The Spy Who Never Was Read online

  “I see,” Nora said. “So I’d move about in plain sight, and they’d observe me. Do you really think that would discredit them or change their minds? Wouldn’t they guess what you’re doing?”

  Mr. Cole leaned back in his chair again, watching her. “Not if you could pull off the assignment by next Friday.”

  “And what is the assignment?”

  He waved an arm, indicating the email on the screen. “You’d establish contact with TSB. Bring them out in the open, as you said. We’d take it from there. So, Nora, will you help us?”

  She shut her eyes for a moment, thinking of the three vulnerable field agents. Her husband had been a field agent for nearly thirty years, and she remembered how often she’d lain awake nights worrying about him. These people presumably had families and friends who cared about them as well. This was a chance to help the CIA stop the person or persons threatening their careers and possibly their lives, and to help protect vital American intelligence. It wasn’t a tough decision. She opened her eyes.

  “Yes,” Nora said.

  Chapter 3

  “No,” Jeff said.

  Nora pulled the roasted chicken from the oven and set it on the carving board. “Why not? It’s just a few days—and a few days in Paris, I might add. I’m not even doing much, merely posing as this missing agent and watching to see who crawls out of the woodwork. They’re threatening to reveal Rose’s identity. Mr. Cole doesn’t think they’d bother me, but it sure would screw up their blackmail scheme. Where’s the harm in that?”

  Her husband picked up the salad bowl from the other side of the pass-through and carried it over to the table in the dining area of the main room. He was a tall man, powerfully built, and he looked even bigger in the modest confines of their West Village co-op. They’d leased it two years ago, when Jeff had stopped being a field agent and joined the desk crew at the New York station of the CIA. His office was in a big building a few blocks south of here, so this apartment was perfect for him. For both of them: They liked having this place in addition to their main residence on Long Island Sound, forty miles east of the city.

  “I don’t just object to the op,” Jeff said, coming back over to the window for the oil and vinegar cruets. “It’s the damn timing of the thing! You’re flying out Sunday, and you’ll be gone a week or so, which means you’ve obviously forgotten about next Friday.”

  “Next Friday?” Nora checked the rice boiling on the stove. “You mean the ransom deadline for the blackmailers?”

  He frowned at her across the counter. “No, not the ransom deadline. I’m talking about the Sullivans, Patch’s parents. They’re coming to town Thursday, and we’re having dinner with them Friday, remember? Obviously not. Dana has been planning this for weeks, her parents finally meeting Patch’s parents.”

  Nora groaned. “Oh, damn, I forgot! I mean, I didn’t actually forget, merely when I said yes to this.”

  Patrick “Patch” Sullivan was Dana’s current boyfriend, a grad student at NYU, and things seemed to be serious between them; he might very well become Nora’s son-in-law. Patch was also Nora’s friend, having helped her out with the Venice op three months ago, accompanying her to Italy and nearly getting killed at one point. The two of them had bonded over much more than just her daughter.

  Jeff grinned. “That means you forgot, Pal. You forgot until this very moment.” Nora winced at his perfect logic, but she liked the nickname. Her married name, Nora Baron, was a palindrome, spelled the same forward and backward. Jeff had noticed this anomaly on their wedding day twenty-three years ago, and from that day on he called her Pal.

  “Okay, fair enough,” she conceded. “I forgot, and I can’t believe I forgot. Meeting possible in-laws is such a big moment for all of us. Now I know I must be back by next Friday. But what is it about the op that you don’t like?”

  “Two things,” he said as he uncorked a chilled bottle of chardonnay. “You don’t know much about Rose, so you don’t know if anyone might be planning to take her out—which in this case means take you out.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Nora said. “They want money from us. Why would they want to kill Rose?”

  He shook his head at her innocence. “You’re new to this, Nora, so trust me here. I don’t mean the blackmailers; I mean any one of a million other people Rose burned in the past. No one’s ever seen her, remember, and now you’re presenting her to the world in the flesh, as it were, in all her glory. You could become a target.”

  Nora paused in her chicken carving. She hadn’t thought of that possibility. Her husband was right: She was a novice at espionage, and she mustn’t become reckless. Recklessness was a spy’s worst enemy. Still, she thought the probable result of her masquerade was worth the risk.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be extra vigilant in Paris. What’s the other thing?”

  On the far side of the pass-through, Jeff suddenly looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Pal. I really shouldn’t be butting in like this. It’s your op, not mine, and you’ve already decided to do it, so maybe I should just—”

  “Oh no you don’t!” Nora cried. “You’re not going to wriggle out of this. You brought it up, so now you have to tell me what’s on your mind. Pour two glasses of that wine, please. Dana and Patch will be here soon, but first we have to talk.”

  Jeff reached for the bottle. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Nora quickly finished carving the chicken and placed it in the fridge with the rice pilaf and green beans amandine; everything would be microwaved before serving. She went out into the living room, took the glass he offered, and sat with him on the couch.

  “What’s bothering you about this?” she asked.

  Jeff thought a moment before replying. “It’s Cole. Rose has been around for a few years—”

  “Nine years,” Nora interjected.

  “Okay, nine years, and she’s kind of a legend in the Company. I never met her, but I occasionally hear stories about what she’s up to. She had something to do with the Russian-Syrian business, and that intel out of North Korea, and—I don’t know, a lot of things. Chris Waverly: That name gets mentioned from time to time. All I know is that your Mr. Cole is running her. I’ve never worked with him, but I met him at a couple of holiday parties. He’s one of the suits from upstairs at Langley, with lots of attitude and no sense of humor. The top tier of the Company is full of them: rich WASP males who went to Yale and Harvard, and they get their old classmates who are now in Congress to sign off on their projects, not to mention their budgets, usually on golf courses. You know the type.”

  “That was my impression of him,” Nora said.

  Jeff nodded. “He hosted one of those Christmas parties at his house in Bethesda five years ago. You should see the place, Pal—maids, butler, grand piano, infinity pool, a Lamborghini in the garage. His walls were covered with paintings by Picasso and Miró and all those guys, and I don’t think they were prints. His nickname at Langley is Old King Cole.”

  “Wait,” Nora said. “I remember you telling me about that party, but you didn’t say the host’s name. That was Edgar Cole? Wow. Is there a Mrs. Cole?”

  “There was, along with a couple of little Coles. They were divorced years ago, before I met him. The hostess at the party was a youngish looker named Alicia or Alexa, or something like that. The rumor was that they were playing house, but I don’t know if they ever got married.”

  Nora said, “So, aside from being rich and having a pretty girlfriend and a lot of cool toys, what’s wrong with Mr. Cole?”

  Her husband shrugged. “Like I said, he’s a suit. He’s never been out in the field; he doesn’t know what it’s like. I don’t trust any handler who hasn’t had firsthand experience, not when it comes to running ops. It’s like having a general who’s never seen action. He ain’t Mr. Green, that’s for sure!”

  Nora understood this sentiment. Hamilton Green was the director of the New York station of the CIA, Jeff’s immediate boss. Mr. Green—or Ham, as he’d inv
ited Nora to call him—was a former field operative in his sixties who was also one of the Company’s best strategists. An African-American who’d attended UCLA, Ham was as far from the CIA’s Old Boy Network as possible, so his elevation through the ranks to his current high position there was all the more remarkable. Nora’s recent assignment in Venice had been Ham’s brainchild, and he’d admired her work on it. Jeff called him Mr. Green, and he was a bit jealous of Nora’s easy, familiar relationship with their employer. Nora secretly enjoyed that.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be careful in Paris, and I’ll use my own judgment on any instructions I get from Mr. Cole. I’ll be there with at least one other American agent, someone from the Paris station, and I have you and Ham on speed dial. I’ll be fine, Jeff, and I’ll try to be back before the big event next Friday. If it doesn’t look like I’ll make it, we can reschedule—even go to them in Connecticut. But I’m really looking forward to meeting them.”

  Jeff nodded again. “So am I. Okay, do your best. There’s just one thing about this op of yours I don’t understand. I heard that Chris Waverly had retired a few months ago, but now it seems she’s just lying low for a while. So where is she now, and what does she think about you posing as her?”

  Nora winced inwardly, masking it with an enigmatic smile for her husband. “Sorry, dear, that’s classified. But don’t worry—I’m sure she’s fine with it.” It was a lame explanation, but Nora had kept her promise to Mr. Cole, so Jeff didn’t know the truth behind Chris Waverly/Rose. It was clear from his comments tonight that he—and, presumably, everyone else in the CIA—still thought Rose was an actual person. Good.

  Jeff was about to say something more, but the buzzer sounded at that moment, sending him over to the intercom beside the front door. Dana and Patch soon arrived from the elevator, grinning as they presented Nora with the dessert they’d brought, her favorite New York cheesecake from the bakery around the corner. Nora embraced her beautiful daughter and her possibly-soon-to-be son-in-law and led them into the living room while Jeff poured more wine. She didn’t mention her assignment to them, and she didn’t discuss it with Jeff again.

  Three days later, Nora flew to Paris.

  Chapter 4

  She wasn’t Nora Baron anymore. Nora smiled at this thought as the Air France Airbus descended toward Charles de Gaulle International Airport, but her smile had no humor in it. For the next few days, she was a forty-two-year-old registered nurse named Julie Campbell—divorced, no children—and she had the passport and nursing credentials to prove it, complete with her most recent résumé photo. She also had a Social Security card, two credit cards, and a New York State driver’s license giving her address as an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If anyone asked, she was a former hospital nurse who now worked for an internist in a private practice near her home.

  As usual on these missions, Nora carried nothing that identified her as herself. Her own IDs, her iPhone, even her wedding ring and the heart-shaped locket with Jeff’s photo that she always wore: Everything had been left behind. Mr. Cole and his two assistants had issued her the Julie Campbell materials yesterday, a mere forty-eight hours after she’d accepted the job, in the safe house where she’d first met them. She’d also been issued a special Company cellphone and an itinerary typed on paper. Nothing about this mission was to be described or transmitted by any means other than the secure phone line, and Nora understood that. Every day the world was learning, more and more, that there was no such thing as privacy online. An electronic leak had apparently caused this blackmail problem in the first place.

  The plane landed just after eight o’clock Sunday evening, Paris time. A driver would be waiting to take her to Hotel Lisette in the Marais district, and tomorrow she’d meet the American agent who was one of the three people using the “Chris Waverly” cover. Nora convinced herself that if she just relaxed and went along with Mr. Cole’s plan, everything would be fine.

  Her theory was proved almost immediately. Shortly after making her way through the usual formalities of entry, Nora realized she was being followed. She’d retrieved her suitcase from the carousel and was wheeling it toward the entrance where her driver would be waiting. Everyone from Nora’s flight was walking along the corridor to the main concourse. She was surrounded by bodies wheeling or carrying suitcases, talking into phones, and supervising rowdy children—often all at the same time. As she made her automatic covert study of her periphery, she noticed that two people in the crowd behind her didn’t fit into the general pattern.

  They were a man and a woman, and they weren’t together. In fact, Nora soon decided that they were unaware of each other, so great was their surreptitious focus on her. The woman was a pretty blonde in her thirties, wearing a chic blue pantsuit and sunglasses. She was fairly close behind Nora, keeping a couple of bodies between them. The man was farther back, and he was about Nora’s age, tall, with graying brown hair and mustache, dark eyes, and a brown leather jacket and jeans. Though it was evening, the woman wore sunglasses; she didn’t have a purse, and neither she nor the man carried any luggage—from an international flight. What were the chances of that?

  Nora concluded that they hadn’t just arrived from New York; they were here for her. She’d been on French soil for less than an hour, and she was already under surveillance by two separate parties. She faced forward, concentrating on the bank of glass doors ahead of her. Beyond those doors was the curb where her car and driver would be, or so she hoped. She didn’t want to be forced to stand out there waiting for her ride, pretending not to notice that she was being observed.

  As she crossed the busy concourse, she wondered what Chris Waverly would do, assuming there really were such a person. Nora had played many supporting roles in her film and TV career, including a police detective and a murderous bank robber, but never an international spy. She imagined herself as the legendary Rose—an elegant, long-limbed beauty with great hair and clothes, gliding through this airport at a casual pace, nonchalantly ignoring the bad guys in her wake. When she’d led them away from the brightly lit crowds to the darkness outside the terminal, she’d swiftly turn on them, drawing a sleek silver weapon from the holster under her designer jacket and taking careful aim…

  Back in the real world, Nora continued to the automatic doors and wheeled her suitcase out into the chilly Parisian twilight. Taxis and private cars choked the roadway in front of the terminal, their headlights all but blinding her. Squinting in the glare, she scanned the cars waiting at the curb. Several of them were limousines, their drivers on the sidewalk beside them holding up placards with names written in bold capital letters. And there was her chauffeur, three cars away from where she stood. She saw the name on his placard, JULIE CAMPBELL, and waved. With a nod, the sandy-haired, solidly built young man marched over to her.

  “Hello, Ms. Waverly,” he said in a flat Midwestern drawl. “I’m Ben Dysart. Welcome back.” He took her suitcase and headed for the limousine.

  Nora stared after him, thinking, Waverly? Welcome back? What on earth…?

  She glanced back through the glass doors. The woman who’d been following her had disappeared in the crowd, but the man was still there. He stood in the center of the concourse, watching her as she followed the young man to the car. The driver placed her suitcase in the trunk, handed her into the backseat, and ran around to the driver’s door. As the limousine moved away from the curb and headed for Paris, Nora looked back to see the man come out to the curb and hail a cab. A car pulled up for him, and he got in. The taxi followed the limousine, keeping a few cars between them.

  Nora waited in silence until the limousine exited the autoroute and entered the city before speaking up. She didn’t know what Ben Dysart had been told about her. He certainly wasn’t in the loop about Chris Waverly/Rose. On the contrary, he evidently thought Nora was the famous agent, and that she’d been here before. Even so, Nora felt that she had to take a chance with him. She glanced back at the cab behind them and
leaned forward to speak through the open partition.

  “Ben, I was followed through the airport just now, by a—”

  “—a blond woman in a blue suit,” he finished for her. “That’s Amanda Morris; she’s one of us. She was just making sure your arrival was, um, without incident, as she likes to say. You’ll meet her tomorrow.”

  Nora blinked. “Are you new to the Paris office?”

  He smiled in the mirror. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been here for three months now. I trained at Warrenton right after graduating from Yale, and this is my first—”

  “Ah, I see.” Now it was Nora’s turn to smile. This young linebacker was on his way to joining the CIA’s Old Boy Network, but he still had a few things to learn. “The reason I ask, Ben, is that there were two people following me, and one of them is in a cab behind us. A man—tall, brown hair and mustache, mid-forties. Is he with us, too?”

  Ben stared into the mirror, first at her and then at the road behind them. His face drained of humor. “Um, no, ma’am, that doesn’t sound like anyone on our team. Um, which cab is he in?”

  “The blue-and-green one two cars back, one lane over, on our left.”

  The young man frowned. “I know the streets of Paris pretty well now. Do you want me to lose him?”

  “No,” Nora said. “Actually, I want him to see where I’m going. Just ignore him, okay?”

  “Okay,” Ben said, but he didn’t sound at all certain.

  Terrific, Nora thought, relaxing back in the seat. Here I am in France, with two tails and a kid fresh out of college. At least she now knew the identity of the woman, but she wondered about the man. Was he TSB? Or could he be one of those other people, the potentially murderous enemies of Chris Waverly that Jeff had mentioned?