This sample chapter is the first chapter that follows a prolog describing events sixteen years previously.
Mt Vernon, Virginia, 2012. Saturday lunch was better described as snack time because everyone in the Hobson household was either busy doing something else or on their way to do something else. Jack was taking a grumpy break from cleaning out the lawn mower carburetor, which had gummed up because he forgot to treat the gas with anti-coagulant the previous fall. Jack, junior (aka JJ) was antsy to get to soccer practice. Mary Jo was passing through between a visit to a crowded supermarket and taking JJ to practice. Becky was scanning People magazine before joining her mall rat friends to waste the afternoon. Thus, noonish on Saturday was a good time for cold cuts.
Mary Jo gave her husband an exasperated look. “Jack! Wash your hands before you handle the deli!” She tried to run a tight ship in her domain, but the rest of the family was constantly conspiring against her.
“I’m just making a sandwich for myself,” he responded defensively.
“It’s what you touch while getting what you want that’s the problem, dummy.” But Jack had already admitted defeat with a sigh and was on his way to the sink. They had gone through variants of the same dialog so many times that it was as comfortable as an old pair of gloves. Even JJ just glanced at them briefly, shook his head once, and went back to wolfing down his own sandwich. Becky paid no attention to the exchange at all, being focused on her magazine.
JJ finished his sandwich and announced, “Mom, we’re gonna be late.”
“No, we’re not. Practice is at two and we are ten minutes away. If you are in such a rush to hang with your friends before the coach gets there, why don’t you jog over? I’m sure the coach would be pleased with the extra effort.”
“He makes us run around too much as it is.”
“JJ, it’s soccer! You’re supposed to run around. If you didn’t want to run around, you should have gone out for the debating team.”
“Dad, I’m on the debating team!”
“Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot about that.”
JJ was not going to let him off that easily. “You were the one who talked me into it! You said public speaking and argumentation skills would be useful.”
“They will be useful, son. It just slipped my mind.”
JJ muttered, “Christ!”
Jack snapped his head up from the sandwich he was constructing and fixed JJ with an angry look, “Hey! Watch your mouth!”
JJ went on the defensive, “Aw, Dad. Everyone talks like that now. Even the girls.”
Jack softened his voice somewhat, “I know they do. And the style for teenage girls is to dress up like hookers, too. But that doesn’t make it right. Until you are old enough to leave this house on your own, you play by my rules. And my rules say you should show respect for women, especially your mother and sister. The point is not the words, son, it’s the discipline to switch gears with the context.”
JJ mumbled, “OK.”
Mary Jo clarified, “JJ, those girls you know do not know they are fighting the wrong battle. It is good for women to have respect, even if it is just a token thing like restraining your language. When they grow up they will realize there is value in the guys who show them respect. As your father said, it’s not the words. I know them all, and they would not shock me. I also know that your father uses them when I am not around. But he doesn’t use them around me and that tells me something good about the kind of man he is. You need to keep that in mind.”
JJ responded, “OK.” This time, though, it was an acknowledgment of useful information to be filed away and acted on later. Though still studiously concentrating on her People magazine, Becky sneaked a speculative look at her mother. Even mothers of teen-aged girls could say interesting things occasionally.
Mary Jo was pleased that JJ got the message and at Becky’s furtive glance. When raising children, even the smallest victory needed to be cherished. In fairness, though, she knew that she had major victories as well. By modern standards her family was somewhat unusual because it was functional. The kids were bright, curious, mature, and avoided the sorts of trouble rebellious teenagers sought. More important, they would still talk to their parents. Mary Jo took pride in that. She had given up a career as a psychologist when Becky was born because she wanted to make sure her kids were properly raised. She had spent too much time counseling kids when it was their parents who should have been in therapy. She had no regrets thirteen years later about giving up her career when she viewed the results.
As she looked at Jack, she readily admitted that she didn’t do it alone. Their home was clearly matriarchal, and Jack had ceded her that authority readily. But he was always there, providing stability, patience, and principles beyond the simple role of bread winner. At 6’1” and lean he wasn’t an imposing figure but he somehow conveyed a kind of a fortress-like presence that one could always count on; she sometimes actually applied the Rock of Gibraltar metaphor to him. In his own quiet way he worked with the kids relentlessly, and he never let work push his quality time with them into the background. When they met, he had been handsome and still was, but she knew they cared for each other far more deeply than any physical attraction and the kids probably sensed that.
Coincidentally Jack was thinking about how they had doubled teamed JJ over his cursing. He and Jo worked well together with the kids, primarily through years of practice. Like much of their marriage, it had become routine and very comfortable. In the early years they had spent time talking about strategies and techniques. Jack had acknowledged Jo’s background as she took the lead in raising them and he certainly could not argue with success. But, he was still somewhat awed by the relentless way she had approached nest building, once she had given up her career. He could even forgive her inevitable attempts to shrink him, mainly because she was usually right.
He had seen Becky’s glance at her mother and Jo’s faint smile when Becky returned to her magazine. Exchanges like that reminded Jack that he had a very good life. The home Jo had created was so comfortable that it was easy to take it for granted. But he was very glad that she was at the center of it. After fourteen years and two kids, she still looked pretty good. She was maybe ten pounds heavier than when they met, but her figure was still good and, at 5’9” the extra weight didn’t show much. Her auburn hair still glistened, her elfin face was almost completely unwrinkled, and she was still quick to smile with both her mouth and eyes. But her looks were now of secondary interest to him; he loved her for her brilliance, her wit, her being an incredible mother, and for building a marvelous home for them all.
Mary Jo noticed Jack looking at her and raised an eyebrow in query. Jack gave her his best goofy smile and shrugged. She responded by shaking her head and rolling her eyes. That silent conversation was halted by the telephone ringing. Jack was closest and picked it up. The caller id was not available.
“Hello, Hobson’s”
“Yes. Is this Jack Hobson?”
“Speaking.”
“Good, I’m glad I caught you. My name is Earl Wheeler. I am a doctor at Plainview.” Jack immediately stiffened. Plainview was a very special medical facility that was largely dedicated to serving CIA, NSA, and other spook agencies. It was virtually unknown outside those circles. Jack had severed his ties from the CIA over a decade previously and would have preferred never to hear from them again.
“What can I do for you,” he replied cautiously.
“I’m afraid I have a situation here that may need your help. Does the name Marta Stern mean anything to you?”
It meant a great deal to Jack. “Yeah. She’s dead,” he responded in a flat voice.
“I’m afraid she is not. She is here and she is asking for you.”
“That’s not possible.” Jack recalled the mission in Kazakhstan that went bad and the FSB somewhat gleefully announcing her execution two months later.
“Actually, it is possible. The FSB lied when they said she was executed. We are not sure why; it was ‘96 when communism was dying. Maybe some hardliner was pissed off and didn’t want to return her. Anyway, they dumped her in a prison in Kazakhstan and forgot about her. She got lost in the shuffle and they only recently figured out who she was and repatriated her.”
“My god! You’re sure it’s her?” Jack reached for a kitchen stool, pulled it over to the phone, and slumped down onto it.
“Absolutely. Fingerprints. DNA.”
“How is she?”
“As you can imagine, she is a mess that I’m trying to clean up. Physically she has scars and broken bones that didn’t set right that we are fixing. The Agency feels they owe it to her to get her the best treatment. The real problem is her mental health. That’s where I come in. I’m a staff psychiatrist here at Plainview. It’s also where you come in. Apparently, the only thing that kept her sane all those years was the hope of being reunited with you.”
“Oh, god.”
“I looked you up. I know you don’t want anything to do with the Agency, but this is a special situation. I don’t think I can get her back to anything remotely normal without your help. In fact, she may get a lot worse if she finds she can’t see you.”
“You know, then, that things have changed. I don’t know what I can do.”
“Yes, I know you married and had two kids since you knew her. As a third party I can’t tell her that or she would probably go into total mental collapse. I need you to talk to her, get her on the road to recovery to the point where she can take it.”
“You think that is even possible?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. I do know that I can’t do anything more for her without your help and without you she is probably going to regress.” Jesus. The sonofabitch doesn’t mind pushing buttons.
“Alright. What do you want from me?”
“I think we need to talk first. Come up with a strategy before you to talk to her. Let me be honest. This will take some time; a lot of visits.”
“And you think there is hope?”
“She is one very tough woman to have survived at all. I think that includes mental toughness. There is no guarantee of success, but if anyone can come back, I am betting on her.”
“OK. When?”
“Could you come for a conference today or tomorrow? I think I would need two to three hours with you first for background.”
“Alright. How about this afternoon? I am about an hour and a half away. Say 3 o’clock?”
“That’s fine. I’ll clear my schedule and tell the gate to expect you.”
“OK. That was Wheeler, right?”
“Yes. And in case anything goes awry, here’s my number.” Wheeler gave Jack his number and they terminated the call.
Jack sat thinking and then realized the kitchen was quiet, except Becky turning pages she wasn’t reading. He turned to see Mary Jo and JJ looking at him. He got up and moved towards the hallway, while looking at his wife and saying, “Jo, we’ve got to talk.”
“Mom! What about practice?”
“Son, something serious has come up. I have to talk to your mother. You may have to miss practice. Sorry.”
“But…” However, both Jack and Jo were already moving into the hallway. They headed for the library and Jack shut the door after they entered. “Library” was a euphemism. Basically it was a room with a bunch of book cases and computers that the entire family shared. They sat together on a leather couch, each turned with a knee up to face each other.
“Marta Stern is alive.”
“I suspected that from your end of the conversation. Where has she been?”
“Some hell hole in Kazakhstan. She got lost in the paperwork and evidently they just recently found out who she was and notified the US embassy.”
“Oh, god! The poor woman! It’s been nearly fifteen years.”
“Sixteen. That was her shrink on the phone. Apparently she is, not unexpectedly, a basket case. He wants my help in rehabilitating her. I’m going to meet him at three to figure out a ‘strategy’ for that.”
“What kind of strategy?”
“I have no idea. He knows I’ve got a family now. The problem is that she has been asking for me. Apparently I was the reason she was able to hang onto her sanity all those years. He thinks if he tells her I’ve married someone else, it will be crushing to her. He thinks I need to talk to her for awhile to get her back on the road to recovery so she’ll be strong enough to take it.”
“It won’t be that easy.”
“I’m sure it won’t. The shrink wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence of a recovery.”
“I meant for you. You loved her. You may still love her. Seeing her as a basket case is going to create problems for you.”
Jack looked at her intently, hoping for understanding, “I can’t walk away from her, Jo.”
“I know that too. I am just saying your side of this is not going to be easy.” Jack nodded, knowing she was right. “You said this place is an hour and half. If we are going to make it by three, I have to get organized.”
“You don’t have to come, Jo. She isn’t your problem; you never met her.” Jack felt ambivalent about her coming. Having her involved with the Other Woman seemed like a complication he didn’t need. On the other hand, he had always been straight with Jo about Marta and didn’t want her to feel he was keeping her out of the loop.
“Don’t be ridiculous. If she’s your problem, then she’s my problem. I am going.” She smiled at him, “Do you really think I am going to let you go off meeting some Mata Hari type unchaperoned when she used to be your lover?”
Jack wasn’t sure how serious she was, so he opted for the more casual middle road, “I guess it was too much to hope for.”
* * * * * *
“Tell me about Marta.” They had dropped JJ off for soccer practice and were headed for Plainview. They were still on interstates but the Virginia countryside was getting more rural. Neither of them was thinking about the scenery.
“What do you want to know?”
“I’m not sure. All I know about her is that you worked together, you loved her, and she died. That was fine when she was dead, but now that she’s back in your life I’d like to know more about her. What did she look like? What was she like? How did she get caught? Anything that will give me a picture of who she was.”
Recalling Marta, Jack drove on for half a minute in silence. “She looked something like you. Same body type; same height; maybe a bit more muscle due to the training. But that’s where the similarity ended. Her hair was black as coal and her eyes matched. When she was pissed she had a glance that would wither a tree but when she laughed her eyes sparkled like diamonds. Where you have delicate, aquiline features, she had heavier, more Slavic features with a deeper, richer voice to match. I guess I would describe her as handsome rather than beautiful. Her face was very mobile and would clearly reflect every emotion. Yet she was a marvelous actor because she could call up those displays at will. Sometimes I would worry that she was just acting with me; I am quite certain I would never be able to tell if she lied to me.
“She was almost schizophrenic in the sense that when working she was all business and hard as nails. I’ve seen her kill people without a qualm and with no emotional after effects. In fact, she is very good at that and I am kind of surprised any prison could have held her so long. She was capable of great patience and could wait for just the right time when she would be utterly ruthless. When I first started to work with her, I was certain she was a sociopath. Yet away from work she was entirely different. She was full of life with a marvelous sense of humor. Very soft and feminine. When she went into a room every head turned and she didn’t need short skirts and cleavage to get that reaction. As I said, when we were together off duty, she was an entirely different person.”
“I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but how do you know she wasn’t acting about her relationship with you? Some sociopaths are very good at that and you said you didn’t think you could tell if she was lying.”
“I can’t say for sure that she wasn’t. But there were a couple of things that made it seem real. One was that she came after me. At first I was put off by her ruthlessness at work and I did think she was a sociopath, so I didn’t want anything to do with her socially. There were lots of other guys trying to score with her. Guys who had more rank, better looks, and more career potential than I had. But she focused on me.”
“You’re not exactly Quasimodo, Jack.”
“No, but she had better targets. If you are a sociopath, you let self-interest rule your choices. Yet she played guys just to get assignments with me. The second thing was that we were lovers for a year and she never slipped once. Off duty she was always ‘in character’, 24×7. Nobody is that consistent at putting on a front. But the real clincher was when she got caught.” Jack went silent for a moment as he recalled the circumstances. Then he told Jo the story.
Part way through, Jo interrupted, “Hang on; I’ve got two questions. First, what do you mean she had ‘passable Arabic’? Wouldn’t a terrorist detect the foreign accent?”
“Not really. There are dozens of Arabic languages and each has a bunch of dialects. It is not unusual for Arabs living in villages a hundred miles apart to be barely able to communicate. So the lingua franca Arabic in the Middle East is really a sort of pigeon Arabic derived mostly from languages the nomads spoke, mainly because they were used more widely and were more stable. Everyone speaks it badly, so accents are easy to dismiss. Her Russian had to be good, though, which it was.”
“OK. Now what did you mean by ‘cozy up’ to them?”
“Pretty much what you are afraid it means. She tried to avoid it, but sometimes she had to sleep with guys.”
“You’re serious!”
“Yes. This was the spook business. It doesn’t work like in the movies. For pillow talk, you’ve got to be in bed.”
“My god! That didn’t bother you?”
“It did, but that was business. It was the mission. It was what she was there for. Do you think the Agency would risk putting a female agent undercover in the field unless there was something she could do that a male agent couldn’t? I knew it didn’t mean anything to her.”
“Oh, lord! What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You know what I mean, Jack. Pillow talk works both ways.”
“It never came up for me. I was working mostly the Middle East and Arab women are almost impossible to get to that way because of the way the society works. On assignments elsewhere that was a possibility, but when it came up — which wasn’t often — there would be a guy who was more charming than I was.”
“You were still in the Agency when we got together. Would you tell me?”
“Right now, yes. If you insist on being in on this, I can’t afford to not be straight with you. It’s a minefield. But truth in advertising. I didn’t, but if it came up and was necessary to the mission I would have. But it wouldn’t have meant any more to me than jerking off in a porn movie.”
“Do you do a lot of that?” she asked, archly.
“Not lately.” After a moment he asked, “Does this really bother you?”
“Somewhat. By most definitions she was a whore, but it didn’t bother you and you loved her. I just can’t imagine myself in a world where people think like that.”
“Is that going to be a problem with how you think about her? As a whore?”
“No, not really. You clearly didn’t see her that way and I doubt she saw herself that way. It was a different world and I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to be foolish enough to judge her.” She paused and then said, “Let’s drop it. You were going to tell me what happened when she was caught.”
So Jack continued the story. He finished with, “I had to get out of there or I would be caught too. It was also protocol; you lived to fight another day. We all knew the risks and Marta insisted I go. As usual, on the job she was all business and her logic was difficult to refute. She said I would not be the man she loved if I stupidly stayed behind in a pointless gesture for her. I convinced myself she and the protocol were right, and I got out of there. The last thing she said as I left was, ‘I love you.’ Given the circumstances, I don’t think she was faking it.”
“No, I guess not.” They drove on in silence for several minutes and then Jo said, “I can’t imagine what that must have been like — fighting for your lives and then that.”
“Leaving was the most difficult thing I ever did.”
“You regret having left her there, don’t you?”
“Yeah. No matter how logical it is, no matter what training you have, emotionally you need to stay. The Agency has a policy against emotionally involved agents going on missions together for exactly that reason. That’s why we never told anyone about our affair.” Jack turned to her and gave her a quick, intense look. “I regret leaving tremendously and now I feel I owe her a huge debt, but I don’t beat myself up for leaving.”
“I think I understand. You’ve come to terms with the fact that it really would have been a pointless gesture.”
“Yeah. It took awhile, though.”
“For what it’s worth, Jack, I can identify with her. If it had been me, I would have wanted you to leave too.”
Jack nodded in acknowledgment. “In the end, that’s really why I left, not the logic of it. I knew that’s what she really wanted, and I would make things worse for her if I stayed.”
“You may have come to terms with it, but you’re still carrying a lot of baggage from your affair.”
“That I know. I’ll try to keep it from leaking out. I really don’t want you and the kids catching fallout from this. That’s why I wasn’t happy with you coming along today.”
“The kids we can keep out of it. But there is no way I can stay out of it. This goes too deeply into who you are. You know that. That’s why you told me about her before we got married. You were still carrying a flame.”
“Back then, yes. But not now. I’ve moved on. I love you and the kids and I won’t trash that. But I still care about her and I feel I owe her. I just don’t know how I’m going to repay her.”
Jo didn’t respond. Her professional instincts told her that things were not going to be that easy. If and when Jack met Stern face-to-face, his resolve was likely to fail. It might be because of guilt, rekindled love, or something else, but one way or another Marta’s resurrection was going to give him problems. And those would be her problems, too.