Page 34 of Two is a Pattern

Ashley rolled her eyes but headed upstairs. Kevin was already at the table, still in his blue and yellow pajamas. Zach was in his high chair, dry Cheerios scattered across the tray.

The kitchen smelled like sweet batter. The oven was on; the waffle maker on the counter was steaming.

“What can I do to help?” Annie asked.

“Do you think you could feed the baby while I finish up the waffles?” Helen shook a bottle of warm formula and handed it to Annie.

“He’ll be happier if you hold him.”

Both women turned to look at Kevin.

“He’s right,” Helen said. “He’d rather be held.”

“I can do that. Good tip, Kevin.” Annie winked at him.

“My children are very surprising today.” Helen opened the waffle iron to reveal a perfectly golden-brown waffle.

Annie pulled the tray off the high chair and set it aside, then unbuckled Zach and picked him up. Cheerios fell from his lap onto the floor. He looked at Annie for a moment with his mouth open, one little tooth peeking through his pink gums. Then he smiled and lunged at her, planting his big open mouth on her cheek.

It was the sloppiest, wettest kiss she had ever received.

* * *

No one ever said out loud that getting people to turn on their country involved sex, but even Annie, green and twenty-four-years-old, could read between the lines. Male agents brought informants home all the time, women half their age or the daughters or ex-wives of top government officials. They brought them to America to keep them safe.

Then they married them.

At first, Annie had focused on interrogating the people stationed with her, but Minsk had been different. The agent scheduled for the assignment had gone into the hospital rather suddenly with a burst appendix that was almost fatal, and Annie was tapped as a replacement. All international agents had a cover, so she didn’t know who she was replacing, and it really didn’t matter. Annie went where she was told.

Annie liked sex well enough. Most of her sexual encounters had been while she was in college, though she’d met a man in a bar a few months back and went home with him. She’d made up a name, a job, a reason for drinking alone that night. Gotten dressed in the darkness and left when the sun was no more than a hint of pink on the horizon. She didn’t leave her phone number. She knew going into the encounter that she would never see him again. The sex was fine—parts of it good, even—but lying underneath him, she thought the whole time about what she really wanted instead.

In Minsk, she’d been assigned a midlevel government worker—a lackey for a well-known politician. The intelligence packet on the man contained information about his childhood, his education, his professional career and aspirations, and his family, but she still didn’t see a clear way in. She was explicitly directed to stay away from the wife and daughter.

“Do it like in the movies, hon,” her supervisor had said with a laugh that sounded like a seal barking when she complained about being stuck. The image of a seal was made more real bythe fact that his office always smelled like reheated fish. “Put on a fancy dress and seduce him.”

It had been a poor joke, but she had still considered the idea as she lay on scratchy sheets in her twin bed at night. Seduction was just like manipulation with acting on the side, and she was good at both. The problem was her target. She’d been so focused on him that she forgot she could do what most male agents couldn’t do without suspicion, and why agents were warned to stay away from families.

Shecouldget close to the wife.

Informants simply would not turn on their countries if they found out their handlers had slept with their wives to get close to them, but Annie had other avenues to get close that didn’t require sex.

Getting people to turn on their country was a long con but not as hard as one might think, since the countries that American spies infiltrated were often run by harsh governments that used terrorism to keep their people in line. But Dasha wasn’t born in Belarus like her husband. She was Russian. It was an interesting time for Annie to be where she was, and it was an interesting dynamic: a husband and wife, Belarusian and Russian, and the Soviet Union dissolving all around them.

Annie didn’t hate Minsk, but she preferred Ukraine and Russia if she had to spend any length of time in Eastern Europe. Belarus was unstable; it seemed that the more independent an area became from the Soviet Union, the more that they were just trading one dictatorship for another. Belarus had a corrupt government that favored corporal punishment and communism.

People kept disappearing: agents, government officials, citizens. There was always someone who went missing, never anyone found. Annie kept her gun with her, always on edge, even in her little apartment, even when she was with other agents. She never felt safe, and it was exhausting. She didn’t want to getkilled, and she didn’t want anyone to get killed because of her, and both of those goals seemed less and less likely as the weeks wore on.

But Dasha was a real turning point. Getting close to a family member of a potential target was always a risky route. Annie had managed to avoid it until Minsk because it put the family member in danger and was ethically hard to swallow, even though it was the most obvious way for an agent to pick up information. Family members often had no idea what their loved one was doing. But Annie was out of options, so she made the choice.

Her cover story was that she was born in Canada and had traveled to Eastern Europe on a scholarship but then decided to stay. She introduced herself as Alexa to anyone she met. Her conversational Russian was quite good, her Belarusian limited at best, but no one knew enough about the regions of North America to place her accent anyway.

She met Dasha at a park while the woman pushed her baby in a stroller. It took Annie a few weeks to secure a job watching her daughter, Yeva, three days a week in the afternoons.

“My budem starat’sya yego,”Dasha said.We will try it.

Dasha didn’t work, so Annie wasn’t sure why she needed a nanny, aside from the fact that other wives of somewhat important men had them. It didn’t take long for Annie to realize that Dasha was lonely and needed someone to talk to who wasn’t her husband.

And Annie could talk. Talking was second nature to her. Talking was what kept her in from recess when she was little, what got her spanked after church, and what turned an afternoon of detention into a fairly successful high school debate career. She figured out that she could talk in other languages too and then talked herself right into Langley, sitting in a roomfull of other wide-eyed recruits in rusty theater seats under a big white dome.

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