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

“Can I ask you something?” said Anna after she had brushed her teeth, taken a shower, and gotten back in bed. “How many women have you slept with in your life?”

“I dunno. Fifty. Maybe a hundred. Do you care?”

“No. But that’s a lot.”

“Not when you think about it.”

Anna pondered it for a while. It still seemed like a lot. Anna had slept with eight men in her life. She could remember each one, each detail. They all seemed like boys, looking back. It occurred to her that Taylor might be the first man—real, grown-up man—she had ever slept with. She felt an immense curiosity about him, wanting to know the secret history and geography of his life in the same way that she was discovering his body. She knew he didn’t like talking about himself, but she couldn’t help wondering.

“Why did you join the CIA?” she asked after a while.

“Because it sounded like fun, and because I couldn’t think what else to do.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. I’m a nihilist at heart. A sentimental nihilist. I liked the agency because it sounded romantic, but it didn’t really stand for anything. And I thought it would beat going to Vietnam.”

“What was your first assignment?”

“Vietnam.”

“Oops. What did you do there?”

“I was a counterintelligence officer in Saigon. I worked my ass off looking for North Vietnamese spies. But it was a joke, as it turned out. We didn’t know it at the time, but most of the country was working for the NLF, including a lot of our so-called agents.”

“And then?”

“Then Saudi Arabia, then Somalia, then Turkey. Then Rockville. Then in bed with you.”

“Did you like the work?” pressed Anna. She didn’t want to let Taylor change the subject yet.

“Less and less. It began to bore me, to be honest. And I was married to someone I didn’t like, which made things worse.”

“Dr. Marcus says people like you are the easiest for the KGB to recruit.”

“Who’s Dr. Marcus?”

“An agency shrink. He was one of my instructors.”

“Oh yeah? Well, he’s full of shit.”

“What about now? Do you like your job better?”

“Until a few weeks ago I was ready to quit. Now, I like it. It gets the blood moving in the morning.”

“Why? What’s different? The work hasn’t changed.”

“I feel like I’ve finally found the inner chamber—the real CIA that’s beneath all the layers of junk. You have to have watched things fall apart to understand what it means to find out that the core is still there. I thought it was dead.”

“So what do you want to do next, after this Karpetland thing? Do you want to stay in Istanbul?”

“Stop asking so many questions. You’re reminding me of my ex-wife.” Taylor leaned over and grabbed the elastic waistband of Anna’s panties, which she had only recently put on. “Let’s make love,” he said.

“I’m sore.”

“Only one cure for that,” said Taylor, pulling off her panties. And he was right. He was so gentle and so loving that it frightened Anna, momentarily, to think what it would be like without him.

Margaret called the next morning at the Karpetland office. Anna was embarrassed. In the thirty-six hours since first receiving Margaret’s message, she had forgotten entirely about it. Margaret’s voice was flat, noncommittal, as if there was something on her mind that she wanted very much to talk about, but not on the telephone. The older woman proposed that they have dinner that night. Anna said yes, even though she had been looking forward to another evening alone in bed with Taylor. They settled on a modest Italian restaurant in Bethesda, the kind that had an indoor fountain decorated with plaster cherubs, where the owner sang “That’s Amore,” on request.

Anna was glad to see Margaret, and more than a little curious. How had Aunt Margaret, the genteel spinster of the clandestine service, discovered that Anna was in Washington? And who on earth had given her the telephone number of the office in Rockville, which was supposedly under such deep cover? She wanted to ask Margaret who had spilled the beans, but was half afraid to find out. She tried instead to make small talk about London. Margaret didn’t put up with that for very long.

“I’m worried about you,” said Margaret after the waiter had brought them a bottle of cheap Italian white wine. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” said Anna. “It’s code word.”

“Oh, is it now? My, my! How quickly the little ones grow up.”

“Come on, Auntie. That’s not fair. You’ve been keeping secrets your whole life.”

“I’m not prying. But I must tell you that what I’ve heard about your activities disturbs me.”

“What have you heard?”

“That you’ve fallen into some scheme of Edward Stone’s.”

“How can you possibly have heard that? What I’m doing is supposed to be secret.”

“Don’t be silly, dear. There are no real secrets in the agency. In our line of work, secrets are a commodity. We produce them, we consume them, sometimes we trade them for something else.”

Anna lit a cigarette. “So what do you know? Or think you know?”

“That you’re working on a project for Stone that involves Soviet nationalities.”

“No comment.”

“And that there’s a flap.”

That got Anna’s attention. “What flap?” she asked. “I don’t know about any flap.”

“There is an interagency committee that oversees CIA operations dealing with the Soviet Union. It’s called the Soviet Working Group, or something innocuous like that.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Stone should have told you about it. But of course he didn’t, for obvious reasons.”

“What obvious reasons?”

“Because the interagency committee exists to keep people like Stone from going off the reservation.”

“Don’t play games with me. This is serious. You said there was a flap. What’s the flap?”

“It’s just a little one, for now. Someone from the State Department heard a rumor that the agency was running a covert action involving Soviet nationalities. They were concerned, because the State Department disapproves of that sort of thing.”

“I know that.”

“Then it won’t surprise you to know that the State Department queried the agency through channels—meaning through this Soviet Working