Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“Oh,” said Anna.

“Which brings us to where we are now,” said Stone.

“Which is where, exactly?” queried Taylor. “This is all fascinating, Mr. Stone, and I’m definitely a member of your fan club. But I still don’t understand what we’re doing here in Rockville.”

“You are an impatient fellow,” said Stone. “That’s what I like about you. But before proceeding, we have another important item of business.” He looked at his watch.

“What’s that?” queried Taylor.

“Lunch.”

“Who’s catering?”

“You are, I believe,” said Stone. He reached into the pocket of his khaki work pants and removed a chain with two silver keys. “The motor pool is outside in the parking lot. It’s a white panel truck with the word ‘Karpetland’ on the side. Here’s a key to the truck, and one for the front door.”

“So what’ll it be, food-wise?”

“There’s a wide range of options in the neighborhood,” said Stone. “McDonald’s. Burger King. Wendy’s. Hardee’s.”

“I vote for Burger King,” said Anna.

“That’s quite acceptable to me,” said Stone.

“Burger King it is,” said Taylor. “Who wants what?”

“Whopper with cheese, no pickle, no onion. Small fries. Diet Coke,” said Anna.

“A hamburger of some sort, with whatever condiments they have,” said Stone.

“How about a beer? It’s good for cover.”

“Fine idea,” said Stone. And so Taylor was off, cruising suburbia in his white panel truck, stopping to chat with the pretty woman in the parking lot at Burger King, shopping for beer at the 7-Eleven with the practiced eye of Joe Six-Pack himself.

22

“Don’t ever be a spy,” Anna’s father had told her a few months before he died. It was on a Sunday afternoon, not long before his second and final heart attack, and she was reading to him from a book she thought he would like, called Ottoman Statecraft. It was a sort of Levantine version of Machiavelli, written in the seventeenth century by a man named Sari Mehmed Pasha. Anna was showing off, translating from Turkish.

“In the matter of spies,” Anna had read, “perfect watchfulness and caution are essential. Rewards should be given both to the spy who comes with joy-giving news and to the spy who comes with information that excites anxiety. He must not be harmed because of news that brings gloom, for it is essential that spies have no fear of reporting their news correctly and truly.”

“Don’t ever do it!” her father had said suddenly.

“What?”

“Don’t ever be a spy.” His tone was so sharp and emphatic that it puzzled Anna.

“Why not?”

“Trust me,” Ambassador Barnes had said. “If you’re interested in the world, try diplomacy.” The conversation had seemed strange to Anna at the time. What in her father’s long and seemingly charmed career as a diplomat had made him so wary of espionage? And why on earth did he think that Anna would ever want to be a spy? She was an intellectual; she wanted to be a professor, not an intelligence officer.

“Why don’t you take the foreign service exam,” Anna’s father had suggested that evening.

Anna had been flattered. But as she thought about her father’s remark, she concluded that it probably just meant he had given up on her brother as the family standard-bearer. Anna’s older brother was, in fact, a walking illustration of how the male line of the Establishment was self-destructing during the 1970s. He lived in New Mexico, getting by as a part-time artist and full-time guru to a string of New Age women who somehow found him irresistible. On the rare occasions when he came home, before his father died, he would make a point of doing something obnoxious, like throwing the I Ching on the living-room floor while everyone was having cocktails, or doing the family’s astrology charts yet again, just to show everyone he hadn’t mended his ways. Clearly her brother was not a suitable candidate for the foreign service, much less the CIA.

Which left Anna. But she was, at that time, determined to pursue what she regarded as her father’s lost vocation—the life of the mind. She had loved browsing among his books, especially the ones he had taken with him on his destroyer during the war: the collected plays of Shakespeare, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a very dog-eared copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, the collected poems of T. S. Eliot. The modernist canon, in short. The young naval officer had carefully annotated each one, as if cramming for the great exam of life that might come with the next wave of Japanese planes. “Contrast this with Jung’s theory of archetypes,” he had written in the Freud book. “But must the modern Prince be so cynical?” he ruminated in the margins of Machiavelli. And in the pages of King Lear: “Yes! Ripeness is all.”

Every young woman, at some level, spends a part of her adolescence looking for her father and trying to connect with his world. But in Anna’s case, that was especially true. All she had wanted, back then, was to browse in his library forever. It was only after her father died that Anna learned from a family friend that he had begun his government career, not as a diplomat, but as something else. Some sort of civil servant in Germany. The lost vocation, it appeared, had been something entirely different.

Anna thought of her father, the ambassador who didn’t trust spies, as she sat under the harsh fluorescent lights waiting for Taylor to return with lunch. Stone had excused himself and gone to the bathroom, and Anna was sitting at one of the gray metal desks trying to sort out what was troubling her. She felt disoriented, though she wasn’t sure whether it was because of what Stone had said that morning or the long-buried memory of her father it had provoked. She busied herself tidying the desk, rearranging the black telephone, putting the Karpetland stationery in a neat pile.

Eventually Stone emerged from the bathroom. He had combed his gray hair back slick against