There are other families, neither happy nor mindfully sad; sanctioned to deception, these families kindle their lives with the flint of authorized deceit. Their pyre is “service,” and it is “national security.” Its flame is “duty.” “Honor.” And it is “faith.” Thus fueled, these families allow this fire to consume their every honest emotion.

Relentlessly.

Equally.

And to completion.

Without protest (which could only arise from feelings they never will allow), they slough the cinders of charred commitments and incinerated commissions, sifting them through iron-toothed grates to conceal their treacheries, hide their betrayals, and bury their secrets beneath a shroud of ash: fluffed gray, velvety, and altogether dead. With the whole of what they should repent girded and unobservable, they are unrepentant.

Unredeemed.

The Kingstons of Foxtail Farm are such a family.

For generations, Kingston children, amusing themselves with summer-storm indoor hide-and-seek, invariably discover they can duck beneath the common room mantel to vanish upright inside the Foxtail Farm fireplace. Still as fawns, ready-or-not, each in their turn is soot-giggly here-I-come caught. But summertime play fades for children of every generation. The “child” in “childhood” divides into “manhood” and “womanhood,” and the wind changes direction, blowing “in from” instead of “out to” the Chesapeake.

It was on this wind—this first leafy breath of autumn, fireplace first banked—Lynn Kingston heard first its faint, its fluted moan. And how much clearer it has become, each passing year, that echo across the Foxtail Farm chimney top. God—  

or is it the Devil?

—who mimics Lynn’s own long-ago moistened lips blown across the rim of her first bottle of clambake beer—chipped-polish, teenage toes curled in sand and seashell muck.

This moan Lynn hears, Lynn shuns. Yet Lynn turns to it like a beacon. Like that senseless desire tugging inside the hearts of the barn swallows who return each year to the abandoned tobacco sheds—afield from the main manor—where the kestrels, merlin, the barn owls invariably devour all but a few of their hatchlings. This moan resembles nothing so much as—

Sometimes, in the instant before narcotic sleep drags her head beneath its alcoholic wave, Lynn relives this, and Lynn trembles—

—the muted sound of her mother’s screams: “Ignite me!” Crying, “Fire! Redeem me!”

Thursday, July First

1.

FINGERS in scissor rings.

Hands in surgical gloves.

Trapezoids and triangles fall onto a bedspread.

The oldest pair of modern household scissors dates to the 2nd century A.D. They originate from a Roman settlement on the Black Sea called, as it is now, Trabzon.

“The Trabzon Scissors.” A tidbit of information. An incidental crumb fallen into a corner of Michael Kingston’s mind as his brain consumed more substantial bytes of data relevant to running his Turkish agent, Orthodox priest Father Cevik. One year developing him. Another year waiting on his promises. Nine months and sixteen trips from Ankara servicing their Trabzon dead drop to little result. Most often, Michael serviced boredom with online trivia instead of serving America Turkey’s secrets.

It is a fiction that CIA case officers operating clandestinely in the field spend the bulk of their time a black silhouette with a gun facing down a capital city; in mufti pressing through sweaty, spice- and hookah-stinking souks, avoiding the fezzed fellows with mustaches curved to match their knives; sitting beneath Cinzano umbrellas, beneath fedoras, skulking behind newspapers at old-world cafes with demitasse cups, coffee black as the Italian sunglasses that hide such clever eyes. Hide hearts of devious intent. Of daring flash. The quiet American who speaks little. Who smiles not. Who, belt-knotted, flips a raincoat’s collar to Nosferatu through nights of green-glowing tropic fog, footfalls echoing on damp canal stairs to long-tail boat breakaways. That mysterious, retreating, uncommunicative stranger who avoids social, transactional, and cultural interaction is a magnet for attention and, no sooner, the obsession of local and state authority.

The CIA officer—no matter the depth and the intricacy of his legend—is under watchful eyes the instant he arrives on station. From your first taste of local air, the local security assumes you are a case officer arrived in their country to make traitors of their countrymen. Even with a U.S. security partner and valued NATO ally like Turkey.

Especially Turkey. Slippery East/West straddlers they are. Always have been. Likely to remain.

Of course, espionage is not something provable unless you and your agent are caught engaged in an act of illicit material contact. So, you play patient, but you don’t play spy.

CIA teaches at the Farm that the best way for the clandestine officer not to get caught is not to go charging after recruits. Slow-walk your cover. Means feeding your embassy day job. Means keeping the Ambassador happy in the barn. A priority. After all, there’s no extra nosebag for spies; the CIA undercover officer on station has taken a legit spot in the embassy stable. Taken a real job denied a State Department employee trained to do what the CIA officer is not. In the context of your embassy job—in Michael Kingston’s case, Cultural Attache—you draw potential recruits into your professional loop; you naturally expand the ring of your foreign coterie to include nationals who may be or have access to (directly or through secondary relationships) potential recruitment targets. You edge them into that growing social circle where, with a little carrot to compromise and a stick to tap-tap their flanks, they come to hand. Snatch. It works.

Has always worked.

You hitch valuable agents. Loyal agents. You don’t get popped. And you don’t get dropped.

Only problem?

While the Clandestine Service wants you to make your plays from the long-game book of patient/naturalistic contact persuasion, back at Langley, the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) wants every play to deliver a score. Deliver intel. Deliver product. Product-product-product. Any/all you can acquire. On this. That. On the other. Now. Oh, but did I mention by five minutes ago? By yesterday? The CIA DI: the biggest and baddest intel-devouring beast on the planet. Size: mistaken for power. Voracity: mistaken for cunning. Might: mistaken for right.

Ops officers who master the physics of counterbalancing the glacial dispassion of the field against the burning desires of headquarters look forward to bright futures.

Michael Kingston wasn’t a “bright futures” kind of spy.

Michael Kingston did not have the forbearance required on the one hand and pushing him was pushing a balloon on a string with the other. And so, over two decades of postings to Asia Minor, Michael made his own set of rules how he handled official cover, recruitment. How he handled product. He played all four sides—

1. Host/target country

2. Clandestine Service

3. State Department/embassy

4. Directorate of Intelligence

—against one another. Once he got going—got them going—once he forced everyone into a position of having no one left willing to monitor him, he stepped up his game and case-officered agents as he saw fit.

“A disruptor with his obnoxious cards and that ridiculous pen he’s always clicking,” Ankara Chief of Station (CoS) grumbled behind closed doors before opening them to “Welcome home!” Michael for a second tour. This, only after the Seventh Floor had welcomed a former Acting Director of Central Intelligence back into the Director’s suite—congressionally confirmed—who’d snapped his Chiclet teeth, saying, “That Kingston exhibits too much of his father. Kick him back to whomever kicked him here. I want Michael Kingston far away from my Campus.”  

Pocketful of business cards and a gunmetal Parker ballpoint. All Michael needed to bury his watchers in circumstantial contacts. The passing of more material than the opposing service could or wanted to handle, obligated as they were to report, backtrace, and write up his activities. Michael’s cover could be tracked by the Willard (“Please, call me Bill”) Bramson (“Like the Virgin guy, but use an ‘M’”)—

WILLARD BRAMSON

CULTURAL ATTACHE, UNITED STATES EMBASSY, TÜRKIYE

—business cards he’d glad-hand into waiters’ and bartenders’, cab drivers’ and counter clerks’ palms. Drop one into the “win-a-döner” rotisserie grill, free-lunch drawing bowl—every sandwich shop whose bells he tickled. Fed business card fishbowls all over town. Towns all over Turkey. Breast-pocketed/clutch-pursed random-jammed audience members of university lectures. Deans and students. Music teachers and concert musicians—violin, oboe, trumpet, and score cases galore. Art galleries, artists, critics—credentialed or champagne’d self-entitled—and a whole slew of “look at me” theater folk—directors, stage managers, actors and dancers—all the way to the theater-in-the-round that was the street: body-painted, golden robot mimes, jugglers, the magicians, once a sword-swallower, Romanis with trick goats, and always the pervasive accordion players who, as if by International Hurdy-Gurdy Union Rule, are prescribed to lurk outside train stations and inside pedestrian tunnels between subway platforms to make us all feel better before we go. Wherever we go. Electro-squeezeboxers who, by some magical osmosis everywhere and all at once, ditched It’s a Small World (After All) and now lead with Careless Whisper. Because why wouldn’t they?

A ubiquitous card for every last-damn one of them. Click-click the Parker. A note always on its back: Culture is YOU. America supports it. Call me. Pleased to meet. Happy to talk.

In between whirlwind rides on the cultural merry-go-round, Michael would in-and-out his small hours through the doors of pharmacies, doctor’s offices, dentists, herbalists, athletic clubs. Click-click. He liked shoe stores—although he only owned three pairs and limited his travel to one. Click-click. He would open small bank accounts at greedy large banks. Click-click. He shopped three groceries: meats, vegetables, dry goods—four, when inclined to fish. Five, if you count the coffee roasters, and Michael did. Cellphone stores. Clothiers. Stationers. Dry cleaners and laundromats. Tobacconists and home goods emporiums. Libraries, bookstores, the late-night internet cafes. Clickity-clickity-click: Culture is YOU. America supports it. Call me. Pleased to meet. Happy to talk.

Michael papered the town until his outside-the-embassy time was more cataloged and cross-referenced, mapped, and reported by his watchers to their service and by himself to his: the Ambassador for his cover job (she wanted to poach Michael from the Agency: “Mr. Bramson walks the walk. Fabulous attaché! So panache-y! I simply must have him.”); his CoS by writing meticulous (read: “wildly imagined”) memoranda on all of them as potential leads for recruitment with their speculated (read: “non-existent”) intelligence value—contact reports that would wend their way back to HQ to feed the DI beast chomping away at Langley until Michael gorged it to indigestion on his corn.

Foolish, maybe. Reckless, yep. Make-work—you have no idea. Mocking?

Culture is YOU. America supports it. Call me. Pleased to meet. Happy to talk.

Most definitely. And that part of it was not looked kindly upon. Mocking is the sort of thing that gets men and women dismissed. Not Michael Kingston—although he did more than enough to make it easy for them by taking it one step further.

Absolutely forbidden, not only by the CIA but every service everywhere, and one of Michael’s favorite tactics: the “innocent” encounter with his surveillance. Right up in their grill. Michael would provoke this with a sudden doubling-back of path and purpose. If supremely lucky, he would physically collide with his surveillance and, hand-to-elbow, proceed to engage them in conversation. Click-click. Write his little note. Hand off his embassy card.

It was unseemly. It was using checker pieces on a chessboard. It was embarrassing. Required extensive reporting for both sides. Often questioning (for him), interrogation (for the opposition), or a seat at the flutter box, fingers velcro’d, chest corded. Could easily, and often did, sideline you for a week or three. Get you ticket-punched-pulled from station altogether.

Point of fact. Michael Kingston engaged in that little stunt so many times in Albania that the SHISH (not kebob/Albanian State Intelligence Service) filed an official complaint with the U.S. Ambassador, who reported it to the CoS, who scolded Michael but found him unrepentant—or, as he phrased it, “Blasé—and too damn protected by that Kingston legacy.” He reported to headquarters he’d squared away the ever-inexplicit Michael Kingston promise it would never happen again. True. Until “oopsy-culpa” it happened again.

Culture is YOU. America supports it. Call me. Pleased to meet. Happy to talk.

Fancy footwork and legacy legwork. His legacy? Silas Kingston. Father. The retired, but shiver-and-chill-remembered, former Chief of Counterintelligence. Point of fact. The once and future most-feared man at headquarters.

So, it was “Michael has a Kingston way of doing things,” muttered at headquarters. Muttered at every station he posted. Muttered by friends. Colleagues. Muttered by rivals. By enemies. All sorts of mutterers and backed up/backstopped by two of those things the cat (read Silas, meow) let/dragged/kicked out of the bag any time Michael’s utility was seriously questioned. The reminder of two foolish/reckless/mocking operations that would cement Michael’s bona fides (mutter “field cred”/gnash teeth) to the Agency. Point of fact: a big F-U finger in all their faces.

1. The careless whispers of some accordion-accompanied break dancers outside the South Caucus Railway terminal in Yerevan—2009—and Michael averts a mass casualty event perpetrated by renegade officers of Armenia’s National Security Service against their own people. Intended to provoke Armenian war with Azerbaijan.

A good one, to be sure, but go back—2004—even better:

2. An unsanctioned bugging operation of Yasser Arafat. A beach casino in Varna, Bulgaria. Click-clack chips, clatter-clat-clat roulette pill. For “to-see-if-I-could” kicks—by which Michael’s agent got Arafat to brag about how he not only bit the hand but took some fingers of his former Soviet, now Russian Federation, sponsors. Led to the thallium sweetener in the PLO leader’s coffee when—once again: an unsanctioned/forbidden, “What the hell’s that guy thinking?” nifty trick—he’d (improperly) shared the audio with an opposite number at the Russian embassy, then (inappropriately) tipped off the Mossad to that. Israelis went along and, best of enemies, rolled out an invisible red carpet for the Russian-red SVR RF hit team, who were able to get all the way inside the one place Israel could not: the teacup in the terrorist’s fat, murderous fist.

In checkers, you make your peons kings, and you use them to attack.

Back to Trabzon. Back to the Scissors. Well, almost. Back by way of this: with each encountered civilian, Michael made a point to extoll them with ad hoc/ad nauseum tales. Cultural cotton candy collected on his outings, explorations, his internet café clickbait misadventures. His Turkish, ranked Level 4 on the Interagency Language Roundtable, allowed him a fluency capable of boring the natives with “sophisticated and nuanced complexity.” Business cards as strewn sawdust, Michael Kingston created an eminently traceable curlicue trail whittled from the out-and-about stomps and stumps of his elaborate afternoons, evening entertainments, and knockabout weekends where his dull conversation suggested an equal amount of sawdust between his ears. All of this because, as his father had taught him:

A spy cannot slip in and out of a secret door if he hasn’t erected a massive labyrinth of false walls to conceal it.

Not surprising, then, Michael rolled out the scissor story today. His reason? To buy time at a home goods emporium cashier counter to evaluate his agent. Scissors—which he could speak about for five minutes without using a thought—were the first distraction he saw, and he grabbed a pair.

“These Chinese scissors are exactly what I need. But did you know? The story of the first pair of scissors?” He hung a bit of silence on the gallows of a question mark.

The cashier leaned in. Blinked her eyes.

“Household scissors like these: opposing blades, center fulcrum screw—?” Did it to her again.

Blink-blink (nearsighted girl). Rope her in.

“First manufactured three blocks from here. The original pair of scissors. Invented in Trabzon.” Pointed at her. “Your. City. China-be-damned.”

The clerk snorted. Found Michael’s story ridiculous, though enough a curiosity to push her glasses up her nose and share it—some sort of flirtation—with her manager. The older fellow frowned. Knew for a fact, nothing world-changing ever happened in Trabzon. Especially with scissors. “Asla yapmadı. Asla olmaz.” Never did. Never will.

Through the grilled windows that backed the clerk and her unimaginative manager, Michael watched the inevitable: Father Cevik’s flapping arms pinned like pigeon wings as the priest was snared at a simit vendor’s cart half a block down the busy street.

Rewind. Forty minutes into Michael’s two-hour Surveillance Detection Route. Run-up to servicing their dead drop in the forest hills above town. Four blocks back, seven minutes earlier. Cevik unexpectedly hurries alongside Michael. Performs a lightning contact. A photo envelope shoved into his case officer’s windbreaker. A beauty piece of tradecraft. Better performed than Michael thought possible.

Indication Cevik believes himself burned.

Michael detects no immediate pursuit, let alone standoff/standby surveillance among the after-work rush hour crowd. He separates from the foot traffic.

Circles a set of blocks.

Enters the home goods store from its rear parking lot.

Grabs the Chinese scissors. Sets himself window-adjacent. In time to observe Cevik to the baker’s cart. Cevik seized. Belief justified.

Aw, hell.

Turkish bagels flew; actual pigeons—wings kazooing—mobbed. Plainclothes security officers wrestled Father Cevik into their unmarked and waiting car. Gone.

That no one burst in on Michael suggested the brush pass had gone unobserved—

God, it was a beauty hand-off.

—and Michael completed his purchase of the scissors as traceable cover for his fade-away SDR via the local museum, where he would bolster that cover and provide a choke point to narrow his pursuit if actual fleet-footed escape became necessary.