Page 4 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

She had gone into her training at the Farm almost immediately from college at Haverford, where she had double majored in English and Psychology. She had been recruited early in the Spring Term of her senior year. That had been a dark, tumultuous time in her life, unsorted, marked by emotional upheaval. She’d had a crisis of confidence in her planned career as a Literature professor upon the death of her beloved father during the Christmas break.

She had not been sure that she had the patience necessary to succeed at her intended career or even to secure that career. English departments?humanities departments generally?were marginalized, colleges conceiving of education as almost exclusively pre-something: pre-law, pre-med, pre-business. The notion, then dear to Lizzy, that college was to acculturate students, and that culture was activity of thought, sensitivity to beauty and humane feeling—that notion seemed to have nopurchase on the imaginations of the other students, even at the small liberal arts college she attended in Pennsylvania. As a result, positions of the sort she wanted were becoming rarer and rarer, English faculties shrinking, and the competition for the few open positions fierce.

She had already been despondent about that when Christmas break arrived. Then her father had died suddenly, unexpectedly, of a massive heart attack just a few days before the holidays.

The house had plunged into chaos, all of it descending onto Lizzy. Her mother, never emotionally stable even at her best, had been crazed with grief. As the only child, Lizzy had been forced to cope with her own quiet, intense, private grief while struggling to contain her mother's loud, wild, public grief. She had arranged and coordinated the thousand details required by a death: funeral, burial, will. Lizzy had returned to Haverford's campus thin and stretched, talking her mother down by phone almost every night while trying to keep up with her classes.

The CIA recruiter at the job fair, Jane Simons, had been a tall, attractive woman. She was blonde, charming, and still quite young herself, only a few years older than Lizzy. She possessed remarkable candor for someone recruiting people for a career of keeping secrets, and she won Lizzy over personally in just a few minutes. Before becoming a recruiter, Jane had been a CIA analyst.

By the time Lizzy left the recruiting table, she had a handful of brochures and Jane's card as well as an appointment to have dinner with Jane that evening. Over dinner, Lizzy made her decision. She would join the Agency and become an agent.

And so she had. A darkling decision in a dark time.

***

Her first honeypot mission was her third mission overall, the first where she worked alone, without any direct supervision, without a handler. It had not been a honeypot mission initially, not what Kellynch?himself new to the directorship at the time?had told her to expect. She was only to use her administrative access to the mark’s schedule, datebooks, visits, and calls, seeking information needed for the CIA. The inexperienced Lizzy had allowed herself to be too eagerly attentive to the man in order to gain his trust, and he took that attentiveness to signal a more personal interest in him.

It was predictable, and Lizzy should have anticipated it. She had contacted the analyst assigned to her mission to report this change. Kellynch himself returned her call on a secure line, the only time he had ever done so during a mission. He’d reminded her of what she’d learned in her manipulation classes at the Farm, the goal being to use the relevant passion—lust, in this case—as a weapon against the mark.

The mission had been a complete success. The mark and his henchmen had been arrested, stolen arms recovered, and Kellynch had been happy with Lizzy. It had been the beginning of her rise in the Company.

But she never forgot how it made her feel to dress to arouse a man for whom she had no desire, making herself into his object?worse, intoherown object?for the sake of a mission. It was her first bitter draft of the reasoning that pervaded the Company.

Personal integrity did not matter; results did.

Without saying too much about it, she did afterward convey her distaste for the mission to Kellynch, and for a while, no more such missions came her way.

***

Lizzy rose from bed and walked to the bathroom. She turned on the light and stared at herself in the mirror, at her heavy, chestnut hair, mussed and tumbled from the pillow and her sleeplessness. A box of the blonde hair dye she’d purchased at the drugstore stood on the bathroom counter.

She could have gone back to Langley and had her hair dyed there by experts, the dye job perfect, undetectable. But Darcy's comments about her?his conviction that she was not the agent to manipulate Wickham?still made her seethe.As if bra and cup size were the measures of a female agent! Competency determined by tape measure!

Lizzy had decided, before leaving Kellynch's office, that she would not just be blonde the next time she saw Darcy. She would be a brassy bottle blonde. And she would still convince Wickham she was everything he wanted.

After she picked up the box and examined the directions, she put it down.It would be easier with help. She left the bathroom, turned off the light, and went into the kitchen.

The sun was up. Its early beams stretched through her kitchen window all the way to the opposite wall and ended in a pattern of yellow rectangles, the negative of the crisscross wooden frame of the window.

She made coffee, watching the clock. As soon as the digits indicated it was seven a.m., she picked up her phone and called Jane.

Jane and Lizzy had remained friends, although their friendship was unexpected for both of them. They had liked each other immediately at Haverford, and their dinner together had been natural, relaxed, and fun. Jane had obviously expected that once Lizzy became an agent, she would move in different circles than a Company recruiter. Instead, Lizzy had sought her out, and they had become best friends.

Jane answered, mutteringHelloin a disoriented, sleepy grumble.

"Hey, it's Liz. Have you ever dyed hair?" This was how they were with each other, no ceremony, always to the point.

Before answering, Jane yawned, perhaps trying to remember. "A few times, I guess, back in high school…college. Yeah. Why?"

"I need to dye my hair blonde for a new mission."

Ignoring the color change for a moment, Jane seized on the other news. "New mission?Already?You're just back from the last one! We haven't even had a chance to go out or drink too much wine at my place or yours! Catch up on all the non-redacted details."

"I know, and I'm sorry, but something came up. Kellynch called me late last night, early this morning."

"Need-to-know stuff?"

"Yeah, need-to-know."

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