Aiken In Check: A Spy Game Novel

By Michael Frost Beckner

"Freighted with moral, philosophical weight, Aiken in Check pits the restless, free-associating mind of its CIA narrator, Russell Aiken, against the Agency itself in this epic climax of the Spy Game Trilogy that thrills as it digs deep." EDITOR'S PICK Publisher's Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Montrose Station Press LLC
• Release date: Sep 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985597486

Michael Frost Beckner

In 1989, Michael Frost Beckner's script for Sniper launched a military-thriller franchise now in production on its eighth sequel. Three consecutive record-breaking spec script sales and three films later, Tony Scott directed Beckner's original screenplay "Spy Game." An international blockbuster that paired Robert Redford and Brad Pitt as CIA partners and rivals, it is now a classic in the espionage genre.Beckner branched into television with his CIA-based drama "The Agency" for CBS, Beckner's pilot predicted Osama bin Laden's terror attack and the War on Terror four months before 9/11. In that series alone, Beckner would go on to predictively dramatize three more future international terror events. Having penned more than twenty-five pilots for network and cable television, miniseries and docudramas, and dozens of original motion picture screenplays, adaptations, and rewrites, he is a Hollywood institution.In 2001, intrigued by the idea of writing a two-man play focused on the four meetings between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee over their lifetimes, Beckner embarked on a twenty-year research odyssey, advised by more than a dozen of the top Civil War historians in America, which saw him transform his intimate theater piece into the most comprehensive Civil War mini-series ever written. Variously known as "To Appomattox" and "Battle Hymn," and now entitled "A Nation Divided," for the first time, Beckner's full 12-hour scripts are being released to the public in three volumes.As a commentator on American espionage, Beckner has appeared on CNN, Fox News, CBS News, TF1 in France, and as a featured guest of Bill Maher on HBO. Now, in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of "Spy Game," Beckner returns to the world of Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop with the release of his trilogy of Spy Game novels: "Muir's Gambit," "Bishop's Endgame," and "Aiken in Check."

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This night December 24, 2002

HANDWRITTEN ADMISSION PROVIDED TO THE CUBAN DIRECCIÓN DE INTELIGENCIA; ROOM 8, HOTEL FLORIDA, HAVANA, CUBA

Russell Aiken [Detainee], Senior Legal Counsel, CIA Office of General Counsel, the Central Intelligence Agency, United States of America

Santa Claus, like God, exists outside the time and space restrictions of our earthly realm. My post-tumoral neurological condition having occasion to deliver me to that unrestricted country— accept that when this statement’s runners veer across discomfiting drifts—it is only from these illusory sleigh rides, the checking-it-twice perspective the jolly old saint provides me, I can confer the treasonous gift of this avowal.

From this sofa, hunched over this coffee table, yellow pad before me, Muir’s-now-my fountain pen in hand—a blood-red, pearl-inlaid 1950 Esterbrook 69—I now bitterly repent my folly in quitting a comfortable home to risk my life in such adventures as this; but regret being useless, I will make the best of my condition, and exert myself to secure the good will of the captors who now exercise their authority over me.

We’ve traded mistakes, mis caballeros.

Mine? Easy: turning myself over to your captivity to betray everything I hold most sacred. Love and loyalty, liberty and life.

Yours? You’ve become my captive audience. Encouraged it: the cozy suite; the box of legal pads; the brown ink for my pen I’ve insisted upon (to my gratification at your annoyed effort to procure it in these late hours). That I suffer, I plan for you to share my suffering with each sentence until my final submission and I belong wholly unto you.

You’ve ordered I make this distinctive. Allow my true voice free rein (although, since voices are not bridled, you meant range. Fits better with voice. Vocal range, right? Albeit writing rather than reciting, range without larynxal context as good as keeps me with swift horses— free range having more to do with farm animals, or, well, chickens, once the barn door closes to conversation). Write on the verge of delusion, your General Trigorin says (or was it write to allusion ? No sé). I’ll take it you intend that my words convey I am their certain monarch, you having good cause to see this admission bear, under physical and psychological forensic analysis, conclusive proof of my identity to the CIA. Let them know I am who I claim to be and compose this without duress, coercion, undue influence, or the shaping of others’ hands. [Initial:

Without viable alternative, I write this now; afterward, I shall never write again. Gone, gone. Gone with the CONPLANS, OPLANS, brief analyses. Gone with the contracts, reports, memoranda. Gone with the confessions, Dear Mads, Muir missives; never to meet a Sweet Jessie, Dear Nina Valentine, I have chosen this as my last hill. All gone, but for this last opinion: nunca más, nada para nadie.

Never again, nothing for nobody.

Fuck all a’yous.

As the good Chanticleer foretells, tomorrow I go into the soup. As grim as that may be, tonight I crow my last.

But with abandon.

PART ONE

DECEPTION

This goddess flies with a huge looking glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin.

— JONATHAN SWIFT, THE EXAMINER, ‘NO. 14’, NOVEMBER 9, 1710

1

Up on the housetop reindeer pause.

Out jumps good old Santa Claus.

Down through the chimney, with lots of toys.

All for the little ones’ Christmas joys.

COVERT ACTION, defined by the 1947 National Security Act Sec. 503 (e) is, An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.

Covert action encompasses a broad spectrum of activities, but may include:

I. Political/Economic Action: CIA covertly influences the political or economic workings of a foreign nation.

II. Paramilitary Operations: CIA covertly trains and equips personnel to attack an adversary or to conduct intelligence operations. These operations normally do not involve the use of uniformed military personnel as combatants.

III Lethal Action: While the US formally banned the use of political assassinations against foreign leaders in 1976 [Executive Order 11905], the CIA may employ covert lethal force against nonpolitical enemies [read anyone else] deemed a threat [threat most casually defined] .

Whereas Title 50 of the United States Code Section 413 (e), gives the CIA sole legal authority to conduct these covert operations, the 1974 Hughes–Ryan Amendment to the National Security Act, requires the CIA must have a Presidential Finding to conduct covert activities—activities monitored by oversight committees in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives.

That’s where I come in.

Before Hughes–Ryan, roughly 50 percent of CIA Operations were exclusively or inclusive of covert action. After Hughes–Ryan, the budget for covert activities dropped to 3 percent of the total Agency federal allocation, providing funding for an average of less than twelve covert operations per annum. Only an idiot (and the US Congress) believes the CIA has spent the last three decades at this reduced level of covert hanky-panky.

Scores of headquarters-concocted covert ops steal under the oversight wire every year. On top of that, CIA officers on station routinely contrive covert actions simply to alleviate intelligence-gathering boredom.

Most are harmless. Some ingenious. Some hideously reckless. Some are spectacularly stupid. Our effort to lace your beloved Castro’s cigars with LSD comes to mind. When that failed, we doubled down and attempted to sprinkle his shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out. That failed, we Wile E. Coyote-d an Acme Company seashell onto the spit of sand at Fidel’s favorite beach-combing spot, intending it should explode when he put it to his ear.

Castro smiled at the sound of the sea.

Be they contrived as station chief chimeras or CIA herms,¹ all of them arrive on my desk with one common attribute: little thought put into possible blowback if it all goes wrong.

They do, and sometimes with stampede force.

Our congressional watchdogs tail-thump their days, drooling at the boot of the Agency chuck wagon for the fall of these meaty morsels. To avoid even the smallest oddment snapped into their maws, I’ve spent my career harvesting covert ops at the CONPLAN (Concept Plan) stage, that couldn’t possibly pass the oversight smell test, to produce fresh and incontestable OPLANS (Operational Plans) that avoid both presidential and congressional nostrilization. I achieve this by transforming the hard targets of covert actions cooked into CONPLANS into soft-boiled objectives of intelligence gathering that have zero requirement of presidential or congressional ingestion, approval, investigation, or finding. The best of these are deception operations and there is an illegal art to their legal construct—a talent I did not come by naturally.

While I attribute all things CIA I am, past, present, feared-of-future, to Nathan Muir,² my fundamental perspective of our shadow world was first illumined inside me my last civilian summer after my graduation from Cornell Law. In a Lone Pine cabin at the eastern foot of the California Sierras, at the knee— singular as the cliché goes, but in this case one-legged reality— of former CIA legal enchantress, Linda P. Morse, I learned the elementary lessons of my dark art.

Great granddaughter of Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of their namesake code, and a lifelong bachelor girl, Linda came to the CIA as a behind-the-lines saboteur of Nazi trains and Hotel Lutetia assassin via the Agency’s WWII predecessor, the OSS. Prison-lamed by her Parisian Gestapo captors, her leg, limp and sore, festered until the smell of ripe almonds indicated gangrene and it was mercifully removed—mercilessly without anesthesia. Discarded in the German retreat (Leg-O’-Linda, as she would quip), she hobbled her way back to the States, where she refused to quit her espionage profession.

Never again to paradrop into enemy territory, her law license became her dynamite, her pen her stiletto. For three decades, those covert actions of highest risk, purest immorality, and deadliest intent—which would never pass congressional scrutiny— were, in Linda’s hands, recast as deception operations that would, and did, to affect some of the most remarkable cloak-and-dagger skulduggery of the first two decades of Cold War confrontation.

But a life of outstanding secret service could not protect a life with an outstanding secret. August 14, 1972, with torch-and-pitchfork exigency, Linda Morse’s former OSS superior, Richard Helms (who bragged he once lunched with Hitler), launched his milestone internal witch hunt. Not to Whack-A-Soviet-Mole like the Charlie Marches and others burrowed into our ranks (then and for decades to come), but against the larger, fantastically more dangerous security risk: the secret homosexual legion at Langley.

As Helms’s Top-Secret directive rhetorically asked, What Is A Homo? then provided detailed instructions for ferreting [them] out, Helms (lunching that day with Linda) requested she read it over her shrimp cocktail in his private dining room.

Accurate, Linda? You think?

Oh, I am especially crazy about this part. She read: ‘There is no way to spot a homosexual. In this, it is similar to recognizing a communist. He may not consider himself queer, he may accept his psychological deviation from the normal, but he recognizes that society frowns upon him.’ Do communists consider themselves ‘queer?’

Helms gave her a pained expression. Linda’s green eyes glittered in an otherwise give-nothing face. Helms signaled the shell-shaped plate of shrimp tails removed. Linda continued from the document.

‘Recognizing the existence of his problem and living with it requires certain adjustments and certain cover in the day-to-day life of the higher-class homosexual, who is our usual subject. He frequently uses a PO Box, his phone number is unlisted, he does his own shopping’—Dear me—‘and his car is typically foreign.’ Honestly, Dick?

Linda paused at the steak au poivre placed before her. Took a moment to savor the aroma of the creamy cognac sauce and peppercorn spice. Director Helms gave an impatient nod that she continue.

‘The homosexual subject is usually regarded as an above-average employee.’ Linda cut into her meat. Through a mouthful she said, Well, that’s more like it.

She chewed, swallowed, went back to her reading.

‘His work habits are good; he is punctual, responsive to authority, cooperative, friendly, a credit to the organization.’ I do consider the gender specific ‘He’ a trifle insulting for your purpose today.

Noted. Anything else you want to say? Now’s the time.

"Whoever wrote this is clearly closeted and writing from personal experience. This is particularly astute— ‘One of the recently popular introductory remarks is ‘Aren’t you Jack from the North?’ The word North is the code word. It means homosexual and what follows is pure danger.’ She gave an acerbic laugh. They’re also making a jackass out of you."

Director Helms sighed. Gays are our most susceptible employees to foreign compromise and recruitment. They must be removed.

I’m sorry. What you’re asking—? I won’t take part as an informer to an inquisition.

Helms bore into her with his black eyes.

Oh… The glitter in Linda’s eyes faded. You’re not asking that. She lay her fork across her plate, her knife alongside it. I’ll give you this, Dick. You’ve done what the Nazis couldn’t when they took my leg.

If it wasn’t so awfully necessary, Linda.

You’ve broken my heart. You son of a bitch.

Your removal must appear—as you are senior staff—to be involuntary, and it must be public. You understand? You must appear to have been driven out.

She braced her cheeks with her palms and mocked him. In fear? Madness?

You’re highly admired here. An institution, really. It would strike the appropriate tone. For the good of the service. It will cost us much less in severance, unemployment, and pension benefits if we force frightened resignations and avoid firings.

Linda shook her head in disgust. She lit a cigarette.

Helms advised, of course, Linda’s retirement would be rewarded with full pension and benefits if she would sign her resignation papers, conveniently in the folder beside her ashtray, turn in her credential, and allow the humiliating example to be made.

She recalled this to me a couple years later over hot buttered rums on a split log bench beside her river-rock firepit that earliest time of my induction into the coven of spies. We were among the windy pines she’d named after fallen officers she’d lost in operations gone bad. It was autumn, and we were bundled in turtlenecks and Pendleton wools under a witch’s moon. Back in June, while the mayflies misted over her pond and the little brown bats swooped in sunset light, Linda had ensorcelled me to my work; by November, with the owls boisterous in the dark limbs above, we’d grown close enough to become haphazardly confessional around the crackle of her fire. She was Bacall beautiful, and I was in a kind of head-over-heels platonic love with her—something she stirred in all men she fancied, with mischievous encouragement.

She said, With that document, Dick Helms carried out the perfect covert action disguised within a deception operation.

Even in the thin gloom of moonlight, I saw it exactly. Nothing to do with sex—

"Everything has something to do with sex, Russell, or don’t you think?"

What I mean is, sex was only the myth being propagated. Linda’s eyes danced, appreciating my pun. "But this had everything to do with an instant seizure of two to four percent of our pension fund with a simultaneous and equal reduction of benefits and salary outlay."

Bravo! she winked. The homosexual purge had nothing to do with gays. It was all and only about Vietnam: a massive money-hemorrhaging wound smack-dab in the Agency’s chest. The purge was a smokescreen to create a slush fund for dirty ops we couldn’t finance any other way. Enacted by my closest Agency friend against me because he knew I’d fall on my sword for my Agency as only the most loyal of us are called to do.

She toasted me with her mug. Remember me in this, Russell, when the blade points round to you.

Here, in my Havana hotel incarceration, I glance out my balcony window across the cobbled Calle Obispo. I superimpose on the shadowed tan facade of the dark apartments opposite a living image (as my epilepsy provokes) of Linda tossing her rich honey hair as she laughs at her circumstances that long-ago now-so-present night.

The most amusing part, she said, and added a juniper log to the fire, Helms promoted my sexuality during the war. Before my own operational clumsiness led to arrest at the Paris Gare du Nord, he and Dulles used my well-honed abilities at seducing Nazi wives and mistresses of adventuresome flair many times to a ‘go forth and Yankee Doodle her for us’ advantage.

Linda P. Morse taught me a covert op has a target and goal that gains a direct result. A deception operation has a target and goal that appears to gain an indirect result but acts as a smokescreen for an unrelated/ hidden hard-target goal, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. The example she taught as the perfect, most massive, continuous covert op disguised within a deception is Santa Claus.

An American-launched deception run worldwide against children—seemingly to their benefit—adults stimulate good behavior from kids at their earliest level of understanding (our psychophysiology programmers train us long-last target assets are most effectively reached from ages one to six) by convincing them of Saint Nick’s existence and magical abilities, which, through children’s daily cooperation with rules of personal discipline and social behavior, provide, in exchange, a stocking or sack of wondrous gifts. The community reinforces this beyond the family in ever-widening circles of complicit deceit: locally, nationally, and internationally.

The magical holiday gift giver to good girls and boys reinforced at all levels in all mediums. From auditorium Nutcrackers—toddlers in tulle trained and twirling for parents and grandparents—to TV’s misfit Rudolph (who becomes a Christmas conformist) leading in lockstep a host of movies and variety shows, municipal parades, and newspapers’ ‘Yes, Virginia There is a Santa Claus’ essays, poems, and propagandizing editorials, while the advertisers for the department stores, automakers, Coca-Cola, and all the rest of the mercantile giants blizzard us with TV, billboard, radio, magazine, window- and floor-display Santas: booted and belted, clothed, groomed, and rosy cheeked, blue eyed and bespectacled, whether live or photographed, painted or plastic, cutout or cartooned: they are all the exact same guy.

Less obvious, and thus more sinister, is the letter from Santa, hand-delivered on foot by a nationwide army of US letter carriers. In 1912, Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock authorized postal employees and citizens—a federal program officially known, as Operation SANTA—to forge and mail Santa correspondence free of postage.

So intent has the US government promulgated this deception that, at the height of the Cold War, Strategic Air Command’s Colonel Harry Shoup publicly announced, The Army, Navy, and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the US against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas, giving birth to the NORAD Santa Tracker out of our Cheyenne Mountain. Our freaking nuclear missile defense command: that’s how important Operation SANTA is to our government.

The beauty of Operation SANTA is as its victims increase in age and logic, and disbelief infects the target-asset population, these subjects are inoculated into continued participation in the deception by the strict understanding the gifts they’ve been receiving will discontinue as soon as belief ends. This crucial gain-versus-punishment period of indoctrination bridges the gap from innocence, through acceptance, to conversion—i.e., the convergence of age and nostalgia that makes them willing partners in the deception as they self-perpetuate the operation (originally run against them), now against their own children and families and communities all in the name of harmless holiday hijinks.

That’s the deception.

Underneath, a powerful covert operation is at work.

The purpose of Santa Claus is top-to-bottom population brainwashing to accept a national surveillance state that sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake, which our government and private sector actively expand with greater invasiveness and proportionate acceptance every year: this a trade-off for an annual economic spike worldwide that creates a massive surge for the US economy. A gigantic thoroughly fabricated Pass Go international money grab to kick off every American year.

Write every operation as if you are creating Santa Claus, Linda taught, and you will never find yourself before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with your nuts roasting on an open fire.

Tonight, were I pit against any other nation, I’d have run my op in and out through the chimney. No one the wiser. Guaranteed home by Christmas.

But not here. Not Cuba. In Cuba, Santa Claus is, by official decree, a criminal.

---

1 Architectural term—pillars capped with the face of Hermes, the Greek god of mischief, codes, and messages; used as an Agency catchword to describe a covert action as a weight-bearing pillar bracing larger intelligence gathering enterprises.

2 Nathan Muir, CIA Operations Officer 1952–1991. Professor Emeritus, Princeton University 1993–2001, where he continued service as an annuitant for CIA Office of Recruitment. Deceased May 6, 2001, Operation ATROPOS. As Muir’s official retirement debriefer, I have full knowledge of all intel relevant to his career. Deliverable upon request/future debriefing.

2

IN 1959, Castro took the vital step to nationalize the bat guano caves, Animal Farm every hen’s egg in Havana Province, and ban Santa Claus. Your El Jefe Maximo’s diminutive firebrand Director of Culture Vicentina Antuña eliminated Santa, condemning him a US import foreign to our culture. No Santa posters, placards, or insidious plastic reindeer allowed. Yankee Christmas trees prohibido ; everyone required to hang their tinsel from la buena palma Cubana . Decorations must be made of Cuban materials, with traditional Cuban scenes, la señora ruled, and Cuban Christmas cards must be used instead of imported ones.

But ten years of Derección de Inteligencia counterespionage by your guys’ forebears not powerful enough to reduce Santa’s power, Castro canceled Christmas altogether. For a time, Cuba was safely both Yule- and Santa-tized. And, while your weakening communist government may have grudgingly restored Christmas as a public holiday in 1998, Santa Claus remains unwelcome and unlawful on your Caribbean island.

In a recent article I saw in your labor union weekly Los Trabajadores—decisive to my choice to surrender to you— your writer exhorted brothers and sisters of the revolution to beware the white-bearded, red-suited polar fat man as Un símbolo minatorial de la hagiografía del mercantilismo estadounidense, which, in English, translates with almost the same lack of lucidity: A minatorial symbol of the hagiography of US mercantilism.

As easy in my own paraphasia to paraphrase: Truism: America’s mighty national embargo op is half of holy.

The article shoots Santa right between the eyes, identifying him as a tool of mental colonization. Shops using Santa Claus for decoration are extending a humble help to the expansion of this consumer culture, with its accompanying ethics and ideology!

Fines and jail time to follow.

Must’ve added some teary Whoville disappointment for Elian Tiny Tim Gonzalez, eh?

LESS THAN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AGO, in the shadow of Mount Whitney, surrounded by pines named from the Agency Memorial’s Book of Honor, Linda P. Morse warned me about you and your evil olive drab-uniformed dictator:

Castro will forever ‘ferret out’ the Satan inside Santa. Nothing I taught you will protect you in Havana or achieve your necessary goal.

My goal is love. I love her, Linda. With every fiber of my being. I have no choice.

Linda clenched her carved redwood crutch in her right fist to brace her willowy frame against it. She extended her free hand over her missing leg. She waggled her fingers, beckoning until I met them with my own. We interlaced hands. Her skin was taut as it had ever been in youth. A texture like silk. The only signs of her sheer, uncomforted age I found in our touch were the hard, arthritic bulges of each joint growing absent of vitality’s warmth.

Then again, Linda was at her coolest under pressure.

"The Cuban DI has always beaten us, Russell. At their worst, they are better than the KGB and the Stasi at their best. Always.¹ It will do you to remember that."

An arctic wind, presaging a white Christmas for her cottage, danced with her long, aged white victory-rolled locks.

You cannot beat them. To save the love of your life, you’ll be required to sacrifice your country. You’ll be forever hunted as a traitor. Adrift without a native land.

I gave a single nod to show my acceptance of my forthcoming crime and condemnation but spoke my faith. Nina Estrada is my country.

You’ll never see her again.

Nina or America. To save one, I lose them both. A man without a country.

I haven’t been careful hiding my tracks. Counterintelligence will discover I came here.

She rubbed her thumb across the back of my hand, marking me with her blessing. I’m a ninety-six-year-old bachelor girl with medals from General Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, and John Kennedy. I wear a ring—she twisted our hands so I could see it— made from a piece of bone I cut from my own discarded leg with the stiletto I still keep tucked in my boot.

I fought sudden horror, the urge to drop her hand, as my finger rubbed against the dead-bone ring.

Oh, don’t be imbecilic. I’m teasing. It’s Congolese ivory our dear Nathan once gave to me. She laughed. Who will they send? Silas Kingston?

I huddled into myself at the mention of that unholy spook.

She flicked her eyes at the firepit. I fed that boy cocoa and roasted marshmallows with him right there. He’s a pussycat.

All tigers were once kittens.

She relinquished my hand.

Russell, as long as you don’t tell me what you’re trading, I have nothing to worry about. But this isn’t a plan you can repaper. It best be something Fidel has use for, or you will have sacrificed both your lives, and they’ll rape and torture Nina out of spite before they put a bullet in her skull.

They’ll take my offer.

Then kiss me goodbye. On the lips. It always feels deliciously dirty when it’s a boy.

Neither a trick of winter wind nor weakened light, a halo formed around her. I knew what came next. I brushed her lips with mine, and time bent to my epilepsy. My legs suddenly became unsteady.

Don’t fuck this up, Rusty! You collapse, you’ll never get out of here! warns Muir.

He stands in the entrance to his office. The day after his Captiva Island confession, his last day with the Agency. 1991. My incontrovertible present. I am inside Muir’s room, amid the boxes Gladys packed for his move. Boxes now flung wide and rifled, file cabinets and desk tossed by the Office of Security hunting for Muir’s Bishop files recently burn-bagged to the incinerator. Gladys and I lift his scorched flag from the wall.

He hollers again: You’re not going to have time for that, pal. Plans have changed. Time is limited.

We guide the heavy frame onto the sofa. Muir and I wait for Gladys to leave the room before we speak.

You died.

Not yet, at any rate. You talked to Sandy, huh?

I stare at him dumbfounded as I always am when I actively relive my past.

Bishop’s mother? C’mon, Aiken. She says you spoke.

Sedaka killed you.

But that would be ten years later, and Muir gives me an impatient look, painted with his perception of all my inadequacies.

We’ve no time for your word games, Russell. Listen up because this is important. You know what’s going on with Tom. In China. Right now. Not how I planned to spend my last day with the outfit, but I’m going to do my best to handle it.

I know how it will end. He will out foxtrot Harker and the Young Turks to see Bishop and Elizabeth safely rescued, but this second time around, I won’t let his insouciance pass.

‘Do your best’? Your son and your daughter-in-law are in a Chinese prison because of your best!

What is it with you, never satisfied unless you’re delivering yesterday’s news? I need activity here, not reminiscence. Snap to speed, please. There’s still one loose end with Charlie March that needs tying off and I’m not going to be able to get to it. His eyes pierce my soul. I’m sending you to Cuba in my place.

I know. You already have. I’m already headed back a second time to fix it all over again.

Jesus. Are you still drunk?

No. Maybe. Sorry.

How could I tell him I travel through time? As it’s happening, this is as real as I am—a living experience—a four-dimensional déjà vu to the past, present, and malleable.

While I self-audit, Muir says, I know you just reconciled with Madeline and I’m happy for that.

I know now he wasn’t. She doesn’t end well—you wanna know the truth.

Nope. But lookit: if there were any other way to do what needs to be done, I would send you alone and without temptation at your side.

I hold back the burning in my eyes and repeat the words he says along with him: But you’ll be taking Nina with you.

You can stop now, came Linda’s voice beneath my lips.

I had no idea how long I’d been holding her in my arms, but the epilepsy-caused halo was gone.

As good a kisser as you are, Russell, it’s too late in the game for me to switch teams.

I hadn’t collapsed. The seizure was past. I’d traveled back… or… hadn’t yet, as the residue would always leave me feeling time-loopy.

Good job, Dumbo, Muir echoed from the other place, not the past yet happened, but a future that never did but always does. Now move it. You got a flight to catch. His voiced faded, his life returned to the living dead.

I gave Linda a goofy shrug and hopped back; I thanked her, I spun unsteadily to my car. I headed to you, General Trigorin, and this, my island exile.

I SEE YOUR CAMERA overhead focused on my yellow pad. So, watching me write this, let’s do a little puzzle together. We’ll call it, What’s Aiken Trading?

Love and loyalty, liberty and life.

Love = Nina

Loyalty = America

Liberty = my Freedom

Life = ?

Not mine.

Isn’t worth a damn to you; hardly anything to me. For Nina, I trade the life of another man. As agreed, I am here to give you the CIA’s longest running agent in Havana. A hero to America and to every Cuban who values freedom and would see your revolution destroyed.

God, forgive me this and so much more.

Codename: HOUNDFOX, with the whoop-de-do and hickory dock… I am the Satan in Santa. My Christmas gift to Fidel: I betray the father to save the daughter.

---

1 Not exactly always. I burned you once, and badly, in 1991. The operational elements of and methods by which I achieved this to be surrendered to you in pages forthwith.

3

AFTER 3 A.M., A WORKING GIRL CAN GET TIRED, and at 3:22 a.m., on what had been the first warm night of June 1947, copywriter Mary Frances Gerety was zonked. Wedged into the corner of her apartment at a repurposed grammar school desk with her Remington portable and her writing pads, she faced the right-angle seam where the two walls met. Dunced of ideas, she’d decomposed for the last hour instead of the opposite. Time to coffee mug her pencils, teacup drown her last cigarette, turn off the inner monologue she’d taken dictation from (and badly) the entire weekend, and pour herself into bed.

She unpinned the campaigns for Hills Brothers Coffee, Armour Meats, and Domino Sugar from her corkboards on the converging walls—Frances found she worked best when she let the advertising grab her attention from the corner of her eye— and slid them into her slab-sided cardboard portfolio. She’d steal herself four and a half hours’ slumber before her Monday-morning walk to N. W. Ayer —I’d walk a mile for a Camel—& Son Advertising, its art deco temple to persuasion uplifted, a mile away at 210 West Washington Square, in Philadelphia.

Mary Frances switched off her work light. She shut the window to the rumbled darkness and walked to her bedroom door, where she stopped. She remembered having promised a signature line for their De Beers account first thing Monday morning.

Unwanted, her inner Dictaphone played back the request from her New York City boss, Gerald Lauck: Frances, we’re dealing with a problem of mass psychology. Marriage is up, but diamonds are down. The masses, hun. Gotta get these diamonds on their fingers. Write me a slogan that strengthens the De Beers tradition for the postwar engagement ring.

Frances plodded back to her corner desk and lit a fresh cigarette. She blew a heavy cloud of smoke. She had steered De Beers through the Second World War with her Love in Boom and her Cupid-blowing Bugles over America (instead of kisses) taglines. She knew postwar housewives preferred a washing machine or a new car, even a Singer sewing machine—anything but an engagement ring—but that wasn’t her business. Diamonds were.

She pulled a pencil from the coffee mug, trimmed its point while she offered a Dear God, send me a line prayer to the shadows. She scribbled His answer on a scrap of paper. Crashed into bed.

Scooping up the scrap on her way out the door to where the sun met the morning, Frances didn’t much like what she’d written. At the staff meeting, her colleagues around the conference table mocked her grammar. Not the best, she agreed, though no one offered anything better. Yet, by last Wednesday at lunch, the Pandora store at Tysons Corner, fifty-six years and 3.5 billion dollars in De Beers sales success later, A Diamond is Forever stuck me and all my aspirations an arrow-straight sentiment right through the heart.

I was telling Jessie the story over my get-a-load-a-this voice-activated Nokia mobile phone—the new kind you can take with you in and out of the vehicle hands-free dock—as I drove away from Langley, merrily unaware I would never return.

Jessie, as I’m sure you’ve investigated and ascertained, is my daughter. She lives with her Nnenne. Grandma in Igbo. And not, technically, her grandmother at all, but Gladys Jlassi, a lifelong Company secretary (retired), who lives with us in our Princeton, New Jersey brownstone. I am counting on your word, General Trigorin, that neither Jessie nor Gladys will ever be contacted, disturbed, or molested in any manner, form, or fashion when our business is concluded; the choice for further contact between my family and myself entirely at my choice and of my choosing alone. [Matter of fact, please initial consent & agreement: ____ ]

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. As usual.

What’s not to know? I’m telling you I’m asking Nina to marry me. Tonight. I bought the engagement ring.

Gladys! she shouted. "He’s doing it! … He says tonight!"

She returned her voice to me. I wouldn’t talk about Frances what’s’er-name with Nina. Are you nervous?

When have you ever known me to be nervous?

She didn’t answer.

Jessie?

Uh, like my whole life?

She asked if I was taking her to Martin’s Tavern, her favorite since she’d finally been able to return to DC without the nightmares about her mother and baby brother’s killing. It’s where John F. Kennedy proposed to Jackie O before he got assassinated. Yogi Bear also ate there.

Along with Yogi Bear (Yogi Berra) and Kennedy (the guy you helped us assassinate), US presidents, Supreme Court justices, even our agency’s OSS founder, Linda P’s former WWII boss Wild Bill William Donovan (who, rumor had it [read Nathan Muir] convinced Linda to a successful seduction of Eva Braun)—all of them, one time or another, dropped in at Martin’s, and Jessie would dish as if she knew them, having memorized the menu’s Our Story page over chicken nugget piles while I plied Nina: laying out my case for why I could, and therefore should, be trusted with another marriage as its coequal guarantor for success.

I had recently moved out of my 1938 Tenleytown townhouse that I’d fallen heir to and had been using during the work week since my wicked, unfaithful wife Madeline tragically fell from the sky on 9/11.

Wedding gift to her or not, the second she filed for divorce that townhouse should have come back to me as a marital infidelity forfeiture in the first place.

Martin’s Tavern happens to be convenient to Nina’s place.

You folks… You know Nina Estrada’s place. That butter yellow U Street Corridor three-level railroad house. Near where Duke Ellington lived and performed as a young man. You folks know the neighborhood; know the door, know the lock, you know the floor plan. You folks know the kitchen. And, intimately well, you know where the knives pull from the butcher block… You fucks.

I told Jessie, No. No Martin’s tonight. I headed to pick up Nina and take her downtown. Butterfield 9. A Nick and Nora Charles, 1940s Thin Man vibe. Our favorite place. And Nina would have ordered the salmon, because she always did, and I would order the seared venison loin with persimmon and Madagascar vanilla, and she’d Awww, you’re eating Bambi, because she always did. I’d order her a California shiraz. Nina would shoot it down and order a pinot saying, Que sera your syrah-shiraz, because she loved to toss my word salad back at me.

She always did.

Would I have gotten on my knee? You bet and you guys fucked that for me. And so what if Jessie didn’t like my A Diamond is Forever story? Nina would have. She’d laugh at the Sean Connery Diamonds are Forever James Bond pun buried inside it as I cleared the Ian Fleming from my throat. And I’d draw Nina’s attention to the deception operation that linked these two phrases to our lives and our work more than anyone bothered to know. Or cared, at any rate, like I did and she would.

Nina’s face incandescent in the candlelight: her lips parted, lipstick glistening a red velvet smile, secret in anticipation; her eyes: humor flashing like bronze speckled fish inside gray pools above the Latakia blue-black hills of her cheeks. The dramatic arch of her brow; her forehead thrusting to the line of black hair pulled back into a ball; her wild fire braids cascading: woman as unquenchable as fire, the human representation of a life force that nourishes my soul.

Back in the 1800s, I’d have told her, a South African kid found a strange scintillating pebble on his De Beer family farm. One, another, and then a handful.

Kudus? she’d point her fork at my meal, punny, with her fawning kudos.

After a little digging by older brothers, his father, uncles, and his neighbors, I would ramble on, "some shoveling with steampunked tools and machines, the Kimberly Mines were unearthed in all their bounty too bountiful." In no time, the De Beers were hauling out diamonds by the ton. Suddenly plentiful, diamonds plummeted in value. Only by locking down the deception that diamonds are rare and priceless could they exploit their glut of glittering gravel as rare treasure. To hide the truth and protect their fortune, they formed the De Beers Consolidated Mining cartel, carefully controlling both the supply and the demand.

The founder of De Beers, I would say, was a fellow named Oppenheimer. Nina would perk up at that because the name Oppenheimer tends to perk those in our profession. By 1938, in the wake of a First World War and a Great Depression, with the Second World War tempesting the horizon, the rare-meets-expensive supply and demand for only the royal, the wealthy, and the celebrated near scuppered De Beers.

Oppenheimer’s son, Harry, commissioned Ayer & Son—the guys with the deco tower in Philly—to bring the sparkle back to their three-billion-year-old stones. At the same time, I would say, joining our hands across the tabletop, "Harry’s cousin, J. Robert was flirting with sparklers a bit older, attempting to create a nuclear fission chain reaction.

"They come together—Mary Frances, the Oppenheimers, and Sean Connery—on that peculiar word, forever. Mary Frances Gerety’s Forever promises a young maiden endless romance at a price tag that encourages the man to stick around past her maidenhood. The De Beers–Oppenheimer’s Forever is the diamond that’s not resold; plant it back in the ground with Grandma because resale causes fluctuations in diamond prices that undermine public confidence in the intrinsic value of diamonds. And because diamonds are as false as Connery’s Forever, which takes Fleming’s book—that isn’t even about spies but cutthroat smugglers and organized crime—and rockets their stones into outer space with the destructive power of a nuclear weapon created by—"

The other Oppenheimer, she’d murmur, and her eyes would dance as she’d watch me place the black velvet box between us.

"The Oppenheimer whose nuclear blasts sent thousands upon thousands of potential De Beers customers into the ‘Forever’ that comes with ‘and ever, Amen,’ as the extreme temperatures and pressures of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions squeezed