Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
It
wasn’t exactly the sensible thing to do, standing outside in the hot
noon sun in July in Rome. Semonov paced back and forth, mopping his
brow, his handkerchief long since soaked with sweat. No, this wasn’t
sensible. He ought to have done as the Romans did, escaping the summer
heat by stopping at Giolitti for a cone of gelato, or napping in a
shuttered bedroom, or fleeing the city altogether for the breezy hills
of Umbria. But Konstantin Nikolaievich Semonov was not standing here,
pleading to be admitted to the American embassy, insisting that he had
urgent information to share, because he was an entirely sensible person.
In
his air-conditioned booth, the soldier hung up the phone. “You need to
make an appointment. No one can see you today,” he said.
“Sir!”
Semonov exclaimed, leaning toward the pinprick holes in the glass. “You
are a Marine. I am speaking to you as a fellow military man. I am an
officer in my nation’s army. My nation which is Russia.” A
needless emphasis, as ten minutes earlier he had slid his passport under
the bulletproof glass barrier to identify himself. “You must
understand. I have information that matters today. Not tomorrow, not next week.”
In
fairness to the soldier, Semonov was a hard man to take seriously. His
shirt buttons strained to contain his plump stomach. His pockets jingled
with loose change. Behind his round glasses, his eyes were wide and
guileless. But when the Marine hesitated for a moment, Semonov’s
instinct, which was well-honed, told him to seize his opening.
“I
am from Moscow.” Semonov lowered his voice. “I am here in Rome on
holiday with my wife. It would not be possible for me to communicate
this information while in Moscow. The nature of my work means that I am
closely watched. Do you understand? The nature of my work has also
exposed me to certain information that I believe your officials will value.”
“Even if that’s true,” the Marine said, “you still need to make an appointment.”
The
Marine was no more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Crew cut,
clean shave, trim as a sharpened pencil, a good soldier, a rule
follower. To grant exceptions to the rules—to take pity, for instance,
on a sweaty stranger with a thick accent—required the seasoning of age,
which he didn’t have. And so Semonov realized, with some reluctance,
that he would have to resort to blunter tactics.
Semonov stood up
straight. A change passed over his features, like a shadow passing over
the sun. Staring at the Marine, he said: “My information concerns
Robert Vogel.”
The tiniest flinch in the young man’s brow as he registered the name.
“Senator Vogel’s flight is due to land in Cairo in one hour,” he continued calmly. “His life is in danger.”
As
postings went, Rome was one of the sleepiest. It had its perks, of
course. The glamorous garden parties at the Villa Taverna, where the
American ambassador plied his guests with crystal flutes of prosecco.
The wine-soaked weekends in the hill towns of Tuscany. The simple
ability to walk safely home from the embassy without an armed escort.
But Amanda Cole would have gladly given up any of those perks for the
chance to do her job.
Her real job. The job she had
trained for. Back in Washington, when she received news of this posting,
her boss in the Directorate of Operations only shook his head, both
sympathetic to and bemused by her obvious disappointment. “Enjoy it,”
he’d said. “Try to make some memories, Cole. You’ll be glad to have them
when you get to the next Third World bunker.”
Italian-style
lunch breaks were another perk of the posting. On any given day, between
the hours of noon and 3 p.m., most of her colleagues were nowhere to be
found. They went home to eat and take a midday siesta, or they enjoyed a
leisurely meal at one of the city’s finer restaurants, entertaining a
source on the government’s dime. They had learned to take the work for
what it was. If they were bored, at least they were bored in comfort.
On
that hot July afternoon, Amanda Cole was halfway through her two-year
posting as deputy station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency. She
was forty years old—though everyone said she looked much younger—which
meant that she’d been in this line of work for almost seventeen years.
It was the only career she’d ever had, if you didn’t count her stints as
bartender and dishwasher and au pair. After graduating high school, she
had no interest in college. Beyond that surety, her sense of her future
was painfully unclear, so she decided to travel the world, paying her
way with a series of short-lived jobs. It wasn’t until she eventually
came home and started at the agency that she learned to channel her
restless curiosity to more productive ends. To succeed in the
Clandestine Service required an appetite for the world’s chaos. Travel
had whetted that appetite.
Her success, over time, had made her
more disciplined. Amanda knew how to play the game. From the moment her
flight landed at Fiumicino, not a single word of complaint had passed
her lips. She nodded, smiled, acted the team player. And yet she wasn’t exactly
one of the gang. The ambassador’s dinner parties, for instance. They
tended to run late, but Amanda always left early. After she had slipped
away, when her colleagues were deep into the Montepulciano, they
sometimes speculated. Was she running something off-the-books? Was she
trying to set an example? In any case, they agreed, among themselves,
that there was something obnoxious about her workaholism.
Regardless
of her reasoning, the fact was that Amanda was the only person there,
in Rome station, to answer the phone on that summer afternoon, and to
tell the young Marine not to admit this strange Russian man to
the building. This was a problem for their embassies around the world.
All kinds of people liked to bang on the gates and demand an audience.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, they were utter kooks.
After
hanging up, Amanda stared at her computer screen, trying to regain her
concentration. She was in the midst of approving a spreadsheet of
expense reports, which (no one ever warned you of this) comprised a
significant portion of her work as deputy station chief.
The
phone rang again. She picked it up and said, irritably: “You know,
Sergeant, if you want to talk to me so badly, you can just ask me on a
date.”
“He says he knows something about Senator Vogel,” the Marine said. “He has all the details about his trip to Egypt.”
“Bob Vogel?” Amanda sat up slightly. “What else did he say?”
“He
said…” The soldier hesitated. Amanda could imagine the young man’s gaze
flicking back to the visitor, wondering if repeating the words would
make him sound like an idiot. “He said Senator Vogel’s life is in
danger.”
She could have laughed at the melodrama of it. But when
she glanced around, taking in the deserted station, the dull windowless
chamber with its beige walls and gray carpet, with its lone fiddle-leaf
fig plant yellowing in the corner, she found herself thinking, Anything is better than these spreadsheets.
“Fine,” she sighed. “Send him up.”
At
least the conference room had a window and made for a change of
scenery. Amanda slid a bottle of water across the table. Konstantin
Nikolaievich Semonov took it gratefully and gulped it down. Amanda
raised an eyebrow and said: “Would you like another?”
“Please,” he said. “It is very hot today.”
Despite
the air-conditioning, Amanda noticed beads of sweat kept gathering on
Semonov’s brow. She noticed too the wedding ring on his right hand, and
the meticulous care with which his shirt had been patched and mended,
and the gold watch on his wrist. She folded her hands atop the table.
“So,” she began. “Mr. Semonov. I understand you have some information
you’d like to share with us?”
“I apologize. My English isn’t very good,” he said.
“It
sounds quite good to me. But if you’d rather continue in Russian, we’ll
have to wait until one of my colleagues returns, because I don’t—”
“No,”
he interrupted. “I am your guest, of course we will speak English. But I
say this because I must have misunderstood. You work on economic
affairs for the U.S. State Department?”
“That’s right. I’m an attaché in the economic section.”
“But my information does not concern economic affairs.”
“Well.” She smiled brightly. “It’s July in Italy, Mr. Semonov. The embassy is a little bare-bones at the moment.”
“I see.” After a long pause, staring at her, he said: “So you are Amanda Clarkson. Amanda Clarkson, the economic attaché.”
She
could perceive, beneath his sweaty brow, a deeper perception. Something
inside her twinged to attention. The detached part of her brain
carefully registered it as another data point.
“That’s me!” she chirped.
“Very
well.” Slowly, he nodded to himself. “Very well, Amanda Clarkson. Even
if you are the economic attaché, I hope you can help me. I come to you
today with information concerning Mr. Robert Vogel. He is a senator in
your country, from the state of New York. A powerful man, I understand.
An aging man, too. I have read reports that his health has been
declining recently.”
Another twinge. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard that, too.”
“He
is part of a delegation en route to Cairo. Yesterday evening, the
delegation boarded a plane in Washington. In less than an hour, that
plane is due to land. A military convoy of the Egyptian government will
escort the Americans from the airport to the Four Seasons, where they
are staying. Tonight, at six o’clock, the convoy will escort the
Americans to the Heliopolis Palace, where they will be dining as guests
of the president.”
He could have googled this, though, she told herself. It would only take a few minutes.
“The
military convoy will accompany the American delegation for the duration
of their three-day visit.” Semonov spoke with bureaucratic precision.
“The Egyptian president is determined that their safety be absolute. He
does not want his guests exposed to unstable elements. There will be one
exception, though. Tomorrow morning, the delegation will be
participating in a review of the Egyptian military. This is the primary
purpose of the trip to Cairo. For the American visitors to assess the
strength of their ally.”
She kept smiling, even as her pulse
accelerated. Sure. Nothing unusual about this. Nothing weird about a
Russian man walking in with detailed knowledge of the Senate
intelligence committee’s movements.
“During this review the
Americans will, of course, be surrounded by the military,” Semonov
continued. “It will be the safest place in all Egypt. Therefore, there
is no need for the convoy. The Americans will be free to move about,
speaking to various generals, examining the artillery, interacting with
soldiers. The review will begin at eleven a.m. At that hour, the
temperature is typically thirty-seven or thirty-eight degrees
centigrade. They will be assembled outdoors. There will be very little
shade. The president has ordered that the review last no more than one
hour. He is aware that several of his guests are older and may struggle
in the heat. Unfortunately, his precaution will not be enough. Just
before noon, Senator Robert Vogel will suffer a heat-induced stroke. He
will be taken to the nearby hospital, where he will be pronounced dead.”
She swallowed. There was no mistaking this internal quiver. But now, right now, it was important not to spook him. “Okay.” Piano, piano,
as a local might say. “Okay. Mr. Semonov. Let me begin with an obvious
question. How can you know about a stroke before it happens?”
“I
can’t. But there are certain chemicals that produce symptoms in the
human body that appear very similar to those of a stroke. So similar
that there is no reason to question the initial conclusion. Especially
when the deceased is eighty-one years old and in frail health.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Semonov. What you’re describing sounds like an assassination.”
“Yes.”
“And how could you know about this assassination before it happens?”
“Because I work with the men who will carry out the assassination.”
“And where is that?”
He squeezed the water bottle in agitation, the thin plastic crackling in his hands. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“It’s not a question of—”
“Then I should leave. I shouldn’t be here!”
He began to stand, but Amanda placed a hand on his arm to stop him. “Mr. Semonov,” she said. “I want
to believe you. I want to take this seriously. But to do that, I’m
going to need more information.” She paused. “You work with the men who
will carry out the assassination. Where do you work?”
The tension in his forehead was visible. “I work for the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
“And which division, specifically?”
“The Main Intelligence Directorate,” he whispered. “The GRU.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Cole, are you drunk?”
Osmond
Brown stood behind his desk, hands planted on his hips, narrowing his
eyes at Amanda Cole, who had followed him into his office as he returned
from lunch. Amanda Cole, who was more than thirty years his junior.
Amanda Cole, who worked for him, but who never seemed to remember that goddamn fact.
Amanda closed the door and gestured for him to sit down. There was something especially impertinent about this coming from her, what with her slight stature and the childish freckles across her nose. He almost snapped at her (this was his goddamn office, he
would decide whether to sit down), but then he shut his mouth and sank
into his chair. Over the past year, Osmond had discovered that it was
difficult to raise his voice at Amanda. She never flinched, no matter
how much he yelled, and this was strangely deflating.
“He’s telling the truth,” she said.
“And how on God’s green earth can you know a thing like that?”
“Because he’s scared. He’s terrified. It’s not the kind of thing you can fake.”
“Did
you ever stop to consider,” Osmond said, in his Mississippi drawl,
which often grew exaggerated after a glass or two of wine, “that maybe
the man is so goddamn terrified because he’s being dangled as bait to the Americans?”
“They would never pick a man like him for a dangle.”
“Oh yes. My apologies, Ms. Cole. I seem to have forgotten you’re a mind reader, too.”
“If
the Russians were trying to sell us on an agent,” she continued,
ignoring Osmond’s sarcasm, as she always did, “they’d pick someone who
looks the part. Someone with an obvious motive. Greed, preferably. Greed
is always the most convincing.”
Osmond scowled. “Let me guess. Now you’re going to tell me that your new friend doesn’t have a greedy bone in his body.”
She
held up her wrist. “His watch. He’s wearing a TAG Heuer. So he’s
well-off, he’s comfortable, but his shirt is mended in at least half a
dozen places. He clearly isn’t materialistic. Not enough to make for a
convincing dangle. The Russians only pick people who look the
part. Semonov doesn’t, and he’s terrified. That fear is the information
we’re working with. And in less than twenty-four hours, there’s going to
be—”
“Whoa,” he interrupted. “Whoa! Hold it right there. You’re acting like we have to do something about this.”
“Well, yeah. Of course we have to.”
“Says who, Cole?”
“Says the evidence, sir.”
Across
the expanse of his desk, Osmond regarded her. Despite his best
intentions, he had allowed himself a glass—okay, two glasses—of
Vermentino with lunch. How could he resist when it paired so beautifully
with the sweet summer cantaloupe? But now he was tired, and he had a
headache, and this whole thing sounded like a boondoggle, and Amanda was
possibly the stubbornest person he had ever met. Dealing with this
woman was one of the more exhausting parts of the job. And yet, he knew
her kryptonite. Amanda Cole did, despite appearances, possess an
essential kernel of respect for the Way Things Were Done. She would push
back, but she wasn’t one to disobey a direct order. At the end of the
day, he saw it as his task to remind her of her fealty.
Well,
clearly she was all worked up about this. Why not indulge her a few
moments longer, before he lowered the boom? So he settled back into his
chair, folded his hands on his stomach, and said: “Okay, Cole. Let’s
talk this one through. Let’s say we decide to believe this guy, this
what’s-his-name—”
“His name is Semonov,” she interrupted. “Konstantin Semonov.”
“Sure.
Okay. Let’s say we decide to believe this Semonov, and decide that the
threat to Bob Vogel is real, and decide to act on it. We’d need to get
word to Senator Vogel about what’s happening and tell him to skip the
review. How do we do that?”
“Verbally. Send someone to tell him. One of our people in Cairo.”
“But
when? Where? How? Every minute of the delegation’s schedule is
accounted for. They have some downtime at the Four Seasons, but you
can’t just have one of our people waltz in. Everyone in that hotel, from
the maids to the managers to the goddamn window-washers, every
person in that hotel is on someone else’s payroll. That hotel is wired
six ways to Sunday. So if we send one of our people to deliver the
message verbally, what happens when that person arrives at the Four
Seasons and beelines straight for Senator Vogel? Hmm?”
The furrow of her brow softened slightly. I’m a good teacher, Osmond thought. No one ever wants to admit it, but I’ve got a knack for this part.
“You think they want to blow our network in Cairo,” she said.
“Bingo.”
Amanda
nodded. Osmond was pleased. See, at the end of the day, he just wanted
these kids (and yes, they were kids, he was older than most of their
fathers) to be a little more careful. Not to get themselves killed for no good reason.
But instead of thanking him, she said: “I don’t buy it.”
He sighed. “And why is that?”
“He’s telling the truth. I’m certain
he is. And don’t just say he’s their useful idiot, that his bosses at
the GRU gave him this line to swallow and counted on him feeling guilty
and running to the Americans. He’s smart. He’d see through it. He saw
through my cover in about three seconds flat.”
“Look, Amanda, I
get it. You’re bored out of your mind.” He tapped a finger against his
temple. “Nothing happens in Rome. This isn’t where the action is. And
they know that, too. They’re trying to use that boredom against you.”
“You’re really suggesting we do nothing about this?”
“I’m not suggesting. I’m telling.”
She
shook her head, but her eyes went glassy. She tended to do this, to go
quiet and retreat into cool detachment when she was overruled. Osmond
respected her for fighting as hard as she did, but he also respected her
for knowing when to surrender.
“We’re the soft underbelly,” he
explained, feeling that pleasant flood of paternal benevolence that was,
quite frankly, the only aspect of the job that still made him feel
good. “Our networks in the Middle East are airtight. It wouldn’t work to
target them directly. So the Russians try to take the back door. They
plant a seed in Rome and hope the tendril reaches Cairo. All they need
to do is keep an eye on Senator Vogel. If we send someone to meet Vogel
at his hotel, bingo: they’ve just identified the Cairo network. It’s
clever, isn’t it? So the best response, or actually the only response, is to do nothing. You see?”
But
that was the point, Amanda thought. The scheme Osmond had just outlined
was too clever by half. It wasn’t how the GRU worked. The many moving
parts, the subtle contingencies: it lacked their signature bluntness.
Amanda
left his office and walked through the bullpen, back toward the door
that led to the rest of the embassy. One of her colleagues called after
her (“Hey, Cole, that guy in the conference room one of yours? The fat
guy with glasses? James Gandolfini past his prime?”), but she didn’t
hear him.
She buzzed through the unmarked door, walked down a
hallway, down a flight of stairs, down another hallway. Through the
glassed-in walls of the conference room, she saw what her colleagues
would have seen as they returned from lunch. Semonov, pacing back and
forth, like a goldfish desperate to escape the confines of his fishbowl.
Amanda
had been trying to figure out what to say, how to explain this failure
of hers, but as soon as he turned and looked at her, he seemed to know.
As she closed the door, Semonov shook his head. She felt a strange
gratitude for his perception. It was a terrible feeling, having to
deliver this kind of bad news, having to shatter another person’s
desperate hope. Semonov had just spared her that feeling.
He sat
down and dropped his head into his hands. She sat beside him, touched
him on the elbow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry. I
did everything I could.”
He was saying something, but his voice was muffled by his hands.
“Mr. Semonov?” she said. “I can’t understand you.”
When
he lifted his head, tears were spilling from his eyes. “My mother died
last year,” he said. “It was a spring day. The lilacs were in bloom.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m, um… I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Just
before she died, she called me to her side, and she said: ‘Kostya, you
have a soft heart. You must be careful. The world suffers when there are
too many soft hearts.’ She was right! I’ve been a fool.” He shook his
head. “A fool of the worst kind. I knew that this day would come. And
what did I think? That I could stop it? Look at what I have done!”
Amanda
slid a box of tissues across the table. Semonov looked at her with
watery appreciation and blew his nose with a comedic honk.
Your menagerie, her best friend Georgia once called it. Your strange little petting zoo.
Bartenders
in seedy dives, hostesses in swanky clubs. Taxi drivers with
photographic memories. Hairdressers with a knack for gossip. Restaurant
owners with private back rooms. Chambermaids and bellboys and
window-washers at five-star hotels. They liked making the extra money on
the side, and they liked how seriously she took them. They liked to
feel that occasional brush with danger. Together they comprised her
strange little petting zoo. It was part of the job, collecting people
like this, although Amanda tended to hang on to the assets even when
they had ceased offering any obvious utility.
Look at what I have done!
Semonov had exclaimed. She was curious about what, exactly, he meant by
that; what role he played in the Vogel story. The expense reports could
wait. So Amanda patted his hand and said: “Tell me about your mother.
What was her name?”
In late July the sun didn’t set until 8:30
p.m. As Amanda walked home, a benevolent twilight lit her way. Past the
church that housed the famous Bernini carvings; past the imposing marble
fountain that marked the terminus of an old Roman aqueduct; past the
ancient Baths of Diocletian. The seventeenth century, the sixteenth
century, the third century. “It sounds like you’re practically tripping
over history,” her mother once said. And she meant it as a good thing,
but history, Amanda knew, was a tricky Janus. History provided important
context, but history also exerted a dangerous narrative gravity. If you
expected the present to be a continuation of the past, you weren’t
actually looking at the present through clear eyes.
“It’s like
this,” Amanda once said to Georgia. “Remember how we used to see that
old man feeding pigeons outside school every afternoon?”
“Hector? I loved Hector.”
“And you could reasonably assume that you’d see Hector every afternoon, right?”
Georgia squinted. “Why do I feel like I’m being set up?”
“But
then one afternoon Hector doesn’t show up. And everyone is so
surprised. Because if Hector does the same thing ninety-nine days in a
row, then obviously he’s going to do the same thing on the hundredth day. But where is it written that the past ever predicts the future?”
“So you can’t bank on anything? Is that really how you look at the world?”
Amanda shrugged. “I mean, no. Not really. But I try to not be surprised when the pattern gets broken.”
But
that night, on her walk home, she wasn’t engaged in such profound
considerations. As Amanda squeezed past a crowd outside the Repubblica
metro, she could only think about how hungry she was, having missed
lunch thanks to Semonov. The refrigerator in her apartment was bare. For
the umpteenth night in a row, she was going to have to stop at her
usual stall in the Mercato Centrale. The market was housed in an old
wing of the Termini station, just a few blocks from her apartment.
Stalls sold colorful heaps of vegetables, creamy orbs of burrata,
dimpled sheets of focaccia, blistered rounds of pizza. Her favorite
stall sold fresh pasta and premade sauces. Amanda had been pleased to
discover that this demanded no more effort than did a box of Kraft
macaroni and cheese. And it tasted good and it was cheap. She had
decided, a long time ago, that this was the easiest way to feed herself.
During her visit last September, Georgia had been appalled by this habit. “You can’t eat the same thing every night, Amanda. You know that you’re in Rome, right?”
“I just don’t care that much.”
“This coming from the girl who once ate a scorpion in Bangkok. Who once drank pig’s blood in Seoul. Who once—”
Amanda
laughed. “Oh, yeah, you mean the girl who was a drunken shitshow and
didn’t know what she was doing with her life? You mean that girl? Should we bring her back?”
“You’re not giving her enough credit. She was fun.”
“She was crazy.”
“Well, she’s still in there. I know she is. No amount of Talbots can cover her up.”
“This is J.Crew, thank you very much. And also, fuck you. I like Talbots.”
Georgia
laughed. Curled up on the couch in the apartment in Rome, she prodded
Amanda with her foot. “I don’t understand it. Your mom is so chic. And
even your dad, you know, he has decent taste, in that boring Waspy way. And you, somehow, have the world’s worst style.”
“So this is my rebellion. Besides, who am I trying to impress? Other than my bitchy best friend?”
Georgia rolled her eyes. “It’s not about impressing anyone. It’s about a little self-respect.”
At
the market, Amanda also stopped at the wine stall. She rarely kept wine
in the house, but it had been a long day, and she needed it. She
unlocked her apartment to find the air inside hot and stale, so she
opened the windows in hopes of a breeze. Sometimes she wondered what the
neighbors across the courtyard must think of her. This American woman
who came and went at strange hours, whose freckles and smile suggested
friendliness, but who never offered anything but the smallest of talk.
Ten
minutes later, having changed into a ratty old pair of shorts and a
T-shirt, she flopped on the couch with her bowl of pasta and a glass of
wine. It had been a marathon day. Amanda and Semonov had covered a good
deal of his life story. How he had hoped to work as a translator for the
GRU, only to be assigned the considerably more boring job of
fabricating passports and visas. How his wife, an Italian woman named
Chiara, had moved to Moscow for work, which explained his presence in
Italy: they were visiting her family. He and Chiara had met in a Moscow
metro station. She was lost and disoriented, and Semonov helped her find
her way. He couldn’t help smiling like a schoolboy when he talked about
his wife. As the hours passed, Amanda had felt increasingly certain
that he was telling the truth. She didn’t know why exactly; she just
knew.
She stabbed at the pasta with her fork. Here was the
problem, though. She had been wrong before. Maybe Osmond was right,
maybe boredom was causing her to jump at the chance for excitement. And
she was bored. Was this just ego at work? This yearning for motion, for action,
this desire to prove that she wasn’t just sitting around, watching her
muscles atrophy from neglect? Besides, she knew the odds. Years ago,
during training at the Farm, she learned to be skeptical of walk-ins and
defectors. Those things happened in the movies, not in real life. To
recruit someone took work. The old-fashioned, time-tested,
carrot-and-stick work of psychological manipulation. A Russian walks in
and warns of a threat against an American politician? Things like that
didn’t just happen. Not according to the agency. Not according, specifically, to the people at the top
of the agency, who believed they had earned their way to those
positions of power. The idea that the world was random—that the universe
was the product of chaos—that just didn’t jibe.
But, see, on this particular point, she was stubborn. Like she’d said to Georgia: sometimes the world was random. But that look on Osmond’s face had kept her from pushing. She knew a losing battle when she saw one.
Semonov
had eventually looked at his watch. He had to go; his wife would be
waiting for him. “Where are you staying?” Amanda asked. And when he gave
her the name of his hotel, near the Piazza del Popolo, she felt a small
ping. Good, she thought. If it comes to it, that makes things easier. She walked him to the lobby and shook his hand. “Enjoy the rest of your time in Rome,” she said, in her friendliest we-know-you-have-a-choice-in-airlines tone. “And, Mr. Semonov—”
“Please,” he interrupted. “Call me Kostya.”
“Well, Kostya. Thank you for coming in and talking to me. I know it wasn’t easy.”
Amanda
stood up and carried her bowl and wineglass to the sink. She recorked
the wine and placed it in the cupboard. As she climbed into bed and
switched off the light, she thought of how his face had darkened at
their goodbye. He looked grateful for her sympathy, but mostly he looked
sad; her sympathy wouldn’t change the course of events.
The
night was hot and still. The fan at the foot of her bed did little to
help. Amanda’s mind traced an endless loop. She should have done more.
No. She had done everything she could. She thought of Semonov, at his
hotel across town, and wondered if he would lie awake all night, too.
Osmond
Brown was usually the first to arrive in the station, but that Friday
morning, the door to his office remained closed. Amanda stared at it,
puzzled, until one of her colleagues noticed. “He’s out today,” the
colleague said. “Frolicking with the ambassador in Capri this weekend.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Forgot.”
She
looked at the clock on the wall: 8:47 a.m. Having lain awake all night,
she was almost delirious from lack of sleep. The morning stuttered by
in minuscule fragments. 9:03 a.m.: writing her contact report. 9:17
a.m.: locking the bathroom door and splashing water on her face. 9:42
a.m.: making a cup of coffee. 9:45 a.m.: finishing the coffee. 9:47
a.m.: considering making another. Amanda wanted to be proven wrong. She
had never wanted this so badly. There was a bar on Via Ludovisi, one
block from the embassy. At 12:01 p.m., she decided, at the precise
moment when Senator Vogel and the rest of the delegation departed the
military review and returned safely to the Four Seasons, she would go to
that bar and reward herself for her wrongness with a shot of tequila.
11:06
a.m. They would have arrived by now. 11:31 a.m. They would be moving
among the troops, examining the artillery, talking to the generals. She
turned off her computer screen so she didn’t have to look at the time.
She gnawed on her thumbnail. She jiggled her knee. One of her colleagues
glanced over in mild alarm, but when he noticed the look on her face,
he thought better of asking her what was wrong.
Amanda turned her
screen back on. 11:57, 11:58, 11:59 a.m. Noon! Noon on the dot! She
broke into a giddy smile. “I’m going to lunch!” She jumped up from her
desk and reached for her bag. “If the chief calls, tell him I got drunk
and went home.”
“Uh,” her colleague said. “Really? You really want me to—”
But
he was interrupted by a sudden, high-pitched chirping. Halfway across
the room, Amanda froze. Every computer in the bullpen was emitting that
identical electronic chirp. No, she thought. No, no, no.
“Holy shit,” the colleague said. “Holy shit. Cole! Did you see this?”
She felt her stomach plummeting.
“It’s Bob Vogel,” he said. “He’s dead.”
