Page 7 of Two is a Pattern

“As I mentioned.” Everton bounced the baby, “colicky.”

“I bet he’s just overtired,” Annie said. “I have, like, a bunch of younger cousins and a baby niece.”

Everton nodded distractedly.

“He doesn’t want to eat?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Everton’s voice was tinged with exhaustion. “He never wants anything.”

All at once, Annie saw everything she needed to know about Helen Everton. She wore her hair in a sensible shoulder-length bob. Her light-wash jeans showed signs of wear. Her button-down shirt had a small stain at the front hem, like it had accidentally been dragged through someone’s dinner plate. Her loafers were scuffed, and her purse strap was fraying.

She was an adjunct professor, so she probably wasn’t making a lot of money. And while her clothes were well-made, they were old and worn, suggesting she’d had money at one point but was living leaner these days. She was a mother, but the third babywas much younger and a foster baby. Had she had a change of heart? Was she helping out a family member or friend who had lost custody? Or was she in it for the money that the state paid foster parents?

Annie decided to see if she could get Everton to trust her.

“You look like you could use a break. Want me to hold him for a minute?”

Everton, who’d been spinning in place trying to calm the baby down, looked over at her with suspicion.

“I’m not going to steal him. I’m a really slow runner, I promise. But I am good with babies. Even colicky ones.”

Everton studied her a moment longer, then with one more ear-piercing wail in her ear, she decided to trust this complete stranger and shoved the boy into her arms.

Annie couldn’t quite believe the woman had agreed, except for the fact that getting people to trust her was something Annie had always been good at. Still, it never ceased to amaze her. It was a game now, in a way, to see how much she could get someone to hand over to her and how quickly. Today it was a harried woman and a foster baby.

The shift was enough to startle the boy into a moment of silence while he reassessed his environment. Annie snatched the bottle before he could begin crying again and put the nipple to his lips, guiding it in and praying that the lie she had spun about being good with children was going to pay off.

She’d had a younger brother, but she’d been only two when Danny was born, so she didn’t really remember having a baby in the house. Still, how hard could it be? Feed them, let them sleep. Change a diaper every once in a while.

As luck would have it, the baby started sucking at the bottle greedily, quiet in Annie’s arms.

* * *

Annie’s first out-of-country assignment had been five years ago in St. Petersburg, though it was known as Leningrad back then. She wasn’t sure she could ever think of it by any other name. The CIA had been eager to take advantage ofperestroika, Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy reform. Her bosses thought that the restructuring of the political and economic systems would open new leads for informants.

Annie joined the CIA at the height of this disaster. She didn’t know that, of course. Most of the turmoil was internal, and they recruited hard that year—visiting universities across the country, promising good pay and a life of excitement.

Annie hadn’t seen the recruitment flyers or heard anything about it, though. She’d been studying economics, considering a possible career in finance, or perhaps becoming a high school teacher. Her mother had taught in an elementary school for a few years before she married Annie’s father. It never occurred to her that she could work for the government or that they might want her.

She didn’t go to the recruitment session, but a recruiter sat in on one of her Russian classes. Annie was almost fluent in German, having taken it in high school, and she was tearing through Russian, listening to language cassettes in her spare time and reading ahead in the textbook. She liked languages; it was like doing puzzles backwards. They were exotic and beautiful, and she liked taking them apart piece by piece.

They had done an exercise that day, performing little conversational skits at the front of the class. Annie was grouped with another woman and a young man. The man was the weak link, fumbling through his lines, sweaty and embarrassed.

Acting was just another language to Annie, and she could spout off simple phrases without effort.

“Dobriy vyecher,”she said.“Meenya zavoot Annie.”The male student was struggling, and she fed him his lines in a stagewhisper, causing the rest of the class to laugh through their three-minute performance while the professor scowled and scolded them.

When she went back to her seat, she noticed the man in the dark suit watching them. She noticed him again when she went outside.

“Annie,” he said as she passed him.“Tebe nravitsya puteshestvovat?”

“Sorry?” She understood the question, but she didn’t understand why he was asking it.

He continued in Russian, asking her if she was proud of her country. His pronunciation and accent were perfect, but she could tell he wasn’t a native speaker.

“My father’s a lieutenant colonel in the army,” she answered. “You won’t find a more patriotic person than me.”

It was a good sales pitch; the recruiters had it down to an art form. She didn’t need much convincing. The background checks were inconvenient, but the worst things on her record were a few parking tickets and some detentions in high school for talking too much during class. She said yes when they offered her a job on the day she graduated. Drove out to Virginia with her father; he tried to talk her out of it the whole way. He had spent his career employed by the United States government and knew well the ups and downs, but his jaded warnings could not overcome the high of being wanted by her country.

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