I’ll be back, but best not to count on me.’

‘And Keira?’

‘Try to help her stay with the program. It’s good for her. I’ll talk to her myself and stress that she needs to behave.’

She left quickly, before the students started to show up. When she reached her condo, a black SUV was at the curb, its engine running, sprouting enough antennas to power a television station. The driver jumped out and opened a door for Marissa. A middle-aged man in a sports jacket joined her, along with a young woman who looked like a teenager next to Marissa’s formidable makeup and tailoring.

Lily didn’t pretend she hadn’t seen them, but she continued up the walk without stopping. She could hear Marissa behind her, not running, because she didn’t need to.

At the building doorway, Lily turned to face her. ‘What is it, Marissa? Have you come from Olympus to tell me what the sweet Fanny Adams is going on in Hayalistan that makes me a person of interest?’

‘We thought it would be good to have a face-to-face conversation.’ Marissa’s tone was light, conversational. ‘Right now, nobody knows who’s doing what.’

Lily smiled. ‘I know what I’m doing but the question is, what are you doing? And who are your friends?’

‘Dr Ernst Paxton. Halina Roman is on my staff.’

‘Is Dr Ernst Paxton a ditchdigger?’ Lily asked, tone polite.

Ditchdigger was Langley slang for the psychiatrists who rooted around in the minds of defectors or US agents who were breaking down under the strain of their work.

Marissa gave her a tight smile.

‘You have arrived, haven’t you?’ Lily asked. ‘It’s a sign of power when you get an entourage to travel with you. Is Halina carrying your briefcase, or are those her own papers?’

She pointed at the outsized bag Halina had slung over her shoulder. Halina flushed and took a step backward.

‘You don’t change, do you, Lily?’ Marissa said. ‘Times change but you don’t adapt to them. Where can we talk privately?’

‘Not in my home,’ Lily said. ‘It’s been wired for sound. Nothing we say would be confidential.’

Paxton said, ‘Why don’t we go to the Chicago office. We can be assured of privacy there.’

Lily cocked her head, thumb under her chin, parodying someone giving serious thought to a problem. ‘Why don’t we—’

‘Lily, Lily, there you are! Renee said you’d been in the theater but you didn’t come to the rehearsal! You’ve been missing for days! Are you sick again? Were you back in the hospital?’

Keira barreled up the walk. Halina jumped out of the way, but Keira’s backpack gave Marissa a glancing blow on the shoulder.

‘Keira, take it easy. Marissa Hockney is a senior government official. She could have you arrested for whacking her with your backpack. Marissa, this is a young friend of mine who’s part of a drama group where I volunteer. Keira is helping me with makeup and special effects for their next production.’

Keira couldn’t suppress a grin at hearing Lily call her a friend in public, in front of this perfectly groomed and made-up woman, but she added to Lily, ‘You said you’d let me know if you were sick, but when you don’t come home—’

‘Sorry.’ Lily smiled at Keira. ‘I had a terrible infestation of bugs in my condo and I had to spend a few days away while the fumigators did their job. Marissa, I wish I’d known you were flying out – you’ve always been good at pest management, either creating or diminishing them. You could have shown me where they were nesting.’

Lily kept an arm around Keira, who was wearing one of her most ragged T-shirts. Along with her unwashed neck, the shirt revealed a tattoo of a dragon walking a tightrope across her right shoulder, its tail on her shoulder, its fiery tongue licking her left breast.

‘When were you in the hospital?’ Paxton had plucked that out of Keira’s outburst.

‘Ernst, I don’t know who you are. Why would I answer your personal questions about anything, especially my health?’

Lily turned to Keira. ‘There are unwritten rules for your first conversation with a stranger. You might ask if they’re visiting Chicago, for instance. Is it their first visit? Then we sometimes talk about the weather. You know how—’

‘Lily,’ Marissa interrupted. ‘You were always the champion winder-up of anyone I know. Dr Paxton and I came here to have a conversation with you. And we’re not leaving until we do.’

‘So, he is a doctor!’ Keira tugged on Paxton’s arm. ‘Tell me the truth—’

‘Keira.’ Lily pulled her away from Paxton. ‘We don’t know he’s a doctor. We only know Marissa gave him that title. If he is a doctor, what kind? Does he have a PhD in ancient philology, an MD in nephrology? We don’t blurt out questions that give him information we don’t want him to have.’

‘A public sidewalk isn’t the best place to answer all those questions,’ Paxton said. ‘The Company offices are a short ride away. That way we can talk—’

‘And you can record every word,’ Lily said. ‘What a great idea. It means I won’t have to speak.’

‘Why do you want to record her?’ Keira asked, chin jutting out.

‘We don’t,’ Ernst said. ‘We simply need a place to be private.’

Lily smiled. ‘I don’t need, or want, to be private with you. Come to think of it, I don’t want to be public with you, either. Chicago is beautiful this time of year. Lake Michigan is a five-minute walk away – you can relax on the lakefront and then catch a flight back to DC.’

‘We need to talk, Lily.’ Marissa said. ‘Without your protégée.’

Lily wished Keira would leave, but she wasn’t going to let Marissa have an inch without fighting for it. ‘Tell me about your own protégée, Marissa. Will she sit in, recording every nuance? “The suspect ducked her head at the direct question from Dr Paxton, showing signs of fear.”’

‘Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,’ Marissa snapped. ‘We can get a warrant or a national security letter if you make us.’

‘You’re giving me amazing powers of coercion, Marissa. I can make you issue a national security letter? If I’d known I had that much power in retirement, I’d have been sending NSLs to a whole roster of questionable people.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Keira.

‘An NSL is a way the government has of making people either speak or be quiet,’ Lily said. ‘Marissa wants to compel me to speak, so she’s threatening to send me one. You know how I told you the cops try all kinds of tricks to make you talk? Like threatening you with arrest or imprisonment? That’s basically what she’s doing.’

‘You can’t put Lily in prison!’ Keira said. ‘She hasn’t done anything wrong!’

‘Lily is lucky she has such a passionate supporter,’ Marissa said, ‘but your unaided word doesn’t do her any good.’

‘What about Renee—’

Lily propelled Keira away from Marissa, up to the entrance to the condo. ‘Keira, these are scary people with a lot of power. When you give them the names of other people who know me, you put those people in danger. Marissa and her sidekicks will go looking for anyone you mention. I know you’re trying to help, but right now, the best thing you can do is leave. If I end up in prison, you can start a letter-writing campaign to get me out. Now, go, Keira, before things get completely out of control here.’

Keira’s lower lip trembled, on the brink of tears, but she covered them with an aggressive march back down the sidewalk. She swung her backpack wildly, so that Marissa and Paxton had to jump out of the way.

August McBride had been standing in the doorway, watching the drama on the walk. He came out as Keira took off.

‘Is she bothering you, Lily?’

Lily summoned a smile. ‘She’s trying to protect me, but I managed to persuade her I didn’t need the help.’

Marissa and Paxton joined Lily in the doorway.

‘Who is this?’ Marissa asked.

‘This is Mr McBride. He works here,’ Lily said. ‘We’re blocking the sidewalk, so he needs us to get out of the way. We’ll oblige by going to the utility room. It’s almost never in use.’

37

THE DITCHDIGGER

She went inside and unlocked the stairwell door, moving quickly so that Marissa had to trot to get to the door before it banged shut. Lily didn’t bother to see who was following; she was hoping to keep Marissa from badgering August.

The utility room, where Lily had picked her hanging apart for her passports, was empty, as she’d expected. Her sewing kit was still on the card table, along with a cracked teapot. Lily moved those to the ironing board and set four chairs – discards from someone’s remodeling – around it.

August ushered Marissa, Halina, and Paxton in a moment later. ‘The community room would be more comfortable,’ he suggested.

‘They don’t want comfort, August, they want me to feel miserable enough to cut the interview short.’

‘Charades, Lily,’ Marissa said. ‘You always were a drama queen.’

August stayed for a moment, frowning in worry at Lily’s behavior. She realized that like Keira, he thought she had some terrible illness that was making her behave oddly.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They’re from the CIA. They have questions about work I did three decades ago. I’ll be fine.’

When he left, Paxton shoved a chair under the doorknob as a makeshift lock.

Lily clasped her hands loosely in her lap and stared at a point behind Marissa’s head.

‘The girl you were with said you’d been in the hospital,’ Paxton said. ‘When was that?’

‘I don’t remember,’ Lily said.

‘Have you been ill?’

‘I don’t understand the question.’

Paxton scrolled through a set of files on his tablet. ‘We’re not seeing any record of a hospitalization. Were you admitted under a different name?’

They had violated HIPAA and looked at her health history. She felt a spurt of anger, curbed the impulse to snap an insult in the nick of time. He was trying to goad her: remember your training! She thought of passages from ‘The Eagle and the Hunter’ to steady herself.

A great eagle appeared

Riding the air currents

She swam through the air

Like a sled pulled by dogs

She chanted silently, but her lips moved, and Paxton pounced on that.

‘What did you say?’

‘I don’t understand the question.’

He repeated the question several different ways, but she had herself in hand now. He finally gave up.

‘Lily, when was the last time you were in Hayalistan?’ Marissa asked.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Last month?’ Marissa said.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Traveling on someone else’s passport?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you know Cinda Mallick?’ Marissa asked.

At that, Lily looked at her. ‘Cinda Mallick has been dead many years, Marissa.’

‘What would you say if I told you someone was in Ts’gali last month, traveling on her passport?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’ Paxton asked.

‘I would say nothing,’ Lily amplified.

‘You’ve been identified as the woman traveling on Mallick’s passport,’ Marissa said.

A mistake to say as many words as she already had. Lily concentrated on her breathing. She kept her hands lightly clasped, visible if Marissa or Paxton leaned over, no signs of fingers tightening. No nervous pulses in her wrists.

‘Where did you hide Mallick’s passport?’ Paxton’s turn. ‘With an accomplice in Perth? With Mallick’s niece?’

‘Coarse words,’ the poem went,

Coarse words from men

Whom love has never touched

Coarse words from men

Whose lungs will shatter

In the thin pure air

Atop Muqqadas

She had recorded the epic when Rani recited it to her in the shepherd’s hut. She had also made recordings of the chanting by the trained poets of the twelve clans. They performed it every year at the winter solstice, when sun and eagle were specks in the sky and Muqqadas cast a heavy shadow on Ts’gali.

In her lonely times over the years Lily had tried to translate it. She would sit at a table, in Delhi or Islamabad or Ulaanbaatar, with Rani’s voice in the room both consoling and agitating her, but she never managed to translate more than a few lines.

In counterpoint to her thoughts, Marissa and Paxton continued to ask about Cinda Mallick and her passport. Lily didn’t keep track of the questions, but figured if they had real evidence – DNA, fingerprints – they would have brought a warrant.

‘Lily, why can’t you help us a little here?’ Marissa said.

Ah, the old ‘help us out’ tactic. Make you feel you were on a joint project with the interrogator. Lily tried to focus on the eagle hunter, Sankari, expelled from the eagle’s nest and returned to his followers on the lower slopes of Muqqadas.

‘When did you last see Jason?’

‘Jason?’ Lily repeated, voice puzzled.

‘Don’t overplay the stupid act, Lily. Jason Tedros.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Three days ago?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did you hitchhike to New York?’

‘I don’t understand the question.’

‘Jason was always your mentor. Did you go to New York last week to get advice on how to handle the fallout from your Hayalistan trip?’

She supposed Rush reported to the CIA when Jason had visitors. Rush knew her as Louise Page, but he also knew her as one of Jason’s nieces. The question about the visit was a random shot. They needed to make sure Jason wasn’t communicating any of the material from his memoir.

Finally, forty minutes into the interrogation, Marissa brought Hayalistan directly into the conversation.

What did she know about the students organizing for the overthrow of the Hayali government? What had she learned when she was in Hayalistan last month? Why had she left Ts’gali so abruptly in the middle of the night? Why was she opposed to Gambrey renewing the lithium leases? Why had she flown to Ts’gali from Perth, instead of Chicago? What route was she using to stay in touch with the Hayali rebels?

‘What did Jason tell you about the rebels?’ Paxton asked.

‘I don’t understand the question.’

‘You weren’t at his retirement party. Have you had a falling-out? Are you hurt that he hasn’t been in touch with you?’

When Jason retired, Lily couldn’t get to his retirement party, not even the one held in Islamabad for his Asian team. She’d been in the Bayan-Ölgii region of Mongolia, overseeing the exfiltration of a Chinese dissident through the mountains into Korea.

She’d been sixty-five, still considered one of the Company’s go-to agents if the escape had to be done through rugged territory. She was a fit and active climber, she had the plus of knowing enough local dialect to get help, and she was famous for improvising. Her reputation had started when she wrangled a dogsled to get Viktor Zokurov out.

FSB Colonel Viktor Zokurov. Of course.

When she’d read the New Yorker story, she’d been puzzled by the picture of Arnold Sylvester standing next to the Hayali finance minister. She thought she’d recognized his eyes, cold, hard eyes that his social smile didn’t touch.

She had gotten Zokurov out of Hayalistan ahead of a platoon of Russian marksmen on skis. In those days, he’d been lean and saturnine, with a scar on his left cheek. Sylvester was plump, with rounded cheeks and no scar, but the eyes were the giveaway. A plastic surgeon had erased the scar, but no one could put life and feeling into the hard eyes.

‘Enough!’ Lily got to her feet. ‘Marissa, you and Ernst may have a point, but you’re wasting my time trying to get to it. Two months ago, you told me the Hayalistan I remember is dead and gone. I accepted that and moved on with my life in retirement. You, on the other hand, want to resurrect a woman who died in that long-gone past. I can tell you nothing about Cinda Mallick, nothing about contemporary Hayalistan beyond what I read in the New Yorker story.

‘I understand life at Langley has changed. You need to keep a billionaire intelligence director happy. I don’t. You go back to DC and tell Warner Oliphant whatever story will make him happy. I, mercifully, am off this particular merry-go-round.’

She headed for the door, but Marissa called to her, ‘We have a credible report that you were in Ts’gali last month. We are not done here until you clear that up. Your building doorman already confirms that you were away for most of April.’

Lily turned to look at her. ‘What is going on in Hayalistan that you suddenly have DEFCON two in play?’

‘That’s need to know, Lily. Since you’re a civilian now, you will never have a need to know. But if you are stirring the Hayalistan pot out of some grudge against the service over your retirement, then you’d better tell me now instead of making me dig it up.’

‘Once again, my extraordinary powers of coercion come into play,’ Lily said. ‘I can’t make you do anything, Marissa, including flying back to Langley and leaving me alone.’

38

ON THE MOVE

Lily didn’t look behind when she left the room but went to her condo and packed an overnight case. She couldn’t stay in her home. She’d be on edge all the time wondering when Marissa or her acolytes might descend again.

She couldn’t predict what Marissa might do next. If she felt Lily had humiliated her in front of her subordinates, she might apply for a warrant. To be on the safe side, Lily inserted a plumper over her gums, gelled her curls flat, turned her red jacket so that the drab gray lining faced out. She was trying for an appearance so dull that no one would remember seeing her, relying on the invisibility of an older, shabby woman.

She carried her overnight case up to the roof, using the utility staircase accessible from her kitchen’s back door. The rooftop led to an exterior fire exit; narrow stairs attached to the outside of the building, which ended at a one-way gate in the alley. When she climbed down, no one was waiting for her.

She went once again to the library, this time to her local branch. It took an hour of digging, but she finally tracked down a picture of Zokurov in a French news archive. He’d been at an International Fraternity and Equality banquet, hosted by France on Bastille Day four months after Rani’s election. Zokurov had appeared in uniform, with rows of medals, but the photographer had focused on his face, not his hardware. He was smiling widely, but his eyes looked like pools of death. The picture had been taken during his last summer as Colonel Zokurov, before Lily exfiltrated him.

Lily looked for Arnold Sylvester on Gambrey’s different websites – for the Center, the company itself, and a foundation – but although his name was listed his picture wasn’t. In fact, she couldn’t find him anywhere, at least not under that name.

She opened the New Yorker story. And found that the picture of Arnold standing next to the Hayali finance minister had been scrubbed.

She didn’t need to compare the banquet photo with the one at the Asian Games. The missing picture told the story. Langley didn’t want people looking at Arnold’s face.

She printed the Fraternity Banquet photo, so she’d have a copy. At some point, someone in the Company might remember that dinner and send the picture down the memory hole.

Lily encountered Zokurov from time to time in the endless round of embassy events that all foreign nationals were required to attend. Lily hated the ironic flirting Zokurov used with her – a way of saying that he knew her work as a cultural attaché was a cover.

The Russian New Year’s Eve ball was the high point of winter celebrations in Ts’gali, at least on the diplomatic circuit. Zokurov, tall, with exaggerated mustaches designed to make him look like an Edwardian caricature, danced with every woman from the American delegation, including Lily, whom he called ‘Goldilocks’.

Zokurov tried to get her to agree to drinks or a sleigh ride and roared with laughter when she said she didn’t have the stamina to keep up with him. What she really lacked was trust from her boss – if people reported that she was meeting alone with an FSB colonel, she could be dismissed on suspicion of treason.

And then came a bitter February day, with winds sweeping a blizzard down the slopes of Mount Muqqadas into the streets of Ts’gali. Lily had a few days of leave, but the weather was so bad she was spending it at home. She was curled up in a teahouse around the corner from the hostel, reading a Liza Cody novel, when Gayla, Bruce Weyrich’s PA, summoned her to the station. Gayla used the code that meant life-threatening crisis. Drop everything.

The wind was so fierce Lily had trouble staying on her feet on her way to the station. When she reached it, her face was bleeding from snow pellets.

Gayla ignored the blood, barely gave Lily time to drape her parka over a radiator before hustling her into the secure room. ‘We’ve had a direct order from Moscow: Zokurov has to be exfiltrated immediately. You’re the only agent actually on location with the skills to do it.’

Bruce was vacationing in Greece, along with two male field agents. In Bruce’s absence, Ts’gali took orders from the CIA station in Moscow.

Lily stared, uncomprehending. ‘Zokurov? The FSB colonel? Since when is Zokurov a person of interest?’ Lily asked.

‘Bruce turned him,’ Gayle said.

‘Bruce? We’re talking about Bruce Weyrich, chief of Ts’gali station?’

‘Yeah, right,’ Gayla said. ‘Whether he was lucky or skilled or someone the FSB could – never mind how he did it. The fact is, Bruce got Zokurov to sell us details on Splizhinka. Once we started replicating the technology at the Savannah River nuclear plant, it was only a matter of time before Uncle Ivan figured out who’d given us the plans. We have about ten hours to get the colonel out ahead of an assassination squad.

‘You need to get Zokurov to Turkmenistan. We’ll have a Marine chopper nearby.’

‘Where is the colonel right now?’ Lily asked.

‘Muq’tsu. In a shepherd’s hut just after the village disappears into the forest.’

‘Muq’tsu in this storm?’ Lily cried. ‘It’s more than two hours on foot in good weather. Is this some insane scheme of Bruce’s to kill me? Or is he pretending Zokurov is an asset so he can have me photographed in a secret rendezvous with an FSB colonel who reports directly to Putin?’

‘It does have Bruce written on it,’ Gayla agreed. ‘But I checked with Jason. He said it’s legitimate. He also says you’re the only agent on the ground here who knows how to navigate the mountain trails. Which means you got the short straw.’

‘I want that in writing. Along with a raise.’

Once they reached Turkmenistan, Lily had to hand-deliver Zokurov to a US Marshal, who’d be on the Marine chopper. Zokurov was a defector. He couldn’t be left on his own in case he had second thoughts about his decision. On his own, he could disappear into Turkmenistan and sell his knowledge to anyone who wanted it.

Once he was on the chopper, Lily was done. The marshals would get him to Langley, where the ditchdiggers would decide if his defection was genuine. If his story held up, the marshals would give him a new identity and plant him some place where they hoped Putin couldn’t find him.

Gayla gave her the coordinates of the handoff place and handed her the flares she was to send up when she reached it. They went over fallback plans – all of them high-risk. What a slipshod business.

Lily mapped out her route to the shepherd’s hut outside Muq’tsu. She’d need a snowmobile, money for bribes, a pack of MREs. She demanded five hundred dollars in small bills. When Gayla protested, Lily said she could find someone else for the mission.

With the money in her waist belt, she went back to her room in the hostel and put on her snowsuit. She packed night-vision goggles, the flares, food, and a makeshift tent. She strapped on snowshoes and took her ski poles.

She spent fifty dollars on a snowmobile rental. The machine stuck in a drift a half mile from the village. After that, she had an hour’s hard walking to reach Tania’s house.

Tania was astounded to see Lily banging on her door.

‘Lilyuka, what are you doing here in this weather? Come in, come in and drink tea, warm up. You’ll have to spend the night.’

Lily touched her forehead, a sign of greeting and respect. ‘Your hospitality is famous and it would honor me to accept it, but I cannot linger. Do you have a Russian staying here? I’ve been ordered to take him to Turkmenistan.’

He’d arrived early that morning on a snowmobile, Tania told her, but he’d burned out the motor trying to get it out of a snowdrift. A Russian hiding in the village would expose everyone in Muq’tsu to reprisals if the Russian Army found him there.

While Lily warmed up next to the fire with a cup of tea, she and Tania worked out a plan to remove Zokurov by dogsled. Tania and Yuri persuaded Pot’ry, the man with the best sled dogs in Muq’tsu, to carry Lily and the colonel cross-country to the meeting place. Two hours after she’d arrived in the village, Lily was moving Zokurov from the shepherd’s hut and packing him into the back of the sled next to her.

Zokurov roared with laughter. With his snow goggles and face mask it was impossible to tell if he was frightened behind the mirth.

‘Goldilocks! What a pleasure to see you and not Bruce. I hope this sled and this pack are just the right size, not too big or too small. And these dogs – how did you manage? There is my machine, no match for this mountain!’

The snowmobile appeared as a heap of snow near the hut. When Pot’ry put his team in motion, one of his sons appeared and began erasing their tracks with spruce brushes.

The dogs were eager. Despite the weight of three passengers, they managed to get clear of the storm just as dusk was drawing in. Although the snow was still thick on the ground, Pot’ry wouldn’t take his dogs farther – the snow would soon turn to mush, he explained, and the dogs couldn’t pull a fully loaded sled through it.

Pot’ry took Lily aside. ‘Lilyuka, I’m going back about a kilometer to make camp. The Russian must not spend the night with me. Here you are only an hour’s walk from your destination. When the helicopter has taken the colonel, send a message to my pager. I will be near this spot. We will be here until the dawn – I can’t drive my dogs in the dark, and anyway, they must rest.’

Lily noted the coordinates. Pot’ry would navigate by a combin-ation of the sky, the landmarks he knew even when covered in snow, and with the help of his dogs, but she needed her compass.

‘If the helicopter does not take the Russian, I cannot help you,’ he added. ‘The Russian soldiers are coming on skis to Muq’tsu. They will shoot my dogs if they know I helped their man escape.’

Lily understood. If the Marines couldn’t get through tonight, she and Zokurov would have to camp in her makeshift tent and continue walking west in the morning. She imagined her body being discovered by shepherds when spring came, then said aloud, bolstering her courage, ‘I am not afraid of what might happen. I will do what must be done in the moment.’

39

SLEIGH RIDE

Zokurov was watching as Lily and Pot’ry touched their foreheads in a farewell gesture. ‘You have become a complete native, Goldilocks. I never saw this salute before.’

‘You’re a colonel, Zokurov, too exalted to learn local customs. That’s what we ordinary people do. You and I must start walking so that we reach the spot where I can signal the Marines.’

She had snowshoes, but he had only his boots, which sank into the snow as the cover became softer. She gave him one of her poles and matched her pace to his.

‘There is nothing ordinary about you, Goldilocks,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’ve watched you all the time you’ve been in Ts’gali, and I never saw how you disappeared into the mountains or how you came back again. You must tell me your secret.’

‘I have no secrets, Colonel, only a love of this country and its culture, and so I embrace it as fully as an outsider can.’

He ignored her comment. ‘When we were getting ready to send troops to Chechnya, Americans knew how many, and where they were deploying before they were even in motion. As battalions were arriving at our base near the Ts’gali Pass, you were nowhere to be seen in Ts’gali or the villages where you’ve made friends. I saw you reappear in your embassy grounds the day before America shared our troop size and destination with the British and Canadians.’

‘Coincidence is not causation, Colonel.’

In fact, Lily had been hanging around the bars near the Russian barracks, disguised as a Hayali shepherd. It was easy to pick up intel that way, but she never shared her methods with anyone, not even Jason Tedros.

Now, tramping through the snow with Zokurov, she added, ‘To show you how little I know about Russian affairs, this morning was the first time I learned that you were sharing Russian technical information with my country. I was astonished. You have an important life in Russia. You’re highly respected by everyone in your own embassy. Why would you sell Russia’s secrets?’

He gave one of his cascades of laughter. ‘Money, Goldilocks, money! An FSB colonel gets a nice flat in Moscow, and a summer home, but for the beautiful life, yachts, women, all those things, you need money. I hoped Vladimir Vladimirovich would reward me as he has others of his loyal friends, but since that has not happened, I must make my own way.’

‘The United States certainly offers ample opportunity to become obscenely wealthy, even richer than Putin’s oligarchs,’ Lily agreed. ‘I was also surprised that Bruce was your liaison. If he persuaded you to share Splizhinka’s technology with us, he has skills I didn’t know about.’

Zokurov laughed again. ‘You are a diplomat, Goldilocks. Yes, getting Bruce to show initiative was a challenge, but we made it in the end, until the end came, a bit too abruptly for my ease of movement.’

‘How did you end up in Muq’tsu last night?’ Lily asked.

‘I was at a meeting in Orenburg,’ he said abruptly. ‘A friend sent me a warning. I was planning to fly from Ts’gali to Ankara, so I commandeered a jeep, but the blizzard interrupted me. I switched to a snowmobile at the pass – and then, as you saw, ended up in near-disaster at the village.’

Orenburg was on the Russian side of Mount Muqqadas. Getting from there to Muq’tsu in a jeep or snowmobile would have been strenuous even without the storm.

She didn’t question him further. She was exposed, alone in a snowfield in a strange country with a man far stronger than she was. As if he sensed her doubts, he added, ‘You saved me. Who else but Goldilocks would have known to get a pack of sled dogs when everyone is relying on engines?’

His relentless compliments were wearing on Lily’s nerves. In hindsight she saw it as a skillful form of interrogation – flattery, cajolery, instead of threats.

‘Quiet for a minute, Colonel,’ she said. ‘I think we’re close to our primary pickup spot.’

He held the flashlight over her waist while she checked the coordinates on her compass. Another two hundred meters southwest and they were in place. The snow cover had been shrinking as they’d marched away from the dogs. It was now about five inches thick. The choppers should be able to land without sinking into either snow or mud.

Night-vision goggles gave her a view of the surrounding area. She was as sure as she could be that they were free of surveillance.

She set off the flares. There was nothing to do now but wait. She set up her lightweight tent, flap open. She invited Zokurov to sit and opened the MREs.

‘You were brilliant today, Goldilocks,’ Zokurov said. ‘There is no end to your abilities. If I had known what a skilled organizer you are, I would have been recruiting you for the FSB.’

‘As a cultural attaché, organizing a complex schedule is second nature,’ Lily said. She was so exhausted that all she wanted was to sleep and let the colonel stay or go as he wished. She certainly didn’t want his probing, needling comments.

‘Cultural attaché, of course that’s what you are, when you aren’t doing undercover work for your country.’

‘I’m too tired for joking around, Colonel. Let’s agree it was a long day, where we were extremely lucky that all the cards fell our way, and leave other topics alone.’

‘You must often be lonely,’ he said, ignoring her objection. ‘Doing two jobs, there is no time for personal relations – unless the rumors about you and the Elurbar are true?’

‘I have only one job, Colonel, US cultural attaché to the Republic of Hayalistan. It’s a job that I love, but it demands long hours, and so it’s good that it’s only one job.’

‘You are a skillful fencer, Goldilocks. A cultural attaché who can be put in charge of exfiltrating a Russian asset at a moment’s notice and succeed.’

‘I take my work seriously, Colonel. I have built up relations with the artisans in the mountain villages, which is fortunate for you.’

‘And yet you must still be lonely. Peasant women cannot be stimulating company for a woman like you, one who is far from home.’

Lily yawned. ‘If you have a dossier on me, you already know that I come from peasant stock myself. I’m at home with peasant women.’

‘I saw your friendship with Cinda Mallick.’

‘Did you, now?’

‘Her death must have been a great blow to you.’

‘Colonel, ask me what you want to know. I’m much too tired for subtlety.’

‘Cinda Mallick was another lonely woman far from home. She attached herself to you – or you attached yourselves to each other? No one is sure who made the first move. The secrets that weighed her down, that led her to take her own life, she must have shared them with you.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Colonel, did you learn your English from back issues of Cosmo? You sound like a cheap advice column.’

‘Cosmo?’ he repeated blankly. ‘A journal of space exploration has an advice column?’

‘Helen Gurley Brown,’ Lily said. ‘Sex and the Single Girl.’

‘You are clever, Goldilocks,’ he said. ‘You know how to confuse me. But even if the advice is old-fashioned and also cheap, it’s still sound advice. When you’re far from home, you seek another to share your secrets. I’m wondering what you two talked about when you swam in Lake Sakin.’

‘Prurient curiosity, Colonel? Are you wearing a wire? Was this whole mad chase across the snow a setup, to collect information about me for Bruce?’

She pushed herself standing with an effort, her thighs trembling so with fatigue that she needed both ski poles to stay upright. A moment later, she saw the lights of the incoming helos. She waved her arms, standing at the edge of the landing spot.

The Marine sergeant in the lead helo got Zokurov on board and directed his backup to assist Lily. They packed her supplies for her and flew her in the backup chopper to the place where Pot’ry had left her. She shared the goat stew Pot’ry heated over his campfire and slept curled up in the sled, warmed by the dogs.

The next day the storm had ended. Pot’ry drove her to Ts’gali by a round-about route, going partway up Muqqadas, but coming down on a west slope that was remote from his village. Lily hopped off the sled two miles from the city and hitchhiked the rest of the way on yak-drawn wagons.

She learned later from Tania that the Russian ski patrol had reached Muq’tsu an hour after she and Zokurov left in the dogsled. The Russians didn’t find any trace of Zokurov, but they still torched the shepherd’s hut. At least they didn’t murder any of the villagers.

A day after Lily got back, Bruce returned from his Athens vacation. She reported the details of the exfiltration but got no praise. Instead, Bruce said, ‘Did the colonel keep you warm?’

She had her hand up to smack his face but stuck it in her jeans pocket just in time.

Bruce’s eyes narrowed into ugly slits, but he, too, restrained himself. It was Gayla who let her know that Zokurov had reached Washington. Beyond that, for everyone’s safety the Company didn’t share information that the ditchdiggers ferreted out: had Zokurov been a genuine defector? Where was he living? What name was he using? All those were questions only the marshals could answer.

For years, Lily’s thoughts on the exfiltration had been a blur – biting cold, the dogs, the surreal arrival of the helos in the middle of a snowfield. Now, though, looking at the photo of the International Fraternity and Equality banquet, she realized what she’d overlooked.

The French photographer had caught the colonel with an arm around Steve Gambrey. In the background was Rani, standing alone.

In that remote Turkmenistan field, Zokurov had pressed Lily for details about Cinda. That hadn’t been from prurient curiosity. It was because Lily was a potential loose end.

Zokurov wanted to know how much Cinda had confided in Lily about the deals she was putting in play. If the Marines had arrived two minutes later, Lily’s dead body would likely have been lying in that field. Done in by exhaustion from her heroic efforts, the colonel would have told the Marines.

Anta had been right about one thing: the CIA was in the very midst of whatever deal Zokurov was part of. Zokurov’s other arm was around a broadly grinning Bruce Weyrich.

40

YOU WON’T HAVE A NAME (WHEN YOU RIDE THE BIG AIRPLANE)

Halina arrived at Robinson Burks High School a little after seven the following morning. She was tense, knowing she was straddling a legal fence. Chicago was a sanctuary city, meaning the schools wouldn’t let immigration officials in without a federal warrant, but she was with intelligence services, not ICE.

‘They’re fed up with Chicago at the White House,’ Marissa had said the previous evening. ‘It’s time to show the city that they can’t override federal laws.’

They’d been at a sidewalk bar a few blocks from Lily’s condo, rehashing the interrogation and deciding on next steps. Paxton and Marissa didn’t think they’d gain anything from a second meeting with Lily.

‘Not unless we arrest her, and even then, it’s hard to know if extraordinary measures would get her to talk,’ Paxton said.

Halina waited for Marissa to say, absolutely no extraordinary measures. When that didn’t happen, Halina asked what Marissa thought Lily could tell them.

‘I know she worked in Hayalistan, but it was so long ago. Everything she knows must be out-of-date.’

‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Marissa said. ‘Until we got word about someone traveling there in Cinda Mallick’s name. I think it was Lily but can’t prove it.’

Halina nodded – she’d helped track Lily’s movements in Australia. ‘But even so – what harm can she do?’

‘Does she have a handler?’ Paxton asked.

‘We don’t know what Lily has,’ Marissa said sharply. ‘If anyone sent her, I’d expect it to be Jason Tedros, but she hasn’t been in touch with him since she retired. I did wonder when Rush reported a woman had been to see him a few days ago, but Jason’s relatives confirmed that it was another one of his nieces. It’s what happened in Hayalistan last month that we have to focus on. We can’t prove it was Lily using Cinda Mallick’s passport, but whoever it was rattled the Gambrey Center by using Rani’s name. To me, that has all the earmarks of a Lily act – thumbing her nose at the authorities, taking chances only a skydiver would think were safe.’

And then she gave Halina her assignment. Go to the high school where Lily tutored Ukrainian and Russian immigrants. Collect data on them and show Lily they could get her students deported unless she started cooperating with Marissa on Cinda Mallick’s visit to Hayalistan.

‘This is a chance for you to assert yourself,’ Marissa said. ‘It will look good for Gordon and Warner Oliphant to see you have a wider scope than analyzing Sudan data. Don’t second-guess yourself; don’t be squeamish. Do the job that needs to be done.’

Halina didn’t sleep well. She stayed up too late researching what rights she had under federal law to go into a school. She didn’t find anything clear-cut enough to make her think she would have the power to demand the school hand over students to her. Don’t be squeamish. She repeated Marissa’s command in a derisive voice.

Halina reached the high school at the same time as buses were unloading students. She was old enough that they paid no attention to her as they joked or fought or simply stumbled along on sleep-sodden legs.

She waited just outside the entrance, listening to conversations. She didn’t understand Russian or Ukrainian but thought she would know when she was hearing them. However, the kids spoke such a mixture of slang, curse words, and half sentences, she could barely understand anything they were saying, even in English.

A uniformed guard appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you doing here, miss?’

She felt her face reddening, but she produced her ID, intelligence services in one corner, CIA below it.

‘And what does the CIA want at this school?’

The students stopped to listen.

‘That’s something I need to talk to the principal about.’

The guard told her to wait outside. Halina watched him banter with another employee, tease some of the students waiting in line because they’d forgotten their IDs, and finally pick up his phone. She felt angry at being belittled so deliberately and walked into the lobby. The guard got up and shook a finger at her.

‘You don’t have permission to enter these premises, miss.’ The guard listened to his phone and finally told Halina that someone would escort her to the principal’s office.

By the time she reached the principal, she’d been at the school over half an hour. Her temper was frayed. They had deliberately made her wait, without even a chair to sit on, to show they had power over her, a member of the CIA’s elite Analytics Division. She wanted to assert her own power, but she knew if she vented her frustration, she would lose any chance at cooperation from the school.

The principal finished a phone call, then summoned her secretary to record the conversation.

‘You can’t record a conversation with the CIA,’ Halina objected.

‘Then we can’t talk,’ the principal said. ‘Without a record of the conversation you could claim I said anything you liked. Your choice.’

Halina’s anger felt split between two targets, Marissa for sending her here without support, and the principal for making her feel small.

‘What’s it to be, Ms Roman?’ the principal asked. ‘I have a school to run, and you’re an unexpected meeting in what’s already a packed schedule.’

Halina nodded. ‘Yes, I see. Go ahead and record. I need to ask you about the students Lily Sedako has been meeting with.’

The principal stared at her. ‘The CIA cares about one person helping students with their classwork? How do you even know – never mind, at this point, nothing should surprise me.’

‘Does anyone sit in on the meetings Lily has with students?’ Halina asked.

‘Lily’s in a classroom with them,’ the principal said dryly. ‘The teacher and all the other students in the class sit in on those meetings.’

‘She’s speaking in Russian to the students?’

‘She’s a translator in the classroom. She helps the students understand what the assignments are. If they have trouble with English instructions, she interprets those.’

‘I need to interview those students,’ Halina said. ‘I need to make sure Lily isn’t giving them instructions on other matters.’

‘Other matters?’ the principal echoed. ‘That covers an enormous range of topics, from how much they can charge if they’re babysitters, to how to insist your boyfriend use a condom.’

She had a scornful smile that further angered Halina, but she didn’t give her a chance to speak.

‘It doesn’t matter what you’re interested in because you may not interview any student in this school on any subject. Unless you have a judicial warrant, signed by a federal judge, you cannot talk to anyone in this school. And even with a warrant, the students cannot talk to you without a legal guardian present. We have an ironclad policy on this.’

‘We believe Lily is indoctrinating students on political matters,’ Halina said. ‘We believe she’s coaching them in matters totally unconnected with their studies, or condoms or babysitting. All we want is a chance to interview them, to make sure that isn’t happening.’

‘Do you speak Russian yourself, Ms Roman?’ the principal asked.

Halina shook her head.

‘Then you would have to rely on an interpreter, just as the students do, and you would have to hope, like them, that your interpreter was giving you accurate information. Of course, that’s irrelevant, since I’m not going to let you talk to my students. If you want a copy of this conversation, we’ll send it to your phone.’

She turned to her secretary. ‘Sally, see that Ms Roman has everything she needs from the recording and help her get out of the building. It’s such a maze; we can’t have her getting lost.’

Sally took Halina through the corridors and made sure she was on the far side of the security entrance. A trio of Black students, a boy and two girls, was standing at the guard’s desk, looking worried, speaking softly to each other. Halina was opening the Uber app when she realized the kids weren’t speaking English, but a dialect she recognized: the Arabic spoken in Sudan.

This was so different from the classical Arabic she’d studied in college that she could follow only the most rudimentary conversations when she was in Zoom meetings with Sudanese officials.

‘Are you from Sudan?’ she asked.

The students backed away, looked at each other and then at the door, as if deciding whether they could outrun Halina and get outside. The guard appeared before they moved.

‘You three, get to the principal’s office for new IDs. And you, miss,’ he added to Halina, ‘we don’t let anyone interview our kids unless their parents are present.’

Halina felt too demoralized to return to Marissa, who would probably have a sharp remark on what she should have done. The high school wasn’t far from the lake, so she walked over, past people out with their dogs, their babies, their friends. She thought she was the loneliest person in the city. On the planet.

Something inside her had broken open when she saw the Sudanese teens back away from her in fear. She’d felt a connection because of her work, but they saw her as a white authority who could get them deported, sent back to the civil war and famine they’d been lucky enough to flee.

And that’s what she’d agreed to do to the Ukrainian and Russian children Lily had been working with.

41

WAR TO THE KNIFE

‘Lily, what’s going on?’

Lily was in the principal’s office. She’d actually come to the school to explain she’d have to cancel her tutoring work for the rest of the school year, but when the guard saw her ID, he called the principal, who sent for her.

‘Someone from the CIA was here this morning,’ the principal said. ‘She wanted a list of the students you work with, claimed you might be training the students to do something unspecified. Why is the CIA interested in you?’

Fuck you, Marissa! Don’t start messing with my refugees or I’ll – Lily couldn’t finish the thought, because what could she possibly do?

‘I worked for the CIA my whole professional life,’ Lily said. ‘Maybe it didn’t come up when I filled out the paperwork as a volunteer, but it’s not a secret.’

‘That doesn’t explain why they wanted to interrogate our students. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘Who did the CIA send?’ Lily asked.

‘A young woman.’ The principal looked at her tablet. ‘Halina Roman. She wanted to talk to the students you tutor.’

Since Marissa had sent Halina on a solo mission, she must have thought it would be easy to get in. Or maybe it was a test to see if Halina was strong enough or clever enough to make the school cooperate. It didn’t really matter – what mattered was that they were invading places Lily claimed for herself.

‘That’s outrageous and also frightening that they’d turn on your kids.’

She turned it over in her mind. ‘They must have wanted the students’ names to pressure me into talking. I don’t have any secrets to share, but even if I did, I wouldn’t endanger these students.’

The principal had broken up school fights that involved broken bottles and razor blades; she’d identified the dead body of more than one student whose parents couldn’t be found. She thought she was unshockable, so she was taken aback by how disgusted Lily’s words made her feel.

‘Give Sally your badge,’ the principal said. ‘We’ll miss your work, but your friends make you a danger to my students.’

Lily’s mouth twisted in a parody of a smile. ‘I actually came today to explain that I needed to stop working with the students for exactly that reason. I’m in one of those nightmares that you see in movies, where the hero has no idea why they’re being chased. Usually, the hero is thirty and buff, with an arsenal of high-tech weapons. I’m seventy-plus without any weapons, only my knowledge of the Agency and what they can get up to. It breaks my heart that they came after the students.’

The principal’s hard eyes didn’t soften. ‘You have coffee with the parents several times a week. I want you to stop that, as well.’

Lily thought the principal would make a good field agent, fingers on every part of her domain. No point in arguing – she didn’t have any possible argument. Out on the street, she stood for a few minutes, trying to shield herself from feeling shame for being thrown out. She felt as she had when Jason forced her to leave Hayalistan. She felt the way she had when her mother turned her back on Lily in favor of the new husband, the new children.

Sitting over coffee with Slavic women made her feel as though her grandmother’s spirit hovered nearby. Now Marissa was taking that protection from her.

War to the knife, Marissa, although it would be a help if I knew what we were fighting about.

She was tempted to violate the principal’s edict and go to the coffee shop where she usually met the mothers and the aunties of her students. What stopped her wasn’t respect for the principal, but the sight of Halina, standing outside the shop, staring through the window.

Lily’s first reaction was contempt – send someone with more experience if you want to dog me, Marissa – but then she realized Halina might be the stalking horse. Someone with more experience from the Chicago office could be watching while her attention was on Halina.

She started walking west, not looking around, but checking passing cars to see whether any of them turned off and reappeared.

She was pulling her overnight bag behind her. Last night, after she finished in the library, she’d stood irresolute on Division Street, wondering where to sleep. She couldn’t keep going to hotels – her savings wouldn’t last a month if she kept paying those charges.

She saw homeless people staking out their claims to shop doorways on the street and thought of the people she’d encountered in the park before she left for Hayalistan. She took a bus to the fringe of the park. From there she turned herself into a member of a community of worn-out people, rendered hopeless and belligerent by lack of sleep and food. Shoulders slumped, pace slow, eyes watchful on the ground for money or cigarette butts, watchful at the same time for assailants.

She passed the rough sleepers and went on to the Keeler Arms, the run-down hotel on the corner. If they didn’t have a room, she’d find an empty bench in the park. The nights were turning warm and she’d slept in rougher places.

The night clerk didn’t look at her when she asked for a room but rattled off the rates. For three hundred fifteen dollars she could have a room for a week with a twin bed, microwave, toilet, and sink. Bathing facilities for women were on odd-numbered floors, for men on even-numbered floors.

The clerk asked for proof of employment, but she said she was old, living on social security. Lily counted out three hundred fifteen dollars in fives and singles and got a plastic keycard to a room on the third floor. There was an elevator, but when it creaked slowly to the ground, the car smelled so strongly of urine that she took the stairs.

In the morning, she’d stopped at the park before heading to the high school. Building relationships with untouchables had helped her in Asia, why not in Chicago? She didn’t see the trio she’d encountered her first time in the park, but she chatted with others, learned where you could get free coffee during the day, and which restaurants shared out leftover food at the end of the day. No one asked her any questions, although they eyed her carry-on bag enviously when Lily got up to leave.

The SRO would be a temporary bolt-hole, but she wanted a real safe house, a place where she could keep the papers she’d stowed in the bank, and where it would be safe to leave her carry-on bag. She found it late that afternoon, a neglected bungalow on a side street near the north branch of the Chicago River. The owner was an elderly woman who’d suffered a difficult stroke and was in long-term care. When the agent said that she looked doubtfully at Lily – another elderly person who could have a stroke. However, this was a difficult property to handle, so she was just as glad to sign up Lily.

‘The owner’s son lives in Scottsdale,’ she warned, ‘so if there are any issues with plumbing and so on, you’ll have to deal with them on your own. And it’s only month to month, in case he wants to unload it quickly.’

Lily said a month would give her time to hunt for something more permanent. From a security standpoint, the house was well situated. Houses near this stretch of the river had small backyards that abutted a high fence. A narrow road lay between the fence and the overgrown banks of the river. Someone could approach from the river, but they’d need bolt cutters to get through the fence.

‘I’m going to install some security lights,’ Lily told the realtor. ‘Living alone, backing onto the river like that, I’ll feel safer with motion detectors.’

‘As long as you pay for them,’ the agent said.

‘In which case, I’ll take them with me when I leave,’ Lily said. She signed the papers in Judith Migelli’s name

Lily found a hardware store on the neighborhood’s main street. They sold her the detectors she wanted and referred her to a handyman who would install them for her the following afternoon.

The house was furnished, another plus, although it smelled of mold. Lily opened all the windows and found a fan in a closet to blow air through the bedroom into the living room. She put the bed linens into the washing machine and lay down on the living-room couch to rest. Forty years of sleeping on hill-sides or the dirt floors of village huts had inured her to odd smells and lumpy cushions. In fact, although she’d meant only to rest her weary legs, she fell into a deep sleep. She woke the next morning, thinking at first she was in a Bengali village where she’d spent six months.

Chicago, she reminded herself. Safe house. She went out to forage for tea and kefir, and to find this neighborhood’s branch of the Chicago Public Library so she could check her email accounts. Like a fisherman, looking at the lines she’d cast.

Her pseudonym Eleanor Tanney had a message from William Sessil’s sister Patricia.

Hi, Eleanor.

This is a strange coincidence, but after you called, my mother decided to drive William to the cabin we have up in New Hampshire. William always loved that place and Mother thought it might help him recover more memory if she spent time there with him.

I drove them up. While I was helping settle him into the bedroom, I found about thirty pages of a manuscript which seems to be about the country you said you were researching. I showed it to him, but he didn’t seem to know what it was. I told him about you and that didn’t ring a bell, either, I’m sorry to say.

He must have been working on it the last time he was up here, which was right before his accident. He wrote all over the pages in red ink, mostly saying, ‘Is this true?’ ‘Can you substantiate this?’ So if you’re doing research, you have a lot of work ahead of you.

Anyway, if you want the notes, I can mail the pages to you if you give me your address.

Best, Patricia

Lily wrote back immediately. She’d love William’s comments, and the sooner the better.

I know I’m asking a lot, but could you photograph the pages and attach them to an email? If there’s an expense I can Zelle you the money. Why don’t you leave the pages where you found them? That way, if William starts to recover his memory, he’ll know where to look for them.

The email came through about an hour later, with a note thanking her for the helpful advice about keeping the pages in the cabin.

‘Mother and I are using them to try to reconnect him to his work. She’s also reciting poetry to him. He used to love poetry when he was young.’

42

A HARD JOB

It was noon before Halina joined Marissa at Homeland Security’s offices on Roosevelt Road. Dr Paxton had returned to DC.

‘You were gone a long time,’ Marissa said. ‘I hope that means you spent the morning interviewing Lily’s students.’

Halina shook her head. ‘The principal would let me talk to them only if I had a federal warrant. I was trying to think what I could say to the prosecutor to get them to give me a warrant, and I couldn’t come up with anything.’

‘You should have called me at once,’ Marissa said. ‘If we needed a warrant, I could have put that in motion. What were you doing all that time?’

‘I guess – the whole process worried me. Using children to pressure Lily, and if that didn’t work, we still were going to send the children back to their home country. I – I needed to think it over.’

She hadn’t been thinking of Lily’s tutees going back to Russia or Ukraine – she’d pictured the three Black teens landing in Khartoum, consigned to starvation or forced military service in the country’s endless civil war.

‘Our work is not always easy or pleasant, Halina,’ Marissa said. ‘We’re dealing with the worst part of human lives, the wars and tortures, and so on. People think field agents suffer more than people like us, doing the analytics, because field agents are working directly with the populations affected by policy.

‘Our job is harder: we have to sift the intel and be responsible for making the – I won’t say right decision, sometimes it’s the least wrong decision. And in the case of Lily, and the destabilization of Hayalistan, the suffering of a few Ukrainian students is the least wrong decision.’

Halina nodded, tried to school her face into a mask of agree-ment. She didn’t tell Marissa she’d seen Lily leave the high school. She’d been standing outside the coffee shop, thinking she’d get breakfast, when she saw Lily on the other side of the street, reflected in the shop’s plateglass window. She’d frozen, wondering if Lily might come over to chew her out for trying to intimidate her students.

She’d been relieved when Lily headed in the opposite direction, but she felt exposed, standing on the street where Lily, or the principal’s secretary or anyone could see her.

Her walk to the lake hadn’t calmed her. Heavy-set Slavic women were minding toddlers, wearing tank tops that exposed their massive breasts. There were Indian women, women in hijab, Black women, white women, women walking dogs, reading, texting, all the things Halina never had time for because the CIA was a greedy master, swallowing her time in giant gulps.

This job had seemed like such a coup when she got it three years ago. A use for the classical Arabic she’d studied in college, to her parents’ and grandparents’ ridicule, a good salary at a time when professional jobs were scarce, and a chance to do something that could help her country.

Now she felt envious of people enjoying the weather. Of course, maybe they were unemployed, maybe that was why they could be on the lakefront in the middle of a workday. So maybe she should just accept that intimidating teens was a least-bad decision and keep her job.

Marissa eyed her narrowly. She couldn’t have Halina becoming nervy – she was too valuable a staff member.

‘Lily’s tutees aren’t our only option,’ she said briskly. ‘We can see what Lily’s been saying to the kids in that theater program, not just to that disturbed girl who showed up yesterday. It would be good to get more views on how Lily behaves in ordinary situations. Our big worry is whether she’s losing her mental stability. I’ve seen it in other field agents – they think they’re still in the field and they start mounting private missions.’

‘What did Dr Paxton say?’ Halina asked.

‘Shrink-speech. Narcissistic personality disorder with flashes of grandiosity.’

‘What did you think?’ Halina asked.

‘We weren’t going to shake her, which is why Ernst headed back to Langley. If we wanted to force her to talk, we’d have to take her to Langley and use more intense interrogators. I’d like to avoid that.’

More intense. No one ever talked about drugs or torture. Everyone pretended those didn’t exist, like a grandmother feigning ignorance of sex.

Renee, the theater director, had a day job, teaching English at a private school on the city’s Gold Coast. It would be two hours before she went to the theater. Marissa was headed to the federal offices on Roosevelt Road to catch up on emails and consult with Gordon. She sent Halina to find Keira.

‘We need a one-on-one with her, to find out more about what Lily is like when she’s on her own.’

Halina didn’t want a one-on-one with Keira. She thought Lily had seemed perfectly in control mentally in yesterday’s interrogation. It was Keira who was unstable, and she was big, bigger than Halina. She tried to protest, but Marissa said coldly, ‘You know you didn’t handle the school situation this morning as skillfully as possible. This is a chance to win back some points.’

Halina was silent for the rest of the ride. At the federal building, Marissa turned the rental car over to her and said she’d take an Uber to the theater building in time for the meeting with Renee Skinner.

Halina phoned one of her friends in the cybersecurity unit at Langley. The friend got into the Chicago school database and texted her Keira’s high school name along with her home address and cell phone number. Halina called the school, pretending to be a relative, only to learn that Keira hadn’t shown up today.

So much easier than trying to talk to students at the high school this morning. ‘Will this win me points, Marissa?’ she said out loud. The whole process had made her feel dirty. She felt worse when she pulled up in front of Keira’s home, a run-down bungalow on Kedzie Avenue.

Keira’s mother answered the door, after Halina had been ringing for several minutes. Halina backed away inadvertently from the alcohol fumes, although the woman’s pinprick pupils showed alcohol wasn’t her only comfort.

‘Now what’s she done? Has she gotten herself arrested? Do you expect me to bail her out? Time she learned to control that temper of hers, so even if I had a dime to spare I wouldn’t waste it on her.’

‘I don’t know where she is, but I’d like to talk to her,’ Halina said. ‘Does she have a friend she hangs out with, someone whose phone number you know?’

‘Friend? The other girls run the opposite way when they see her coming.’

Halina hadn’t imagined she could feel sympathy for Keira, but if your own mother sneers at you, maybe you act out just to get someone to pay attention. ‘When she comes home will you ask her to call me?’

The woman squinted at the card Halina handed over. Her eyelids were swollen and scabrous, making her read slowly, moving her lips while she struggled with Halina’s name. ‘CIA? Fuck! The little bitch really is in trouble, isn’t she?’

‘No, ma’am,’ Halina said. ‘I just want to ask her a few questions.’

‘Yeah, that’s what all cock-sucking law assholes say when what they mean is, I want to arrest you and frame you for some crime I’m too lazy to investigate. My girl may carry on some times, but you’re not setting her up for a crime you can’t solve by yourself.’ She backed away from the door on unsteady feet and closed it.

The cheap wood was warped, so the lock didn’t click shut. If Halina had wanted to, she could have shoved the door open, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the squalor she imagined inside.

She went back to her rental car and locked all the doors. She wiped her fingers over and over with the hand sanitizer in her backpack.

At four, she met Marissa at Homeland’s at the theater program. Marissa had phoned Renee Skinner to let her know they were coming. Skinner took them into one of the small conference rooms so they could speak away from the students.

The interview itself was humdrum: what was Lily’s role in the theater, did she ever meet one-on-one with students, take them on trips, show them special attention?

‘This program exists to help kids on the margins. I know that’s not popular with the government these days, but we think—’

‘This isn’t about government policy,’ Marissa said. ‘This is about Lily.’

‘She does things for us we wouldn’t be able to afford without her,’ Skinner said. ‘She has amazing connections with Hollywood people who do professional makeup and special effects. She also shows the kids how you disguise yourself without makeup by changing how you walk, how you hold yourself. One day she came in, bent over, limping, wearing a drab coat. She walked up the aisle and none of the kids recognized her.’

‘We know Lily has a relationship with a difficult girl in the program, Keira Lindblom,’ Marissa said. ‘Does Lily take her on special trips or outings?’

‘You think Lily is some kind of pedophile?’ Skinner was disgusted. ‘That’s ludicrous.’

‘Nothing is ludicrous these days,’ Marissa said. ‘She could be using Keira.’

‘Not to get to other kids,’ Skinner said dryly. ‘Keira’s one misdemeanor away from being kicked out and almost everyone in the program would cheer. Unless there’s nothing else, I need to get to the auditorium.’

Marissa and Halina followed her into the hall. Students were going into the auditorium, pushing each other, yelling greetings. As if on cue, Keira appeared.

She marched over to Marissa. ‘Where’s Lily? What have you done with her?’

‘Keira!’ Skinner snapped. ‘Control yourself. These women are with the federal government.’

‘I know. I saw them yesterday when they brought in a shrink-wrapper to question Lily. She hasn’t been home since. Did you lock her up? What did you do with her? Did your doctor shoot her full of drugs to take away her mind?’

‘How do you know she hasn’t been home?’ Marissa asked.

‘She isn’t answering her phone, and that stuck-up scarecrow in a uniform said she isn’t home.’

‘Why do you need to see her?’ Halina asked.

‘Is that your business? Why do you want to talk about her behind her back?’

‘Keira, you are one hundred percent out of line. If you want to stay in the production, you’ll butt out, go sit with the rest of the group, and keep your mouth shut,’ Skinner said.

Marissa ignored that. ‘We want to know if Lily is okay. She’s old, and old people sometimes get confused. She may have been telling people things that she’s making up, believing that they’re true.’

‘You look pretty old to me,’ Keira said. ‘Maybe you’re making up a story about Lily to try to get her in trouble, but you won’t succeed, she’s a hundred times smarter than you are.’

She stomped past them and went into the auditorium. Halina looked sideways at Marissa, to see how she reacted to being called old, but Marissa ignored that. On the other hand, Keira’s comment about getting Lily in trouble was close enough to the truth to make Halina squirm.

43

FEET OF CLAY

Lily read and reread the thirty-two pages the literary agent’s sister had emailed her. They were fragments of the memoir Jason had been writing, unconnected pages which Sessil had marked for special attention. Over and over, Sessil had written in the margins: actionable unless you can give us rock-solid proof.

In one fragment, Jason described a party at a semi-private club in Istanbul, a place where you could be a member for the night if you paid a certain fee.

It wasn’t designed for homosexual meetups, as much as where anyone could indulge their particular desires without police interference. High-priced call girls were on tap, gambling was encouraged. Jason had met someone there for dinner, unfortunately on the same night Bruce booked a room with his male subordinates for a team-building trip.

Bruce and his team were in a private room at the back of the club when Jason saw them. They were drunk, and roaring with laughter, passing a photo around the table and making hilarious, sexually explicit jokes. Jason thought he’d leave them to it when he heard Lily’s name. He went in, snatched the photo from Bruce’s hands and saw Lily bathing in Lake Sakin.

‘You violated so many regulations taking this picture, Weyrich, that I need list only three of them to get you fired.’

‘And I only need to mention who you were eating dinner with to get you fired,’ Weyrich said.

Bruce had seen Jason eating dinner with another man in a small private room in the same club. Nothing compromising had taken place, but, as Jason wrote, ‘In those days, the whiff of a suggestion that you were queer could destroy your career. If I’d been straight, I would have laughed in his face, but my hesitation gave him the ammunition he was looking for. I kept Lily’s photo, got him to turn over the film, and he more or less kept quiet about my dinner date. I’ve been ashamed of this ever since; this book will tell everything about Hayalistan I wish I’d revealed thirty years ago.’

Reading that section, Lily felt her insides crumple. Jason had mentored her, protected her, but she almost wished he hadn’t. Better for Bruce to use her naked picture as an excuse to fire her than for Jason to demean himself.

She was reading the pages in the run-down apartment on the West Side. The dirty, ill-furnished room made Jason’s story seem more sordid. She lay on the lumpy mattress, thinking, rethinking all the times she’d turned to him for help, all the times he’d stopped her from one or another action, and felt a deep sense of betrayal.

Of course, the biggest betrayal of all was sending her away from Hayalistan before the coup. Gambrey and Dunwoody – and Zokurov – wanted Rani out of the way so they could get control of the lithium. But if they were pushing the CIA into helping them run a coup, why had Lily heard nothing from her own sources? She felt dizzy, as if she’d seen it coming and overlooked it. Jason had sources all through Central Asia. He would have heard things she didn’t.

Nothing in the fragments Sessil’s sister sent described the CIA’s involvement in the coup. What Jason did mention were the recordings Rani made of meetings he or his staff had with foreigners.

He played two of them for me, meetings where I had given explicit – Jason’s text broke off there at the bottom of a page. Sessil had written: The recordings are key evidence. Where are they?

The page with the rest of the sentence wasn’t in the stash Lily had, but the fragment took Lily back to her painful meeting in Rani’s office after the hydro dam incident. She hadn’t thought about it – her own pain had clouded her mind – but of course if Rani had equipment in place to record Senator Dunwoody, he would have been recording other meetings as well.

He would have been using microcassettes back then. He’d have little recording machines hidden in the room. Any time Lily was present at a meeting, he would have heard her voice as well as Bruce’s. What would he have felt, listening to her? Contempt, that she was part of America’s plans for his country? She wished she could believe hearing her voice made him remember her as lively, valorous – words he had often used to her.

There would have been quite a stack of cassettes by the time of the coup. What had happened to them? Had Agajan found them and destroyed them? Or was Anta sitting on them in the Elurbar compound?

She lay in misery, letting memories torment her. Finally, she pulled herself back to the present, the stale sweat smell of the mattress, the dirt. She forced herself to get up. Time is short, wallowing in recriminations only protects your opponents. It was a mistake, too, to have these papers with her in the apartment. She took a bus back to the Gold Coast.

Close to her condo was a private research library. It was a quiet, calming place, where anyone could use the reading room. It didn’t have the computers that you could use in a public library, but it was a good place to think. She took the fragments of Jason’s memoir to this library and stuck them into a gap between the wall and a bookshelf. Even if someone on the staff came upon them, they wouldn’t point to her.

She debated shredding them, but the Company was ruthlessly disappearing documents about Hayalistan, Sylvester, and Rani himself. These fragments were the only physical documents the Company hadn’t found.

She went from there to a public library branch so she could search online for connections between Jason or Bruce and Gambrey and Senator Dunwoody. She learned that Bruce had retired from the CIA as a very wealthy man, while the senator’s net worth was estimated in the high nine figures.

She couldn’t gain access to his actual financial records, but Dunwoody had been a senator for fifty years. The big tech firms had shown their gratitude with plenty of stock shares, so his wealth wouldn’t have come only from a thankful Steve Gambrey.

‘I seen my opportunities and I took them.’ Some politician she’d studied in college had said that, but it could apply to Dunwoody, or the billionaires running the security services and much of the rest of the government these days. She wasn’t going to find enough data to write an exposé, but that wasn’t what she needed.

She needed to goad Gambrey, Langley, and Zokurov into acting in a way that would make international news. Then the investigative reporters who had more resources than she could dig deeper for the details.

The one place where she might find leverage was in the frustration Gambrey’s board felt with him diverting corporate resources into his quest for perpetual youth. The financial press said some Gambrey directors wanted Arnold Sylvester to take over as CEO, since he was handling day-to-day decisions already. Others, speaking anonymously, actively disliked Sylvester’s abrasiveness. Some even questioned his honesty. The board was united, though, in demanding that Steve Gambrey start paying attention to his core business ahead of the Hayali elections.

Lily tried to find Sylvester’s net worth, or even a home address, but he had skillfully avoided any online trails, both as Sylvester and as Zokurov.

Who had scrubbed the record? Zokurov himself? Langley? What if Putin had sent him to the US as a kind of triple agent – pretending to Bruce and Jason that he was defecting, while all the time the defection was to plant him in the States. He’d spent time in the boondocks improving his English and then found a way to weasel into a senior position at Gambrey Minerals and Mining.

Lily began sketching an op. It had a lot of moving parts, all of them played by amateurs, and so it was a high-risk option. If it failed, she would end in prison, or dead.

Her first step was to put out a document that would put all the players on edge – or at least put them on public display. Substacks, they were called now, not blogs. Easy to create. Easy to register an account.

44

BAD COMPANY

Marissa and Halina returned to Washington, Marissa in a foul mood. She wasn’t used to failure. Lily had disappeared, the local FBI agents were annoyed at being asked to look for her. And Halina, her best analyst, was fraying in the face of the reality of CIA work.

When things start falling apart, they go into free fall. A week after Marissa returned to Langley, Lily’s first Substack appeared.

BAD COMPANY: A CIA INSIDER TELLS ALL

Long ago, in a continent far away, I worked in a place called Hayalistan. This small, mountainous country, pinched between Russia and Afghanistan, has a proud tradition of independence. By Western standards they were poor, but they valued their families, their clans, and their religions more than money. They lived by herding goats and reindeer on the lower reaches of their sacred mountain, Muqqadas. Hayali women were remarkable weavers and quilters.

They had been one of the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics. Like many of the Stans, the fall of the USSR didn’t make them independent: they became a Russian satellite state.

However, in 1999 they set up their first independent, freely elected government, with Rani, from the Snow Leopard Clan, as their prime minister.

I was a CIA field agent in Hayalistan for many years.

I was good at my job, and proud of my work. Until this spring. This is when I learned that my work was used to help American billionaires take over Hayalistan’s natural resources.

Hayalistan has massive lithium deposits. Everyone who makes batteries, auto windows, cell phones, and cars wants lithium. The American government tried to pressure Rani into giving leases to a US company.

When Rani put his country ahead of money, we Americans were baffled: if you are a billionaire, you cannot understand why anyone else doesn’t want those billions. The American solution was to get rid of Rani and install a government that would do what we want. That government, under PM Agajan, gave Hayalistan’s lithium deposits to a man named Steve Gambrey.

Gambrey was already rich. With lithium, he became fabulously wealthy. He helped his friends become wealthy as well. His friends include a US senator, whose net worth is close to a billion dollars. It’s possible Gambrey’s friends include the former head of the CIA station in Hayalistan, who retired with a private fortune. It’s possible his friends include someone close to Vladimir Putin’s circle, who defected to the West. As I learn more, I’ll write more.

And to my old friends at the Company who worry about my mental state, feel reassured: Lily is still here.

‘How did this happen?’ Gordon had summoned his division heads to an emergency session. ‘I’m meeting with Oliphant in an hour. I need to tell him where Lily is and what we’re doing to stop her.’

‘We’ve blocked the Substack and deleted it,’ Marissa said.

Since the essay had been reposted some fifty thousand times not just in the US but overseas, deleting the stack itself was meaningless, but no one in the room brought that up.

‘Pick up Lily and bring her in,’ Gordon demanded.

He was trying to sound firm, angry, but he seemed more frightened than belligerent. His job was on the line. Hers, too, Marissa knew. Everyone in the room would suffer because of Lily Sedako. What a selfish, show-offy bitch she’d always been.

‘We’re pretty sure she’s still in Chicago,’ Marissa said. ‘Her photo and name are on watch lists for all the airlines, Amtrak, car rentals, and bus stations.’

‘She could have sailed across the lake into Canada,’ someone suggested. ‘They’d love to gloat over us.’

‘That lake is hundreds of miles long, and it ends in Wisconsin, not Canada, even if she got hold of a boat,’ the head of the climate division said.

Gordon slapped the table. ‘Don’t waste time on pointless crap. In a nut-shell, you don’t know where she is. Is Chicago looking for her?’

Marissa nodded. ‘FBI has made it a priority. We’re watching the high school girl she’s been protecting, along with people in her building in case she’s friendly enough with them to reach out.’

‘And that writer, the one who started this shit show – have you kept tabs on him?’

‘Thom Kolchak,’ Marissa said. ‘Yes. Phone, email, even tree mail. No communication between him and Lily. The big question is who gave her the financial information about Weyrich and Gambrey. We’re sure it wasn’t Jason?’

‘He’s buttoned up tight,’ the FBI liaison confirmed. ‘I checked with Rush. Jason’s absolutely incommunicado except for the nieces who do his laundry and cook him dinners a few nights a week. Rush searches them when they arrive and when they leave, and we have tabs on their phones and so on.’

‘Where did Lily get her info? Or is she making it up, connecting dots that only she can see?’ Gordon said.

‘We think she was in Hayalistan on Cinda Mallick’s passport back in April,’ Marissa reminded him. ‘We don’t know who she talked to, but she could still have contacts there who went underground after the coup. She knew a lot of village people. If they had jobs at our embassy, or Russia’s, they’d have heard a lot of secrets, and Lily was the kind of person who could persuade them to share.’

‘What a fucking mess,’ Gordon said. ‘She’s what, seventy-something? She’s on her own with a bad shoulder. Either someone we don’t know about is helping her, or she isn’t in Chicago any longer. You’ – Gordon pointed at the climate director – ‘find where she grew up and see everyone there who remembers her. It cannot be that hard to find a person whose fingerprints, DNA, and life history we know. Do whatever it takes!’

45

SEX IN THE COMPANY STORE

For her second stack, Lily found a store on Chicago’s poverty-ridden West Side that let you pay cash for computer time. She knew Langley would find the store through the computer’s ISP, but she wouldn’t have to blow one of her identities with a credit card.

She’d used the public library – which was free – for the first stack, but when Langley shut it down, she didn’t want to risk enhanced surveillance for her next messages. She had worn one of her silicone head masks while she was in the library, but prudent tradecraft said to keep mixing your methods.

After the second stack dropped, she had to steel herself not to go online to track reactions. It’s the vanity or maybe neediness of the online poster – look at me, look how popular I am! But Langley would be watching for anyone going into the account multiple times.

Instead, she took a day off. She went to one of the city’s most crowded beaches and ignored the lifeguard whistles to swim out beyond the breakwater. Back on land, she bought a big floppy hat from a street vendor to hide her face – from the sun as well as any drones – and luxuriated in a half day’s freedom from surveillance.

She imagined Marissa and her unhappy young sidekick, forced into meetings to discuss how to shut her down. I’m taking a day off, Marissa. You having fun?

No one at Langley had any fun the day the second stack showed up. Gracelyn sent it to everyone’s phone, with a terse command from Gordon that they get their butts into the office ASAP.

Thanks to everyone who read and subscribed to my Substack. I’ve re-named it B*D C##pany – some Virginians had their feelings hurt by my first post, so they shut down Bad Company. However, water will always find a way around a rock, and so Lily’s still here.

Today let’s talk about sex. Sex and the CIA, sex in the CIA.

Back when the Company began, some eighty years ago, the first director liked a quickie on his desktop to steady his nerves ahead of difficult congressional hearings. Animal House was the Company culture and that went on w-a-a-a-y too long. Also, women as sex toys meant we were put on a siding, not allowed access to top jobs.

I was among the first generation of women who got to be field agents. I loved my job, but I also faced pushback, especially from my boss, Bruce Weyrich, who was head of Ts’gali station in Hayalistan where I was based.

Last February, The New Yorker published a story about Hayalistan. The story included a photograph of me naked in Lake Sakin with a group of Hayali women.

Every month, Hayali women conducted a full moon ceremony. When they invited me to take part, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. This ritual was sacred, and it was absolutely private. It was held in a secluded cove of Lake Sakin. No men were ever allowed to witness the ritual, and the foreign anthropologists who begged to study it were excluded.

These days, Lake Sakin is so polluted the ritual can no longer be performed, but I take my vow so seriously I won’t even share details of our practice now.

That photograph in The New Yorker made it seem as though I had violated my oath and allowed an outsider to watch us. It made me angry, and I started asking questions about the story.

I called my old colleagues at the Company. First, they laughed at me, then they started bird-dogging me, wanting to know what I knew about Hayalistan – the lithium leases which an American billionaire controls, student uprisings, which the Hayali government put down with frightening ruthlessness.

And then they installed surveillance devices in my home, and on my phone and computer. Wouldn’t you have said, ‘What the hey is going on?’ I dug deeper.

And I turned up – not gold, too ugly for gold. I turned up garbage that had been rotting for twenty years and now is at the smelliest stench possible.

First, I learned who took my picture: my old boss, Bruce. The man who hated having me in his agency.

When I was starting out, if you were lesbian or gay, it meant automatic dismissal and termination of pension benefits. My boss sneaked up on our ritual in a canoe. He took a photo of me swimming naked with other women. He planned to use it to prove I was a dyke who should be fired.

Why didn’t that happen?

My boss’s boss was the person who recruited me. Jason was my godfather all the years I worked for the Agency. He took the picture from Bruce and started procedures to fire him.

And then the story got even crazier.

Jason was gay. He was deeply closeted, but Bruce discovered his secret. Bruce threatened to out Jason. And so, the two men, hating each other, agreed to a standoff. They would both stay on. Bruce would continue to make my life, and that of every other woman working in Ts’gali, a misery.

Jason would continue to head Central Asian Operations.

Next time: murder in the mines. Who killed Australian economist Cinda Mallick and dumped her body into Lake Sakin? Also coming soon: did a Russian FSB colonel con the Company into moving him to the US with a new identity?

If you like this story, repost with #Sex&theCompany – and remember: Lily’s still here.

Gordon’s skin was pasty, his eyes bloodshot. ‘How the hell did she make this post? I thought we blocked her. The socialist media is having a field day, laughing at us, and the Senate Intelligence Committee is frothing. As is Ollie.’ Meaning Warner Oliphant, head of all the security services.

‘We did block her, but she chose a new identity, a new title, and a new computer to post from,’ Brian, the cybersecurity chief, said. ‘We blocked this one, but it’s already been reposted in seventy countries. We’ve vacuumed it from social media sites, but it’s embedded in so many documents it’s hard to delete completely.’

‘Did she post it in Chicago?’ the climate-geography group head asked. ‘We have surveillance in all the libraries, right?’

‘She used a computer in a UPS store on the city’s West Side. You can pay cash for computer time, so there’s no credit card on file.’

‘She’s still in Chicago and the FBI can’t find her? What a bunch of fucking morons!’ Gordon slammed the table so hard his coffee splashed onto his tablet. He turned to Marissa. ‘And what about your girl, Hyena, what’s she been doing?’

‘Halina,’ Marissa said through tight lips, angry with Gordon for disrespecting a female staff member. ‘I brought her back to DC. She wasn’t making any headway, and the FBI is on the ground in Chicago, anyway.’

‘The FSB colonel,’ Gordon said. ‘What’s that refer to?’

‘Viktor Zokurov.’ Marissa was staring at her tablet, which was showing the live camera feed of her two horses grazing in her pasture. If she quit today, she could probably save her pension, but she might not be able to if she were fired.

‘Lily exfiltrated him several years before I joined the Company,’ she told her horses. ‘Even three years later, how she managed it was the talk of Central Asia Command. This added to her mystique as the go-to agent for impossible missions. She survived an avalanche with the help of her smelly smugglers. She saved the Mount Muqqadas hydro dam from a bomb. She found a dogsled to get Zokurov to Turkmenistan ahead of a platoon of Russian snipers.’

‘What does the Russian say about her?’ Gordon demanded.

‘The marshals won’t tell me where he is or what his US identity is,’ Marissa said.

‘Maybe Lily’s with him,’ the psy-ops director said. ‘After you and Paxton interviewed her, he said she has a narcissistic personality disorder with yearnings for grandeur. She could have teamed up with this FSB guy when they were in that sled together and be working with him now.’

‘That’s ludicrous,’ Marissa said, but Gordon cut her off.

‘It’s a great idea. Put it out that she was working with the FSB to undermine American interests in Central Asia, and that this whole Substack crap about Hayalistan is a smokescreen.’

The mood in the room shifted. A pro-active plan, designed to neutralize the enemy. The suggestions flowed in quickly.

Since they had the original photos that they’d taken from Thom Kolchak’s home, they could enhance the picture of Lily in the water, make sure she was recognizable, make the scene more erotic, more titillating.

Repeat Bruce Weyrich’s rumors about Lily’s sexuality: she was having sex with Hayali women, she had an affair with the Australian Cinda Mallick – put out that Mallick committed suicide because Lily dropped her. Say Lily went both ways and had slept with the discredited socialist Rani. Plant the stories in the likely places in social media, get right-wing streaming to pick it up. Add a pedophilia link to the teenager hanging around Lily.

‘What’s Weyrich up to these days?’ Gordon asked. ‘Will he come forward?’

‘He built himself a fortified castle in Florida, but he plays golf most days,’ Brian said. ‘Do you want someone in Tampa to see whether he can speak to the point?’

‘Affirmative,’ Gordon said.

One of his tics that irritated Marissa. Why couldn’t he just say, yes?

‘And what about Jason’s memoir? We had all the copies, right? The literary agency let us comb their files and the guy himself, the one who was working with Jason, he’s been neutralized, right?’

‘Affirmative.’ That was from the special ops group head. ‘He didn’t die, but he has major brain damage.’

‘And finally, why the fuck can’t we locate Lily? She’s still in Chicago, or near enough. Where’s her car?’

‘She doesn’t drive,’ Marissa said.

‘Then make sure Uber knows to notify us the minute she books a ride,’ Gordon said, exasperated that Marissa didn’t know to do that.

‘She uses public transit.’

There was silence in the room as the group digested the idea of relying on public transit, and then Gordon said, ‘Get her face on whatever Chicago uses for transit: If you see this woman, call 911.’

‘She’s an old white-haired woman,’ Marissa said. ‘If people start calling the cops every time they see an old woman on a bus, we’ll spend the rest of our lives interviewing them.’

‘Then you goddamn find her,’ Gordon snapped. ‘By sundown.’

46

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

By sundown. Marissa walked down the hall, fingering imaginary revolvers on her hips. Did Gordon picture her in a shoot-out with Lily?

She wondered what Lily’s point was. She must know that she couldn’t win a fight with the Company. If she wasn’t killed outright when they found her, she’d spend the rest of her life in a federal prison, or even one of the filthy black holes the US was using around the world for dissidents these days.

‘I am tired of you, Lily,’ Marissa said out loud. ‘Your gyrations, your thumbing your nose at rules, your boasting about the intel you get from your invisibles.’

Even with her annoyance, Marissa was squirming at the list of actions the group had agreed to. Accusing Lily of pedophilia, of causing Cinda Mallick’s suicide, and all the rest of it.

Which side are you on, she’d asked Halina just yesterday. Which side was she on?

She left her tablet and phone on her desk and climbed two flights of stairs to an unused conference room. It was a small space that housed obsolete equipment, like movie screens and slide carousels. Marissa moved a stack of government reports to the floor and lay down on the tabletop.

She had spent all those years in India, then Senegal, then Turkey, proving her analytic skills. She’d been so excited when she got the promotion to headquarters. She hadn’t thought the reward would be destroying her old frenemy.

She lay still for half an hour before getting to her feet. She stopped in the toilet, another unused room that smelled of mold, and straightened her clothes and her hair. Marched briskly down the stairs, shoulders back, returned to her office where her PA was waiting with a stack of messages.

Marissa thanked her with a serene smile. While she was lying on the table, she’d thought of something Lily’s protégée, that lumbering teen, had said. Keira, her name was, as unlike the elegant screen actress as possible. She’d said she saw Lily change her appearance right in front of her on the street. Marissa had dismissed the comment as so much ‘teen with a crush’ babble.

Now she summoned Halina, who’d also been there.

‘We dropped the ball on this one,’ Marissa said. ‘We need to get the girl to tell us exactly where she saw Lily.’

‘She’s trying to protect Lily,’ Halina said. ‘I doubt she’d tell us anything.’

‘We need to make her tell us,’ Marissa said. ‘We are not a social welfare agency, we have a job to do, protecting our country’s national security.’

‘I saw the list of assignments Mr Alford sent out to discredit Lily, and one of them is to say Lily is a pedophile who abused Keira,’ Halina said. ‘Didn’t you see in my report that Keira’s mother was reported to Chicago’s child abuse hotline for using drugs and letting her dealer attack her own daughter? Why would we abuse a girl who’s already been so damaged by her own mother? We should be getting her into a therapy program, not exploiting her.’

‘This is a troubled, unlikable teen who can help us shut down a major threat to national security. There’s always a danger of overidentifying with a target. I think that’s happened to you with Keira. You take a few days off.’

‘And you’ll send Sebastian?’ Halina said. Sebastian was her main rival for the top spot on Marissa’s team.

‘I won’t send anyone else to Chicago,’ Marissa said.

She held the younger woman’s gaze: look at me, I am the most honest person in this agency, she hoped her face said. And actually, she wasn’t going to send another assistant out to talk to Keira – she was going to go herself.

She flew out that afternoon. When she and Halina had met with Renee Skinner at the theater program, they’d learned about the special effects and makeup Lily’s Hollywood connections gave the program. Renee had shown them some of the head masks, strange dead-alive creations that could change your age, or sex, or species.

In the time Marissa had been close to Lily, she’d never known her to wear makeup, but here she was, apparently adept in using it to change her appearance.

‘Don’t tell me there’s one more thing you can do that makes me hate you,’ she muttered.

While she was still in the air, Marissa texted Sebastian and told him to get in touch with whomever Lily worked with in Hollywood.

‘Find out what silicone head masks Lily ordered,’ she told him. By sundown, she mouthed silently.

She’d booked a limo to her Chicago hotel, but she had it make a stop first at a costume shop near the expressway. The shop sold gimmicks like cheap vampire teeth for Halloween, but it also had cheap wigs and makeup. Marissa bought a wig of gray, tightly curled hair and some cheek plumpers.

Halina hadn’t given Keira’s phone number to Marissa, but that was easy to find from the mother’s address. She called the girl and identified herself as Lily’s sister.

‘She talked about you all the time when she was home last month,’ Marissa said. ‘We’re worried sick about her because she disappeared, and we don’t know where she could possibly be. I flew into Chicago from Los Angeles this afternoon to look for her. Can I meet you somewhere tomorrow? If anyone knows where she could have disappeared to, it’s probably you.’

Marissa was afraid she’d overdone it, but Keira was needy, desperate, eager. Marissa pushed aside the thought of Halina’s reproof, that Keira didn’t deserve for the Company to exploit her in their search for Lily. She arranged to meet Keira the next morning before school.

In the morning, she took out the supplies she’d bought at the novelty store. Marissa had lustrous dark hair with auburn highlights, the result of a twice monthly, five-hundred-dollar trip to Washington’s most skilled colorist. She pinned it up now and covered it with the gray wig.

She stared at herself. Without the hand painting, her hair would be just about that shade of iron-gray. She would look like the old woman in the mirror.

She inserted plumpers at the back of her gums. They made a startling difference to her cheek contours. Her phone’s facial rec didn’t know her.

She had seen those pooched-out cheeks before: she’d studied them off and on for weeks in the photo of Cinda Mallick by Hayali Customs and Immigration. Every time Marissa had looked at the picture, she thought it looked sort of like Lily but not quite. It was Lily with plumpers.

She should let Gordon and Ts’gali station know, in case Lily tried to use the Mallick passport again. Her fingers hovered over her phone’s keypad, but she put it away, refusing to ask herself why.

She was meeting Keira at a bubble tea shop across from her high school. Marissa got there early, waited outside the shop for half an hour. The horn sounded to summon the kids to school and the tea shop emptied out. It was only then that Keira appeared.

Keira was meeting Lily’s family. This was a big day in her life, so she’d put on extra makeup, was wearing cowboy boots with fringes, a plaid miniskirt, and a frilly white blouse whose layers fell open to reveal a piece of the dragon tattoo.

‘Keira? I’m Rose, Lily’s sister. I don’t want to make you late for school, but I’m hoping you can tell me something – anything – about how to start looking for her.’

‘I didn’t know Lily had a sister. Where do you live?’ Keira said. ‘Are you older or younger? What was your favorite thing you did together when you were growing up?’

‘I’m eight years younger,’ Marissa said. ‘Lily always looked out for me when we were growing up, so it feels strange to be looking out for her, but she’s having memory problems. We need to find her. Since you’re one of the people who saw her the most, I’m hoping you can tell me if you’ve seen her on the street around here. It would give me a place to start looking.’

She answered Keira’s questions about her childhood, where she’d grown up, what Lily had been like – so clever with languages! We always thought she would be a professor. As for Rose herself, she’d lived a very ordinary life, never married or had children, worked doing data entry for a large company.

It was easy to tell a bold lie. Why had she always thought Lily was doing something clever that she herself couldn’t manage?

‘Thank goodness I could retire before AI took over my job. Now tell me about yourself. I know you met Lily in the theater program, because that’s what she told me. Is acting your dream?’

Keira’s face clouded over. ‘Acting is my dream, but the stuck-up bitches who get private lessons are the ones who get the roles. I’m supposed to work on videos, which anyone can do. We learned about them in, like, sixth grade. I’m sure Lily’s sick. They even sent out this lady with a doctor to interview her. Didn’t she tell you? I think she has cancer, like my nana did.’

‘Lily isn’t sick,’ Marissa assured Keira. ‘We just worry about her memory. I expect you worried about your nana’s memory, too.’

‘She never forgot anything, like my birthday, my mother can’t be bothered, but Nana always took me out for a special treat. And Lily, not that she took me out for my birthday, but she let me stay with her when the police picked me up. It was for curfew,’ she hastened to assure Lily’s sister. ‘I’m not a criminal!’

‘So, you know Lily really well,’ Marissa said. ‘I bet if you saw her on the street, even if she was dressed funny or walking funny, you’d know it was Lily.’

Keira nodded, delighted to have the relationship affirmed by her idol’s own sister. And so, Marissa was able to get her to tell the story again about Lily changing her appearance right before Keira’s eyes.

She’d been on her way to school, or at least – with a sideways look at Marissa – she’d been thinking about going to school and saw the woman up the street from her.

‘She was like two blocks ahead of me, waiting at the bus stop.’

‘How did you recognize her?’ Marissa asked. ‘Her clothes, maybe? Or the way she was standing?’

‘Mostly the coat,’ Keira said. ‘She has this red coat, it kind of flares, and I saw it, I saw her wearing it. Only, the bus came right before I got to her. I caught up to the bus at the stoplight, but there wasn’t anyone on it wearing red like that. I don’t know if it was someone else to begin with, or if Lily disappeared. I thought, like, those CIA bitches must have arrested her so fast I didn’t even see them.’

‘Where was this?’ Marissa tried not to sound too eager.

‘Up on Foster Avenue.’ Keira swung out an arm, pointing vaguely north. The sleeve of her frilly top caught the frame of Marissa’s glasses and pulled them from her face. The gray wig came loose and fell forward.

Keira gave a little shriek and jumped up, bringing the glasses and the wig with her. ‘What’s wrong with you? Your head is—’ She stopped.

‘I see. You’re in disguise. You’re the skank who wants to lock up Lily. And now you’ve tricked me. You’re worse than any cop. You pretended to be Lily’s sister so I would rat her out. You – you’re worse than the worst cockroach I ever smacked dead with a shoe. Lily will never forgive me. Oh, I hate you!’

She flung her drink at Marissa and ran from the shop, Marissa’s wig and glasses still stuck to her arm. Keira tore them loose and stopped long enough to stamp on Marissa’s glasses before disappearing down the street.

47

EAGLE ON THE MENU

Lily had spent a few nights in the safe house she’d rented, but it wouldn’t stay safe if she used it so often that a drone could track her there. On the other hand, the neighbors would talk if she didn’t use it often enough. The neighbors seemed aloof, but her long experience in the field told her that even the most aloof-seeming communities watch newcomers closely. She set up light timers, she organized a local landscaper to tidy the yard and make new plantings, and every few days she’d come in around six, as if she were returning from work.

The rest of the time she spent in the run-down apartment on the West Side. She changed her route every time she went there, through a half dozen random bus and L rides, each time altering her appearance slightly. Impossible to know if you’re completely free of surveillance, but you mustn’t worry about it too much or you paralyze yourself.

The park, at least at the end where the apartment building stood, seemed more desolate as the May days heated up. Spring was an invitation to strew the streets and parks with bones, bread, and bottles. The debris wasn’t quite as disgusting as the dump around Lake Sakin, but the hopelessness in the faces of the people drooping on the benches looked the same.

On the day she first returned to the park, she spotted the trio she’d spoken with back in April. The woman was making an inventory of the contents of one of her black garbage bags; the two men were sharing a bottle. They didn’t recognize Lily and she didn’t try to speak with them.

Her rented room faced the park. It was in that space that she wrote out her first two Substacks, by hand, trying to figure out where she could type them and post them free of surveillance. It was time-consuming and exhausting to travel around the city so much in the name of cybersecurity, but she knew better than to use a computer close to where she slept.

The day after her second post, she rode a bus to a northwest suburban library to check her new Substack account. It had been blocked immediately, but the highlights of the stack were posted on all the major social media networks. It was widely reposted overseas, embedded in other articles. There was even a translation into Hayali, in an account registered to ‘Elurbar Are Endangered.’ The students, Lily guessed. She hoped her posts didn’t put them in further danger.

Lily’s goal with the Substacks was to force the key players into the open. Seeing them reposted all over the globe meant that surely one of the players would read them and start to act.

The fact that Langley shut down her Substack accounts within minutes of her posts showed that Hayalistan was a sore tooth at Langley. They were paying attention; they didn’t want a public eye on Hayalistan and the leases or on Rani’s assassination.

On the slow bus ride back to the city, she felt tense, anxious in a way she never had in the field. She knew it was her isolation, the fact that she had no one to consult. If she could call Jason – she couldn’t talk to him, but she had his words. She returned to the research library and pulled the documents from behind the shelf where she’d stashed them. Reading his fragments, she could hear his voice, and it steadied her.

‘I went back to Hayalistan last year to attend the Central Asian Games,’ Jason had written. ‘These games include pony races, eagle-handling, Asian versions of polo, craft displays, concerts, dances. They go on for ten days and are a beloved part of the countries that line the Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia. I wanted to watch them one more time while I still had the strength to travel from New York to Ts’gali.

‘During a buzkashi match (explain what this is, Sessil wrote in the margin) I went to the prime minister’s enclosure to pay my respects. Steve Gambrey, the billionaire owner of Gambrey Holdings, was seated next to the prime minister in the front of the booth.

‘Gambrey doesn’t come to Hayalistan often these days. His family fortune started in coal, but Hayalistan’s lithium mines turned Steve Gambrey from a millionaire Alabama businessman into one of the world’s thousand obscenely rich people.

‘These days, Steve Gambrey is using his share of the money in his quest for perpetual youth. Gambrey Minerals and Mining’s day-to-day operations are handled by his chief operating officer, Arnold Sylvester.

‘Sylvester is a mystery man. He is never photographed, and he operates behind a network of ISP addresses that make him hard to find. Someone in the crowd told me he was actually present, in public, in the prime minister’s tent, standing at the back next to Hayalistan’s economic minister.

‘Watching the oligarch and his mysterious number two as honored guests of the Hayali government, I decided the time had come for me to write a memoir, detailing my role in these events. I let myself be pressured into silence at a crucial moment in Hayalistan and America’s history. I want to speak about that.’

When the library was closing, Lily put her papers back in their hiding place and returned to the Keeler Arms. She tried to make a timeline, starting with Zokurov’s exfiltration. She was trying to line up all the key players and see how many of them had been in the same place together, but she finally gave up in frustration. Without access to her computer or files, it was too massive a project.

She slept badly. In the morning, she couldn’t make herself get up, except to brew a cup of tea, which she took back to the lumpy bed.

She stared at the ceiling, watching a spider crawl unsteadily from the light bulb to a corner by the window. It must have been Jason who took the picture of Zokurov in the prime minister’s enclosure. How had it ended up in the magazine? Did he have a connection to someone at the magazine, or to Kolchak himself?

She slapped her cheek lightly – focus, Lily. No point to questions like that, no point to any questions that she didn’t have time or resources to answer, like who in Texas had sent her the magazine. She had to assume Jason had made that happen, maybe before Rush and his team of thugs tightened their surveillance.

What he didn’t know, couldn’t have foreseen, was the assault on the literary agent, but the rest of it was Jason, the puppet master.

Jason, her godfather, her personal puppet master. He’d been betting on her lack of impulse control. He’d known her so well, he’d known she’d see red, white, and blue when she saw the Lake Sakin photo. He’d counted on her doing something rash that would force Langley’s hand.

She needed to slow down, picture one step at a time. She shut her eyes, thought of the advice of her meditation instructor in Delhi. Deep breaths, don’t think, the breath will lead you where you need to be. In this case, it took her back to Anta’s venomous assault in her hotel room.

Anta said she saw the tanks unloaded from the C-5 Galaxy planes, in advance of the coup that killed Rani. Anta knew the gossip from the embassy because all the staff doing menial work were Hayali.

Lily had been aware of Agajan when she was in the field, but hadn’t known much about him. He was part of the Lodi clan. Lodi, loosely translated as rock, boulder, were supposed to care for Mount Muqqadas as a sacred trust. The Elurbar, Snow Leopards, ran and jumped above the treeline, but they could do so only with the support of the Lodi, the rocks that lined Muqqadas’s upper reaches.

Agajan resented Rani’s power. That was common gossip in all the tea shops and taverns Lily used to visit. He cloaked his resentment in old verses about the Elurbar and the Lodi and their intricate relationship, but everyone knew Rani was going to let him go because of the money he was pocketing from foreign mining companies.

Rani was a good leader, but not a skillful politician. Lily knew this at the time, but even if Rani had been willing to listen to her advice, she couldn’t offer it. She was perilously close to crossing a line with him as it was.

Or should have been. She sat up in bed. Bruce had been giving advice to Agajan. Or selling himself to Agajan.

Senator Dunwoody, Steve Gambrey, Bruce Weyrich, Viktor Zokurov – the quartet that gathered at the Bastille Day banquet three years earlier – had looked really jolly. Rani had been elected, true, but they must already have been making plans for how to get rid of him if he wouldn’t respond to their pressure.

Had all four been rewarded with shares of Gambrey Minerals and Mining?

Lily left the apartment and made the tedious roundabout journey to a different library than she’d previously used.

She read more about the kind of longevity treatments Gambrey was studying at his ranch in New Mexico. All she knew about the longevity movement was an obsession with diet, and alternate days of fasting, which supposedly added to your lifespan.

She curled her lip: anyone who’d lived in India or Bangladesh could tell you that fasting leads to early death from terrible diseases, but maybe that was true only if you were forced to fast, not if you did it voluntarily.

Billionaires were toying with cryogenics, trying to tie up their fortunes for hundreds of years in the future for when they’d be unfrozen and would need the money. She couldn’t find more specifics on what Gambrey was doing, but then she came on an account on Facebook. The writer claimed that Gambrey was getting blood plasma transfusions from teenage boys at his ranch. The report was unverified and she couldn’t find it elsewhere, but the writer said Gambrey promised the boys he’d get green cards for their families in exchange for monthly donations.

If this report was true, no wonder some of Gambrey’s board was pushing for a leadership change. Other directors were telling the right-wing press that if Agajan died or failed to renew the leases, the US Marines could help persuade the Hayalis to renew those leases.

Like killing Rani to get the mines to begin with. Killing Rani. If Anta was right, the US had provided the weapons that helped Agajan take over Hayalistan. Maybe the US had provided troops under the euphemism of ‘military advisors’.

Lily began searching for US appropriations budgets. Her fingers felt thick, too big to fit on the keyboard: she was afraid of what she’d find, but she wasn’t surprised when she came on it.

The spring after Agajan seized power, the US had started its disastrous invasion of Iraq. Late in the previous summer, they’d begun shipping vast amounts of armaments to Kuwait, staging ground for an invasion that they always intended to mount, regardless of the cover story about looking for WMD. All fall hundreds of C-5s headed out, carrying tanks and other weapons.

A line in the Department of Defense appropriations budget included a dozen planes carrying tanks, sent to Ts’gali instead of Kuwait. That had happened in the fall of 2002, after Jason had moved her to Delhi. Weyrich must have engineered the delivery timing to make sure Lily wouldn’t see them. He’d have known she would get a message to Rani.

Betrayal by Agajan, betrayal by the Americans, by the Russians, Rani had no chance to keep his government – or himself – alive. How helpless, how humiliated Rani must have felt, watching American tanks deployed on his country’s soil. Lily sat, face in hands, swallowing silent gulping mouthfuls of tears.

In the middle of her tears she had her own vision, of her time in the Idumali meadow with Rani. She was healing from her frostbite and preparing for the loss of Rani himself.

She had never revisited the meadow: it was a holy place; you didn’t vacation there. The Hayali had an unwritten code that you went there for healing or for preparation for major life changes. At the end of her fourth day in the meadow, Rani sent her down the mountain on a pony. He stayed behind for his own rituals to prepare himself for leadership.

Steve Gambrey likely had never heard of Idumali. If he had, if he believed its grasses could extend his life, he would want to grab the grasses and keep them for himself. Lily thought she could build quite a nice op around his greed. Sitting in the library, she whispered a prayer to the Elurbar and the Eagle, asking for strength and foresight.

48

FORAGING IN THE PARK

Lily saw her op taking shape, but it would work only with support from the mountain people. That night she went to the park to try to reach Duruna at the Anglo-American Club. She was lucky on the first try.

Lily asked if eagle was on the menu, Duruna said that the eagle was a sacred bird and no one would eat it.

After that, Lily stayed in the park, waiting for Duruna to call back. The mosquitoes were out in force, even though it was only the end of May, but she sat patiently, listening to the rustling of people on nearby benches, and beyond their sounds, the movement of animals through the park. Raccoons, possums, foxes, all the animals we think belong to the country, have moved into the city where garbage makes foraging easier.

It was almost three in the morning when Duruna called back. Lily asked if she was well, and then if she was sure no one could hear her.

‘I live with three girls, four in one room. Now they are all at work or at school and I am alone in the room. And where are you?’

‘It’s the middle of the night here. I’m in a park. I have an idea for how to stop Steve Gambrey, but to do it will take a lot of help from people in the mountains.’

As Lily described her op, Duruna scoffed.

‘That’s ridiculous. We cannot go to the Idumali meadow and turn it into a playground for stupid CIA ideas.’

‘I think we can make Steve Gambrey believe that Idumali will help him live at least another hundred years,’ Lily said.

‘No one is that stupid,’ Duruna said. ‘Everyone knows the angel of death is waiting for us.’

‘These men with so much money are like little boys, screaming because they can’t have one more lollipop, one more piece of cake. It’s not that they’re stupid but that money is all they know of life.’ Lily described Gambrey’s New Mexico ranch, and gave Duruna links to websites describing different ways people were hoping to avoid, or at least postpone, the angel of death.

‘I must talk to the others,’ Duruna said. ‘I will call you at this time tomorrow.’

Lily bit back a protest, a demand that Duruna decide now. She needed to leave Chicago before she was found, but she didn’t want to go until she knew whether she could stage her op. If she couldn’t, she didn’t see how she could continue to live in America. Even if she left Chicago, the FBI and CIA would be on the lookout for her, and it would take only one lapse of attention for some alert citizen to unmask her.

Lily was impatient enough that she returned to the park the next night at midnight. This time she was well coated with insect repellent and had brought a thermos of tea. At three, Duruna called.

‘We will do it,’ she said. ‘Azam and Grigo agree. Mika says you are looking for a way to betray us, the way you did to Rani, but Azam talked to a grandfather who was a cleaner at the American embassy. He remembers you as the woman who spoke Hayali, and he remembers your up’rosi as a man who drank too much and behaved badly with local girls. Azam says we can take a chance with you. If you are a traitor, then you will die, and if you are not, then maybe we will have a way forward.’

Lily couldn’t blame Mika and Grigo for being doubtful. She was doubtful herself, but she gave Duruna instructions in a brisk, confident voice. Go to Muq’tsu, talk to Tania and Yuri Iremi. With their support we will have a chance. If Tania and Yuri agreed to her plan, Lily would finish what she needed to do in the States and fly to Ts’gali.

After the call, she made her way out of the park and cross town to her safe house, where she could take a bath and sleep in a better bed. Getting soft, she mocked herself, thinking of all the places she’d slept on the ground under a tarp.

It would take a minimum of two days for Duruna to get to Muq’tsu and get an answer from Tania and Yuri. Time for her to post one last Substack, and to compose messages to Steve Gambrey and his second-in-command.

The next evening, Lily waited until twilight to set out for the old bank. She put on one of the silicone head masks her friend in special effects at the Hermes Studio had created, topping it with the wig – black hair streaked with gray. She looked middle aged and worn out, a dark-skinned woman with gray-streaked black hair, whom everyone ignored on the street because she cleaned toilets for a living.

Partway to the bank, she stopped at one of the little shops that offers poor people the things they need or want, from tobacco and dry shampoo to cheap phones and SIM cards. The little shops were also good because they took cash. As soon as you bought a burner with a credit card, the phone’s registration number was available to anyone who wanted to find it.

It was dark when she reached the building. Technically, the doors were locked at seven, but so many graphic designers and musicians used the building it was easy to follow someone inside.

The drama group had access to a computer lab there. Lily had started creating videos when she was helping with scenery for the drama club’s production of Into the Woods. She still remembered the code to the digital lock. She switched on the lights and logged onto a machine using the drama program’s credentials.

She worried that the approach she’d imagined for Steve Gambrey was too crude, without enough to back it up, but absent an ops team it would have to do. She created a company, Hayalistan Lives!, whose slogan was ‘Commercial Opportunities Will Make Hayalistan Great!’

She registered Hayalistan Lives! at one of the domain registries, then used a shelf package to create a rudimentary website, including stock pictures of mountains and clear springs and lakes. The centerpiece was a photo of Lake Louise, which she labeled Lake Sakin, with the Rockies in the background. Superimposed on that was a photo of a Mongolian meadow with a close-up of Himalayan grasses. She labeled everything as part of Mount Muqqadas, then devoted an entire page to a description of the history and the healing power of the meadow grasses at Idumali.

Steve Gambrey wanted to live forever, he wanted to corner the market on longevity before any of his competing longevity seekers got there. Once she’d uploaded the website, she wrote a letter to Gambrey, inviting him to invest in Idumali. She saved it to a thumb drive – she couldn’t send it until Tania gave her a green light.

She saved the website to the thumb drive and used her Judith Migelli credentials to get Steve Gambrey and Bruce Weyrich’s private email addresses from the CIA databases. She couldn’t find one for Zokurov, or Arnold Sylvester, which was odd. Judith didn’t have access to all databases, especially not the US Marshals. It wasn’t prudent to go on a prolonged fishing expedition in the Langley systems. She exited, hopefully without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind.

Before logging off the drama club computer, she created another Substack, which involved signing up for yet another account. Last one – it was getting too hard to find a safe machine to use.

She scrubbed the traces of her work from the machine and tucked the thumb drive into the pocket in her bra band.

She was walking across the hall to the stairwell when she heard the door to the auditorium bang shut. She ducked into an alcove away from the lights. Keira, poor Keira, was heading for the stairs. She looked as though she hadn’t bathed or slept for days. Had Keira run away from home? She might be squatting in the old bank building, but Lily wasn’t in a position to help her.

She waited until she heard Keira’s footsteps on the next flight down and then began her own descent. A couple of men were heading up. She heard one of them accost Keira.

‘You’ve been roaming the building the last few nights. What are you doing here?’

‘If you’ve seen me, then you’re roaming the building, too!’ Keira yelled. ‘Let go of me.’

At the sound of a scuffle, Lily started down the stairs. At the top of the flight where the men were holding Keira, she called out, ‘I seeing her when I cleaning theater. She student, theater student, working hard on theater.’

The men turned to look, and Keira broke free. She ran down the stairs shouting, ‘So there! Learn to mind your own beeswax!’

Lily followed slowly, walking on the sides of her feet as if she had bunions.

It was hard to be on guard both against the people who wanted her in prison, and a girl who needed her. She waited in the lobby shadows until Keira had disappeared, but she stayed in character until she boarded a bus to her safe house.

49

A LENGTH OF ROPE

Lily went back to the park, where she again called the Anglo-American Club and asked if eagle was on the menu. This time, she couldn’t connect with Duruna. At five, she finally crossed the street and slept a few hours on the lumpy mattress. At eight, she got up long enough to try to phone Beatriz, who said she’d call later. She woke Lily at noon, phoning from the parking lot behind Maude’s diner.

Lily explained that she’d started to put a plan in play. ‘It has a lot of moving pieces, but if it works, it will be important to get Jason out of the house before Homeland Security decides he’s expendable.’

‘Don’t do anything to put his life in danger!’ Beatriz cried.

‘I’m working to save his life, not endanger him.’ Lily kept her voice calm, patient, the standard soothing noise for scared double agents. ‘We’re in this mess because Jason decided to write a memoir that the CIA doesn’t want published.

‘If we don’t get him out of the house, some time soon the FBI or CIA or both are going to get tired of him.’ She let Beatriz absorb what that meant and then asked if the kids had been out playing in the park at night.

‘Yes. And it was like you said,’ Beatriz admitted reluctantly. ‘Rush tried to drive them away at first. They taunted him, which had my heart in my mouth, but then he saw the fishermen on the docks next to the park were laughing at him, so stopped paying attention.’

‘Keep them going. I don’t have an exfiltration plan yet but getting him out by water would be a plus. Can you keep his boat ready nearby?’

‘It’s in drydock. We can’t get it out without raising a ton of suspicion,’ Beatriz said.

‘How about his friend, the Coast Guard admiral you mentioned. What was his name?’

‘Sam,’ Beatriz said reluctantly. ‘Sam Evans. He has a sailboat, the Terry Hoyt. I guess I could see if he’d bring her round.’

‘That’s a great idea,’ Lily said. ‘Why don’t you give me his number and let me call him today, so he knows who I am and what we’re doing.’

Another ten minutes of arguing, and then a reluctant agreement, along with Admiral Evans’s phone number.

Every extra minute on a phone that might be traced made her edgy, but she needed Beatriz on board if she was going to rescue Jason. She was nervous about every aspect of her plan. The big risky part was in Hayalistan, but Lily had a superstitious fear that if she couldn’t save Jason, then her Hayalistan plans were doomed.

When Beatriz finally felt able to end the call, Lily switched to another burner phone to call the admiral. ‘This is Lily, Admiral, Lily Sedako. I used to work for Jason as a field agent. Beatriz Tedros gave me your number.’

His response startled her. ‘Lily? Lily, the unguided missile?’

‘Is that what Jason called me?’

He laughed. ‘Before all those Clint Eastwood wannabes showed up at his place. Tell me something that lets me know it’s the missile and not one of Homeland’s goons.’

‘I could tell you anything,’ Lily objected. ‘You can’t reach Jason to corroborate it. Like Blue Noses. That was the coffee shop in Ankara where he made his first approach to me when he was head of Ankara station.’

‘I believe you, Missile. If you were a fake, you’d have chosen something about him personally, like the wart on his testicle.’

‘Right,’ she said dryly. ‘I can’t stay on the phone long. It’s a burner but Langley has a lot of ears.’

She described her plan. Unlike Bea, he didn’t have to be talked into it. He was ready to execute today and was disappointed when she said she had more pieces to put in place.

‘I’m not doing anything these days but pacing around watching the wannabes gut my service. I’ll get the Terry Hoyt shipshape and ready to move. Get going on the rest of your plan, Missile. I’ll be on standby. Jason had a lot of confidence in you, a lot. Just so you know.’

When Lily hung up, she was breathing easier. Jason trusted her. Maybe he’d called her an unguided missile, but he knew she’d bring everyone who depended on her home safe or die trying.

She went to a hardware store several streets over and bought a length of stout rope, some WD-40, and a slitter blade. Back in her room, she tied the rope around the base of the toilet. She sprayed the WD-40 into the sashes and sliced through the years of paint holding the windows shut until she could open the bathroom window easily. That way, if she was cornered, she’d have an escape route of sorts.

50

BIG GIRL PANTS

Marissa had reported on her meeting with Keira, although she left out the major embarrassment of Keira dismantling her disguise. Gordon had sent a congratulatory text, copying everyone in Marissa’s division.

Good going, Hockney. Did you pull in the girl?

Halina sat watching the screen, waiting for Marissa’s reply.

Negative to pulling in the girl. She’s easy to find if we need her. I got her to show me where she’d seen Lily. An east-west street called Foster, where it crosses Central Park Avenue.

Brian and the other division heads responded with hand-clapping emojis. Halina wrote Marissa a private message, not part of the group chat.

Marissa, you’re a rock star. How did you get Keira to talk?

I’m glad to see you’re in the office, Marissa texted back. You made the right choice not to quit. I told Keira I was Lily’s sister, and we were worried about Lily. Keira couldn’t tell me the exact location, but she gave me a sector of the city to search in. And then I overplayed my hand and lost her. I’m staying on a few days to oversee the FBI hunt and see if I can reconnect with the girl.

Halina felt sick. Keira was a teenager, vulnerable, and Halina had helped Marissa find her and trick her. All to take out Lily, whose crimes no one had ever explained believably.

Marissa had urged Halina not to do anything drastic, to think about her options. She’d tormented herself for forty-eight hours. The human cost of her work wasn’t something she’d thought about in the past. She produced analyses, someone else decided what to do with them. But what if her work was destroying people’s lives, then shouldn’t she quit? But was it really? Her work on Sudan, after all, might lead the administration to put more money into Africa.

And then, if she quit, what would she do? After all, it was a tough job market. So much analytic work was performed by AI these days that she’d be hard put to find anything in the private sector that commanded similar pay.

She still hadn’t made up her mind when Gracelyn summoned her to take Marissa’s place in a meeting with Gordon and the division heads.

Marissa was still in Chicago; in her absence, Halina was the ranking member of Analytics. Your turn to wear the big girl pants, Gracelyn texted Halina.

‘I had a call from Rush, the Bureau’s guy at Tedros’s place in Long Island,’ Gordon said. ‘He heard the nieces who do Jason’s laundry and cook his fish soup telling Jason the bastard niece had been in touch. He thought we should know in case she’s a conduit. Woman named Louise Page who lives in Albuquerque.’

‘What did she talk about?’ Brian asked.

‘The call came into the one niece’s phone, not to Tedros. Rush traced the number, but it’s a burner. The bureau couldn’t tell where she was calling from. Rush saw her when she showed up in person a few weeks ago. Says she’s old, more like Jason’s age than the other nieces, but he couldn’t find her in the usual databases. The Bureau checked with Gambrey, who says he never heard of her, so she’s probably not a risk, but we can’t take chances this close to the lease expiration date.

‘Halina, you’re Analytics today. Your job, find this Louise, make sure she’s neutral to harmless.’

Halina went back to her desk to search for Louise Page in Albuquerque. When she didn’t find a Louise Page, Halina expanded the search to all of New Mexico, and then the surrounding states. There were a handful of Lois Pages, but no Louise. Halina sat, turning the name over on her tongue. Try Louisa, try Eloise. And bingo. There she was – the mother of all women doing significant work for the Company.

If Marissa had been in town, Halina would have discussed the finding with her. Marissa always cautioned against jumping to conclusions. Halina’s conviction that Louise Page was a cover name, and a cover name for Lily at that, was definitely a leap. She didn’t have proof. It was just the way the name sat on the tongue.

Halina went into the reports that Rush was sending from Jason’s home, going back to the day that Louise Page popped up and Jason acknowledged her as his brother Ilidio’s daughter. There was no way to double-check that history. Ilidio was dead. Rush had interviewed his adult children, who didn’t believe their father could have had an affair with anyone, but no one could prove anything, especially since Rush hadn’t thought to get a DNA sample.

Halina tried to imagine what would happen if she was right, if it had been Lily who showed up at Jason’s home that day. Would the Company resort to torture to get Lily’s location, and whatever plan she and Jason might have put in play? Jason still had friends in the Senate who were keeping him under house arrest instead of dead, but if word got out that he was working with Lily to undermine the Hayali lithium deals, that support would evaporate.

Halina sat with these thoughts for close to an hour, and then composed a careful memo to Gordon, with a copy to Marissa.

‘There are no women named Louise Page of the right age in any of the databases I used. I found two named Lois but they don’t have any connection to Jason or to members of his family. I can’t find a record of a driver’s license, but since Louise Page took the train from New York City to Jason’s home, perhaps she doesn’t drive.’

She read it through, then added, ‘Has there been any unusual activity at Jason’s, aside from the nieces talking about this unknown cousin?’ She pictured Lily and Jason’s nieces unloading weapons from his dock in the middle of the night and imagined a headline: Elderly Women Terrorize CIA.

She typed up her resignation letter but deleted it. If she quit, she’d be on the outside forever. She might never know if they caught Lily or did something terrible to Keira. She especially would never know what Lily had done that meant she needed to be caught and interrogated.

‘You can use me on the ground with you,’ she wrote Marissa. ‘I’ve met all the key players, which the local bureau people haven’t. And I have a bit of a relationship with Keira.’

Marissa thought it over. ‘Yes, you should come, especially since I need to head back to DC. It will give you a chance to show you’re really on the team, not folding when it’s necessary to employ tough measures with targets.’

51

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE BLIZZARD

One of my most challenging assignments with the CIA was to exfiltrate a Russian colonel from Hayalistan minutes before an elite team of Russian snipers arrived to shoot him. At least that’s what my bosses told me at the time.

In the late twentieth century, FSB Colonel Viktor Yulevitch Zokurov gave America Russian nuclear secrets. In exchange, America gave him a new identity and a chance to live in our country. A blizzard was roaring along Mount Muqqadas when I was ordered to find Zokurov and get him out of danger.

My boss, Bruce, was in Greece with his male subordinates, attending an important conference that involved dice and cards.

A Hayali villager I knew had a dogsled. He and his dogs brought the colonel and me to a field where an American Marine helicopter picked up the colonel and carried him to the plane that brought him to America. He arrived in Virginia where the CIA vetted him, agreed he was an authentic defector, and gave him a new identity.

Now, it looks as though the colonel made fools of us, quite possibly with the help of my boss, Bruce Weyrich, along with the billionaire Steve Gambrey. And the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dunwoody.

When Rani was briefly prime minister, from 1999 to his death in a coup in 2002, he couldn’t be bribed by anyone – Americans, Australians, Chinese, anyone – to hand over leases to Hayalistan’s lithium deposits. I believe my quartet helped plan the coup.

This means I came close to dying in a blizzard to rescue a Russian agent and make sure he got sent to America.

The biggest questions about Colonel Zokurov are his relations with Vladimir Putin. Did Putin order him to pretend-defect to have a man on the inside in America? Did Zokurov love the capitalist lifestyle so much he changed his identity a third time to hide both from Putin and from the US marshals?

I don’t know where in America the marshals parked the colonel, and I don’t know the name they gave him. However, I know the name he’s using these days. I might even be able to find him if the CIA stopped gunning for me and asked me nicely to locate him.

Whatever the answers, Zokurov is a living docudrama. Can’t wait to see his story on Netflix.

In the meantime, here’s some fun reading from the congressional appropriations bill for 2002: in October, a dozen C-5 planes were rerouted from the Iraq weapons buildup to deliver tanks and other armaments to Ts’gali.

A week after that shipment arrived, Rani was dead, shot in a coup that installed the Agajan government. Agajan spends most of his time in Switzerland, maybe counting the dollars or euros or crypto that Steve Gambrey gives him. Next week we’ll look at what the Australian economics analyst Cinda Mallick did to make Zokurov and his buddies murder her. And we’ll speculate on who was in the boat that rowed her body to the middle of Lake Sakin and dumped it overboard.

And in case you were wondering,

Lily’s still here.

The Substack dropped while Halina was in the air. She landed in Chicago to predictable whining from Gordon: how had Lily gotten the data on tanks and other armaments the US delivered to Hayalistan in 2002?

Public documents, doofus, Halina muttered under her breath. Of course, the cybersecurity team had shut down the stack as soon as they saw it, but screenshots were multiplying around the world.

Marissa, in the air on her way back to DC, was bombarded with calls from Gordon, demanding that ‘her girl’ find Lily. And where the hell was Zokurov?

Gordon told her Steve Gambrey was fuming, threatening to sue the CIA for letting one of their agents libel him. Senator Dunwoody was texting Gordon five times an hour. The only person Lily mentioned who didn’t call Gordon was FSB Colonel Viktor Zokurov.

Marissa tried not to gulp her vodka martini. She sent a message to her staff to dig deeper into Zokurov both before and after his defection. They already had the basics about his training at Moscow’s elite intelligence institute. She knew he’d provided valuable intel on Russia’s nuclear program to Bruce Weyrich, when Bruce was head of Ts’gali station. Zokurov had fled to the West with the Russian army skiing after him, ready to shoot.

Lily rescued Zokurov in the middle of a blizzard by commandeering a dogsled. Of course she had. Nothing less flamboyant would have occurred to hot dog Lily.

Marissa demanded more information. Who had actually given the exfiltration order if Weyrich had been in Greece? Had he authorized the dogsled?

An hour later, she learned that the exfiltration order had come from Moscow station because Weyrich hadn’t responded to any signals about the matter’s urgency until after Lily and Zokurov reached the meetup point in Turkmenistan. Bruce put a reprimand in Lily’s file for taking Zokurov away in a dogsled. He said she exceeded her authority and should have brought Zokurov into Ts’gali, where he could have been kept safely in the US Embassy.

Okay, maybe not hot dog Lily, Marissa thought grudgingly. Bruce hated Lily – maybe he’d ignored the signals, hoping Lily would fall on her face. But a dogsled? No one else would have come up with that.

After the chopper collected him, Zokurov had arrived in Washington, been interrogated for a week by a senior authority on Russia along with the ditchdiggers. They all declared him a genuine asset deserving of US protection.

As was the usual protocol, the marshals provided him with a new identity and a new home, details which they shared with no one. Marissa already knew this. Her plane was landing – a brief respite from texts – but in her limo to Langley she violated all protocol by calling the head of the US Marshals service. He said even now, more than twenty-five years later, they still wouldn’t say where they’d resettled the colonel. Everyone was safer when no one knew where he was.

Could they be sure Zokurov was safe? Marissa asked. He’d been accused of murder, by a deranged former agent. The director of the US Marshals said stiffly that they knew what they were doing.

When she got to CIA headquarters, Marissa picked up her car and drove to her country home without going to her office. She couldn’t face her colleagues. She rode for an hour, unwinding on the trails through the woods, and then soaked in her Jacuzzi.

She was relaxing in her living room with another martini when the head of the marshal service called, panic-stricken. They’d stopped checking on Zokurov several years ago, because he’d been in the country for so long. Zokurov had disappeared. His new identity showed him still living in Idaho, but local people said it had been at least four years since they’d seen him.

Marissa texted the report to Gordon, who phoned her. ‘Maybe Lily found him and killed him over Cinda Mallick. Weyrich thought they were a couple of dykes. These fucking Substacks she’s posted make it sound as though she’s on some kind of revenge tour. She has to be found as soon as possible and stopped. Cold.’

Gordon’s comment rankled. When would women be judged by the effectiveness of their work instead of the content of their DNA? That made her perversely rise to Lily’s defense.

‘I read through her personnel file when this whole mess was just getting started. Weyrich didn’t want a female agent, period. He tried to stop her initial posting, long before there were any issues on the table. When that failed, he started extreme rumors to get her fired, but he claimed so many conflicting things, from larceny to her sleeping with Rani, that no one took him seriously.

‘We should talk to Weyrich. See if Lily has sent him any threats. Also, I’d like his version on Cinda Mallick, the lithium leases, Zokurov, and everything else that happened in Hayalistan when he was head of station. He’s still alive, living in that ridiculous fortress in St Augustine.’

‘He won’t know anything. He was in Greece when Lily danced off with her dogs.’

‘It’s strange he was in Greece when his prize asset was under threat,’ Marissa said sharply.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Gordon demanded.

She wanted to argue the point with Gordon – it was suspicious Bruce had gone to Athens with his top male subordinates just when Zokurov needed to leave Hayalistan. But she would never win that kind of argument, not with someone who was following government directives on cutting back on women in senior positions.

‘We don’t know anything about what happened twenty-five years ago,’ she said instead. ‘It can’t hurt to talk to Bruce. Maybe someone from Zokurov’s past recognized him out in Idaho and he fled. He’d go to his handler – that’s what assets do when they’re scared.’

She could picture Gordon pulling on his Adam’s apple, thinking it over, trying to see if it would get him in more trouble, but apparently deciding he could offload trouble onto Marissa.

‘That’s a good thought. It could be Lily turned up with some secret poison she found in one of those Asian countries where she worked. Okay, you send someone down there. Or go yourself.’

Marissa thought Weyrich might open up more to a man, but her team was stretched thin. Besides, a trip to Florida would keep her out of Gordon’s orbit for another day. Lily’s Substacks were making him the target of everyone in the intelligence services. He wasn’t handling it well.

The tag, ‘Lily’s still here,’ had gone viral. It was picked up by the late-night shows and used as a meme for everything from annoying coworkers to kids not eating their broccoli. Moms posted, ‘I looked at his plate, and, yup, Lily’s still there.’

The gossip was, if Gordon couldn’t control one seventy-something woman, how could he run the world’s most famous spy agency?

52

GOOD INTEL – BUT FOR WHOM?

By the time Halina landed in Chicago, Brian’s cybersecurity crew had traced the computer for Lily’s third stack to the building where the teen theater program met. The FBI had followed that lead and found a CCTV camera at the building entrance. They hadn’t seen Lily, but they had seen the overweight hysterical girl who hung around her.

Halina looked at the footage. Yes, that was Keira, looking around furtively. Was she checking for a tail, or was she worried about being picked up for violating curfew? She disappeared out of the picture. It was impossible to tell which way she’d gone. Halina studied all the footage for the hour before and after Keira’s departure, wondering if she and Lily had met at the theater. She didn’t see anyone who could be Lily. Young men and women who could be artists or musicians, an older woman who might have been on the cleaning crew, but no one Lily’s age.

She went with a Bureau agent to pick up Keira at the bank building. They went up to search the auditorium and found traces of Keira in the balcony – blankets, junk food wrappers. She seemed to be camping there, but even though Halina stayed there until two in the morning, Keira didn’t show. She wasn’t at her mother’s; she hadn’t been to school for six days.

Halina arranged to have the building’s camera feed directly to her phone. She decided it would be a waste of time to canvass Foster, the street where Marissa said Keira had spotted Lily. Halina started instead with August McBride, Lily’s building super. She also talked to the other condo owners in the building. No one knew Lily well, although one woman commented on how carefully Lily had looked after her mother in the last years of Irene Dungeness’s life.

Irene Dungeness wasn’t in any Langley databases. There was a simple explanation which Halina couldn’t know – Lily listed her father as her next of kin when she joined the Company. And even though her family had been vetted, her mother’s surname at that time was still her second husband’s, Melton. Erik Dungeness had been Irene’s third husband.

Because she was frustrated, Halina trolled different datasets for Irene Dungeness.

It seemed unlikely for someone as savvy as Lily was supposed to be, but she reported the event to Marissa. What she didn’t report was that she had found an active bank card registered to an Irene Dungeness at Lily’s condo address.

Halina stared at the report for several minutes. Twice a year, Cook County property taxes were charged to the card. It wasn’t used for anything else. She started to put a trace on the card so that she’d be notified any time it was used. Then she took off the trace. More information she was keeping from Marissa. She tried imagining her termination interview and could not come up with any plausible reason for keeping that information, or Louise Page as Jason’s bogus niece, to herself.

Halina had always been a doobie, painting inside the lines, homework on time, tutoring other kids, playing cello in the school orchestra, dressing like a preppie long after that look had disappeared, no drugs, no booze, no body art.

Now she was taking a risk that could get her fired. It scared her, but not enough to tell Marissa about Louise Page or Irene Dungeness.

53

TANKS – A LOT

Marissa spent the day in an unsatisfying meeting with Bruce Weyrich. He had retired to Florida, to a house so barricaded with high-tech security that it took Marissa half an hour to gain access. Talking to him about Lily made him trot out a list of grievances which hadn’t shrunk in the twenty-five years since she moved from Ts’gali station to Delhi.

When Marissa asked if he’d heard from Colonel Zokurov recently, he acted as though the name were new and strange to him.

‘Viktor Yulevitch Zokurov. Remember?’ she said. ‘That was your great achievement in the field, turning an FSB colonel. When was the last time you spoke, or had an email or a carrier pigeon between you?’

‘Why?’ He was playing with the lapel phone he used to summon his PA or his butler.

‘He’s disappeared. The marshals can’t find him. If Lily was after him, he would come to you, his godfather, for help. I need to know where he is, so we can keep him safe if Lily starts a revenge tour.’

‘What does she have to revenge? Has she gone completely whacko?’

Bruce’s grating voice, half whine, made Marissa’s feelings toward Lily veer again. Of course she’d done things on the down-low, with him as her station chief.

‘How valuable was Zokurov? He fed us secrets about nuclear centrifuges, but what else?’

‘The Splizhinka was valuable enough, I didn’t hound him for any other crap. It’s not like he was a file clerk we were trying to squeeze. Anyway, Lily whisked Zokurov out of Hayalistan while I was at a conference—’

‘Yes, in Athens. I saw the expense report. Even for Greece, your expenses were impressive. “Other crap” from an FSB colonel would be infinitely more valuable than what a file clerk knows. He could have told us whether Moscow supported Rani or Agajan. Or perhaps even one of the Hayali generals who wasn’t on our radar when the coup took place.’

‘The coup happened after Viktor left Hayalistan!’ Bruce snapped. ‘He couldn’t have been involved.’

‘Interesting that you and the colonel were on first-name terms.’ Marissa looked at him steadily. His lips tightened into a pout and he shifted in his arm-chair, but didn’t say anything.

‘Lily’s latest Substack says that C-5s were unloading tanks at the Ts’gali airport a few days before the coup,’ she continued. ‘We know getting Agajan into power worked for American commercial interests. According to your reports at the time, those tanks were defensive only, to support Americans on the ground, but AP photos showed them moving into the plaza around the government’s offices the night before Agajan’s forces attacked the prime minister.’

‘It was twenty-five years ago, maybe more. I don’t remember those details. And fucking AP, can’t mind their own damned business.’

‘You don’t remember the details, but you remember exactly how many years before the coup that Zokurov came to the United States?’

Marissa paused again, waiting for Bruce to speak, but he stared at her, glassy eyed.

‘You left the service a fabulously wealthy man,’ she said, voice gentle. ‘Did Gambrey pay you with shares in his company?’

He refused to say anything more, except if the CIA was going to harass him after a lifetime of service, he would involve Senator Dunwoody in fighting back.

Anyone who had one-on-one meetings with Dunwoody knew it was only his staff who kept him coherent, but his staff knew how to wield his considerable power. If Marissa stirred the pot too vigorously, Bruce could use Dunwoody to ensure that it was she, not he, who suffered. She ended the meeting more from disgust with Bruce, but fear for her own future played a role.

Back in her hotel, she spent several hours crafting a report to Gordon. ‘Bruce is extremely uneasy. I think he knows where Zokurov is but refuses to say. I even wondered if the colonel could be seeking refuge in Bruce’s basement, but I don’t have any leverage to force an answer. I’d welcome your advice.’ Something she actually never welcomed.

The atmosphere at Langley was so toxic these days that she’d welcomed the trip to Florida. She hadn’t really expected that Zokurov would be in touch with Bruce. After listening to Bruce, though, she began to think that he and the Russian might have colluded on some deal around the lithium, or the coup, or both.

She looked for a photo of Zokurov. The CIA had pictures from the Russian New Year’s balls in Hayalistan, but Zokurov appeared only with his head tilted back, pouring a shot into his mouth, or dancing with his back to the camera. She finally found the one Lily had dug up, but she didn’t have his US identity to compare it to.

Zokurov had almost no faceprint in an era of ubiquitous cameras. And neither did Arnold Sylvester. She felt a tingle in the back of her neck, not excitement, but dread. What if they were the same, what if the CIA had vetted a Russian mole and declared him kosher? And what was Lily’s role in this? Her third Substack had said outright that she knew how to find Zokurov. Was that because of her famous nose for intel? Or because Lily was working with him?

None of the possibilities appealed to Marissa. Her rivalry with Lily was one thing. Learning that Lily had been a traitor was quite another. She didn’t believe it was possible, but all the same – she needed to find Lily, confront her face to face. Until that happened, she couldn’t bear one more hysterical message from Virgina.

Marissa shut down all her devices for the day, even the video stream of her horses. She was staying in a waterfront hotel. In the morning, she went for a swim in the ocean, putting off hearing from Langley as long as possible. She finally turned her phone back on while eating a late breakfast. It was filled with messages, dozens, that had come in the middle of the night. Halina and the Bureau had found Lily.

54

RUNNING DOWN A BUS

By the end of her second day in Chicago, Halina knew the answer to the question she’d asked herself at the beginning: was her assignment punishment or valuable? The answer was punishment. Marissa was shunting Halina to a siding of mediocre assignments to show her what happened when she questioned the Company’s actions.

Halina had been visiting teen hangouts looking for Keira, rather than trying to find Lily. She decided to finish the day with a patrol of Foster Avenue so she could report the futility of spending more time on the search. She had photos of both Keira and Lily on her tablet. At twilight, she started wandering down the street, stopping at little shops and fast-food places to show people the pictures. Since the street was filled with tired middle-aged women and boisterous teens, it didn’t surprise her when she didn’t get a hit.

To her astonishment, while she was nursing a raspberry bubble tea, she saw Keira across the street, heading west. She abandoned her tea and started following. It was getting dark, but Keira was easy to spot. She would jog for a block or two, then slow to a walk. Halina finally realized she was following a bus.

Her heart beat faster. They were passing a city park now. Well-tended bungalows and small shops gave way to broken sidewalks and debris. She could hear voices from beyond the trees, murmurs, girls giggling, the occasional argument. She closed the distance with Keira to make sure she didn’t lose her.

The bus pulled to a stop and an old woman came down the stairs. Keira started running, shouting Lily’s name. Halina sprinted to her and grabbed her.

The old woman crossed the street, giving no sign of hearing either Keira’s or Halina’s shouts to stop. Keira punched and bit Halina, screaming for Lily, but by the time she broke free, Lily – if it was Lily – had disappeared.

‘You monster, you scumbag, you – you cock-sucking CIA bitch!’ She was punching at Halina’s head when a patrol car pulled up.

The car turned its searchlight on the two women and Keira instantly dropped her hands and backed away from Halina. Her face was screwed into a fierce scowl.

‘Everything okay here?’

‘Thanks, Officer,’ Halina said. ‘My sister got mad at me for trying to get her home before curfew, but she’ll get over it.’

The patrol car stayed where it was, the officers looking at them for a couple of minutes, then finally drove off.

Keira stared at Halina. ‘You didn’t let them arrest me. Is that because you want to arrest me yourself? Take me to that bitch who pretended she was Lily’s sister?’

Halina could feel a sheen of sweat on her face as well as blood where Keira had clawed at her. In a detached part of her mind, she realized she’d lied to the police, as if that were her nature, when her nature was to uphold law and order, not protect wild teenagers. Another line crossed.

‘The CIA doesn’t have arrest powers,’ she heard herself reciting to Keira, as if from a training manual. ‘We turn people over to the FBI if we want them arrested. If Lily is arrested, she’ll be taken someplace where she’ll probably never get out. They may even kill her to get her out of the way. When you run after her as you did tonight, anyone can follow you. Tonight, it was me, but tomorrow it could be the FBI.’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Come with me, let’s leave this area in case someone else sees you. They will know we think Lily is nearby.’

Halina crossed the street and started walking east, back toward the lake-front. She didn’t look behind her, but a few minutes later, Keira caught up with her.

‘Is that true?’ Keira demanded fiercely. ‘Or are you trying to fool me into telling you something?’

‘Do you have something to tell me?’

Keira’s silence had a flavor to it, the flavor of someone with knowledge they’re reluctant to pass on.

‘Do you know what kind of work Lily did?’ Halina asked.

Keira scowled at her but didn’t answer.

‘Lily was a spy.’

‘No, she wasn’t! You and that stupid woman who pretended to be Lily’s sister are making this up just to get her in trouble! She was some kind of important actress, or something in the theater. That’s how she could get us costumes and disguises.’

‘She worked for the CIA in a country called Hayalistan,’ Halina said.

‘I know that. But she worked on arts projects. She told us.’

Halina wanted to grab Keira by her worn, dirty T-shirt and shake her. She needed to get back to where Lily had left the bus and try to find her, she needed to keep an eye out for the FBI or the Chicago cops, but first she needed to get Keira away, which meant she needed to stay calm when her head seemed to be exploding.

‘Lily did both. She was incredibly brave: she climbed mountains, she dug herself out of an avalanche, she saved a lot of people’s lives from a bomb explosion, and along the way her friends in Hollywood taught her how to wear costumes and change her appearance so the bad guys couldn’t trap her. Now she’s in trouble.’ She tried to give a thumbnail sketch of what was going on in Hayalistan that made Lily need to disguise herself.

She wasn’t sure how much Keira was taking in, but at the end, Keira said, ‘So the bosses want to blame Lily for their problems. But you’re one of the bosses.’

‘I’m not a boss. I’m a research analyst. My job is to look for information, make an informed assessment of it, and pass it on to the bosses,’ Halina said. ‘I want to keep Lily from being arrested until I get all the facts, not just the ones the bosses are telling me. That’s why it’s important that you stay away from Lily. The cops know what you look like, and they’re looking for you, hoping you’ll do like you did tonight. You brought me close to Lily, but a cop will simply arrest you.’

‘Lily needs me to look after her,’ Keira said. ‘To keep her safe from you and that Marissa skag.’

‘Lily won’t be safe if you’re not safe,’ Halina cried.

‘I’m staying someplace safe!’ Keira flashed.

‘The FBI saw you on the cameras outside the theater building,’ Halina said. ‘If that’s where you’re staying, it isn’t safe.’

She felt as though she had left her own body for an imaginary one. In her real body she wouldn’t be bleeding on a dark street trying to reason with the volatile, needy teen who’d injured her.

‘Is there someone who can give you a safe place to rest? Your father?’

Keira gave a bark that was half laugh, half sob. ‘That was probably one of Mom’s dealers. Since my nana died last year, there’s no one, except maybe Aunt Jackie, but she hates Mom. And when she came to Nana’s funeral, she was all over me on how I dressed and how it made me look like – like I was going to turn out like my mom.’

Halina dug out Aunt Jackie’s details. Bismarck, North Dakota, where Mom grew up, a high school math teacher, not married, no children. It took ten nerve-wracking minutes, with cop cars periodically driving past, but Halina finally persuaded Keira to call her aunt, and then to let her talk to the woman. ‘Keira’s in way over her head. The adult she counts on is being chased by the FBI; they think arresting Keira will make the woman give herself up. If Keira’s out of town, with you, I think they’ll leave her alone.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Jackie demanded.

‘My boss is one of the people leading the chase,’ Halina said. ‘Keira is afraid to go to you. She says you were pretty harsh when you came here for your mother’s funeral. The trouble is, I’m in over my own head, and I can’t protect your niece.’

Jackie asked about drugs.

‘No,’ Halina said. ‘She’s angry and unhappy but not following her mom. Even if you can only keep her for a few weeks, that would give me breathing room here.’

And so, they agreed. Halina would put Keira on a bus tonight.

‘My stuff is all at the theater building. That’s where I’ve been sleeping.’

‘The FBI put a camera at the entrance,’ Halina said. ‘The feed comes to me. Why haven’t we seen you?’

‘I go in through the alley,’ Keira muttered. ‘People come out to smoke or take out garbage and I go in through that door.’

It sounded dreadful, but Halina was tired. She’d lost her usual detached judgment. She called an Uber – at least she could justify a trip back to the bank building, claiming she was checking to see if Lily had made a return visit. As they waited for the car, an unmarked SUV zoomed up the street toward them. Halina caught a glimpse of the plate: FBI, heading toward Lily.

Halina didn’t want to leave the street, but she wanted to get Keira out of the way. When the Uber arrived, she had the car take them to the back of the theater. She waited in the car while Keira collected her few things. At the bus depot, she bought her a ticket with cash and stuffed two twenties into Keira’s backpack.

‘I’m going to be monitoring you, Miss Keira. If you don’t get on that bus, stay on that bus, and stay with your auntie in Bismarck, I will declare you a fugitive from justice and sic the FBI on you. Got it?’

Halina thought she might argue, or pull a tantrum, scream she was being kidnapped. Instead, she climbed quietly onto the bus. Halina didn’t realize that Keira didn’t feel threatened, she felt cherished. Halina cared about her enough to make her a fugitive from justice if she disappeared. She’d be just like Lily.

55

FOUND – AND LOST AGAIN

Lily heard Keira call out as she was boarding the Foster Avenue bus. She stiffened but didn’t turn around, didn’t hurry her climb up the bus steps. She hoped that Keira would think she’d once again been mistaken and leave.

Sitting slumped near the rear exit, she saw the girl running after the bus. Poor needy child, I can’t help you. Get out of the way before the hounds chew you to pieces. She couldn’t risk a conversation with Keira – it would be impossible to persuade her that she needed to leave Lily alone.

The third Substack had been a step too far. She’d been writing out of grief over Rani, and rage with the men she believed engineered his death. Measure twice, cut once – a slogan of seamstresses and carpenters that her father and grandmother tried to drill into her. She’d done it backward, writing, posting, without taking time to think it through, especially her suggestion that she knew what name Zokurov was using now.

She needed to get to the Keeler Arms to collect the rest of her silicone masks. And then back to the safe house where she’d left all her identities. Get out of town tonight, while it was still possible, instead of waiting to hear back from Duruna.

When she climbed off the bus at Keeler Avenue, she heard Keira shout her name again, and then another woman’s voice. An altercation that was becoming physical, she guessed, but she didn’t risk looking back to see. She crossed the street into the apartment building.

By the time she’d taken her bag of disguises from the hiding place under a floorboard, she’d seen the Lexus bounce to a halt in front of the building. She waited until the two agents had run up the walk to the entrance, then slung her rope out the bathroom window. She dropped her bag, dropped a skateboard, and shinnied down the rope. Swung from the big knot at the end. And found herself dangling ten feet from the ground.

She felt a howl of fury with her own carelessness rise up. Measure twice, measure twice. Stop it! Recriminations when you’re safe, not here, not when you need to act. She swung in an arc, tried to draw her knees to her chin as she let go. Her body couldn’t obey her, and she landed hard on her shoulder.

The trip to the theater building and the bus depot meant Halina missed Lily’s drop from her window. Instead, Halina got back to the park as the FBI men were tugging at people’s heads to see if they were wearing silicone masks. She could hear the protesting squawks and make out the agents’ angry responses but she couldn’t tell what was happening.

Movement on the street made her turn her head. She saw the teenage boy limp over to the agents’ SUV. The driver’s door was on the far side of the street from her, but she heard the beeps as the electronic lock opened. The boy was a sophisticated thief, then.

The two agents ran past her to the car, roaring with rage. A bus was pulling up across the street. The boy managed to board ahead of the agents. The two men stared and then lost their heads and started running after the bus.

The crowd on the corner was laughing and clapping. ‘You gonna stop that bus all on your lonesome just ’cause some kid keyed you? Run, federales – we’re timing you!’

The agents came back to their car, angry, on edge.

Halina walked over to them, badge in hand. The onlookers turned their attention to her:

‘Hey, girlfriend, over here.’ ‘Lots of loving over here.’ ‘Look at your face! Did Five-Oh do that to you?’ ‘Come on, have a drink, let it wash your troubles away.’

Lily would have grinned and waved. Halina marched past, head high. She could feel the group on the corner, eager for more drama, wanting to see what would happen next.

‘Get away from the car. This is a federal crime scene.’

‘And I’m a federal agent.’ Halina flashed her badge at them. ‘Are you the agents on the ground looking for Lily Sedako? You had her and lost her?’

‘What the fuck business is it of yours?’

‘She’s CIA property and I’m in charge of bringing her to DC for interrogation.’ She made them study her badge. ‘What made you think she was in the park?’

‘We had a tip. CPD spotted the girl who hangs around with her near this corner and phoned it over. Lily’s been living in this building here. She jumped out a window when she heard us coming inside. We checked all the dirtbags spreading their garbage around the park. She’s old, she’s limping, she can’t be far.’

Halina thought of Lily’s masks, and the teenage boy with the skateboard limping across the street.

‘She probably got on a bus,’ Halina said. ‘That’s how she gets around town. That and walking.’

The two agents called for a full team, set up a cordon, ordered agents to board every bus in a mile radius. Three CPD squad cars pulled up, strobes streaking the park with light, making the homeless people scuttle deeper into the undergrowth.

The two bureau men went to one of the squad cars to explain what was happening. Halina chose a different one. When the officers saw her face, they wanted to take her to a hospital.

She showed them her badge. ‘I don’t have time for that: I’m trying to catch up with an old woman that the FBI want to take into custody. If they do, they could send her anywhere, even Rwanda or El Salvador, without anyone ever knowing what happened to her. I want to find her before they disappear her.’

The driver phoned the station to check with his sergeant. Halina heard the sergeant through the driver’s lapel phone: ‘We’ve all been briefed about this target. She’s seventy-five, retired, a volunteer in the schools, some kind of drama coach and translator. The bureau has spent weeks chasing her, demanding our cooperation, without telling us what kind of crime she committed. Makes you wonder, don’t it – fifty grown men chasing one old woman. If your CIA gal is on the level, give her a hand, get the Bureau off our backs.’

Halina got into the squad and listened as they tracked the FBI’s progress around town. A team reached Lily’s bus at the south end of their dragnet. Halina’s squad arrived a minute later, in time to see three agents drag Lily from the bus.

Passengers were leaning out the bus windows, filming the agents and yelling at them to let Lily go. A crowd started to build on the street. ‘They pulled this old lady right off the bus?’ ‘Shame! Shame on you!’ ‘You want your mother or your grandma treated like that?’ ‘Let her go!’

Halina walked up to the agents. Lily was half swooning, leaning against one of the men.

‘Lily Sedako is CIA property. I’ll take her from here.’

‘No, you don’t,’ one of them panted. ‘We chased her through the park, and across town. We found her while you were sitting pretty in a squad. She’s ours.’ He shook Lily’s shoulder, hard.

They’d put Lily’s hands behind her in zip cuffs. The shake knocked her off balance and she collapsed, sliding to the ground. The shouts from the crowd grew wilder.

One of the cops came over. ‘You are ten seconds away from a full-scale riot, which my guys will have to put down. Go home while you still can.’

He picked Lily up and carried her limp body to the backseat of the squad car. ‘Cuffed behind her? The Bureau went out of their way to punish her,’ he grumbled to the driver. ‘Leave the door open so she can get some air.’

Lily lay on the backseat. The driver leaned in, checked her neck pulses, and got out to join his partner in blocking the crowd’s view.

When she was sure both cops had their backs to her, Lily curled her knees up to her chin, slid her arms down around her feet and up in front of her. She’d bunched her hands into fists when they were cuffing her. Now she brought the cuffs up to her mouth, held one cuff in her teeth, and slid her hand out from the other one. She rolled to the floor and out the open door. She moved slowly, casually around the back of the squad, where she pulled the boy’s baseball cap out of her jacket. She reversed the jacket yet again. With the cap on her head, she walked away, still slow, up the street to a different bus stop.

She was lucky: she needed to wait only two minutes before a southbound bus pulled up. She was pretty sure no one had seen her, but she left the bus downtown and flagged a taxi to a South Side L stop. She was the only person who got on the train there. The car was nearly empty; everyone was half asleep, coming home from work or heading to an early shift. She finally could relax enough to work her left hand out of the cuffs.

She left the train a half mile from her destination. She was walking to the forest preserve that backed onto her safe house when a woman appeared out of the shadows.

Lily felt a roaring in her ears, sweat on her neck. Don’t faint, don’t lose your head now. ‘Halina. I apologize. I underestimated you.’

‘I saw you in that cap at the apartment building tonight.’ Halina sounded apologetic. ‘When the cops and the Bureau team realized you had escaped, they set off in opposite directions. I called an Uber and followed the bus and then the taxi.’

‘And the L?’

‘I checked all the stops until you appeared here. I was hoping I’d picked the right direction.’

‘You would make a good field agent,’ Lily said dryly. ‘Now what? You’ve called Marissa? The wardens and the ditchdiggers will be along soon?’

Halina took a deep breath. ‘I called Marissa. Her phone went to voicemail, so I left a message that we’d found you and lost you. I – I need to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it before I give her a more full report.’

‘And I should tell you because?’

‘It could make a difference between a prison sentence and freedom for you,’ Halina said.

‘You don’t have negotiating power, Halina. I can’t tell you what I’m doing because you haven’t shown why I should trust you.’

‘I helped Keira avoid the FBI at that run-down building tonight. And I could have shouted at any number of Bureau or local cops when I saw you walk to the bus stop.’

Lily made a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. ‘That will have to do. Where is Keira? Does she know not to go back to the SRO?’

‘I put her on the bus to an aunt of hers in Bismarck, with orders not to get off until she got there.’

‘You used Uber? Your phone will lead Marissa straight to you. Come to think of it, so will your stops along the L route! Tell me you were ignorant, not malicious!’

Halina shrank into herself, mortified. She took her phone from her pocket and removed the SIM card.

‘I don’t know how long it will take for the Bureau or Marissa to track you to this spot, which means we need to move,’ Lily said. ‘Once they trace you, you’ll have to join the hunt for me or face arrest yourself for helping me. There’s an all-night diner about ten minutes’ walk from here. Go there now. Keep that SIM card out of your phone. Resist every temptation to look at your messages. I’m going to shower, change, pack an overnight bag. If I’m not at the diner in half an hour, I’ve been picked up. Go.’

The hip she’d fallen on was shooting points of pain at her, her sore shoulder was throbbing, she was exhausted past bearing.

You have to bear it, so don’t say it’s past bearing! she lectured herself. This is your own exfiltration. Manage it as you’ve done all the others: carefully.

She showered, changed, and took her small carry-on case, already packed, including her spare passports, and a bag of makeup props. She used these to turn herself into a tired office cleaner with a large hairy mole that made Halina flinch and look away when she reached the diner.

‘I know, honey, I know,’ Lily said, voice hoarse. ‘You’re a good girl to come out and meet me. All your hip friends would drop you if they saw what kind of ma you had. Let’s get going.’

Halina followed her into the night. ‘I didn’t recognize you! That mole is disgusting.’

Lily led Halina to the closest L stop. She stood well in the shadows until a southbound train pulled up. She didn’t check to see if Halina was following. Only a handful of riders was in the car, people as tired as she after their work shifts had ended. Lily lay back in her seat, eyes closed to slits, until she saw Halina sit across the aisle from her. She dozed off then, half-alert to the stops. When the train had passed the hospitals clustered along the West Side, she got off and walked to a bench. She felt rather than saw Halina sit next to her.

A few of the tired workers got off as well. They glanced at the pair – white women on the Black South Side – but didn’t speak. Halina felt tense, and angry. If she were mugged here, it would ruin her career!

‘I’m going to tell you what I know is true,’ Lily said. ‘Things you can verify easily through Company intel. Then you’ll tell me why I should trust you with anything else.’

She gave a précis of her career in Ts’gali, the many times and ways Bruce had undermined her, and the protection she’d received from Jason Tedros. She mentioned Rani’s government. Jason’s decision to turn a blind eye to Bruce’s behavior when Bruce threatened to out him.

‘The CIA doesn’t have a lot of heroes,’ Lily said dryly. ‘We all make different accommodations so we can feel our work is worth doing. Then, in retirement, Jason decided to write a memoir. Something in it made everyone at Langley hysterical. They seized his computer, his copy of the manuscript, put him under house arrest. They attempted to kill his literary agent. They didn’t succeed, but the man has brain damage and may never speak again. They grabbed all copies of Jason’s memoir – print, cloud, and so on – and thought they were home free. And then I came along.’

‘They tried to kill his literary agent?’ Halina was shocked. ‘Does Marissa know?’

‘I don’t know what Marissa knows,’ Lily said. ‘I don’t think she signed on to the op at first, because it took a while for her to realize that a memoir about Hayalistan was a no-fly zone. She certainly knows now, but it’s one of a thousand unpleasant CIA acts that every senior person has to swallow.

‘With the Hayalistan elections coming up, and Agajan in bad health, the Company is going all out to make sure the lithium leases stay in American hands. Other countries can seize this opportunity to support a new government, and make sure that they get the kind of deal that’s made Gambrey filthy rich. Emphasis on filthy.’

She fell silent, letting Halina digest it, dozing on the bench until the younger woman spoke. ‘You stayed on as an agent for decades after the coup. If everyone was so corrupt, why did you?’

‘It’s only been in the last months that I’ve seen how much the Company betrayed – not me, but the ideals that I followed that defined my work,’ Lily said. ‘And I loved my work. My cover was as a cultural attaché. I worked with American artists and artisans and brought them together with local people in the countries I served. I built networks of ordinary people who wanted change in their lives. The American dream, the dream of freedom and opportunity, inspired many people around the world. And for me personally, I had the gift of time with Rani before he became prime minister. He inspired me to hold myself to high standards of justice. These last months have been a bitter time for me. If I’m alive a year from now, maybe I’ll have a good answer for whether I still value the work I did.’

‘I don’t think those kinds of satisfactions exist,’ Halina said. ‘Not in today’s CIA, today’s government.’

Lily took her time answering. ‘Marissa and I were friends for a time when we were both posted in Delhi. She took enormous pleasure in sifting through data and spotting anomalies and trends that no one was looking for. Her work was important. I can imagine if you have her skills the pleasures would be there, but when you’re in Washington, at the heart of the political fire, the politics can burn you to a crisp. In addition, as you say, today’s Company is a different animal.’

Halina asked Lily what she was going to do next.

‘I hope this means you’re not calling Marissa. I plan to sleep and hope you will you do the same. Thank you for helping me get free tonight. Whatever you decide to do with your life, do it for you, not to meet expectations of people around you. You can have a career in the Company and maintain your integrity – it’s just a harder dance.’

They got on a northbound train. When they got off at the stop near Lily’s safe house, Halina asked if she could call an Uber now.

Lily nodded. She waved goodbye and started down a side street. As soon as Halina’s ride arrived, she returned to the L and boarded the train to O’Hare.

56

BLOWING DODGE

Lily took the first plane she could find going anywhere, which turned out to be a 5:35 am flight to Raleigh-Durham. She was traveling on an identity that she hadn’t used since Delhi, a British passport that she’d have trouble renewing without the resources of the Company. When it expired next year, she’d have to let that identity go. She took a room at a motel near the airport and slept for nine hours. A day of no action, but after yesterday’s frenetic racing around a day’s rest was essential.

When she got up, her hip had stiffened from her fall, and she had trouble walking. Her shoulder had also seized up. The motel had a swimming pool and a whirlpool. She bought an overpriced swimsuit at the gift shop, using her mother’s credit card, and sat in the whirlpool. Children were jumping into the pool, shrieking and splashing each other. Parents were drinking, lobbing an occasional command toward the pool but not really watching the action. The noise was actually a soothing backdrop for thinking.

After twenty minutes of massaging her legs and shoulders under the jets, she hoisted herself out. She could walk now, still with pain, but not severe enough to make her think she’d broken something.

The motel was near a major highway as well as the airport. She found as quiet a spot as she could, one where she could see anyone approaching, and called Jason’s niece.

‘It’s your cousin Louise,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m wondering if we should think of moving Jason to a managed care place.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Beatriz said. ‘Whatever care he needs, we can provide here.’

‘Okay, okay, no need to get your undies in a bundle. Just thinking about it.’

‘I’ll talk to Faith and call you back,’ Beatriz said. ‘But I’m sure she’ll agree with me.’

Beatriz called an hour later, logged into Lily’s VPN, from a town some twelve miles from Sargo Point.

‘I’m on a bunch of most-wanted lists,’ Lily said, ‘so even with this VPN I don’t want to talk long. Events in Hayalistan may start heating up. Kids still playing in the park?’

‘They’re getting tired of it; it’s hard to keep a big group coming out.’

‘Tell them we’ll need them for one big effort and then they’re done. I won’t be able to call you – I’ll be in Hayalistan if all goes well. Keep an eye on the news for something about Steve Gambrey and Mount Muqqadas, especially about him and a sacred meadow.

‘The evening you read that story, have the kids break a window in the front of the house – a baseball that gets away from them or something like that. When Rush is shouting and threatening them, get your cousins to start a fire in the kitchen. That will be the cover—’

‘Absolutely not!’ Beatriz cried.

She waited patiently for Beatriz to shout at her for endangering Jason’s life for her own whims. This was always hard. People agree to be part of an operation but are afraid of the dangers, and then, when a beloved relative is at risk, the dangers of action look overwhelming.

When Beatriz paused, Lily said, ‘I know it’s hard. But a fire will be the perfect cover to get Jason out. With firefighters and neighbors and so on, Rush and his team can’t keep track of everyone. This will happen soon, probably in a week, but perhaps sooner. Once Jason is safely away, he can tell you the whole story of what happened in Hayalistan all those years ago.’

‘But the house!’ Beatriz began.

‘Jason’s life is more valuable than your family’s house. He might not agree, but I’m sure Faith and your other cousins would. When you and I finish talking, I’m going to call Admiral Evans and tell him to be on standby.’

‘There are too many things that can go wrong,’ Beatriz said. ‘Admiral Evans is old. Not as old as Jason, but we’re asking him to navigate in the dark. If he can’t get his boat here in time, if Jason dies on his way to the boat, if Rush shoots the children…’

‘I know,’ Lily said quietly. ‘I’m worried about all those things, too. But Admiral Evans loves your uncle, and he’s furious with the FBI for keeping Jason away from him. And you told me yourself he grew up sailing your coastline.’

Beatriz sighed. ‘I wish I could ask Jason about you. It would make me feel better if I knew he trusted you. I hope we’re all alive this time next week, but just in case, I’d better get to confession this week.’

Lily wasn’t sure if that was an attempt at a joke. ‘Say a prayer for me, too,’ she said, ‘just in case. But monitor business news streams, because that’s who will cover Gambrey even if big media doesn’t.’

The call ended with Beatriz still unhappy, and Lily on edge, not knowing if she’d follow through on the most important US part of the op.

She called the admiral. If Beatriz was filled with the doubts common among new recruits, the admiral had a kind of sublime confidence that could also be dangerous.

‘I’m betting on Steve Gambrey’s greed,’ she told him. ‘I’m betting he will go to Hayalistan without telling anyone, hoping that he can get control of a particular meadow high in the mountain. When you see the first story about him, either that he’s disappeared, or he’s in Hayalistan, that’s when you need to get your boat to Sargo Point. I hope Beatriz and the kids will be ready, as well.’

‘And where will you be, Ms Missile? Waiting for him in the meadow?’

She laughed. ‘It would be lovely if people were like puppets, or maybe bots, that you could maneuver into position. Maybe I’m wrong about Gambrey, in which case it would be a waste of time and money for me to wait in a meadow for him.’

What she really needed was word from Tania and Yuri in Muq’tsu, that the mountain villagers and nomads would work with her. She couldn’t hang around the Raleigh-Durham airport hoping for news. Even traveling on fake IDs, she couldn’t obliterate trails of DNA or fingerprints she was leaving. If Homeland caught a whiff that she was on the run, they’d double surveillance at every airport in the country.

She took an early morning flight to Germany, via JFK in New York, under her British ID. When she reached Germany, she waited there for two days, hoping for word from Duruna about whether Tania had gotten enough support from the mountain villagers to go ahead with the op. She monitored news from the States in case Admiral Evans had become trigger-happy, but if anything had happened in Sargo Point it hadn’t made the international news feeds.

When she still hadn’t heard after two days, she decided to fly to Ts’gali, anyway. She booked a room at a small, clean hotel she’d noticed near the Great Mosque when she’d been there in April.

The hotel was walking distance from Lake Sakin. When she’d checked in, she walked up the dark street and stood on the shore, watching the reflection of the gibbous moon in the water. Words from the old moon ceremony came to her:

Sakin, we offer you the gift of our blood. Keep us under your protection, Goddess of Life and Death, of Beginnings and Endings. She added, Protect the villagers, protect Jason and his nieces, give Admiral Evans fair winds and following seas, and please, I beg, save all of us ordinary people from the oligarchs who seek to consume us.

She created her own nosebleed, blotted it with her fingers, then knelt to rinse them in the water.

She was weary from travel, weary with age, but she walked down to the Central Market where she found an internet café. She had written a letter to send to Gambrey when she created the Idumali website back at the theater building in Chicago, but she hadn’t been sure what she wanted to say to Zokurov. She wanted to flush him into the open, but it wasn’t until she’d been walking the Lake Sakin shore that she thought of how to do it.

Watching the face of the moon ripple in the waves brought painful memories as well as good ones. Her final private meeting with Rani, when he played that cassette tape. Dunwoody had been on it, probably Gambrey. Not Zokurov – she’d taken him out of Hayalistan that previous winter.

But Zokurov would believe Rani taped all his meetings: it was standard procedure for most heads of state, particularly if they thought their government was threatened. If she could get Zokurov to think she had a cache of Rani’s cassettes, that might make him take some big risks to find them. She composed a letter to Zokurov to hold until after she saw whether she could lure Gambrey to Idumali. She saved it to her thumb drive and then sent Gambrey the letter she’d written in Chicago.

Dear Mr Steve Gambrey,

Our organization, Hayalistan Lives!, believes Gambrey Minerals and Mining is vital to the future of an economically important Hayalistan. Not only do we want your firm to renew the mining concessions when they expire next month, we want to open another part of the country for your consideration.

The Idumali meadow dovetails perfectly with your interest in extending the human lifespan to double or triple its current eighty years. The meadow is an unusual feature on Mount Muqqadas: it occupies a small plateau at about 8,500 feet, which is fed by hot springs and is therefore green all year round.

The grasses that grow on Idumali have health- and life-giving properties that allowed clan leaders to live to 170 years. They would go there in secret to harvest the grasses, which grow nowhere else on earth. The clan elders brew them and drink them as tea or dry them and turn them into medicines.

In the past, the clans kept the meadow a secret from all but their highest-ranking members.

In the years since the mines opened, the clans have lost their authority in the government and in the lives of everyday Hayalis. They have forgotten the promise of the meadow grasses, which are going to waste for want of a sensible harvest program.

We are offering qualified investors a onetime-only chance to buy a share in the meadow, which is being administered by Hayalistan Lives!

After making an anonymous visit to your ranch in the American state of New Mexico, we are convinced that you would be a thoughtful steward of Idumali. You can make an appointment through this link: Idumali-Meadow-Shares.com.

If you decide to visit the meadow, you will be met by our senior consultant, Professor Mat’q’uara, who is a distinguished professor of botany at Ts’gali University. She will help you deposit $1 million US into our account as a signal that you are serious as an investor. When you have made your appointment, Professor Mat’q’uara will be waiting for you outside the K’tali market to escort you to Idumali.

Two days later, on Sunday, her risk was rewarded. Steve Gambrey called the number on the Hayalistan Lives! website in person. Lily had used one of her burner phones for the number on the website. She almost couldn’t believe that Gambrey had taken the bait, but she tried to sound like a hearty salesperson, ready to give away Mount Muqqadas to the right buyer.

Gambrey booked an appointment for a week later at ten. ‘Perfect,’ she had chirped. ‘We’re seeing Mr B – well, another investor – everyone’s identity is confidential – at three that afternoon. Should I put you in touch with him so that you can share a ride up the mountain?’

When the call ended, Lily felt too keyed up to sit still. She took a long walk along the Sakin shore. Later that afternoon, when she returned, the clerk said that someone had stopped by with a message for her.

‘It was a young woman, but she didn’t leave her name. Her message was very odd: she said that eagle is on the menu.’

‘How very strange,’ Lily said. ‘The eagle is a sacred bird and no one may eat it.’

‘She said the same thing, and that she would be inspecting the food stalls at the K’tali market to make sure no one was committing such sacrilege.’

57

THE BILLIONAIRE VANISHES

Steve Gambrey had fallen off the map. No one on his board, no one managing his subsidiaries, no one at his New Mexico longevity lab, knew where he was.

‘In the age of round-the-clock surveillance, how can a high-profile individual completely disappear?’ That headline from Forbes magazine summarized the chatter online and in the financial press.

On Sunday, Gambrey’s private jet had left from Santa Fe, New Mexico. The flight plan had it heading for Riyadh, with a refueling stop in Portugal. The plane refueled on schedule in Lisbon but never arrived in Riyadh.

By Wednesday the global hunt for Gambrey was underway in earnest. His staff couldn’t connect to his cell or satellite phones. Some in the media labeled him a latter-day Amelia Earhart while others compared him to Howard Hughes, not for his business and engineering acumen but for his increasing eccentricities.

The Gambrey board was due to meet in a week. If Steve Gambrey didn’t turn up, Arnold Sylvester could chair the meeting as the company’s number two, but he was disliked by a majority of the board. Members of the executive committee told the Financial Times – off the record – that they had reached out to an executive search firm to start identifying prospects in the event that Gambrey didn’t reappear in the near future.

Sylvester roared with laughter when reporters asked him about this. ‘They are strangely naïve for senior business leaders. Gambrey Minerals and Mining has systems in place to deal with the board chair’s loss of capacity. And his disappearance counts as loss of capacity. I’ll be at the annual meeting in Hoover next week, and if Steve doesn’t show, I’ll be chairing it.’

Even though Gambrey had homes in London, Sydney, and St Augustine, Florida, Gambrey Minerals and Mining headquarters remained in Hoover, Alabama, where Steve Gambrey had grown up.

Some people thought Gambrey must be in Hayalistan, perhaps attending secret meetings with the economic minister or meeting with the team that managed the mines. He and Arnold Sylvester were at odds these days over the future of the company, so it was plausible that he’d meet senior Hayali officials without Sylvester’s knowledge.

The media couldn’t find Gambrey’s pilot, who was paid well not just for his skill in the cockpit, but for his discretion. When he’d delivered Gambrey to a private field outside Ts’gali where the paperwork was filed under a fictitious LLC’s name, he flew to Ankara to wait until he was needed again.

The Howard Hughes theorists were closest to the truth. When Gambrey read the letter from Hayalistan Lives!, he thought it could be a scam, perhaps created by Arnold Sylvester to see if he could embarrass Gambrey ahead of the board meeting. He’d looked the organization up online and found one small bone of information, almost all of it in the intricate embroidery of the Hayali language script. There was more information on the meadow, though, and what he read was enticing. A secluded meadow warmed by geothermal springs so that at 8,500 feet it was green year-round even while the mountain itself was rocky, forbidding, snow-covered. The healing properties of the grasses and meadow flowers were famous through the region.

Gambrey felt resentful toward his Hayali staff. They must know all this, as well as his interest in longevity, but they’d kept the knowledge to themselves. He, too, would keep his actions to himself.

Asian travel sites warned hikers that the meadow was hard to find and hard to access. It was used by the old clan leaders in ritual observations and was not open to Westerners. Gambrey dismissed those warnings. The clan leaders had proved ineffectual in opposing his open pit mines. They wouldn’t keep him from Idumali.

Just in case Hayalistan Lives! was bogus, he traveled in complete secrecy. He’d be back in the States without anyone knowing where he’d been. However, if the meadow was real, he’d be there two days before any of the other invitees showed. If the grass looked promising, he’d take cuttings to his New Mexico lab and still easily make the board meeting.

One step at a time, but he was already mapping out how to take control of the meadow away from the locals, or Mr B – and other potential competitors.

On Monday afternoon, when he reached his gated residence on the north shore of Lake Sakin, he realized he’d forgotten how big Muqqadas was. It loomed above his home, making him feel uncomfortably small. It would take days, even weeks, of flying up and down the mountainside to find Idumali.

It was annoying, but he would have to ask for help. The concierge at his compound was discreet and knowledgeable. The next day he introduced Gambrey to a Hayali guide who showed him the route, not by air but on the ground. They took an ATV to the final fork in the trail, with Gambrey mapping the coordinates on his phone’s compass app. It was frustrating, because the mountain kept blocking his phone signal, so he had to type some coordinates by hand. He took pictures in the belief that when he took a helicopter up the next day, he’d recognize key trails from the air.

The guide would not drive the ATV up the last half mile of trail.

‘Here is walking. You go?’ the guide said.

‘Here is driving,’ Gambrey snapped. ‘If you won’t go up, I will.’

‘No machine at Idumali,’ the guide said. ‘Wrong to—’ He struggled with his minimal English, and finally explained in Hayali that it was an insult to the mountain to bring a machine to Idumali. You came on foot, or if you were old or weak, you came in a yak cart.

Even if Gambrey had understood Hayali, he would have ignored the warning, but he realized it would be stupid to seize the ATV from the guide. He’d have to make his way back down the mountain on his own without provisions, and he might make a wrong turn.

Wednesday morning, only a mechanic and a janitor were in the hangar when Gambrey took out a helicopter from the Gambrey Minerals and Mining fleet. Both men were Hayali. They didn’t recognize Gambrey – they’d never seen him.

He was American, he showed them a platinum Gambrey Minerals and Mining card, which qualified him to take a helicopter. The mechanic didn’t check his destination or route, or even his name, since platinum card holders were furious at having their credentials challenged. In fact, Gambrey listed the Ts’gali Pass as his destination, and gave his name as Tom Jones.

The morning was bright, with only occasional clouds floating around Muqqadas’s upper reaches. Gambrey had been able to mark the route well enough that he reached Idumali with only a few wrong turns.

The meadow was an oblong, not quite a mile long. Its north edge abutted a cliff that rose five or six hundred feet above the meadow. Water trickled down the rock face, not heavy enough for a waterfall, but over the centuries it had etched shallow caves along the surface.

The cliff protected the north end from Muqqadas’s heaviest winds. From there, the meadow stretched to rocky outcroppings on the other three sides. Within these boundaries, fields of high grass and meadow flowers covered the entire ground. From the air, Gambrey could see the two hot springs that helped regulate the meadow’s microclimate.

Gambrey landed in the middle of the field. Birds rose from the ground with terrified cries, flying in desperate circles to protect their nests. Several were slashed by the rotor. Gambrey jumped down, ignoring the bodies dropping from the air. Eagles swooped down from the cliff heights, chasing small animals the helicopter had disturbed, but Gambrey didn’t notice them, either.

He’d brought an assault weapon, since he was traveling without his usual security detail. He studied the cliff face through its monocular, focusing on the shallow caves. The high grasses and the steam rising from the hot springs made it hard to get a clear view, but the birds had returned to their ground nests and the eagles were back on top of the cliff. If there were another human presence, they’d be more agitated.

He had a sterile kit in his pack, and he unrolled it carefully, then dug up several stalks of grass. He placed them in a specimen bag and wrote the location and time of day on it.

He was moving to the next spot he’d decided to sample when a woman’s voice spoke from the cliff face. ‘This meadow is a sacred space. You may not remove grasses from here without permission from the clans. Who gave you permission?’

He squatted back among the grasses and once again trained his weapon on the cave faces.

‘Show yourself,’ he commanded. ‘This meadow is public. Anyone can use it.’

‘The meadow is sacred space. The Hayali forbid weapons here, and they forbid machines here. Return to your helicopter and leave.’

He stood, angry, and strode toward the cliff. A figure suddenly appeared at the entrance to one of the shallow caves. The steam rising from the nearby spring made it hard to see, but Gambrey was sure it hadn’t been there before. The figure wore the dress of a Muslim woman, a red robe that shimmered as the wind moved it, her face hidden by a niqab, the black cloth that reveals only the eyes.

A suicide bomber, ready to blow herself up. Gambrey fired three rounds at its middle and knocked the figure flat. Yes! He fist-bumped, but stopped, fist in the air: when the Muslim woman hit the ground, her head came off. It bounced crazily and landed in the spring.

Gambrey stood motionless for some seconds before remembering he was a target. If the woman was wearing a suicide vest, that could explode at any second. He squatted and inched close to the spring. The head was swirling in the water. The niqab had come loose, revealing the face of a middle-aged woman with graying dark hair. Her eye sockets were empty, her mouth a red gash.

The sight was so unsettling that Gambrey fired at it repeatedly. He splintered it into fragments that disappeared in the steaming water.

‘Since you disregarded the order to leave, and committed further violence, we have disabled your helicopter. You will have to leave this meadow on foot.’ The voice from the cliff was clipped, tight with anger.

Gambrey ran to the chopper. The control panel was crawling with insects. When he tried to brush them aside, they stuck to his hand and started stinging. The natives had coated the panel with honey. They’d poured it into the ignition keyhole. Where had they been hiding? He’d seen no one from the air before he landed.

At first, he was too angry to be frightened. He wiped his fingers on the meadow grasses, then pulled out his satellite phone. He kept yelling, ‘Gambrey to base, Gambrey to base,’ without any reply except static.

58

THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW

The morning after her arrival in Ts’gali, Lily had crossed the lake and rented a yak cart to take her to Muq’stu. Tania and Yuri greeted her cautiously. Duruna had visited them, yes. She had explained Lily’s plan, yes. A messenger had gone to the mountain Elurbar. They did not want Gambrey to see the meadow. Once he saw it, the mountain people said, he would claim it, and then Muqqadas would lose its most sacred space.

Yuri sent out word that Lily was there in person; the Elurbar could question her themselves. Late that night, several Elurbar nomads appeared in the village. Yash, who might have been sixty, had known Rani. ‘Rani valued Shen Lily. He brought her to Idumali to heal her from her wounds. I did not meet her then, but I knew of her.’

He took Lily apart and spoke with her privately for more than an hour. When they had finished, he told the others that he was willing to try her plan.

‘She will never succeed without our support, but she is a t’ kha – even if you tied her feet together you would have trouble moving her. So, it is better we help her, than having to carry her body down the mountain if she fails.’

Tania and Yuri laughed. Lily made a face. She was a stubborn mountain goat, or an unguided missile. How about a clever, skilled agent? But with the Elurbar support, she, Tania, and Yuri moved the plan forward quickly.

She and Tania created Professor Mat’q’uara from one of Lily’s silicone masks, stuffed with wool. Her body consisted of yak-hide bolsters also stuffed with wool. Yash’s nephew Hûbar and a number of other young Elurbar helped set her up inside one of the openings created in the cliff face by centuries of icy water falling from the higher reaches of the mountain. They cleaned out another opening where Lily could wait for Gambrey’s arrival.

Hûbar spent the coldest winter months in Ts’gali, living with his grandmother while he studied electronics. He set up speakers and microphones around the cliff face for Lily to use in speaking to Gambrey.

Gambrey’s appointment with Professor Mat’q’uara was booked for Sunday morning, one week after he had left New Mexico. Lily was pretty sure that the thought of Mr B getting to the meadow ahead of him would goad Gambrey into arriving early. To be on the safe side, Lily moved into her little cave on Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday evening, Hûbar and Yash came to check on her, and to report that Gambrey had been driven to the meadow’s footpath entrance by the guide with the ATV. The next day, he showed up with his helicopter, alone.

Lily hadn’t slept much the night before Gambrey arrived. In her field days, she would be keyed up before an op, but that only sharpened her mind. With this mission, she was feeling an anxiety so painful she could barely keep herself lying through the dark hours on the nest of rugs Yash had provided.

She had risen as soon as the air outside her sleep-cave grew light. She bathed in the hot spring and rubbed her sore hip and shoulder with the grasses. When Yash and Hûbar arrived, she could move easily enough to follow them to a hideout they’d chosen among the boulders on the slope at the west end of the meadow. She lay there on a rug, sheltered by the great rocks around her and the high grasses in front of her, but she could see action on the meadow through a narrow gap.

When the helicopter landed, she finally calmed down. The op was underway.

She hadn’t imagined how Gambrey would react to Professor Mat’q’uara when Hûbar moved him into view. It was frightening to see him shoot up the professor, but it also made her angry. When she’d told him his helicopter was dead, when he’d checked it, and emptied his weapon in rage, Lily crawled through the tall grasses and emerged a few feet from him. She was wearing her favorite undercover costume, which made her feel alert and focused.

Gambrey took her for an ignorant native who’d destroyed his bird. He lunged for her, trying to smash her head with his rifle, but she rolled away and got to her feet a few yards from him.

‘I am here from the Hayali Ministry of Lands, Waters and Mountains. We have rules on who can remove plants from Idumali, and the quantities that can be taken. You didn’t apply for the requisite permits and you are in violation of the Safety of Indigenous Plants Act.’

Not that the Agajan government would ever have agreed to such regulations. If Agajan had known Steve Gambrey wanted to despoil the Idumali meadow, he probably would have urged him forward.

Gambrey glowered at her. ‘Whoever you are, I don’t answer to you. If you’re the person who disabled my helicopter, I will sue you to the full extent of the law.’

‘That will be a very short lawsuit, Mr Gambrey, since you are on Hayali soil, and the full extent of the law here is that you violated the law by landing your helicopter in the meadow.’

She headed for the footpath at the southeast edge of the meadow. Gambrey was hot and thirsty, filled with the rage that had consumed him since he’d found the insects in his control panel. He stumbled after Lily, wanting to grab her and choke her, but he tripped on a bird’s nest and landed hard.

Lily waited while he got back on his feet. ‘You need to think about where you’re going to spend the night, Mr Gambrey. I’m leaving the meadow. You may come with me: neither I nor the mountain people will harm you if you follow me.’

‘Come with you?’ Gambrey’s face seemed to swell in his rage. ‘Trust the word of some native who would slit my throat while your friends watched? Prime Minister Agajan is a personal friend. He will have you rounded up and executed as soon as he learns what you’ve done.’

‘The prime minister is also a native,’ Lily said. ‘However, you may stay here on Idumali. No one will molest you – no Hayali would kill anyone in this space. It is safe to drink the water falling down the cliff, but at some point you will need to find food. It is more dangerous to sleep on the trail than in the meadow, so you will have to make some difficult decisions.’

She continued to the footpath but turned to face him before heading down. ‘I will wait for half an hour at the bottom of this path in case you decide to do the prudent thing and join me for your return journey.’

Gambrey swore at her for a long minute. When he ran out of insults, she added, ‘You are responsible for moving the helicopter off this sacred land. Since you can’t fly it off, you will have to think of a way of removing it. You’re a billionaire with many intelligent people at your command. I’m sure they’ll come up with something.’

She waited a moment. He tried yelling more insults, but his throat had dried up. She headed down the path, wondering if he might suffer a stroke alone there in the meadow. She had hired a yak cart to meet her where the footpath joined the main trail. She waited a full hour in the cart, in case Gambrey changed his mind, but finally told the driver to take off.

Gambrey returned to his helicopter for more ammunition. He didn’t have a clear plan, just a vague feeling that killing Lily would ease his fury. Unfortunately, the young nomads had removed his additional magazines as well as his handgun.

His anger against Lily grew. He ran back across the meadow to the footpath that led down to a bigger trail, planning to strangle Lily, but she had disappeared.

He had never had to look after his own comfort and safety before. As a child, there’d been nannies, and then his father’s security detail, and then his own servants, wife, mistress, guards. It wasn’t until the shadows began to cover the meadow that he realized how alone and exposed he was. Leave or stay? Lily had said he would be safe on the meadow, but he didn’t trust her. He wasn’t going to linger in a place where natives moved through the grass to steal his supplies and mutilate his bird. It was summer, even on the mountain the light lasted longer, he’d be able to make his way down. After all, everyone agreed he was remarkably fit despite his age.

He had marked the coordinates of the route from Ts’gali to the footpath when he’d been out with the Hayali guide the previous day. All he had to do was follow the path. At some point soon, his satellite phones would pick up a signal, and then he’d be able to navigate on foot back to Ts’gali. He was careful to fill his water bottles from the waterfall, and to pack the energy bars and freeze-dried meals he found in the chopper footlocker.

The five hundred meters down the narrow footpath took much longer to navigate than he expected. Assholes, he muttered. Why can’t you drive an ATV up here? It was the fault of the natives and their stupid regulations that he was stuck here. When he took control of the meadow it would be a very different place.

When he finally reached the bottom of the footpath, he saw it connected with several trails. It wasn’t clear which one would take him to Ts’gali. He tried his phones, but they were still not getting signals. He could read the trail coordinates that he’d stored on his smartphone, but he couldn’t access his compass to figure out which trail to take. He hadn’t looked at landmarks when he was here with the guide, because he knew his device would guide him.

He called himself a hunter, but he had never actually hunted without a team of people to lead him to his quarry and help him set up his shots. He didn’t know how to read a landscape.

The yak pulling the cart Lily rode off in had marked the trail, but Gambrey didn’t know what kind of animal had left the droppings. He didn’t know if there were bears or mountain lions on Mount Muqqadas.

He felt helpless, which was so repugnant that it rekindled his rage. No one knew where he was because his staff was such a bunch of incompetents that they didn’t bother to trace his movements, which is what you should do if you work for the eighth-richest person in the world.

Arnold Sylvester would be having a field day, gloating over Gambrey’s disappearance. Gambrey needed to get to Ts’gali before Arnold took control of the company. He chose the trail that went straight down, not the one with the droppings on it. The trail led him into a bog.

It was almost dark by the time he got clear of the mud and the brambles, but at least the satellite phone was now picking up signals. He was a half mile from the nearest coordinate he’d mapped yesterday. He sent out a distress signal and tried to find a place where he could rest and eat one of his freeze-dried meals. His hands were filthy and bleeding from the brambles, but at least he knew better than to waste his precious water supply bathing them.

About the time he was climbing out of the bog, Lily’s yak cart had reached Tania and Yuri’s home. Hûbar, running along the secret trails the nomads used, had arrived long before her and reported on the day’s excitement. Lily had been amazing, she’d driven Gambrey from Idumali. They had helped, but they never would have had the idea of making Gambrey experience the power of the mountain. That was all due to Shen Lily.

Tania greeted Lily as a heroine, tucked her into the most comfortable rugs she owned, fed her bean and noodle stew, rubbed salve into her sore joints. Near midnight, Duruna arrived with the gossip she’d gleaned at the Anglo-American Club. She reported on the search efforts Gambrey Minerals and Mining was mounting for their missing CEO, but didn’t have any news of Arnold Sylvester.

‘He flew from Santiago in Chile.’ Duruna stumbled over the unfamiliar words. ‘He landed in Florida, but the newspeople don’t know where he is now.’

Lily explained why she wanted Duruna keeping an eye out for Sylvester. ‘I’ll be sending an email to Zokurov, using Sylvester’s address. I’m pretty sure that Sylvester is the colonel’s current identity, and my letter will bring him to Hayalistan.’

Yuri unexpectedly backed her up. ‘I talked to this Sylvester at the Central Asian Games – one of my grandsons was on the winning buzkashi team and Sylvester came into the arena. I knew there was something in his face that was familiar, something cold and arrogant. I remember the Russian colonel from when he stayed in the shepherd’s hut – he needed us, but he treated us like – like servants. The voice was the same.’

That night, Lily drifted into dreams of meeting Rani in the cave. She curled up next to him on the rugs, but he turned into a skeleton. And then Anta was standing over her, ready to bash in Lily’s head with the great staff of Hayalistan, using the eagle carved into the handle.

59

DOST THOU COVET DESTRUCTION? IT’S THE BOSS

At the end of the day, the manager of Gambrey Minerals and Mining’s helicopter fleet noticed one of the choppers was still out. That wasn’t unusual, but when he checked the log and saw ‘Tom Jones’ had flown to the Ts’gali Pass, he tried reaching the craft. He couldn’t get a read on where it was, and he definitely had no history of a Tom Jones in his register of authorized users. The mechanic who’d released the craft went off duty at eight pm. The manager summoned him back to work.

‘He has platinum VIP pass,’ the mechanic stammered, when he’d made the long journey from the shanty housing he could afford. ‘Bosses say, not question platinum.’

The manager harangued the mechanic for ten minutes but was interrupted by one of his clerical staff.

‘We checked the camera footage at the gate,’ she said. ‘I – the only person who came in that early – I think it’s Mr Gambrey.’

She held out her tablet, which showed a man in a camouflage jacket with a backpack and an assault weapon.

‘You didn’t recognize Steve Gambrey?’ the manager screamed at the mechanic. ‘Are we hiring morons who can’t recognize the boss?’

The mechanic stared at his feet. His English wasn’t good enough to craft a reply. Anyway, if he was going to be fired, there was no point in arguing.

‘I called up to the guard station at the Ts’gali Pass,’ the secretary said. ‘Mr Gambrey didn’t land there. They don’t have any record of his bird in their airspace today.’

After that, the situation changed. The manager told the mechanic to return home and forget everything that had happened today. He brought in a tech team to track the helicopter’s flight.

The igneous rocks on Muqqadas’s upper reaches were laced with iron ore, which meant GPS could be unstable. The tech wizards were able to follow the chopper’s path as it rose north and east up the mountain, but there were many dead spots, and they couldn’t tell when or where the craft landed.

Gambrey had sent a distress signal from his satellite phone, but Hayalistan didn’t have the Cospas-Sarsat receptors that allowed people to pinpoint where a signal was coming from. Since Gambrey hadn’t told his staff where he was going or what he was doing, no one could even be sure that he was the person sending the signal. The Hayali mountain rangers would send patrols to the area where the signal had been sent – they were obligated to rescue anyone lost in the mountains. It would have to wait until morning – it was far too dangerous to send helicopters up the mountain in the dark.

The manager of the Gambrey helicopter fleet called in the head of the entire Gambrey mining operation in Ts’gali. He needed to get out from under being responsible for losing Steve Gambrey as quickly as possible.

The head of Gambrey mining sent a message to the Hayali Ministry of the Environment, asking them to alert the mountain villages. He also notified the US Embassy, standard for any missing American. When the ambassador realized it was this American, the billionaire shoring up the Hayalistan economy, he notified Washington.

In Washington, Steve Gambrey’s disappearance created a three-alarm fire. Senator Dunwoody interrupted his lunch to call Gordon Alford and demand a Marine detachment be sent to find Gambrey. The president went on national television to denounce leftists who might have kidnapped him, and every media outlet scrambled to find footage of Gambrey, Mount Muqqadas, and information about Hayalistan.

Marissa didn’t know what the CIA was supposed to do when a senior businessman took off on his own without leaving word with his staff. Only Gambrey’s pilot, and his PA, waiting for him in Zurich, knew he’d gone from Lisbon to Hayalistan, but neither knew what his agenda was there.

Marissa cursed Gambrey, his pilot, and his PA, for giving her another Hayalistan headache in a year that had overflowed with them.

She had brought Halina back to DC the morning after the FBI found and lost Lily. In ordinary times, Halina would have been put through the ditchdigger wringer to uncover any responsibility she shared for the Lily fiasco. For the moment, though, Marissa needed her research support more than her head on a platter. She sicced Halina on tracing Gambrey’s movements leading up to his disappearance.

‘His PA says he was at that longevity ranch he runs outside Santa Fe,’ Halina reported. ‘He was going to get a blood plasma transfusion from a local teen athlete but suddenly changed his mind. The PA rode with him as far as Lisbon, where he put her on a commercial flight to Zurich and told her to prepare his bankers for a new investment if he had a successful trip. That’s all she knows. He didn’t give her any hint about what country he was visiting for this new investment.’

Brian’s cybersecurity team got access to the Gambrey helicopter software. They were able to trace the start of his flight up the mountain, before the mountain itself interrupted the flow of data.

The embassy provided Marines and choppers to concentrate on that part of the route. Unfortunately, thick clouds had descended on the mid- and upper reaches of Muqqadas, limiting how far they could search with choppers. Gambrey Minerals and Mining deployed drones, but again, with the thick clouds, they weren’t seeing much. Langley demanded the Army send a Ranger detachment to Ts’gali to conduct a foot search.

‘The local people are either stupider than the yaks they herd, or they don’t want to help,’ Gordon railed. ‘No one knows anything about an American lost in the mountain. The board meeting is next week. They have to find Gambrey.’

Marissa and Brian prudently didn’t mention that this problem wouldn’t have arisen if Gambrey himself hadn’t been so secretive. Instead, Marissa said, ‘There’s chatter on X that Sylvester kidnapped Gambrey to force the board to promote him.’

‘I suppose it’s possible. Everyone says Sylvester is cold-blooded and wily, but we can’t run with a conspiracy theory. We need facts. Dunwoody’s on the brink of demanding all our resignations,’ Gordon said.

‘There’s a different, more plausible conspiracy theory,’ the economics division head said, ‘The miners have not forgotten the use of the army to put down their strike two years ago. They could have tricked Gambrey into walking – helicoptering – into a trap.’

The division heads chewed that over in a tired way, but no one had any suggestions for action. The meeting was petering out when code red alerts came in on their phones: everyone on the Gambrey board had received an open letter addressed to FSB Colonel Viktor Zokurov. And signed, allegedly, by Lily.

Colonel – it’s Goldilocks.

It’s been so long since we last met that my golden locks are white now, but the fundamental Lily is still here. And you – those wonderful abs you used to show off at the Russian New Year’s parties, those have softened into flab, haven’t they?

I almost didn’t recognize you when you were in the ministerial enclosure two years ago at the buzkashi match – but your eyes still have the same bold, cruel look. The plastic surgery that took away your scar couldn’t change your eyes or your fundamental nature.

In the years since I ferried you to Turkmenistan, I’ve often wondered if you were planning to kill me in that snowfield. You kept asking what Cinda had told me. I’ll never know what made you murder Cinda, but there was a witness who saw you row her out to the middle of Lake Sakin. I recently found him and he can identify you.

It never made sense that creepy, weedy Bruce Weyrich turned you. They loved him for that in Langley, but it was always the other way around. You wanted to be moved to the States, and so you gave us the Splizhinka technology, made it seem like Bruce had skills no one believed in deep down.

Yours were the brains behind the coup. You were in America by then, but you still had people in Ts’gali following your orders – particularly Bruce himself.

Now here’s some new news – this will really astonish you, and Gambrey and Bruce as well. Did you know that Rani recorded all the meetings you had with Bruce, Senator Dunwoody, and Gambrey? You thought since he and his attachés didn’t speak English it didn’t matter what you said, but the recordings, those old-fashioned out-of-date micro-cassettes, survived. One of the Elurbar’s close companions rescued them after the coup. He knew the Elurbar valued my counsel, and when he learned I was still alive, he promised them to me.

I hope when everything comes out in public, we’ll find out if Vladimir Vladimirovich sent you to America. Or did you have plastic surgery and put on all those soft pounds so he wouldn’t see that you’d joined the American oligarchs without giving him his share?

After all this time, you’re still here – and so is Lily!

Lily’s still here. Marissa thought all Gordon’s blood vessels might explode at the same time. She unconsciously backed away from the table to avoid the spatter.

The letter raised a dozen questions, starting with Zokurov. Gracelyn gave a thumbnail sketch of the colonel’s Hayalistan career. ‘He defected and was brought over two years before the coup.’

Marissa said, ‘What about Lily’s claim that Zokurov turned Bruce instead of the other way around? Bruce retired to Florida with way more money than his pension. If he was a gambler, he must have had incredible luck at the tables.’

Gordon stared at her through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. ‘Bruce worked for his country for forty years in a flea-bitten godforsaken corner of nowhere. Lily made his life hell. If he got lucky at the tables, he deserved it. I need to know everything we have on Zokurov. He’s the one the marshals lost, right?’

‘Yes, but you know in Lily’s third Substack she said she could locate him if we left her alone.’ Marissa looked at her tablet, watching her horses.

‘Yeah, so you think we should issue an all-clear on her?’ Gordon jeered.

‘I think we should look at all the players connected with Hayalistan. The only picture we have of Arnold Sylvester is that one in The New Yorker that we scrubbed from the internet.’ She carefully avoided saying, the photograph you had someone steal from Thom Kolchak’s apartment.

‘So what?’

‘I scoured the net and found only one picture of Zokurov that showed his face.’ She sent everyone the Fraternity Banquet photo.

The room was quiet for a moment, then Gordon said, ‘You are seriously suggesting Zokurov is Sylvester? That is a real reach, Marissa, a real reach. It’s more likely Zokurov turned Lily and they’re holed up somewhere. Why couldn’t your girl keep track of her in Chicago?’ Gordon demanded.

‘The FBI had Lily and lost her,’ Marissa said coldly. ‘It was Halina who tracked her to her lair forty hours after arriving in Chicago. She deserves a special commendation.’

Privately, she wasn’t sure. Halina had colored outside the lines in Chicago, most notably sending that hyperemotional teen to stay with an aunt in North Dakota. Marissa had lectured Halina on why she should have kept a volatile asset in a state of uncertainty – the more they feared arrest and perhaps deportation, the more likely they were to share intel.

‘On top of that, with Lily on the run, the girl was our best route to Lily. After all, she led you to Lily the night you and the Bureau lost her.’

Halina had bowed her head, acknowledging the reprimand. She didn’t try to justify herself. She also didn’t say she’d watched Lily free herself from the zip tie handcuffs.

‘Do we know if Lily’s still in Chicago?’ the economics division head asked.

‘She hasn’t traveled by any commercial transport,’ Brian said. ‘As far as we know, she doesn’t have any friends with private planes, but she could have hitchhiked. She sounds enterprising enough for that.’

‘She could be in Hayalistan, or at least trying to get there,’ Marissa said. ‘The letter says the Elurbar have promised her the recordings Rani made of Bruce and Gambrey and Dunwoody.’

‘Gracie, get onto the embassy and tell them they need to fingerprint and do DNA swabs on every American woman in their seventies who comes into the country for the next week.’ Gordon paused, then turned to Ward, who handled special domestic ops, and said carefully, ‘We got everything Jason was working on, right?’

‘We got everything from the literary agent’s house and car,’ Ward said. ‘Rush did a complete sweep of Jason’s house and boat. Still, I’ll send a note, tell him to look for something small.’

‘What about Lily’s accusation that Zokurov murdered the Australian woman? That was the name on the passport Lily used when she went to Hayalistan in April, right?’ Brian asked.

‘Cinda Mallick died over twenty years ago,’ Gordon said. ‘The Australians believed the suicide verdict then. I’m not going to cause an international uproar by asking them to look into a death that old when we have only Lily’s wild accusation. Now – let’s go accomplish something real. We’ll meet again at eighteen hundred hours, unless one of you has an unexpected brain wave. Dunwoody and the Homeland secretary are calling me every fifteen minutes. Your jobs are on the same line as mine. And this latest bombshell stays in this room.’

That was an impossible command, since the Gambrey board had also received copies of the letter. They were talking to one another, to their lovers and PAs, and to the financial press.

Marissa thought the media excitement was close to obscene, like teenagers wriggling in anticipation of committing sex or violence. Streaming services almost never have real content to offer, but Lily’s letter offered a Roman banquet of topics to dissect for hours at a time.

Of course, the first questions from the media were about Lily. What was her full name? Why was she called Goldilocks? What role had she played in Hayalistan? The CIA protects the identity of their field agents. She’d used a fake surname in the field, and so efforts to track her down through the embassy in Ts’gali proved fruitless, but the streaming services kept hunting.

Next, who was Zokurov? Everyone was competing for Russia experts to explain what the FSB was, and what it meant to be a colonel in the security forces. They struggled to dig up background on Zokurov, who had not created much of a trail after graduating from Russia’s prestigious Academy of Foreign Intelligence. They speculated endlessly on whether Zokurov was a Russian spying on America or a genuine defector. Russia experts explained that Vladimir Vladimirovich was how Russians addressed Putin – so commentators got to throw in hours of babble on how Putin placed agents deep inside America, and then how he punished people who turned on him.

When they finished digesting the Russians, the media turned to Arnold Sylvester, but he proved even more elusive than Zokurov. No one could find any background on him deeper than what Halina had uncovered for Marissa weeks earlier – born in Topeka to unknown parents, living in a fictitious Idaho town, a Wharton school graduate.

And finally, Hayalistan itself – a country most people had never heard of was a rich source for streaming services. Footage of pony races, buzkashi matches, and eagle-hunting competitions captivated American viewers. This is how primitive peoples look and act.

The AP had old footage of Rani, looking breathtakingly handsome in traditional Hayali clothes with his eagle on his forearm. They interviewed his cousin Anta, who’d cared for him when his mother died; she blamed the CIA, in particular Lily, for undermining Rani’s government whenever possible.

Less interesting to both media and viewers were the coup that overturned Rani, the lithium mines, and the recent uprising by the Gambrey lithium miners, which had been put down with brutal (MSNBC) or necessary (Fox) force.

Senator Dunwoody made some appearances in which he said Rani had been a radical socialist, maybe even communist, whose government was a serious obstacle to US commercial interests. ‘When the HiLee (the closest he could come to pronouncing Hayali) people rose up in revolt against Rani, that was a good thing for them, for our country and for the world,’ he affirmed. ‘Prime Minister Agajan has been a fair and democracy-minded leader who’s been good for America.’

Thom Kolchak found himself on talk shows describing Hayalistan and the myriad health problems caused by the lithium mines. CNN scored ahead of the field when they flew a reporter from Turkey to Ts’gali. They brought Kolchak with them and he gave an account of the two-year-old mine workers uprising.

However much they talked about Colonel Zokurov, no one knew what had become of him after he left Russia for America. No one could find a picture of him – Marissa had scrubbed the banquet photo after sharing it with Gordon’s staff.

Everyone on his staff also had a copy of the photo of Arnold Sylvester with the Hayali economics minister. They all had a different opinion about whether the two men were the same, but for once, no one leaked either the pictures or the internal bickering over what the two photos showed.

Marissa wished she could talk to Lily, to find out how much she really knew versus what she was guessing. If Lily had hard evidence that Zokurov, Bruce, and Gambrey had engineered the coup, with military support from Dunwoody, Marissa wanted that evidence.

The pieces of the kaleidoscope turned in her mind. Zokurov came to the States before the coup. Bruce, definitely ‘weedy and creepy,’ was unlikely to persuade an FSB colonel to defect.

Bruce had retired with something of a fortune. Marissa looked at his financial records. Thirteen million and change. Almost six million of that was in Gambrey Minerals and Mining holdings. That looked like a very nice thank-you for getting Steve Gambrey the mining leases.

She could find no financial records for Arnold Sylvester, nor for Viktor Zokurov. The marshals, overcome with shame for not noticing Zokurov had disappeared, had given Marissa the name Zokurov used when he was relocated and re-created: William Booth. The marshals had also given her his social security number. The only asset in William Booth’s name was a ten-thousand-dollar CD at an Idaho bank.

Marissa spoke to the numbers on her screen. ‘You are one clever agent, Viktor Yulevich, manipulating a lot of people, including Steve Gambrey, Bruce Weyrich, and my boss. But you didn’t fool Lily, and you’re not fooling me.’

She looked to see where Sylvester was now. He’d been in Chile, overseeing Gambrey Minerals and Mining’s interests there. When the letter arrived, he left the country abruptly. He’d landed in Miami and then, like Gambrey himself, fallen off the map.

Bruce lived a five-hour drive from the Miami airport. It wouldn’t surprise her if Sylvester thought he should make a detour at Bruce’s little fortress. She wouldn’t trust Bruce for one second with her own life and safety; Zokurov-Sylvester certainly wouldn’t, either. If she could persuade Bruce his life was in danger, he might reveal more about the coup and the leases than was healthy for anyone.

60

HOW WILL THE MOVIE END

Marissa pitched her trip to Bruce’s castle as precautionary, to make sure he took a potential threat from Zokurov seriously. She didn’t mention that Bruce had significant holdings in Gambrey Minerals and Mining. As did Senator Dunwoody, for that matter – after hunting for Zokurov’s financials, Marissa had moved on to the senator’s. He held more than double the Gambrey shares as Bruce, which was fitting, Marissa supposed – after all, he’d supplied the tanks and Marines that enabled Steve Gambrey to acquire the mines. All Bruce had done was enable a Russian colonel to move to the United States.

She didn’t say any of that to Gordon, just said, ‘If Lily’s letter to the Gambrey board flushes Zokurov out into the open, he may go to Bruce, looking for protection against Putin.’

‘Or against Lily,’ Gordon said, but he agreed she should go back to warn Bruce in person.

When she reached Bruce’s fortified home, he refused at first to talk to her at all.

‘Is Zokurov in there with you, Bruce?’ Marissa called through the intercom. ‘Is he holding a gun on you, forbidding you to talk to your old colleagues?’

‘I haven’t seen Zokurov in years. Go away, go back to Langley and look for conspiracies someplace else.’

‘How long have you known that Zokurov was calling himself Arnold Sylvester? By the way, your gardener is listening to us. How good is his English?’

At that, Bruce buzzed her in and spoke to her angrily for fifteen minutes.

‘Do you want a protection detail?’ Marissa asked.

‘I don’t need protection, unless crazy Lily is on the loose.’

‘Lily’s letter to the Gambrey board – have you seen it? I can share it with you if you haven’t. Lily’s letter says it was Zokurov who turned you, not the other way around. She says that you were a Russian agent, or at least, you knowingly helped a Russian agent operate on American soil—’

‘That’s a fucking lie, totally in keeping with Lily. If that flaming fag Tedros hadn’t protected her all those years, she would have been out on her ass when her six months’ probation were up.’

‘The shares in Gambrey stock you own, that was a present to you from Steve Gambrey because—’ She let the sentence dangle.

‘I helped him the same way we helped any US citizen overseas.’

‘So, there’s no truth to Lily’s claim that Zokurov gave you the Splizhinka technology in exchange for being labeled a defector with high-value intelligence?’

‘Nothing Lily ever said her whole life was true.’ Bruce was having trouble getting the words out. ‘I’m surprised she didn’t kill Zok when she was exfiltrating him.’

‘What about the recordings she says Prime Minister Rani made of meetings you and Gambrey and Zokurov held in his presence?’

‘She’d say anything to get me in trouble. You should have seen some of the stunts she pulled when she was in Hayalistan. She couldn’t obey the simplest order. Like when Dunwoody came, lipstick – would it have killed her to put on makeup for the head of the intelligence committee?’

Marissa remembered Lily getting ready to attend a formal dinner in Delhi, trying to walk in high heels and tripping and falling, cutting her head against a corner of the banister. Jason Tedros had helped her to her feet and cleaned her forehead with his handkerchief. The next day he’d laughed when he saw her head turning different shades of green and yellow. ‘Lily, think of state functions as undercover ops where you have to blend in so you can collect sensitive intel.’

No, Lily could not have worn lipstick even if she’d wanted to please Dunwoody, which Marissa didn’t think was possible.

‘So, if we listen to those microcassettes Lily says she has?’

‘They will be full of lies.’

Marissa was suddenly tired of trying to talk to him, tired of pretending what he said made sense. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you to it. If the colonel shows up, you’ll be fine – two patriotic Americans getting together to reminisce about the good old days in Ts’gali. I know when Zokurov was with the FSB, he had a reputation for ruthlessness, but I expect he trusts you not to fold under pressure.’

Bruce’s face was starting to glisten with sweat. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’

‘If he thinks you might turn state’s evidence,’ Marissa said, voice gentle. ‘If he thinks Rani had spyware inside our embassy, for instance, and made tapes—’

‘That’s outrageous!’ Bruce spluttered. ‘Listening in on a sovereign nation’s private conversations! He didn’t understand word one of international – couldn’t pay attention – we tried—’

‘Tried what?’ Marissa asked.

‘What do those tapes show?’ Bruce demanded.

‘We’re trying to sort that out.’ Marissa wasn’t going to tell him they didn’t have tapes, weren’t even sure that Rani had made tapes – that the only thing they knew right now was Lily claimed Rani had tapes. And Lily could easily have invented that to wind up the Company.

Instead she said, ‘If Zokurov thought tapes showed you and he were part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Rani government, well, he might act even more impulsively than Lily. Certainly more mercilessly. I’ll be watching from Virginia to see how the movie ends.’

She waited two minutes for Bruce to say something, but he watched her with such venom in his face that she went outside to wait for a car to take her back to the airport. She was pretty sure the microcassettes were something Lily had invented to rattle Bruce and Zokurov. On the other hand – so many US presidents had recorded everyone who came to the Oval Office. Why wouldn’t Rani have done the same? He’d been in meetings where he didn’t know what was being said, so he’d recorded them for a staff member to translate for him later. In fact, he might have had hidden microphones in the rooms where Dunwoody and the rest of the American delegation were meeting.

Jason Tedros would know. However, if Jason had the cassettes, the Company would have confiscated them when Rush swept up all his personal papers. Marissa wished she’d known about Jason’s memoir from the beginning. She would have handled Lily’s first phone call differently and forestalled this giant spinning whirlpool of a mess.

She was booked on an evening flight back to DC, but when she got to the Jacksonville airport, she changed her route to fly to New York. She texted Halina to meet her at a hotel near JFK – they’d drive out together to Jason’s home at the end of Long Island. She had the authority to override Rush and speak directly to Jason. In addition, she and Halina could search the house. If those cassettes actually existed, Jason could well have them. And he could have hidden them some place that Rush and the rest of the Bureau hadn’t thought to search.

She was in a hotel lobby at JFK, waiting for Halina, when the alert came in from the CIA’s internal network. Jason Tedros’s house had caught fire, and Tedros had disappeared in the confusion.

61

LITTLE, BUT FIERCE

By the time Marissa and Halina reached Sargo Point, a crowd had gathered around Jason’s house, so big that they had to park almost a mile away. Marissa used her Homeland credentials to push her way through to the police and fire crew in front of the house. People were in an ugly mood. The sight of CIA on a badge made them move aside just enough for the two women to squeeze by, but there were plenty of shouts of ‘Nazis, Fascists, go to Russia if you want to live like this.’ Marissa pretended not to hear.

When they reached Jason’s house, they found Rush holding on to two middle-aged women in handcuffs. His FBI cohort was trying to clear a path so he could ferry the women to the Suffolk County detention center, but the crowd wouldn’t budge.

Someone in the crowd yelled, ‘Jason’s house burned, asshole, while you were on duty, and now you want to arrest these women? Let them go before we see how long you can tread water.’

This provoked loud cheers and a chant of ‘Let them go!’ ‘Go tread water!’

The fire department had a truck there, and there were a number of Suffolk County cop cars, but none of the local LEOs were trying to disperse the crowd. Marissa went to one of the firefighters and asked what was going on.

‘You with the press, ma’am?’

If the cops and firefighters were leaning on their vehicles, letting the crowd get more belligerent, they were not going to welcome another person from Homeland Security, but it was better to own it at once. Lying about it would make it impossible to get any kind of cooperation from the local people.

‘They sent me up from DC to try to cool down Rush, which looks like more than a one-person job. Who are the women he’s cuffed?’

‘Faith and Beatriz Tedros. Two of Jason Tedros’s nieces. Rush wants to believe they set the house on fire. If you have any authority over him, take him back to DC. We’ve had to sit back and let him keep Jason under lock and key on grounds that someone was threatening Jason’s life. Now Jason’s house got torched, no one knows where Jason is, and Mr FBI wants to lock up two sixty-year-old women who’ve been doing their uncle’s laundry and cooking, besides running the local Girl Scouts and homeless shelter and everything else in between. So you go talk to him. If he bites, I’ll get you a rabies kit.’

He pushed past the crowd to one of the cop cars and spoke to one of the men leaning on it. ‘This lady here thinks she can talk the asshole into letting the girls go.’

The cop stood up. ‘ID, ma’am.’

Marissa handed him her badge.

‘CIA? The CIA is involved? No fucking way are we letting you in there.’

Marissa smiled, she hoped winningly. ‘Jason worked for the Company his whole life. That’s why they want me running interference here.’

‘You with her?’

He’d spotted Halina, unobtrusive in Marissa’s wake.

‘Backup,’ Halina said.

‘Backup?’ He looked scornfully at her slim figure and soft clothes. ‘What, if he slugs your boss you’ll read him a poem?’

‘I’ll read him the same Shakespeare I’ll read to you,’ Halina said. ‘Though I am but little, I am fierce. Let us through, please.’

That made the cop laugh. ‘Okay, fierce little one, in you go to the heart of the fire.’

He cleared enough space in the crowd to let Marissa and Halina through to Rush. A garbled version of the conversation traveled through the crowd. The small woman with the long hair was a poet, she was a black belt, she had beaten up men twice Rush’s size. The crowd closed in behind them, eager for the show.

‘Rush. Marissa Hockney, CIA. The optics are not good here. You are detaining two highly respected members of the community. Let them go, so all these other people go home.’

‘I don’t need fucking CIA ordering me—’

‘Rush, you do need us. We’re protecting your career.’

‘They set this house on fire so they could get Jason Tedros outside. He’s disappeared and they’re pretending they’re old ladies too weak to lift a match.’

‘Who’s looking for Jason while you’re collecting a hostile crowd?’ Marissa asked.

‘Two Bureau guys. And the Coast Guard is searching for him.’

‘They think he might be swimming to freedom?’ Marissa asked.

‘They aren’t thinking,’ one of the cuffed women said, ‘Any more than this creep is. Jason’s own boat is still in dry dock.’

The firefighters and cops were watching Marissa and Rush. Halina slipped away from the jousting and went into the house. She knew it was dangerous to go into a house that had been burning, but the front didn’t seem damaged.

When she and Halina landed to news of the fire, Marissa didn’t want to rely on Rush’s reports about what happened. She wanted to see the setup for herself, and she also still wanted to search Jason’s house, unless the fire had completely destroyed it.

Halina’s job would be to go up the stairs, if they were still usable, and search the bedrooms and Jason’s bathroom.

The acrid smell of wet firewood stung her eyes and burned her nose. She pulled her shirt up over her face and tested the stairs, riser by riser. She was shining her phone flash on the stairs, but when she reached the top she saw another flashlight dancing in a room to her right.

She almost called out, assuming it was a firefighter checking on something, and then realized it was someone hunting as secretively as she was. She turned off her flashlight and stuck the phone in her back pocket. The strobes from the fire truck were staining the hall a lurid red, as if blood were oozing from the wallpaper.

The engines outside were throbbing loudly enough that she couldn’t hear what the other person was doing, but that meant they couldn’t hear her, either. She sidled forward, back against the wall, until she reached the room where the intruder was searching.

She saw his right arm moving close to the ceiling and realized he was feeling in the blind brackets as Marissa had instructed Halina to do. He didn’t seem to find anything and moved outside her field of vision. Halina forgot the need for caution. She went to the doorway and saw him, a tall, heavyset man, reaching long fingers into the bracket of a second window.

‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ she demanded.

He whirled and charged, so quickly she didn’t have time to get out of the way. He punched her in the jaw. When she doubled over in pain, he kicked her in the side.

Halina lay in the bedroom doorway for several minutes, dazed and sick to her stomach. She heard the man’s feet on the old baseboards, the sound of splintering and an angry curse, and then his feet coming back up the hall toward her. She drew her knees to her chin and rolled into a corner of the room, but he didn’t stop. He went down the front stairs. She heard an outraged cry from one of the men outside.

She threw up when she got to her feet. She walked unsteadily into the hall, looking for a bathroom. Found one across the hall. She stood in the tub with her head under the shower, washing the sick from her knit top and trying to dull the throb in her head.

A firefighter found her there, with water pouring over the side of the tub.

She screamed when she saw his flashlight bobbing in the mirror.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘This house could collapse. You and your lover thought that would make sex more exciting? What do you do, go around looking for burnt-out houses?’

‘My lover? My lover?’ She was trembling, on the brink of hysteria. ‘He was in that room—’ she pointed toward the hall with a shaking arm. ‘He saw me, he punched me, and kicked me. Where is he?’

The firefighter strode to her. She screamed again and shrank against the wall, but he turned off the tap and lifted her out.

‘You need to get out of the house. And then tell me what the hell you and he were doing here.’

She was shaking, teeth chattering. She kicked him and pounded his back but he was used to people fighting against their rescuers and carried her easily down the stairs and out the front door. He propped her on the back of the fire truck and summoned one of the cops.

She could dimly hear the crowd cheering, but she was too distraught to make sense of anything.

‘What do you have here, Clete?’

‘Gal in the bathtub upstairs. Showering with her clothes on. Figured she was with that guy who streaked out the back way.’

The cop looked at Halina, shook his head. ‘She’s in shock. Get her something hot to drink, wrap her up. I’ll bring Karen over.’

Karen proved to be a woman officer. She squatted and spoke to Halina in the time-honored voice used for soothing babies and frightened animals. Halina made a strenuous effort, gave her name and a reason she’d been in the house.

‘My boss, she’s the woman who went to talk to the FBI agent. She told me to go inside and see if Mr Tedros left anything in his room that would show he knew about the fire or had an escape plan. This man was in the bedroom. He was doing something with the blinds. When he saw me, he punched me, knocked me to the ground, and kicked me. I – I don’t know how to fight. I was – scared. Stupid. Threw up.’

‘It isn’t stupid to be scared when someone beats you up,’ Karen said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Who was the man?’

‘I don’t know. I never saw him before.’

‘What did he look like?’

Halina said, ‘The light was behind him, I couldn’t see his face. He was tall, I know because he could stick his hand on top of the blind bracket. He was heavy. He – I heard him in the hall. Something broke. He shouted, it didn’t sound like English. Where is he? Who is he?’

Marissa arrived at that moment. She had persuaded Rush to let Beatriz and Faith go and the crowd was breaking up. The extended Tedros family stayed behind, gathering the two women up, deciding who would spend the night with them, how to protect them if the feds came again.

‘You told her to go into the house?’ Karen demanded of Marissa. ‘Didn’t you realize how dangerous that was?’

‘I thought the front of the house looked safe,’ Halina said. ‘I told them the Company wanted to know if Mr Tedros planned the fire or left any notes about his escape.’

Marissa nodded. ‘My bad. I should have remembered what a perfectionist Halina is. Who attacked her?’

‘Big guy. Came out through the kitchen, which is a wreck. Took us all by surprise. He cut across the neighbor’s yard, got into a Jeep, and bolted. Your girl says he was searching Jason’s bedroom, beat her up, then headed down the hall – probably going for the back staircase – we saw where he put a foot through the floor. He was lucky he didn’t fall all the way through.’

‘Could the state police stop him?’ Marissa asked. ‘That’s a long, slow road back to New York City.’

‘Oh, yeah, they could stop him if he was on the road. They found the car. Looked like he had a chopper waiting.’

None of the emergency personnel were happy with Marissa and Halina. All the emergency personnel were fed up with Homeland Security. Marissa wanted to know who owned the car, who had flown the chopper. The police chief answered as briefly as possible. The car had been stolen from a lot at JFK. No info on the chopper. When Marissa expressed surprise, he explained with the exaggerated patience of a father whose child had pushed his patience too far: helicopters don’t have to file flight plans and so the FAA had no information on who had ordered the ride, let alone who was at the machine’s controls.

Karen, the officer who’d taken care of Halina, unbent enough to tell Marissa how the fire started.

The kids in the community had been coming out after supper to play in the small stretch of parkland between Jason’s house and the water.

‘Rush, he hated it,’ Karen said. ‘Kids played baseball, soccer, whatever, and the balls would get in the shrubbery. They’d come over to hunt the ball and Rush would order them off the property. Kids – they’d start yelling, “FBI, FBI, watch that big guy start to cry.” So last night, they hit a baseball right through the front window.

‘Rush came out and fired his gun – in the air, but still, gunfire with children around? That brought the whole town here, including Beatriz. People swarmed right into the house. Hard to say how the fire started – could have been grease in the kitchen catching the walls while FBI was shooting out front. Anyway, Jason got out, and when Rush and his two backup clowns figured that out, they grabbed Beatriz and Faith, said they caused the whole thing.’

‘Impressive,’ Marissa said.

‘This town is one hundred percent behind Jason Tedros,’ the fire chief added. ‘Washington said his life was in danger if he was allowed to roam around like a free man, but as far as I can tell, you and your FBI pals are the ones he should be afraid of. So if you’re thinking of a manhunt, or going door-to-door here, you’d best wait until you have heavy backup.’

Marissa held out her hands, placatory. ‘No manhunts. All I want are beds for me and Halina here. Will the town let us check into a hotel? Can you remind them I talked Rush into letting Beatriz and Faith go free?’

He stepped back and muttered to the police chief, who spoke into his lapel phone. After a few minutes he told Marissa the Gateway Motel on the edge of town would be expecting them.

Halina followed Marissa to their car, expecting another reprimand for going into the house, but Marissa only said she was exhausted, and hoped the Gateway was not infested with roaches or rats.

When they’d checked in, Marissa said, ‘Did you really not see his face? The man who hit you, I mean?’

‘Do you know who it was?’ Halina asked.

Marissa pulled up the photo of Colonel Zokurov from the old International Fraternity and Equality banquet. ‘I’m guessing it was him. He’s gone off the map, but he’s someone with a serious interest in those microcassettes Lily wrote about. Looking in the brackets holding up the blinds is a place that a skilled searcher would pick. If he didn’t find anything here, he’ll look for Lily next.’

62

EASY SILENCE

Jason Tedros and Sam Evans stood on the deck of the Terry Hoyt. Even in the middle of the night, they could see the lights of other craft, small boats like the Terry Hoyt, commercial freighters, top-heavy cruise ships.

Jason was weeping with pleasure at being on the water once again, at being with his oldest friend again, at being in the middle of easy silence. The waves lapping the hull, the wind lapping the sails, but no clangor of weapons, trucks, angry shouts. They were far enough from the other craft not to hear their engines, or the shouting and cursing that had bedeviled Jason for the past six months.

‘They could court-martial you, take your anchor and stars and pension away from you for helping me,’ Jason said.

‘They could shoot you for a traitor,’ Sam said.

‘Scuttle the Terry Hoyt.’

‘Send your nieces to Leavenworth.’

‘That would be the worst,’ Jason said.

‘Now we know the worst, tell me what’s been going on that they had you under house arrest. Bea said because you were writing a memoir. Are your memories that dangerous?’

‘I had a good career,’ Jason said. ‘Stellar, for someone who didn’t come up through the Ivies with Mayflower ancestry. It took the CIA a long time to realize that straight white men from Yale were not the only good candidates for intelligence, and that sometimes those straight white men were downright lethal.

‘No one knew I was gay, but everyone knew my family were Portuguese fishermen. I was the only one of my brothers to go to college, and that’s because I was the baby. I worked my share on the boat in the summers, but come fall, back I went to Fordham.

‘I joined the Company out of college, and I spent so much time trying to conceal my queerness, my blue-collarness, that I turned into a person who was too cautious, too secretive about more important stuff.

‘I was eighty-four, I was tired of hiding. I decided I need to reveal an ugly situation I let develop in Hayalistan to protect my own career.’

He fell silent, watching the gleam of the running lights on the black water. ‘You know the CIA.’

‘Nope, not really,’ Sam said.

‘We do not have the cleanest hands in the world.’

Sam waited.

‘We were charged with getting the US government intel. And we were charged with taking direct action in other countries if the US government ordered us to. People laugh at the efforts made to assassinate Castro – exploding cigars, that kind of crap – but we have Patrice Lumumba and Salvatore Allende and a score of others on our consciences. And the Rani government in Hayalistan is in that group. They had massive lithium deposits, biggest ever scoped, we wanted US industry to own those mines. Rani wouldn’t hear of foreign leaseholders and so Gambrey and his backers began beating war drums in Senator Dunwoody’s ears.

‘The pissant head of Ts’gali station was a twerp named Bruce Weyrich. He formed a cabal with a Russian FSB colonel, Zokurov, and the American millionaire – now billionaire – Steve Gambrey. They read Senator Dunwoody into the op. Pulled the whole thing off pretty neatly.’

‘You knew all this at the time?’ Sam kept his voice level with an effort.

‘Some of it, not all of it. I was running the whole Central and South Asia desk then. India and Pakistan were the biggest headaches, constantly hovering on the brink of a nuclear exchange, so I let Hayalistan be a back burner issue. But I decided I needed to make the story of the coup public before I died. Not a heroic gesture – old man with nothing to lose.’ He stared again into the dark for a long beat.

‘There was an Australian woman working there, playing too many ends against the middle. Cinda Mallick. She was an economist with the Minerals Council of Australia and she came up with ways of getting the Hayali clans on the Australian side, and then used her body to try to get intel from the Russians and the Americans, along with the Chinese, who were and are big players in mining.

‘She made a colossal mistake with the Russian colonel, took his hearty laugh at face value. I’m not sure what actually happened, but she cabled me in Islamabad, begging me to come to Ts’gali and give her some protection. I was in Sri Lanka. This was before you could be reached instantly no matter where you were – the cable was waiting for me when I got back. By then, Mallick was dead, and I couldn’t find out what she’d been involved in. I phoned the Australian ambassador, who told me she’d committed suicide, pressure of work, unhappy love life, and I let it ride.

‘When I decided to write my memoir, I got in touch with ASIS – Australian Secret Intelligence Service – to see if they had anything to add to the story, a quarter century after the fact. Time passes, people don’t guard the truth so fiercely – well, look at me. That was a mistake because ASIS talked. To each other, to the Hayali government, and finally to Langley, who told me to stop with the memoir writing. I told them I’d write what I damned well pleased. Next thing I knew, they’d searched my house, stolen my files, my manuscript.

‘I was working with a literary agent, guy named Bill Sessil. I’d sent him a couple of chapters, an outline of what I wanted to cover, and a sample of unclassified or declassified cables, emails, and so on, including some from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

‘When Langley shut me down, they didn’t know about Sessil. After they confiscated my computer, my papers, everything, even if it had squat to do with the book I was writing, I got in touch with Sessil to let him know what was going on. I had a second phone I thought I’d kept well hidden, told him I was going to be charged with violating the Espionage Act if I kept on writing. I said if he could find someone to use my material – with a different slant, of course – to go for it.

‘He apparently got in conversation with a kid writing about opioids. Kid used part of my intel for a story The New Yorker published. His focus was on the way the mines had polluted the Hayali landscape, and the opioid crisis that came with the mines, so he was safe from a Company standpoint – they didn’t connect his report to me.

‘But then I learned the Company had tracked my backup phone. They’d tracked my call to Sessil and gone after him. Harmless guy making a living selling books like mine to publishers. They killed him, or very nearly did, took everything they could find of mine from his home and office.

‘And then I was really angry. My best field agent ever was a woman named Lily.’

‘The Unguided Missile,’ Sam said. ‘We’ve spoken – she made sure I was in Sargo Point tonight.’

‘My Unguided Missile,’ Jason agreed. ‘She got intel no one else could find because she would get down in the dirt with people, eat their skimpy meals, listen to their stories. She was a linguistic genius, picked up Hayali, which is one of the world’s hardest languages for a Westerner, knew Russian, learned Hindi when I moved her to Delhi. Her big flaw, no impulse control.

‘When the New Yorker story ran, the reporter quoted a Hayali woman who blamed the CIA and Lily, in particular, for all the woes the country has experienced since the coup. I got Lily a copy of the New Yorker story. Roundabout, through a grandchild of my sister Helena living in Dallas. By then, Langley had me under house arrest.

‘Lily’s retired. I knew if she read the story, she’d get angry and start acting. And that’s what happened. Right before Bea set my house on fire, I saw on the news that Steve Gambrey is lost on Muqqadas, Hayalistan’s biggest mountain. He flew a helicopter up and disappeared. I believe it was Lily’s hand on that tiller, so to speak.

‘She came out to see me a month ago, and realized at once that she couldn’t talk, or give her real name. But I was able to put her and Bea together. Tonight was Lily’s op, executed by Bea.’

Sam busied himself with looking at his map and masthead Windex. They were going to sail through the night – the sea lanes were too busy to risk anchoring and perhaps getting rammed. They were heading for Nova Scotia, for the Yarmouth Yacht Club. As soon as Sam agreed to Lily’s crazy plan, he’d emailed Yarmouth to say he was thinking of doing some sailing along the coastline and could he harbor there.

‘Impulse control,’ he finally said. ‘Not much of that here tonight, with me agreeing to pick you up as soon as I saw a report of fire from your place. And you jumping off the dock while your blessed nieces and nephews swarmed around. Don’t know if my back will recover from hauling you on board.’

‘Send me the bill for your surgery,’ Jason said. ‘Anything else you want or need. You don’t know what freedom feels like until you’ve been a prisoner.’

63

THE MOUNTAIN’S POWER

Mount Muqqadas, the great lord, showed his rage at the billionaire by shrouding himself in clouds for days, making it hard for helicopters and drones to hunt Gambrey. Mountain people usually help with rescue efforts, but not for a man who tried to dig up Idumali. He already owned the mines that had spoiled their air and water – now he thought he could own the sacred meadow? They left him for his underlings to find.

As for Lily, she spent a day with Tania in Muq’tsu to rest but then returned to Ts’gali. All kinds of stories about her were swirling around the mountain. The Elurbar who’d helped her on the meadow were full of how clever and fearless she was. She’d lured the billionaire to Idumali, she’d given him a chance to leave, and then – with their help – she’d left him stranded on the mountain.

Tania and Yuri spread that story. The elderly people in Muq’tsu recounted the many times Lily helped them in the old days. She’d brought medicines for their babies from the United States chemist, she’d promoted their wool work and hangings and made Hayali crafts famous around the world. She’d helped deliver a goat when the nanny’s labor pushed it sideways.

However, other Hayali held a different view of Lily, Anta’s view. She was CIA, which meant she’d helped overthrow Rani’s government, and given their lithium mines to the American billionaire. Now she had a grudge against the billionaire, Anta claimed, and was making herself look like a heroine, when she was really the villain.

Steve Gambrey’s attack against Idumali triggered student protests. They held rallies outside Ts’gali University every day, demanding that the school close the Gambrey Center. Anta had started speaking to international reporters about Lily’s perfidy. When the students saw her interviews, they invited her to speak at their protests.

Anta said that in the old days, Lily had helped Hayali women, but she did so only to blind them to her hidden, malevolent plans. The whole time she was pretending to help women she was trying to seduce Rani, to make him give mining leases to the Americans.

And now, Anta said, everyone was cheering Lily for driving Gambrey from Idumali. ‘But no one knows what she really said or did there. She spoke in English to the oligarch, and the Elurbar men who helped her don’t understand English. She probably was working out a way to help Gambrey take over the Idumali meadow, but she will act like a fawn whose doe has been shot if you question her.’

Lily watched a clip of the speech. The students were roaring with anger; it wouldn’t take much to unleash a mob to hunt her in the hills around Muq’tsu. Even if today’s students didn’t have their ancestors’ knowledge and stamina in the mountains, enough of them could reach Muq’tsu to put Tania and Yuri at risk.

The two tried to hide their relief at Lily’s departure. ‘You know we don’t believe the lava that flows from Anta’s mouth,’ Yuri said. ‘It’s just that other people do believe it.’

‘Of course,’ Lily said. ‘I do know that.’

‘Is it because of Rani that she hates you so much?’ Tania asked.

‘I don’t know the inside of her head,’ Lily said. ‘I can only guess. So many different things in her life didn’t align with her wishes. She was a second mother to Rani when his own mother died. Maybe she thought he should have given her a powerful position in his government. Then, Rani and I – we were—’ she fumbled for words.

Tania laughed. ‘Everyone knows what you and Rani were, Lilyuka. Yuri helped dig you from that avalanche. He saw how Rani held you.’

Lily colored. ‘Anta would have hated any woman Rani was close to, but I think it was more than that. She didn’t have the community life the village women enjoyed. Even though she was a skilled artisan, she was alone. Even though my elder detested me and tried to force me to leave the CIA and go home, there I was, living an independent life, making a name for myself. Anta might have envied that. As I say, though, I don’t know the inside of her mind.’

The microcassettes were also fueling Anta’s rage, or, rather, the idea of the cassettes. Lily didn’t know if any of the recordings Rani made had survived the coup, but Anta couldn’t bear the thought that Rani might have wanted Lily to have them.

‘She fancied herself the Eagle to his Hunter,’ Anta said in one of her speeches to the students. ‘She thought she was special, the queen of Hayalistan, perhaps, and when Rani ignored her, she set out to undermine him.’

In her hotel room that night, Lily watched Anta’s speech several times.

‘Projection,’ she said out loud. ‘You undermined Rani, Anta, out of your rage with me. What did you do? Give Agajan the keys to the ministerial palace so he could let a contingent of Marines in to ambush Rani when he arrived that morning? Was it something so dreadful you can only exorcise the memory by displacing it onto me?’

Not that Rani’s government could have survived the force of American Marine ‘advisors’ combined with Agajan’s rebel troops, but with advance warning of the attack, Rani might have survived to regroup in the mountains.

Lily closed the tablet and lay in her hotel bed with its soft sheets and three pillows. What a strange life she was leading, one night sleeping in a cave, the next in a yurt, and now here.

In the morning, she found an internet café in the Central Market and tried to reach Beatriz through her VPN. To her surprise, it was Halina who phoned back. Halina filled her in on the fire, on Jason’s disappearance, on the attempted arrest of Beatriz and Faith.

‘Marissa has gone to Hayalistan, but I’m staying on here in Sargo Point. I said I’d be the liaison with the FBI as they keep hunting for Jason, but I’ve reached my limit with the Company. When this situation winds down, when you and Jason can live in the open, I’m resigning.’

She told Lily about the man who’d attacked her in Jason’s bedroom. ‘Marissa said she thought he was Colonel Zokurov.’

‘Marissa was always the best-performing analyst the Company put in the field,’ Lily said. ‘I believe she’s right.’

Halina had been lucky that Zokurov was in a hurry when she found him in Jason’s house. If he hadn’t needed to get out ahead of the firefighters and local cops, he might have kicked her head in. Lily kept that to herself – no need to exacerbate Halina’s distress. Instead, she asked Halina if Langley had heard from Bruce.

Halina told her about Marissa’s meeting with him before she flew to New York. ‘Marissa could tell he was frightened. She thinks Zokurov probably threatened him when he stopped in Florida on his way to Long Island. We haven’t heard anything about Bruce being shot, so maybe he’s locked inside his safe room.’

Beatriz wanted a word before Lily ended the meet. Lily was braced for anger over the abuse Beatriz and Faith had suffered at Rush’s hands, but Beatriz surprised her with gratitude.

‘Thanks to you, we got Jason safely away. I thought your plan was dangerous and stupid, but it worked. Jason called. He wouldn’t tell me where he was, in case the phones are monitored, just fifteen seconds to say that he was safe and he’d be in touch. You helped us save his sanity – he was dying under house arrest. Oh, and he said the op had the feel of a Lily special, apparent chaos leading to a well-planned conclusion.’

Lily laughed, thinking of the dozens of times in the field Jason had criticized the chaos and minimized the well-planned conclusion. Knowing that Jason and his nieces were safe left Lily feeling relieved, almost buoyant.

Zokurov’s trip to Sargo Point, in the midst of a heavy police presence, showed he was seriously worried about the tapes. He might know they really existed; might know they’d survived the coup.

Lily figured his next stop would be Hayalistan, looking for her even if he couldn’t find the tapes.

She bought another cup of tea while she watched the news on her tablet. The feed included a clip of reporters outside the ministerial palace, shouting questions about the tapes at Agajan when his entourage rolled up to the gates. The prime minister scuttled into the palace, surrounded by his security detail.

Lily watched that scene on Hayali state TV, before switching to a US channel. As was typical of American media, three people were chewing over the latest reports. In reading the nameplates, Lily was disconcerted to see that the man in the middle was Thom Kolchak, looking young and vulnerable between two veteran commentators.

Kolchak spoke bitterly about the CIA’s culpability for Hayalistan’s problems. His companions cut short his description of the desolation in the streets of Ts’gali with a question about Arnold Sylvester. No one had seen or heard anything about him since he’d flown from Chile to Florida more than a week earlier.

‘He wasn’t at the Gambrey board’s emergency meeting in New York,’ one of them said. ‘No one on the board seems to know where he is. Gambrey himself is still missing. The assumption is that he’s lost somewhere on Mount Muqqadas.’ The screen showed the mountain from the air, shrouded in fog. ‘Gambrey shares have sunk forty percent on the disappearances of both Gambrey and his number two.’

The channel switched to the student rallies, which were growing bigger every day, especially the ones where Anta was speaking. The scene showed the militia out in force. However, as one of the talking heads put it, Hayali military wouldn’t crack down on the students while so many foreign journalists were in the capitol.

Lily watched a clip and decided she needed to attend a protest herself. The next day, dressed in her goatherd costume, she took the tram over to Ts’gali University. A large group had gathered to hear Anta in person. Lily edged her way to the front of the crowd, which she thought was several thousand strong – not bad for a country with no tradition of street protest.

Anta was on a makeshift grandstand, wearing a traditional Hayali dress, made of purple – the color of the Elurbar clan – with double rows of silver buttons. She wore a formal headdress, the kind Hayali women wear on public occasions. It, too, was festooned with silver buttons.

The Hayali militia were out, surrounding the grandstand. They were keeping media in a separate enclosure, close enough that their cameras and mics could pick up the speeches, but not close enough to badger the speakers with questions. Lily spotted Thom Kolchak in the media pen, along with France 24, CNN, and the BBC.

Lily waited through an address by the minister of Land and Mineral Use, who was booed for assuring the students that the government was protecting Idumali from predators. A few students spoke, and then Anta came to the mic. She gave a strong nationalist address, demanding that foreign agents be forced to leave Hayalistan before they destroyed more of the country’s air and water.

‘Americans must give the mines back to Hayalistan. The government must force the CIA to leave. And the CIA must apologize for the damage Lily did to our country during the time she lived here.’

Lily saw that Mika was on the dais along with Grigo. Duruna hadn’t been willing to tell her what the pair was doing, but Tania explained that the student friendships had fractured because of Lily’s op. Duruna and Azam thought it was a chance for Hayalis to start taking control of their resources and their government. Mika and Grigo wanted the same thing but agreed with Anta: Lily was CIA and any action of hers would be a cover for a secret US plan to deepen the claw-hold America had on the country.

Mika and Grigo both applauded vigorously every time Anta stopped for air. At the end of the speech, the two students followed Anta from the grandstand. Reporters with mics surrounded Anta, along with a number of students, including some in traditional Islamic dress.

Thom Kolchak made his way to Mika. She was momentarily puzzled, then gave a radiant smile as she recognized him. Kolchak was gesturing toward a cluster of tea stalls and cafés across the main road from the protest. Mika had a word with Anta, who was deep in conversation with a woman in hijab.

As Mika and Kolchak moved away from the grandstand, Grigo seemed to expostulate with Mika. She made an imperious gesture of dismissal and took Kolchak’s arm.

Lily wasn’t as interested in that drama as in Anta and her companion. Like the other Stans, Hayalistan was a Muslim country, but it was rare for women to cover themselves. Anta’s companion wore the khimar hijab, covering her face as well as her head and whole body. A muhajjabah. The word popped into Lily’s mind – the respectful Arabic word for a woman who covered herself completely in public.

This muhajjabah was more than a head taller than Anta, with a substantial belly. At one point, she leaned down to speak directly into Anta’s ear. As she straightened, her veil got caught in the buttons on Anta’s headdress, and pulled away from her forehead, revealing heavy eyebrows and a receding hairline. Anta quickly stuck up a hand to readjust the other woman’s veil.

Lily didn’t think anyone else had noticed. A group of drummers had taken the stage and the crowd was clapping in time with them.

Anta went to a car that was waiting for her at the curb, while the muhajjabah walked away toward the main part of the campus. To Lily, the woman seemed unused to wearing such billowing skirts. She kept catching her feet in their folds. When she yanked the skirts free, Lily saw she was wearing outsize cowboy boots.

She would have been easy for Lily to follow, if she hadn’t needed to keep the muhajjabah from noticing her. Lily kept bending over her phone, as if checking directions, and turning away to check alternate routes. At the Gambrey Center, her quarry went to an SUV waiting near the building entrance and took off.

Lily missed the things you had access to if you were on the Company payroll, including leaping into a car to follow the SUV, and getting Langley to trace the license plate. She sighed, straightened herself, and walked back across the campus, careful to stay in character.

She could use a cup of tea, but the stalls across from the university all had long lines. She had decided to wait until she returned to her hotel when she spotted Kolchak sitting cross-legged on the ground with Mika – the chairs and tables were all occupied with exuberant demonstrators, some sitting two or even three to a chair, waving Hayali flags; the militia stationed along the curb were photographing them.

Lily moved close to Mika and Kolchak and squatted with her back to them. The crowd was thick enough that she could listen without being obvious.

Whatever serious discussion they might have had about Anta and Mika’s role in her life had ended. They were laughing, trying to teach each other words in English and Hayali. Mika, who had seemed stern and humorless when Lily met her in April, was giggling over Kolchak’s pronunciation. He, in turn, was saying that perhaps life at high altitude did something to the tongue that made it able to perform cartwheels in the mouth – which is what it took to speak Hayali.

At length he gave a regretful sigh and said he had a date with the woman running the addictions clinic. ‘I promised my magazine a short follow-up on where things are with opioids since my first visit here.’

‘They are worse, always worse,’ Mika said. ‘You not need clinic lady telling all is worse. Is why we angry with Americans. Not with you, Thomas, you telling Americans true things. Is Americans like Lily we hate.’

As Thomas got up, he gave Mika the name of his hotel, the Mountain Gentian. ‘Let me know when you feel like teaching me five new Hayali words. And let me know if Anta hears from Lily or from Arnold Sylvester.’

64

GRUBBY OLD SHEPHERD

Back in her room, Lily sat cross-legged on her bed, back against the wall, thinking. First about Anta and the person in the hijab, whose long legs ended in outsize cowboy boots. And then about Rani, and Idumali. He told her he used to spend time at the meadow to hear what his eagle had to tell him. I fast, sometimes for five days, until I can hear the eagle speak to me.

That meant he spent nights there. Perhaps he unrolled his bedroll directly onto the grasses and let their sweet smell flood his mind, but even for an Elurbar, used to spending weeks on the mountain, the grasses would be damp and prickly. Besides, Rani was not the only Hayali who went to the meadow for guidance.

Presumably, some Hayali continued to do so, which meant they must make sleeping arrangements. When Lily had been there five days ago, none of the little caves looked as though people used them regularly.

The two Elurbar who’d assisted her had known the terrain intimately. They had set up her bedding in a cave they had prepared for her; they’d positioned her manikin in another. They had brought everything to the meadow themselves, so Lily didn’t know if they had carried them up the steep trail, or if they had some other access, known only to nomads and smugglers.

After sitting for several hours her body was stiff. She lay on the floor and stretched herself, joint by joint, rubbing salve into her sore hip and shoulder. She wished she’d brought some meadow grasses away with her from Idumali – rubbing them into her bruised joints had brought a day of respite from pain. But denuding the meadow for personal gain felt wrong, a small version of Gambrey wanting to cut and analyze and privatize.

She went to the room’s small table and wrote a short note in English:

Did you notice the tall, heavyset person in hijab deep in conversation with Anta when you and Mika left the meeting? That was possibly Arnold Sylvester aka Viktor Yulevich Zokurov. Not a great disguise for such a big man – he kept catching his cowboy boots in the hijab skirts when he walked away from Anta. Your readers will want to know what they were discussing. Your readers will want to know their involvement with Agajan at the time of the coup.

She couldn’t decide whether to sign it or not. In the end she decided not. She put on her yak-skin boots but carried her long shepherd’s jacket until she was on the street, when she wrapped her head in a shepherd’s cap, put on the jacket, and walked to the Mountain Gentian hotel.

The Gentian catered to foreigners who didn’t want or couldn’t afford the opulence of the hotels on Lake Sakin’s north shore. It had a doorman who tried to bar shabby elderly shepherds from entering.

Lily announced that she had been paid money – by an American! – to bring a note to a Gentian guest. She showed the note, and the five US dollars as proof. The doorman loftily relieved her of three of her dollars. She protested, feebly, but was told she’d lose the other two if she didn’t stop whining. He wanted to take the note, but she ducked under his epauletted arm and delivered it to the concierge with her remaining two dollars. He picked it up by the corner but assured her that Mr Kolchak would receive the message.

In the morning, after a restless night, Lily took the first ferry across Lake Sakin. She had her daypack with a few toiletries, clean T-shirts, socks and underwear, and a blanket. She carried a phone, but didn’t bother with a charger, since reception on the mountain was so spotty. Most important, she had her trekking poles.

The ferry terminal connected to a network of tramlines, including one that brought Hayali workers to the embassies and private residences on the north shore. Lily rode to the tram stop closest to the Anglo-American Club. At a quarter to six Duruna hurried past without noticing Lily.

‘Duruna!’ she called softly. ‘Is eagle on the menu?’

Duruna stopped and stared, eyes wide with nerves.

‘Sorry,’ Lily said. ‘It’s me, Lily. It’s safer for me to travel around the city dressed like this.’

Duruna said, ‘You can’t be here – I can’t be seen—’

‘Quickly,’ Lily said. ‘Arnold Sylvester was at yesterday’s demonstration. I saw him, hiding in a hijab, talking to Anta, one head close to the other.’

Duruna started to protest, to exclaim, which made one of the men walking to the club stop. ‘Is that a beggar? Is he bothering you? I’ll get security.’ He spoke English, with an American accent.

Lily got to her feet, made a Hayali obeisance and said in Hayali, ‘The gentleman has a face like a dead water rat and the manners of a weasel.’ When it was clear he didn’t understand, she added to Duruna, ‘Get Mika to tell Anta people think she’s meeting with Sylvester.’

Duruna said, ‘I can’t – that’s not possible – she won’t believe—’

‘Tell Azam,’ Lily said. ‘Talk it over with him.’

‘Don’t talk to these beggars,’ the American shouted at Duruna. ‘It only encourages them!’

Lily went up to him and said in broken English, ‘Dollars, mister, dollars for wife, childs.’ She counted on her fingers in English, and added, ‘Seven childs, all no food.’

‘Get out of here!’ he shouted. ‘If I see you on the premises again, you’ll be in prison and your seven or seven hundred childs will be beggars in your place.’

Lily hobbled back to the road. She was tempted to wait in case Sylvester/ Zokurov arrived. He had enough impudence to stay at the club, even though he was the subject of an international search.

Do things in order, she lectured herself. The next step was getting to Idum-ali, not hanging around a private club on the off chance of taunting the colonel.

She took a tram to the K’tali market, where she bought food to last several days. She’d brought her own thermos, which she filled with tea at one of the stalls. Outside the market, at the north end, yak carts were lined up like taxis to carry people up and down the mountain. Lily chose one at random and asked to be taken to the end of the trail near Idumali.

‘You looking for the billionaire?’ the driver asked. Hayali is a gendered language; he addressed her as a woman. Mountain women often wore male garb when they were traveling by themselves.

‘No, is there a reward?’

‘Ten thousand American dollars. If we find him, I will share it with you.’

‘If we find him, get him to count the money out first,’ Lily said. ‘Those billionaires, they cling to their money as if honey had glued it to their body.’

He laughed and helped her into the cart.

65

THEM BONES, THEM DRY BONES

The fog still shrouded the mountain, but at ground level the trails were easy to read. Lily and her driver periodically heard helicopters in the distance – the search crews looking for Gambrey, who’d been missing now for almost a week – but the choppers and drones couldn’t get close enough for effective spotting. Foot patrols had spread out from the spot where Gambrey had sent up his distress signal.

Lily’s driver knew plenty of people living on the mountain. Even if they weren’t helping with the search, they were following its progress. Gambrey hadn’t stayed in the place he’d sent up the signal. By the second day his satellite and cell phone batteries were both dead and they had to rely on foot tracking, reading the trails as best they could for the shifting winds and rains.

Lily felt a twist of guilt. She had offered Gambrey an escort down the mountain, but when he refused it, she could have sent an ATV up to find him. She had been playing God: who shall live, who shall die and when.

The thought sent her up the footpath to the meadow in a heavy mood. The cart had reached the trail midafternoon. The driver was reluctant to leave an older woman on her own. Was she really going to spend a night there? Even though the clans were not as powerful as they used to be, still, the meadow was sacred, and spirits would not welcome an outsider. And perhaps the Elurbar nomads would be even more insistent than the spirits in driving her from the meadow.

‘Since the billionaire tried to steal the meadow, the nomads have kept close watch.’

Lily thanked him for the warning. ‘It is good to pay attention both to the spirits and to the Elurbar. My dreams have told me to come here. Perhaps the Elurbar will not harm me if they know I was guided by a dream.’

She paid him and arranged for him to return in two days. She slipped her hands through the grips on her poles and started up the trail, stopping at the first bend to wave farewell. The driver gave her a reluctant half wave and began turning his yak around. He had to give his whole attention to his animal: yaks are stubborn, not easy to move on a narrow mountain space.

Lily was feeling nervous along with her guilt. When she’d come here the first time, she’d had the support of the nomads. Now she was on her own. And yet, she hadn’t lied about her dreams to the yak driver. She didn’t inhabit the complex Hayali spirit world, but she felt certain that there was a trace of Rani here.

The climb, about five hundred meters, took over two hours. When she reached the top, she stood for a time, leaning on her poles. She needed a rest, but it was more the scent of the grasses and flowers, and the way they rippled in the breeze that made her stop. The clouds had been lifting all day, and by now the air was clear. The afternoon sun streaked the grasses and the cliff face with yellows and reds. When she’d spent the night in the cave, she’d been so worried whether Gambrey would take her bait and show up at all that she hadn’t responded fully to the meadow.

No wonder Rani had come here for refuge. She moved slowly across the land, making sure not to step on birds’ nests. The helicopter was still there, a jarring presence in this peaceful space, but when Lily reached it, she saw that local people had been dismantling it. The seats had been pulled out, and the rotors were gone. A faint scent of fuel lingered around the machine, but she saw that someone had dug up the oil spill.

She had lured Gambrey and his helicopter to this place. She apologized out loud, to the meadow, to the spirit of Rani. With the clearing of the sky, Gambrey’s searchers should be able to find him. She hoped. Hoped they found him alive.

She shuddered and walked over to the hot spring. She took off her yak-skin mountain boots and soaked her feet, but didn’t try to bathe. She needed to inspect the small caves, to see if this is where she’d find a trace of Rani.

She walked along the cliff face shining her flashlight around each opening. The one where she had slept had been swept clean. The rugs she had lain on were gone, as was the sound system Hûbar had set up for her. In others she saw nothing but animal nests and droppings. She also stumbled over some of the shell casings from Gambrey’s assault on the cliff.

She picked up one and spoke to it. ‘It’s a mercy you didn’t hit me or one of the Elurbar. It’s true I lured him to this place, but he chose violence. He chose to stay here.’

There was a ledge about ten meters above her head with more caves opening onto it. She walked to the western end of the cliff, where it began to break up. Rocks fell from here down the steep hill where she’d lain to watch Gambrey arrive in his chopper.

At this end of the cliff, she saw breaks in the granite face that could be used for toe- and handholds. She knew it was a kind of madness to make the climb alone, especially when she looked at the drop down the hillside if she fell, but she slung her poles through the straps on her pack and began to climb.

She found a handhold about a foot over her head and pulled herself up, bending her knees so she could brace her toes against the rock face. She straightened just enough to stick an arm up, scrabbling for another slit in the rock, cheek against the stone. Muqqadas, my protector, keep me safe here. Toes against the rock, hands in a new crevice, face caressed by granite.

The water sliding down the rock made the going slippery. She slid once, a couple of meters, feet connecting with a hole before she went all the way back down.

Her injured hip began to ache, as well as her damaged shoulder. She gave a bark of laughter: she’d been at the orthopedist for this shoulder when she read Thom Kolchak’s article. If she’d known how much she was going to need the shoulder, she wouldn’t have left the doctor’s office so abruptly.

Leg over leg, arm over arm, and suddenly she was hoisting herself onto the ledge. Her whole body was trembling from the effort. With slow, careful moves she slid her arms out of the straps of her pack, laid it against the cliff face and leaned back to rest. She took out her thermos and drank tea, resting until her muscles stopped shaking and cramping. The ledge was wet from the water that trickled down the cliff face, and soon her trousers were soaked.

The dark was drawing in. She couldn’t spend the night in this spot. If she fell over in her sleep, she’d tumble to the ground. Legs dangling over the edge, she inched herself along on her butt until she came to the first cave.

She’d stuck her flashlight into a pocket of her shepherd’s jacket. When she shone the light inside, it was a dreary place, rocks where snakes and bats were living. She moved along, feeling more and more downhearted as she looked at the animal homes the caves provided. Until she got to the fifth.

This was one of the deeper openings. Someone was taking care of this space. The floor was swept. Her flashlight picked up drippings from a yak-fat lamp that mountain villagers used in emergencies.

Remnants of fabric hung over the edge of a shelf at the back of the cave. Her fingertips tingled. She tiptoed to the back and found a skeleton. It lay there, grinning in the manner of skeletons, with eagle feathers across its eyes. At interment, the bones had been held together by skin and muscle, but those were long gone, and what remained were bone fragments that looked like broken clam shells.

In life, the skeleton had worn yak-skin boots, designed for mountain wear, much like the ones she herself had on. The boots, well oiled and waterproofed, had survived almost intact, while the shroud and clothes the body had worn had mostly rotted away.

Lily knew those boots, knew before she looked that they had a layer of snow leopard fur inside the collar. The Elurbar did not hunt the snow leopard, but occasionally, above the tree line, they found a dead one. The fur went to the head of the clan.

Lily felt odd, as if she were outside her body, as if she were watching a stage play of herself. The heroine goes mountain climbing with an impetuous and reckless heart, and finds her lover’s body, where it has lain for a quarter century.

She knelt by the bones but didn’t touch them. In the fictional or AI version of her life, this would be a Heathcliff moment. She would scream his name so loudly that the meadow would waken, a snow leopard would make its way down from 10,000 feet to bring her consolation. She was merely Lily, so she knelt in silence.

When Rani brought her to Idumali to nurse her, and to bid her farewell, they had stayed in a tent on the ground, near a hot spring. After he’d seen her down the path to the main trail, he returned to the meadow to prepare himself for leadership.

She had imagined him in the tent they’d shared, but now she saw that this was where he had come. The cave was filled with Elurbar symbols and talismans. This was where he came for strength.

She wouldn’t touch his bones, but she couldn’t resist picking up one of the boots and running her forefinger over the snow leopard fur. Something rattled inside the boot. It didn’t sound like pebbles, but something lighter. She shone her flashlight inside, thinking she might see eagle talons.

Instead, it was a cache of microcassettes. She looked at them, first with incomprehension, and then a bubble of hysteria rose in her. They existed, they were here with Rani. Had someone lured her here? No, she’d come herself without prompting, but – but—

She didn’t want to stay inside the cave, next to Rani’s bones. She removed her wet trousers and hung them from the edge of rock just inside the entrance. She unrolled her blanket at the cave mouth, just beyond the wet ledge, and leaned against the jagged stone of the entrance.

She ate some of the dried vegetables she’d bought in the market, drank one of the jars of yak kefir. There was nothing else she could do, so she lay down. She thought she would be too agitated to sleep, that fear and excitement would chase through her until dawn. Instead, as soon as she lay flat, she fell into sleep.

In her dream, she had climbed to Muqqadas’s tree line. She was naked, untroubled by the thin cold air, her red-gold hair unbraided and falling to her waist. She was holding her arms wide to embrace the mountain when a snow leopard appeared on the rocks above her head.

He cocked his head, studying her, and then swung his long tail around her and lifted her to his back. She sat there easily as he jumped from rock to rock. They traveled in dream time and space, so that a moment later they were at the site of the hydro dam. The leopard lifted her down at the edge of the dam.

‘Muqqadas has been injured and unwell since the diggers came here, Lily,’ the snow leopard said.

She felt a dampness on her thigh and saw that her period had come, her body rejuvenated along with her hair. Without thinking, she jumped from the edge of the dam into the water a hundred meters below. It was cold, it was healing. When she rose to the surface she was weeping. Rani was swimming behind her, arms wrapping her where the snow leopard’s tail had been.

He swam with her to the wall of the dam. It dissolved, and they were lying on the grass near Lake Sakin and Rani was chanting ‘The Eagle and the Hunter’: My life lies in your wings.

66

CRADLED IN THE MOUNTAIN

The nomads shook her awake. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here?’

Some half-dozen men were standing over her, like doctors staring at a patient etherized on a table. She was cold and stiff from her night on the ledge and it took her a few minutes to unkink her joints enough that she could sit up.

‘I’m an old woman,’ she said. ‘If you want me to answer your questions, you must first let me get up, perform ordinary morning activities, and then have a cup of tea.’

The men were startled by her voice. ‘It’s a woman!’ ‘An old woman climbed here?’ ‘What was she thinking?’

‘It’s Lily!’ Hûrab, the young Elurbar who’d helped her a week earlier, pushed past the other men to squat next to her. Yash, the older man from the Gambrey op, was also in the group.

They all knew who Lily was. The buzz of comments grew louder – she had left the meadow, hadn’t she? They’d come back to clean and she was gone. Also the American Gambrey had left, so she had come back by herself, but why?

Hûrab helped Lily to her feet. She wrapped her blanket around her waist. Her trousers were still damp, but Hûrab said the nomads were camped on top of the cliff; one of the women would send down some trousers for her. He guided her to a place on the ledge not visible from the ground, where the cliff face buckled inward. Metal rings were fastened there, and ropes swung down from the cliff’s higher reaches. Another rope was coiled around a hook. The youth uncoiled it and tied the end around Lily’s waist.

‘Hold on, Shen Lily. I’m sending you down to the ground, where you can make your morning activities, and then we will have tea and you will explain.’

She took her time on the ground, soaking her sore legs in the hot spring, washing her hair and teeth in the water running down the cliff. A trio of women appeared, chatting excitedly. This was Lily!

‘Here, take these trousers,’ they cried. ‘Made as if for your body.’

The women gave her tea and kefir.

The men kept a discreet distance on the far side of the hot spring, where the rising steam made a good curtain. When she came around to their side, they demanded she show them how she reached the cave. They were astounded when she led them to the broken edge she’d climbed.

‘But we need to know why you did it. Did Hûrab tell you the bones were there?’

The young Elurbar said, ‘Of course I did not. That is a terrible—’

‘No one told me,’ Lily said. ‘I came – it’s hard to put into a simple sentence, a simple story. A dream spirit brought me here.’

The Elurbar nodded. They all understood the voices of dream spirits, not visible in daylight, but speaking with an authority you couldn’t ignore.

‘When my country sent me to Hayalistan all those years ago, I fell in love with the mountain and the people. Rani did me the honor of teaching me personally about your country and your history.’

‘We know Rani did you many honors, as you did him,’ one of the women said, teasing.

‘No one can be in a shepherd’s hut on Muqqadas and think the nomads haven’t seen them,’ Yash added. ‘But we never spoke of this, even to Rani himself. He did as he wished. But this still does not explain why you are here, on Idumali, by yourself.’

Lily nodded. ‘The last time I saw Rani with no one else in the room, he summoned me to the ministerial office. He sat behind his desk and spoke to me as the head of the clan, angry with the clan’s least important member. He played for me a recording he had personally made, of conversations between my elder and other powerful Americans in which they were threatening to bring American Marines in to make Rani do as they wished.’

Everything about the memory was raw and painful, from Rani’s cold anger to her own humiliation, and her words came slowly.

‘After that, my elders moved me from Hayalistan to India. Eight months later, the coup happened and the news across the borders was that Rani had died. l asked to come back, but my elders forbade my going. I left in secret and came into Hayalistan through the hills. No one could tell me whether Rani was alive or dead. I looked for Anta, but then heard she was calling me Hayalistan’s greatest enemy. I returned to India and wept privately in the night.

‘For Anta, I was like sand in a wound, making her memories of Rani rough and raw. She blamed me, personally, for all the ills that Hayalistan has suffered since Agajan gave the billionaire Gambrey the lithium mine leases.

‘But the years kept turning and I became old, and then a young journalist wrote Anta’s words for every speaker of English to read. She told the journalist that I had destroyed Hayalistan.’

Lily held out her arms, the flesh with its wrinkles and dark spots. ‘She said these small arms undid a whole country. I wanted to prove her wrong. I began studying the past and learning from it and realized that she was not completely wrong. The Americans for whom I worked did much damage here, and all for money. They were joined by a Russian colonel, whom I myself helped flee from Hayalistan, in a sled pulled by the dogs of the Reindeer Pot’ry.’

Another murmur – everyone knew of Lily and Pot’ry and the Russian. And he was a traitor?

‘Yes, a traitor, but to whom? To Russia? To Putin? To the Americans?’ Lily said. ‘He is living in America under a strange name, and he has made himself powerful in the Gambrey company, the company that owns the mines.

‘I made a plan, that I would try to bring him into the open, to confront me in a public way that would make both Anta and the Americans understand that I was not the cause of Hayalistan’s problems. I thought of the recording Rani played for me; I knew if he made one, he made others. I knew this meadow is a place he went to sit in silence and let the meadow tell him what he should do.

‘I thought if the recordings were in the ministerial palace, that Agajan would have destroyed them. But if Rani removed them, then perhaps this meadow would have a sign to tell me where to look. And so, I climbed the cliff last night. And found his bones.’

‘With your small arms,’ one of the men said, but the tone was teasing.

The group withdrew and talked for some minutes.

‘Did you touch him or his boots?’ one of the women asked.

‘Touching him felt wrong. But I knew the boots, I recognized the fur. I saw the recordings, but I didn’t touch them.’ She didn’t add that she had planned to take them away with her. They probably guessed that, anyway.

‘In those last months, Rani felt the sky closing on him,’ Yash said. ‘He didn’t know where to turn, with Anta angry and jealous, with the Americans giving money and weapons to Agajan, and so he came here, with his recordings, and left them in that cave. We knew he was here, we saw his troubled spirit and asked what help we could give him. He said if Agajan and the Americans attacked, to stay away from Ts’gali, for it would be a slaughter, not a fight.

‘In those three short days that it took to destroy Rani’s government, we came down from the mountain heights to the thick air near Ts’gali and watched from the hills. The day Rani was murdered we ran into the city and gathered his body and brought it here. We removed his boots and put the tapes inside them because we knew the spirit of the Elurbar would guard his body, his boots, and these little tapes.

‘Even though Anta screamed to the heavens that your CIA had snatched him we decided to let Muqqadas shelter Rani. If Anta or Agajan or the billionaire knew where he was, they would do something shameful with his bones. We Elurbar nomads voted that we would care for him here, in this sacred meadow, telling no one in the lowlands where he lay. But now you have found him, Lily. So we wanderers must decide what to do next.’

67

TECH SUPPORT

Yash brought Lily and Hûrab to the home of one of his cousins in Ts’gali. It was a quiet place on the city’s southwest side, far from the main thoroughfares to the mountain or to Lake Sakin.

The yak driver who took Lily, Yash, and Hûbar to Ts’gali told them that Gambrey had been discovered the previous night. He was apparently dehydrated and delusional; the Americans flew him to one of their base hospitals in Turkey.

Lily was hoping for more information – about Zokurov/Sylvester in particular, but also the mining leases, Anta, and whether the US had put the Marines on alert, but the yak driver couldn’t help with any news that wasn’t on state television.

When the nomads decided the best thing they could do in Rani’s memory was for Lily to listen to the tapes, Yash and Hûrab had escorted Lily down the mountain to Yash’s cousin. The nomads ruled that if the tapes exposed Gambrey or Zokurov or even Anta’s villainy then they should be used.

‘You never listened to them?’ Lily said.

‘We tried, but too much was in English. We had no good speakers of English that we trusted, and so we kept them. Now we see Muqqadas was telling us to wait for you to return.’

Through his winter electronics classes, Hûbar knew people who could lend him a sound system, both for listening to the tapes and to edit and digitize them. Yash’s cousin let them take over the family living room for their work. Hûbar’s grandmother lived a few streets away and let them sleep on rugs in her own family room.

Hûbar helped Lily untangle the fragile cassettes and record the usable sections. Some tapes were so damaged that they could only make out a few phrases, but many were remarkably intact.

It was stressful work, concentrating on voices where they couldn’t see the faces, trying to figure out what language was being spoken, or how many players were participating. Some tapes dealt with Hayali political questions, which were also potentially explosive, since they discussed grazing rights versus farm or mineral rights.

One of the hardest for Lily to hear was a recording of Bruce and Zokurov with Steve Gambrey the morning after Cinda Mallick’s murder.

Gambrey: Well?

Zokurov: All well, my nervous friend. Bruce as Little Chicken drove the truck, I as Samson rowed the boat. Our problem is floating in the lake. Bruce cried with fear as is right for Little Chicken, but all is well.

Bruce: unintelligible squawks over being called Little Chicken

Gambrey: What info did she send to Australia?

Zokurov: Nothing. Are you another Little Chicken? A man who wants to move from millionaire to billionaire must embrace risk like a beautiful woman. For that reason, I embraced risk. Not for you, but for me. Remember that I, too, wish to be billionaire, and we will all live like a fairy tale, in the happy ever after.

Lily and Hûrab couldn’t figure out where that recording was made. A number of the tapes were of meetings that Rani couldn’t possibly have attended in person. Finally, when they listened to one tape where Lily was speaking to Bruce’s PA Gayla, they realized that Rani had bugged the secure room at the US embassy.

Lily laughed. ‘Rani, you crafty leopard! You had one of your own Elurbar working there as a janitor. I remember him – he looked like a leaf that a strong wind could blow over as he quietly pushed a broom down the halls and emptied trash cans. He must have bugged the secure room.’

It was exhausting work and took almost a week to play each cassette and extract usable clips.

In addition to the tape where Zokurov bragged about killing Cinda, they found one where Bruce and Zokurov were in the embassy’s secure room. Zokurov was telling Bruce that it was time for him to head to America.

‘Lily and Cinda Mallick were friends. How much does Lily know?’

‘Who cares what that crazy cunt knows?’ Bruce said.

‘Make sure she is the person who takes me out of Hayalistan. Then I can find out what she knows, who she told, and put a stopper in that bottle. Once I’m in the land of the free, it will be time to move American Marines and tanks into Ts’gali, so that we can also be rid of this tiresome Elurbar. Agajan has given me assurances that he will give the leases to Gambrey as soon as he is installed in the ministerial palace.’

‘What if we install him and he gives the leases to the Chinese?’ Bruce cried.

‘Oh, zatknits’, plaksa!’ Zokurov roared.

‘Shut up, crybaby,’ Lily translated the Russian for Hûrab.

After a gap in the tape, Bruce was screaming at Gayla, demanding to know how Lily had made it back to Ts’gali.

‘I don’t know,’ Gayla said. ‘Lily has all those friends in the mountains. They helped her out.’

When Hûrab and Lily had finally finished with the tapes, they compiled a twenty-five-minute segment that spelled out Bruce, Gambrey, and Zokurov’s role in overthrowing the Rani government, and in murdering Cinda Mallick.

They included a transcript of their recording. Lily translated the English into Hayali and Russian, still one of Hayalistan’s official languages. The Russian and Hayali passages she translated into English.

‘Now what use will we make of this work?’ Yash asked.

‘I would like to suggest we use them at Idumali, if it isn’t a desecration,’ Lily said. ‘However, it should be a decision of the people of the mountain, not what I wish. Until you make your decision I will do nothing with these’ – she pointed at the thumb drives – ‘but in the end, I want to make them available to American and European media.’

She explained what she had in mind. Yash and his cousin started to debate her idea, but the week’s work had required such close concentration that Lily fell asleep before they made a decision. Yash wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the grandmother’s house. He placed her on her rug in the family room where she slept the clock around.

68

DRAG QUEEN?

Thom Kolchak had hoped for an interview with Anta; it was why he had singled out Mika after the demonstration ended. When he read Lily’s note, telling him Anta had been talking to Arnold Sylvester disguised in a hijab, he laughed, the idea seemed so preposterous. However, he was a careful journalist. He was being offered a scoop, if it wasn’t a scam. He called up video footage of the protest on social media and looked for Anta. There were dozens of videos on TikTok and Instagram, and he saw the muhajjabah waylay Anta as she left the grandstand.

Kolchak himself was visible in a number of videos as he came between Mika and Anta, and persuaded Mika to leave with him. He’d been so intent on his own quarry that he hadn’t paid attention to the person speaking to Anta.

What struck him now was how big the muhajjabah was – tall and rotund. He realized that the hijab made her – him? – invisible as a person. He looked for videos that showed the muhajjabah walking away from Anta. Sure enough, the person wasn’t used to walking in billowing skirts; at one point they had to disentangle the long robe from one of their feet, and it showed the telltale cowboy boot.

The other thing he saw was a white-haired woman limping behind the muhajjabah. She was nondescript, but her hair and complexion looked like a Westerner, not a Hayali. He couldn’t see her clearly, but he thought it might be Lily, the woman Anta blamed for Hayalistan’s woes. She had written the open letter to Colonel Zokurov that led to Kolchak’s own assignment in Ts’gali.

The note he’d received at the hotel must have come from Lily. He’d wondered at first if it came from Mika, unwilling to be publicly identified with an accusation against Anta, but it was written in fluent English. Mika’s English was stilted, schoolbook.

Kolchak went to the US Embassy, asking for both Lily and Arnold Sylvester. He was told to submit a request in writing and someone would get back to him.

He rode the tram out to the airport and slipped some money to an official in immigration enforcement. Neither Lily nor Sylvester had cleared Hayali immigration in the past month. He couldn’t know that Lily had been traveling under another name, and Sylvester had come by private jet through a soft route, avoiding immigration altogether.

That afternoon, Mika told him that people had come to Anta in the middle of the night with stories that Lily had been seen with the nomads on Muqqadas.

‘Lily witched Rani; now Anta saying Lily also witching mountain Elurbar.’

‘Bewitching?’ Kolchak said. ‘You told me you met with Lily when she was here in April. Did you feel her bewitching power?’

Mika looked at him fiercely. ‘You think I making story? No, I felt no witching, but my friend, yes. Now Duruna like puppy, saying, “Yes, Lily, I do what you saying, Lily.”’

Kolchak changed the subject. ‘Can you help me talk to Anta? I could put her ideas about Lily and the CIA in front of millions of people.’

He also wanted to ask about his anonymous writer’s claim that Anta had been talking to Sylvester, but that wasn’t a message to send via a third party, even if Kolchak had spoken flawless Hayali.

‘No. You not come to house, no one come to Anta house, she have special—’ She struggled with the English words.

‘Special visitors?’ Kolchak suggested.

‘Yes, so she saying, Mika, go home two, three days.’

He responded with perfunctory sympathy. He felt certain that Sylvester was Anta’s special guest, and his journalist DNA was crying for the chance to see him in person. Was he really Zokurov as his message claimed?

He went with Mika to another rally at the university, in hopes of confronting Anta, but she wasn’t there. The network that paid his way to Ts’gali demanded that he show up to talk about the implications of Gambrey’s reappearance. He obediently went to the camera room they’d set up in their hotel, let them make up his face, answered questions about what it meant for Hayalistan, and left as quickly as he could.

He had bought a secondhand bike to get around the city, since he couldn’t figure out the city’s tram and bus system. He rode that evening to Anta’s compound near the embassies, to see whether Sylvester might show up in a helicopter – everyone knew by then that he had fled Long Island in a personal chopper – or boat.

Anta’s compound was surrounded by armed guards who drove him away. Since most of the area was gated, protected by their own guards, the closest he could get to Anta was the tram stop used by the Hayali who came to work for the wealthy.

It had the advantage of being on the road that led into the enclave. There was a lot of traffic in the early part of the night because of the hotels, but by one in the morning, only the occasional car came through. He was dozing, thinking he should go back to his hotel, but so tired he couldn’t bring himself to mount his bike, when the gate to Anta’s compound opened.

Anta drove a Land Rover when she went around on her own, while her chauffeur ferried her in a Mercedes Maybach sedan. What came through the gate, though, was a two-seat ATV. Anta was driving, with a massive man in the passenger seat.

The sight was so unexpected that it woke Kolchak completely. Two more ATVs followed, carrying uniformed men who were likely Anta’s bodyguards. Kolchak jumped on his bike and pedaled furiously after them.

Anta and her entourage didn’t obey any traffic lights. They were traveling fast on the highway that hugged the lake’s north shore. For a time, Thom kept their taillights in view, but soon he lost those as well. He kept pedaling in a blind hope of catching a sight of her turning, or maybe turning over, but by the time he reached the ferry terminal he had to admit defeat.

The road split there in several directions around the west end of Lake Sakin. One fork led to the west side of the mountain where the road climbed to the mines and the Ts’gali Pass, another curved around the western end of Lake Sakin into the old city, while the third ran due west all the way to the Caspian Sea.

It was four in the morning. The ferry terminal and surrounding shops were closed. Since the first boat didn’t leave for Ts’gali’s south shore until five thirty, no one would be on duty for a good forty-five minutes.

He wheeled his bike to the waterfront, which was brightly lit, but the pontoons shifting in the oily water sounded like barking sea lions. In a zoo they might seem playful, but here in the wild dark they could leap up and knock him into the water. He rode to the other side of the terminal.

Feral cats scattered at his approach. The mountain rose behind the terminal, a dark mass that blotted out the sky, even more terrifying than the dark lake.

He was about to jump on the bike and pedal back the way he’d come, when he heard voices, a woman’s staccato, a man’s rumble. His quarry, if that’s what they were, had started up one of the trails leading from the ferry building to the mountain. They were out of sight but weren’t far away. They were speaking Hayali, so he had no idea what they were saying, but he was sure it was Anta and her entourage.

He couldn’t possibly sneak up on Anta in the dark. Her bodyguards carried weapons. And then there were snakes and bears…

He had collected Grigo’s and Mika’s phone numbers when he talked to them at the demonstration.

Kolchak knew Grigo resented him, for the attention he and Mika were paying each other. That didn’t stop him from waking up the other man.

‘Grigo, Thom Kolchak here.’

Grigo said something in Hayali, which Kolchak assumed would translate as ‘Fuck you, asshole.’

‘I just saw Anta drive off with a very large man in an ATV. I couldn’t really follow them, but I wondered if they would go up the mountain in the dark?’

He’d spoken too fast for Grigo to understand, and so he repeated the question slowly.

Grigo began shouting in Hayali, and after a moment Kolchak could hear Mika responding, sleepy and bewildered at first and then shouting back.

‘Mika not knowing. Today is much secrets at Anta, Anta not wanting Mika hearing so Anta tell her, go home.’

‘What about the man on the back of the ATV?’ Kolchak asked. ‘I’m thinking he was Anta’s special visitor. Did you hear his name? Was it Sylvester? Or Zokurov?’

There was more Hayali, and then Mika came to the phone. ‘I not seeing man, not hearing name. Like I telling today morning, Anta treat me like child, send away.’

‘Would Anta go up the mountain in the dark?’ Kolchak asked.

‘No, very much danger, fall down rocks, wild animals, easy be lost. But first trail, behind ferry, two hundred meters is resting place. She maybe go there, so no one not see her going up mountain.’

Kolchak untangled the syntax in his head. Even Anta, growing up with the mountain, would wait until daylight to go farther.

‘Where would she be heading?’ he asked.

‘Meadow,’ Mika said promptly. ‘Idumali meadow. Many Elurbar coming to Anta yesterday, all talking Idumali. Talking Rani. Talking recordings. I not in room, I not hearing much, but Idumali, Lily, recordings, those words they speaking much.’

‘If she’s going to the meadow with Sylvester or Zokurov, I want to be a witness to whatever happens. Can you show me the way? Or can I hire a guide when the market opens?’

There was more discussion in Hayali, and then Mika came back to say she and Grigo wanted to visit the meadow, they wanted to know what Anta was doing on the mountain, and if Lily was there as well. They would come to the ferry terminal as soon as it was daylight and help Kolchak go up the mountain.

69

THE EAGLE IN LOVE

Marissa was in her hotel near the US Embassy, writing a crisp report on the many shortcomings of the Ts’gali CIA station. If Bruce had run it like Animal House, the current director treated it like a post office, waiting for people to bring in mail but not going out to look for it.

She knew – everyone in Hayalistan knew! – that Lily was in Ts’gali, because Lily had lured Steve Gambrey to a meadow high in the mountains. The CIA could not find any trace of Lily, either through immigration and customs, or combing passenger manifests, or interrogating people they thought Lily had known.

At Gordon’s orders, Marissa had flown to the private clinic in Ankara where Gambrey was recovering. The billionaire knew he’d discovered an important meadow in his helicopter, but he couldn’t remember how he’d known to fly it there, except to say that some native had shown him.

When Marissa asked him about Lily, he said he’d shot her. ‘It took twenty-five rounds to blast her to pieces, but I did it. Her head fell into the water.’

He giggled, unnerving Marissa. ‘Her head bounced in the water and I blasted it to bits! She lied to me, you know, see what she said here?’

He showed Marissa the email Lily had sent him. This at least gave her team something to do. She sicced them on finding everything they could about Hayalistan Lives! They could see on Gambrey’s phone that he had called the number on the website. They could see a few dozen queries written to the site from people around the world who wanted a unique travel experience, but the site had no content beyond the home page.

Brian’s cyber team traced the creation of the site to a computer in the Chicago building where the theater group met. This made everyone in Langley even more furious: how come the FBI hadn’t seen Lily when she was in the building creating this trap? Brian tore the website apart but that was small comfort. Actually, that was no comfort.

No one at the embassy or the CIA station spoke enough Hayali to conduct a proper interrogation of local mountain guides. Marissa hired an interpreter and interrogated the guides who gathered at the K’tali market. No one admitted to taking Lily anywhere, but Marissa did find the guide who’d shown the route to Gambrey. That didn’t help, since the guide hadn’t seen Lily.

Marissa assigned an agent to watch Anta, since Anta’s connections would locate Lily faster than the CIA could. She was in luck: the first night that her agent was watching Anta’s compound, Anta and her bodyguards left at four in the morning on their ATVs. The agent sent up a drone to follow her but lost her behind the ferry depot near the K’tali market.

Everyone Marissa consulted agreed this meant that Anta was heading up the mountain. They had to assume she was going to the Idumali meadow, and so Marissa hired the guide who’d shown the route to Steve Gambrey.

Anta’s party arrived at Idumali in early afternoon. The ATVs were faster than yaks, but the narrow paths and steep gradients made for slow going. They also burned fuel at a ferocious rate. They’d carried extra fuel with them, but that weight further slowed their progress.

Zokurov had never been there, nor had the guards. Anta had a moment where the smell of the grasses took her back to her childhood, before her own mother died, when everyone in her extended household made a pilgrimage here. She knelt to bury her face in the meadow.

Zokurov was furious. ‘I don’t like this. This is a sniper’s paradise – all those boulders along the perimeter, top of that cliff, or in those holes.’ He pointed at the rock face with its little caves. ‘I told you this was a trap and it looks like it. If we go back down that path, they’ll pick us off like rats in a barrel.’

‘You chose to ride along,’ Anta said. ‘You wanted to see the end of Lily.’

‘I want to see what she knows. It’s preposterous to believe Rani made recordings. He never struck me as practical enough for a stunt like that. It’s even more preposterous to think any recordings survived, but I can’t be sure. I’m getting clumsy as I age. I should have spoken to your source myself.’

The source had been Tania, from Muq’tsu. After Hûbar and Lily put together their master tape, Lily had taken a copy to Muq’tsu. Duruna and Yuri came with her. When she played the recording, along with her translations, Tania and Yuri were sickened.

‘So many people lined up against him,’ Yuri said. ‘American government, American businessman, Russian agent, and our own people! Agajan, a cur, worse than a rabid weasel. Rani had no way to stand against all of them. But where was Anta when all this happened?’

Yuri went to the headman’s yurt and brought him and other village leaders to hear the recording. After the fourth time of listening, they talked for hours. Some villagers were were openly weeping as the news of Rani’s betrayal sank in.

‘But what can we do?’ Tania cried.

‘Tanuka,’ Lily used Tania’s pet name, coaxing. ‘Anta needs to know I am at Idumali with Rani’s bones. She can think anything that pleases her, but she might imagine that I did the sacrilege she keeps proclaiming: that I organized his murder and then gathered up his bones. Do you know a way to talk to her, or have a friend who could?’

Anta was a skilled and famous weaver, Tania a renowned spinner of the softest yak fiber, dyed in rainbow colors of her own recipe. The two women had often collaborated on projects.

Early the next morning, Tania went down the mountain and rode the tram to Anta’s compound. Anta came to the front gates in person to greet her. After the usual courtesies, and the presentation of yak fiber skeins for Anta to choose, Tania told Anta she was troubled by reports of Lily hiding out at Idumali with Rani’s body.

‘Of course it must be a lie, a terrible rumor,’ Tania said. ‘She couldn’t have carried his body around the world with her after she left Hayalistan. I thought if anyone knew what really became of Rani it would be you. Please tell me this isn’t possible.’

Anta studied Tania’s face and saw in addition to the lines of age, the lines of worry. Tania was a simple village soul, utterly honest. She wouldn’t lie or make up stories. Anta thanked her for coming to share the report and took a dozen skeins.

Tania refused payment. ‘You have kept the fire burning all these years. It is a gift to the Elurbar’s cousin.’

When Anta repeated the conversation to Zokurov, hiding in her guest wing, he was cautious but finally decided to ride up to Idumali with her. If the cassettes existed, he wanted them in his hands, not Anta’s.

At the meadow, after warning Anta about the danger from snipers, Zokurov found a niche in the cliff face where snipers were least likely to hit him. He ordered Anta’s protection detail to inspect the caves and meadow perimeter. When the guards gave him an all-clear, he lumbered through the high grasses to look at the remains of the helicopter.

It had been nearly two weeks since Lily had discovered Rani’s bones. In that time, most of the chopper had disappeared, including the skids. The doors were gone, but you could still read the Gambrey logo on the side of what was left of the body.

Zokurov gave one of his shouts of laughter. ‘The king of the mountain is like his machine here – both of them missing their brains and their extremities.’ Zokurov walked back to Anta, who was bathing her feet in the hot spring. ‘You’ve been taken for a ride, as the Americans say. There are no bones here, except of Gambrey’s helicopter. We need to leave now, at once, or we’ll be trapped up here in the dark, at the mercy of every mountain hunter and mountain lion that prowls the heights.’

Anta was convinced Tania had told her the truth. She was sure there must be some place the guards had overlooked. ‘What about the caves up there?’ She pointed at the ledge ten meters above their heads.

‘No way to get up there, Anta,’ the bodyguards said. ‘This is a sheer rock face with occasional holes and caves. We didn’t bring rappelling equipment.’

Anta walked the length of the cliff. She even saw the broken granite corner where Lily had climbed. She tried to hoist herself up but couldn’t get a toehold. After slipping to the ground several times and slicing her palms raw, she finally had to agree there was no way up.

Anta’s shoulders sagged. Zokurov was right: she’d been brought here to be put into a trap. Tania was such a simple soul that she must have believed some web of lies Lily told her. Anta agreed to go down the trail and back to where they’d parked the ATVs, so that they could reach a shepherd’s hut before complete dark set in.

They were still a good hundred meters from the trailhead when a voice spoke from the cliff face.

Ankari announced a hunt.

All the members of his clan,

The clan of Elurbar,

Snow Leopards,

Cried in one voice, Yes, a hunt!

They set off in the early dawn

When mists swirled on Lake Sakin,

The mother of lakes,

The mother of Hayali,

The wife of Muqqadas

The Great Mountain and

Lord of all the eye can see.

The hunters were merry in the dawn

On the mountain that ruled them.

It was Rani’s voice chanting ‘The Eagle and the Hunter.’ Anta felt as though some giant magnet had wrenched her heart from her chest. She fell to the ground, writhing in anguish.

The guards rushed to her side.

‘Is she dead?’ Zokurov demanded. ‘Only fainted? Carry her down to the carts. We need to leave – wherever that sound is coming from, they’re using it to knock her off-balance.’

Rani’s voice stopped and was replaced by the dialogue between Gambrey and Zokurov over Cinda Mallick’s death. Zokurov let out a loud hiss of air. ‘So, he did make recordings.’

‘Goldilocks, where are you?’ he shouted. ‘Not in those caves. You’re above? You found a way up and now you’re tormenting us?’

At the end of that segment, which had been in English, Lily had recorded a translation into Hayali. Zokurov and the guards were frantically surveying the cliff face with their binoculars, looking for signs of Lily, but all they saw were multiple speakers hanging from the ledge. They tried to shoot them out, but there were others, less visible, that continued to broadcast.

That next clip was the meeting between Senator Dunwoody, Gambrey, and Bruce, where Dunwoody promised to bring in tanks for Agajan to use in carrying out the coup. At the end, Lily’s voice, light and clear even in older age, translated the conversation into Hayali. She added, ‘Colonel, I can’t remember how good your Hayali is, but I’m sure you understood the English, so we didn’t translate into Russian.’

The whole party, guards, Anta, Zokurov, were so absorbed by the broadcast that they hadn’t noticed Thom Kolchak arrive with Mika and Grigo. Mika started to call out to Anta, but Grigo silenced her: they needed to understand what was happening.

‘Recordings,’ Kolchak said. He had his phone out, making his own record of the broadcast. ‘Isn’t this about the coup against Rani?’

Mika’s face was dotted with sweat. ‘This is why they were talking about Rani, and talking about tapes when I was at Anta’s,’ she whispered in Hayali. ‘I understand now.’

Treason, perfidy, and money. Over and over again the story was about who was getting paid and how much. The young people didn’t know who they were listening to, but the content was perfectly plain.

The session ended with a tape within a tape: the recording Rani had played for Lily of Dunwoody threatening to send Marines in to promote US interests in Hayalistan.

Everyone in the meadow heard Lily’s voice trembling with the effort to hold back tears. ‘Excellency, I know nothing about the Marines.’

‘And yet a Marine came with you to this meeting!’

‘My up’rosi fears what I may say outside his hearing. He sent the Marine to report back to him. He is like you, angry with me and not wanting to see me here in your country. And he is angry I came back to Ts’gali instead of staying by the dam while engineers took apart the explosives.’

A pause and then Rani ordering her to go, and Lily’s final trembling comment, ‘I sent Your Excellency a gift from the mountain, an eagle feather and an arrowpoint, wrapped in red birch. I’m sorry they failed to please.’

Another pause and then they heard Rani bellow in fury to Anta, demanding to know what became of the feather and the arrow.

‘For years you have tried to build a wall between me and Lily. What else have you hidden from me? What has she tried to tell me that you don’t want me to know? Are you with Agajan, hoping to remove me from government to satisfy your wounded pride? Leave this office, leave this building. Stay away, far away, until I know how to see past the darkness in front of my mind.’

‘Rani, no, Rani, I want Hayalistan for us, not for the Americans! That darkness, that’s Lily blinding you!’

Lily had started to put this segment into English, but her voice had shaken too much; in the meadow they could hear only the Hayali. Kolchak tried to get Grigo and Mika to translate, but they shook their heads.

And then Anta let out a scream. ‘Where is he? Where is Rani? Have you hidden him all these years to reach this moment? Show him to me! Rani!’ She ran stumbling toward the cliff.

‘Up here, Anta.’ Lily’s voice floated down from the upper ledge in the twilight. ‘His bones are here where Elurbar nomads carried them. The nomads were nearby when Rani was shot. They didn’t trust Agajan, or you, or me, to care for him. They carried him to Idumali, hoping to heal him, but he died here in the meadow, and here in the meadow he has remained.’

70

GATHERING IN THE MEADOW

Like Mika, Grigo, and Thom Kolchak, Marissa arrived at the meadow partway through the broadcast of Rani’s tapes. A Marine had flown her and a guide in a chopper to a landing point about two hours’ walk from the meadow. They stayed in the background, but when Anta collapsed, some of her guards pulled their weapons. Marissa’s Marine escort moved in front of her, his own weapon at the ready.

Before anyone could start shooting, dozens of mountain people rose from the tall grasses where they’d been lying. They seized the weapons with very little trouble and carried them to the rock face, where they were ferried to the upper ledge.

Yash was standing on the ledge, speaking in Hayali. ‘Perhaps the Russians and Americans who are here don’t know this, but all of you Hayali surely know that this meadow is sacred. No weapons may be fired here. No one may be kept captive in this meadow. It is a free place for free people. This means that any of you may leave at any time, but evening is drawing in. Traveling on the mountain in the dark is never safe. If you prefer to sleep here, we have put rugs in several of the little caves on the ground level. We have food, which we will share for those who stay behind.’

Yash paused for Lily to translate, and then added, ‘For Anta, and anyone who doubts Rani’s death, we can assist you in seeing his bones, which we mountain Elurbar have kept safe all these years. The ledge is perhaps as wide as a fox’s body, slick with water and dangerous in the dark, so do not try to climb up here without our help.’

‘You want to get rid of him before I see him and then claim thieves came in the night for him!’ cried Anta.

‘Shen Anta, come now,’ Yash said. ‘Hûrab, make ready a rope chair for Rani’s cousin.’

Hûrab and several other younger men fitted Anta into a harness and a rope chair and hoisted her to the second level, where other Elurbar helped her out. Mika insisted on following; Grigo went with her.

When Anta reached the ledge, she demanded to see Lily.

‘I am here, Anta.’ Lily was standing in the cleft in the cliff wall, a narrow opening on the ledge not visible from the ground.

‘You stole him from me!’ Anta hissed.

‘No, Shen Anta,’ Yash started to say, but Lily silenced him. ‘Not his body, Yash. His regard. Anta was a second mother to him. I was a foreigner, an American. I understand her bitterness.’

One of the women among the nomads took Anta by the hand and led her carefully along the ledge to the cave where Rani lay. Mika followed. No one knew what Anta said or did, but the nomads lay rugs down in the cave; she spent the night there with Mika at her side.

Yash lowered Lily to the meadow, where she made her way to Marissa. ‘I heard you were in Hayalistan, Marissa, but didn’t know I would have the pleasure of seeing you. It would be good to talk, you and me, and reach an agreement about letting me live openly in America again.’

‘You think that these records prove you’re entitled to that?’ Marissa demanded.

Lily smiled crookedly. ‘At least as much as Senator Dunwoody or Steve Gambrey. And twice as much as Bruce Weyrich or Colonel Zokurov. There are many copies of these recordings; Langley won’t be able to silence them. On top of that, Thom Kolchak has recorded today’s events and the Elurbar will make sure he gets safely to a place where he can broadcast them to the world.’

Marissa’s face darkened; anger mixed with embarrassment. She had been trying to call the embassy, to ask for a Marine detachment to come and seize the recordings, but like Gambrey before her, she couldn’t raise a satellite signal, let alone an ordinary smartphone.

‘Where is the colonel?’ Lily asked.

Marissa shrugged. ‘I saw him talking to some of the men over by the hot spring. Arguing, by the looks of it. I’m sure you would have known what they were saying. When they finished, he went into that cave there.’ She gestured toward the opening on the meadow level where Yash and Hûbar had set up Lily’s manikin of Professor Mat’q’uara.

Lily said, ‘You told me once in Delhi that you don’t run with losers, and for a time it made me proud to think that someone like you, the whole package of chic, smart, ironic, would think of me as an equal. I was never ambitious enough for position and authority to turn myself into someone who was socially acceptable. If I tormented you by making you sleep on a dirt floor in Kolkata, you’ve more than made up for it by forcing me to be on the run in my own country.

‘There’s nothing in these tapes about you or Gordon. Broadcasting them won’t hurt you; it might even help you and Gordon by forcing Dunwoody to resign his Senate seat.

‘If the Hayali decide it’s time to end American control of the lithium mines, let them run their country as they wish, let me live my life as I wish. And let Jason Tedros do so as well.

‘All of these secrets came bubbling to life tonight because Langley wouldn’t let Jason write his memoirs. Someone in the Company tried to kill his literary agent. Jason was under house arrest for months. I’ve been on the run, hiding in my own city, because Langley didn’t want the world to know how Bruce and Gambrey and Zokurov engineered the coup that killed Rani.

‘These tapes would have remained hidden forever, with Rani’s bones, if you hadn’t tried to stop Jason.’

‘You and Jason,’ Marissa said. ‘I never understood why your career and your safety mattered so much to him. You broke every rule, you never tried to placate anyone.’

‘Maybe that was why,’ Lily said. ‘We’ve all seen the emotional price he paid for giving in to Bruce’s blackmail. Maybe I was his talisman.

‘I have to thank you for one thing, Marissa: these past months have given me a gift, as well as pain. These recordings showed me that Rani placed me high in his mind and heart, and so in a strange way, I am grateful to you for pulling me out of retirement and giving me the chance to hear Rani’s voice again.’

Lily left to talk to Kolchak and Grigo. Hûrab was there as well. With Lily as translator, he explained that he was taking Kolchak to his side, meaning, in the nomad’s eyes, he was caring for Kolchak’s safety. He would guide him to the plateau above the meadow, where the nomads made camp, and where he would be safe from Anta’s bodyguards and Marissa’s Marine, all wanting to snatch his phone and the video of the scene in the meadow.

When they reached the encampment, four hundred meters above Idumali, Kolchak was able to get a strong satellite signal. He transmitted the video to his agent in New York, with a copy to his lawyer, Penelope Loewenhoek. Long before Kolchak made it back to Ts’gali, he and his video were an international sensation.

In the dark, people gathered on the granite lip at the bottom of the rock face to eat mountain stew, a mix of dried beans and vegetables, served with Hayali flatbread.

Zokurov found his way to Lily. ‘I should have killed you, Goldi-locks, when the opportunity presented itself all those years ago.’

‘It is never good to dwell in the islands of the past, Colonel,’ Lily said.

‘What did you know of Cinda’s discoveries?’ he asked. ‘I needed to know that, at the time, to see how far they had spread.’

‘I knew only whatever she’d done had backfired in a way that terrified her. I had been keeping her at arm’s length, because Bruce wanted to catch me in bed with her to prove I should be removed from the service. If I hadn’t been so righteous, perhaps I could have protected her from you.’

‘How did you know I was Sylvester?’ he asked.

‘Your eyes,’ Lily said. ‘I was close to you in that sled for a day. Even though the photo in The New Yorker was a bit blurry, your death-star eyes made me shiver. You laughed a lot, in the sled, and at your embassy’s parties, but your eyes were always like a cash register keypad – cold black buttons. I hope the Gambrey board rejects the idea that you should take over as board chair.’

Zokurov gave another of his braying laughs. ‘The same Goldilocks lurks underneath that white hair! Black cash register buttons – no one knows what those are anymore.’

Lily brushed the comment aside. ‘How you must have laughed at us in Ts’gali station, swallowing the idea that Bruce Weyrich was clever enough to turn a Kremlin-trained colonel.’

‘But Goldilocks, you yourself know that the best lies are the ones the asset wants to believe.’ Zokurov’s tone was reproachful. ‘I could never be sure what you thought, and I hoped to find that out, and leave you forever in that Turkmenistan snowfield.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Lily said. ‘Did Putin send you to burrow inside American institutions? Or did you engineer your exfiltration so you could snuffle at the same Gambrey trough as Bruce?’

He laughed again. ‘If I was going to confess my story to anyone, Goldilocks, believe me, it would be you. Rest assured, though, that Vladimir Vladimirovich keeps a watchful eye on all his loving countrymen.’

He moved away from her in the dark. In the morning, he had disappeared, along with one of Anta’s bodyguards. They had taken one of the ATVs parked at the bottom of the foot trail. The CIA and FBI put him on their most wanted lists. For months, there were phantom sightings in South America, Africa, even Texas, but nothing ever came of them.

Marissa returned to Ts’gali the morning after the scene at the meadow. She bade Lily an ironic farewell: ‘Every time I travel with you, I have to sleep on the ground in some godforsaken native village without plumbing.’

‘Get me clearance to live in the States under my own name, without harassment, and I promise all our future meetings will be in five-star European spas.’

‘If my career survives this mess, I’ll see.’

Lily stayed in Hayalistan for some months. She spent the time resting and rebuilding her connections with her friends in the mountains. She consulted a Hayali doctor, who repaired her damaged shoulder and hip, not using Idumali grasses, but ordinary X-rays and joint surgery.

While she was recovering, the Agajan government decided not to renew Gambrey’s leases for the lithium mines. Gambrey Enterprises was in such disarray that not even Agajan could justify taking more bribes from them just to renew the leases.

Steve Gambrey himself had dropped out of active participation in the company. He spent his days in his ranch in New Mexico, injecting himself with ever more bizarre herbs and chemicals.

The leases went to DSMM, the Australian company Cinda Mallick had worked for. Lily hoped the Australians would be better environmental stewards than the Americans, but she wasn’t optimistic. For her, the one hopeful prospect was the number of young people running for parliament, including Azam and Duruna.

All the months that Lily lingered in the villages near Ts’gali, she never saw Anta or had word from her. Tania tried to visit, tried to entice her with more yarn, but Anta wouldn’t see her, either.

‘She’s turned her face to the wall,’ Mika said. ‘She feels desolate, that she’s lost Rani three times – first to Lily, then to the coup, and now she has to admit that Lily didn’t kill him. She can’t face anyone.’

‘She can’t face herself,’ Tania corrected. ‘Take her to Idumali. Sit with her, let the grasses heal her.’

As the early Hayalistan autumn began rolling in from the mountain, Lily received the message from Marissa that all charges against her had been dropped. The Company was dealing with bigger issues than one former insignificant field agent. If Lily would leave Bruce alone, Langley would leave her alone.

No worries, Lily texted back. Bruce is safe from me. Not from the media coverage Thom Kolchak had created, but she didn’t drive home that happy thought.

She spent her last night in Muq’tsu with Tania. ‘I will return as often as my aging body permits,’ she promised. ‘As for my heart, it is still cut in pieces, but the biggest piece is here, with you and the Elurbar.’

71

THE LONG JOURNEY HOME

Lily stopped in New York on her way back to Chicago. She spent a night at a hotel in the city, where Beatriz joined her. They ate at the city’s only Hayali restaurant, down near the Brooklyn Bridge, and then spent a long night talking in Lily’s hotel room.

Beatriz told her that Halina had resigned from the CIA. ‘Right now, she’s working in the Sargo Point library, helping run story time and doing different odd jobs. She said to tell you she’s kept in touch with Keira, whose summer in North Dakota went well enough that she’s staying on to go to high school in the fall.’

Lily was a bit ashamed of the relief this news brought her. Keira needed attention and guidance, more than Lily wanted or maybe could provide, but the aunt apparently felt up to the task.

She and Beatriz drove out to Sargo Point in the morning. Jason had spent a month in Canada hiking and catching up with old friends in Canada’s foreign office, but he kept anxiously monitoring the news from Central Asia. When Langley finally returned his passport, he stayed in Nova Scotia until Lily also had clearance to return. Admiral Evans sailed with him back to Sargo Point.

While Jason had been away, his family and friends had rebuilt his house. He still spent most of his time outdoors, either on the water, or in his garden. It would take time before the house stopped feeling like a prison to him.

When Beatriz’s SUV pulled up in front of the house, he was sitting on the dock, wrapped in a blanket against the fall air.

Faith and Clare had prepared lunch, which everyone ate sitting on the dock or in Jason’s boat. Neighbors stopped by, the admiral came, eager to meet Lily in person, but as night closed in, Jason and Lily moved inside to talk about the long story, Jason’s story.

‘I’m back at work on my memoir, which is a form of confession. I’ve spent the months of my imprisonment awash in guilt. I should never have allowed Bruce to blackmail me into silence. So much harm came out of that, including, perhaps, Rani’s death.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lily said dryly. ‘Let Colonel Zokurov, Senator Dunwoody, and Steve Gambrey carry that load.’

Jason gave a snort of laughter. ‘Yes, it’s a form of vanity to feel responsible for great ills as much as great goods. At least my literary agent is actually recovering, against everyone’s doomsaying. But I need to apologize to you directly, Lily. When Gordon got the FBI to shut me down, and almost killed William Sessil, I manipulated you into ferreting out all those old Hayali secrets.

‘That picture of you in Lake Sakin – Bea found it stuck to the back of the radiator in my study when she was cleaning. I guess it fell out of my papers when Rush stole them. I told her to send it to Anta, Elurbar Compound, Ts’gali – I knew Anta hated you, and I thought if nothing came of the Kolchak boy’s article, Anta would push on you from another direction.’

He put a hand over hers. ‘Lily, I took such liberties with you, with the person I know you to be, in the hopes that you would still leap without looking. You did, but I put you in danger of your life. Every day after you started posting those Substacks I had my heart in my mouth, watching for news that you’d been shot.’

‘This year has been hard,’ Lily said. ‘I did feel you betrayed – not me, exactly, but the image I had of you. Your probity, your eye, seeing like an eagle a whole landscape and where each person stood in it. But then, in these last months I had to do my own reckoning with my own past.

‘I loved Hayalistan, I loved Rani. I know I violated my oath to my country by sleeping with him, but doing this op and uncovering America’s role in the coup that killed Rani also gave me the chance to hear his voice. I heard him valuing me and that has brought me a peace that makes up for the weeks on the run.’

They were silent for a time, and then Lily said, ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

‘Of course I knew! You drove me wild, sleeping with Rani. Even if he hadn’t been heading for the premiership, that was grounds for firing. If Bruce had come up with tangible evidence, I would not have lifted a finger to save you. I was madly casting around Asia for a station that would take you despite the rumors. When the Delhi post came through, I was going to fire you if you didn’t take it.’

Lily’s face twisted, grief, regret. ‘Maybe that would have been better. Anta was right to lump me together with the people who destroyed Rani, because we all did. It was like Lumumba on steroids, like a practice run for what we’re doing these days: destroying other countries so that billionaires can have what they want. Men like Gambrey and Zokurov are obscene, mindless maws crouched in a pool of molten gold, devouring more than their bodies can hold.

‘I guess none of my later assignments did damage on the scale of Hayalistan, but still, looking back – what good did I do? I loved the adventure, and the chance to learn new languages, new cultures – but all my carefully harvested intelligence – whom did it help?’

Jason shook his head. ‘Don’t choose to live in bleakness, Lily. It’s an easy destination these days, when we watch how our beloved country is behaving in the world, but bleakness is as destructive a place to live as arrogance.

‘Here are a few good things: all those Hayali women who trusted you because you treated them as sisters. You saw what they could teach you, and you learned it. In return, you gave them from the bounty of your own knowledge and skills. You did that over and over, wherever you were stationed.

‘No one can save the world by themselves, but we will only save it if we build bridges to each other. Look at the bridges you built in Hayalistan this past year – with the mountain Elurbar and with the young students. With the young reporter, with the villagers who were friends of your youth.

‘Here at home, you saved my life. You also brought new life to Beatriz. You helped her and her cousins find new strengths, you opened new worlds for them and their children. Take some time to savor that. Whatever you do, don’t turn your back on the world. A lot of us depend on knowing Lily’s still here.’

THE EAGLE AND THE HUNTER

Sankari announced a hunt.

All the members of his clan,

The clan of Elurbar,

Snow Leopards,

Cried in one voice, Yes, a hunt!

They set off in the early dawn

When mists swirled on Lake Sakin,

The mother of lakes,

The mother of Hayali,

The wife of Muqqadas

The Great Mountain and

Lord of all the eye can see.

They were merry in the dawn

On the mountain that ruled them.

At midday they found a clearing

A clearing in the forests that cover

Muqqadas like the thick fleece

On the back

Of the richest sheep.

As they ate,

A great eagle appeared.

She soared and twirled

Riding the air currents

She swam through the air

Like a sled pulled by dogs

Down the steep winter-covered

Slopes of Muqqadas.

The men had been merry.

Now they ceased their laughing

Ceased their drinking

Their joke telling.

Sankari, the hero,

Greatest of all the Elurbar

In the hunt,

Rose from the ground

Eyes on the eagle

He left the clearing

Left his friends

Their cries unheard

Left his bow,

His stone-sharpened arrows

Walked sure-foot

Into the dense forest

On paths no man

Or mountain sheep could find

Walked sure-foot

On paths seen only

By the far-searching

eagle.

The eagle wearies of the hunter and abandons him to his human friends.

Sankari ran, arms reaching, heart pounding

My life lies in your wings

My life is not here,

Not here with men

Whose talk is heavy

Whose talk clouds my head

Their talk – a cock the size of Muqqadas—

Roaring laughter—

Coarse words from men

Whom love has not touched.

Coarse words from men

Whose lungs shatter

In the pure thin air

Atop Muqqadas

And so their thoughts are thick.

Their words ugly

Return to me, my beloved

Return or my heart will crack in two

Inside my breast

Like the spine of a mountain sheep

Cracking in two inside your talons.

.

.

And then, later, as eagle and hunter are reunited, and come to save

Hayalistan:

Down from Muqqadas the Eagle flew

Down from Muqqadas ran the Hunter

Hunter and Eagle

Eagle and Hunter

A blur of motion

Two figures joined

Two figures, one will:

To drive away from Sakin—

She who was wife

To Mighty Muqqadas—

To drive out barbarians

To drive out outlaws

To cleanse Sakin

Our holy source of life

Heart of Lord Muqqadas

Light the great fire!

Call the people!

Let them dance,

Let them sing

Sing praise to the Eagle

Praise to the Hunter

Whom she commands

Praise Eagle, praise Hunter

Who restored rightness

Restored peace

Restored life

To Muqqadas

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bad Company came to me in a charming old hotel in Paris. This didn’t happen because I was Joyce or Stein, propelled to new levels of creativity by Paris itself. Rather, I fell out of bed one morning. As I sat on the floor massaging my sore joints, I imagined an aging detective who still wanted to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but her body wouldn’t do the job anymore.

Lily would be a retired CIA agent, on the run from the Company itself. I invented Hayalistan, a mountainous Central Asian country, where Lily spent the greatest part of her career. I spent many – perhaps too many – happy hours writing about their poetry, their clan system, the mountain nomads-cum-smugglers, the full moon rituals the women practiced.

Bad Company is about people who work for the CIA, but it is not about the CIA. People who know the Company will realize I’ve created my own version of the agency, including its organizational structure. I’ve tried to remain true to the CIA’s stated mission of providing the President of the United States with the best possible intelligence so that he/she can make the best possible decisions in our national interest. I’ve also been mindful of the central role electronic surveillance has taken in intelligence gathering. My characters ponder whether that’s always a useful or good thing, just as they worry about whether their own work has been valuable or not.

As a young woman, I spent fifteen years in the corporate world. Most of us were just doing our jobs, but there were always people who wanted to be close to the corporate power centers. They wanted to move up the work ladder themselves, they wanted the jobs with visibility and access, they managed up, never down. They undercut subordinates, claimed ownership of work they hadn’t done, and counted success in how many high-level meetings they attended.

Jockeying to be close to power looks the same in government as it does in the corporate world. Sexism is exhausting and rampant in both places. Bad Company is more concerned with how the need for power and wealth distorts and corrupts us, than it is with an accurate depiction of intelligence gathering.

My interest in how powerful people use their positions to harm ordinary people is at the heart of my VI novels as well as Bad Company. And as is also true of VI’s stories, the heart of Bad Company lies in the lives of ordinary people: a troubled teen, a gifted weaver, young people ardent for justice.

Finding ways to keep ordinary people safe from oligarchs is what makes me want to go to work every day.

THANKS

Many people helped me bring Lily to life and across the finish line.

For insights into working at the CIA, I drew on Liza Mundy’s The Sisterhood, a history of the way women were excluded from senior career tracks at the Company, and the fight women waged to have their skills treated seriously. For the strategies agents used to avoid surveillance, I relied heavily on Spy Dust and The Moscow Rules, co-authored by Jonna Mendez, who was a technical operations officer and did brilliant work with disguises. I also benefitted from a private conversation with a retired CIA field agent.

Sometime geologist Louis Baggetto gave me helpful information about Mount Muqqadas. He also vouched for the real-life possibility of the Idumali meadow.

Neil Foster stepped in with information both on weapons and helicopters. Randy Nixon was helpful with Marissa Hockney’s hair. Karl Knaub advised me on how Lily and her dogsled driver could communicate in the era right before cell phones. Leighann Dahl shared her dogsled experiences. Jolynn Parker introduced me to buzkashi. Serdar Seytaptiev gave me the Russian word for Granny.

The roster of people who provided the emotional support I needed to write this book from the beginning of draft one to the end of draft eight is long, but top of the list are Marzena Madej and Lorraine Brochu. I cannot be grateful enough to Lorraine, who mapped out timelines of a novel set in three continents and three decades – and did it every time I scrapped a draft and went back to the drawing board. My cousin Barb was with me every step of the way, as she has been throughout my life. The Blackstone singers were a wonderful community as well.

My agent, Dominick Abel, was constant in his support as he has been throughout my writing career.

Finally, I’m grateful to my editors, Carolyn Mays at Bedford Square and Keith Kahla at St Martin’s, for their faith both in Lily, and in my ability to tell her story.

ALSO BY SARA PARETSKY

The V I Warshawski Series

Indemnity Only

Deadlock

Killing Orders

Bitter Medicine

Blood Shot

Burn Marks

Guardian Angel

Tunnel Vision

Hard Time

Total Recall

Blacklist

Fire Sale

Hardball

Body Work

Breakdown

Critical Mass

Brush Back

Fallout

Shell Game

Dead Land

Overboard

Pay Dirt

Novels

Ghost Country

Bleeding Kansas

Collections

A Taste of Life

Love and Other Crimes

Ends of Justice

Windy City Blues

V.I. x3

Anthologies Edited

Beastly Tales

A Woman’s Eye

Female Sleuths

Women on the Case

Sisters on the Case

Sisters on the Case Volume Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit © Steven Gross

Sara Paretsky is a modern American author of detective fiction. Paretsky was raised in Kansas and graduated from the state university with a degree in political science. In the summer of 1966, Paretsky joined other Civil Rights activists to support Dr King and the Chicago Civil Rights leadership in trying to combat Chicago’s discriminatory housing, education, and employment systems. The summer ignited her lifelong passion for social justice. She’s made her home in Chicago since 1968. She completed a PhD in history at the University of Chicago.

Her dissertation, ‘Words, Works and Ways of Knowing’, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Like her legendary detective, VI Warshawski, Paretsky loves singing, golden retrievers, and good whisky.

@saraparetsky

saraparetsky.com

BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK/SARA-PARETSKY

Copyright

This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2026 by No Exit Press,

an imprint of Bedford Square Publishers Ltd,

London, UK

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© Sara Paretsky, 2026

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