• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 632 0

like the lowlife he’d infiltrated, an actor unable to get out of the role upon leaving the stage after a performance. She knew that was common with all law enforcement people who went underground to get the goods on the bad guys. The Bureau had a special psychological unit specifically to help agents in that situation. A nice idea, having a shrink handy when your husband emerged from the nether lands acting like a Mafia capo or Arab wheeler-dealer. Maybe she should have seen a shrink, too. Once, when he’d come home after spending two months with an Irish gang in New York, his demeanor for weeks was distant and cold, frightening in its intensity. He’d been given the customary leave after emerging from underground— “decompression time,” it was called—and spent it looking like the gang member he’d become, never even attempting to shed that guise and return to being Special Agent Traxler—until he received orders to report to Quantico for three weeks of special training. She was glad to see Skip go that time, relieved that his menacing presence had been removed from her life if only for three weeks. Menacing. Her fear of her husband grew each time they were together, an unstated, unsettling threat he exuded without acting it out with her, laying dormant like water close to the boiling point, simmering, never bubbling over but the hissing and steam offering evidence that it was there.

The divorce was easily accomplished, uncontested, no kids to fight over, separate bank accounts that stayed that way, divvy up the cars, sell him her half share in the West Virginia cabin they’d bought as a vacation retreat, sign the papers, I wish you well. No happiness that her first marriage was short-lived and over quickly, but a profound sense of relief in its place.

Now, it was Max Pauling in her life, and bed, ex-CIA operative in Moscow, independent to a fault, good-looking and rugged and manly without flaunting it, going back to his sub-rosa life in Moscow for God knows how long, living dangerously and loving it, loving it more than her, she knew.

Why am I drawn to such men? she wondered as a jet from Reagan National screamed over the apartment building, causing her to flinch. She sometimes knew the answer, although was reluctant to admit it even to herself. The fact was, she lived what she considered a dull life, desk-bound and classroom-bound, spicing it up by pursuing little winged creatures and marking them off in the latest edition of Birds of North America, analyzing information at State each day that had been gathered by more adventuresome souls.

The pension. Was that all there was to look forward to? There were worse things—or were there?

The phone rang.

“Jess, things are heating up here. We need you.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Forty minutes later she was at her desk reading secured reports from the embassy in Moscow regarding the Russian government’s reaction to the initial charge that the missiles had been manufactured there. Dry words on dry paper. Indignant reactions by Russian officials, transcripts of Russian radio and television broadcasts, newspaper stories, long, verbose analyses from embassy “experts”—plenty of material to wade through. It was her job to read them once, twice, then read them through again, trying to discover any clues in what was said or, just as important, not said, and to write up her discoveries, speculations, insights into brief, pithy reports and, sometimes, longer analyses. She was good at this, reading between the lines, and behind them, and she knew it, which didn’t help when the paper traffic turned from stream into flood at times like this.

“Coffee?” she was asked by a colleague.

“Thanks, yes,” Jessica said, “God yes,” wishing she were back in Primi Piatti working on a second Negroni.

Part Two

Chapter 11

The Next Day

The J. Edgar Hoover Building

The multiagency meeting took place at two in the FBI’s seldom-used Strategic Information and Operations Center, a secure command center. Present were representatives of the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the