The Faithful Spy

A somewhat bitter joke. The initials stood for Self-Loathing as well. Did they really hate themselves? Probably not. But Exley could always hear a little voice deep in her head, and she guessed the other four women could too: Your kids don’t even think of you as their real mom anymore. You’re going to be alone the rest of your life. Worst of all, words she knew the others didn’t hear: There’s a pattern in the intercepts. Something is coming, and you’re too dumb to see it. She needed to stop this second guessing before she shook herself apart. There wasn’t any pattern. She couldn’t analyze information that didn’t exist. That damn voice. Men didn’t hear that voice. Men expected success even when they failed; women awaited failure even after they had succeeded.

Lynette, a slim black woman who was a producer at NBC, caught her eye. “You okay, baby? You look stressed.”

“Just fine.” Exley tried to smile.

“We find Osama yet?” They all knew Exley worked at the agency, though not what she did.

“You’re asking the wrong woman,” Exley said. “I’m just a secretary.”

“I know you run that place.”

“If I ran it, things would be different.” The joke was almost automatic, but Lynette smiled anyway, and after a moment Exley did too.

“That is the truth.” Lynette raised her glass. t h e ag e n cy a n d the Joint Terrorism Task Force had worked nonstop in the months since the Los Angeles bombings. But the investigators still hadn’t identified the bombers, much less figured out how they had accumulated three tons of ammonium nitrate without anyone noticing. Either they had gotten the stuff through customs or they had built a stash bit by bit while living in America for years. Exley couldn’t decide which prospect was worse. And she worried that the attacks had been designed as a diversion. Even the United States government didn’t have infinite resources. The FBI had put some of its best agents on the bombing case, pulling them from other open investigations. Exley understood the instinct; the families of the dead wanted answers and arrests at any cost. She just hoped that the cost wouldn’t include another attack. She and Shafer were looking ahead. They had spent the spring and summer poring over the databases the JTTF used to track the movements and communications of every known al Qaeda member, searching for patterns the first-line analysts had missed. So far they hadn’t found much. Over the years the intelligence community had accumulated evidence that al Qaeda had at least one sleeper network somewhere inside the United States. Network X, some people at the agency called it. Two or three cells, between six and twenty agents in all. Put in place before September 11. Al Qaeda’s secret weapon. Waiting for orders to launch a big attack, presumably chemical or biological or radiological. Or nuclear, God forbid. And last month the NSA had picked up an e-mail that indicated that al Qaeda had somehow gotten nuclear material into the United States. But the message was unconfirmed, and no one knew how — or even if — it tied into Network X.

Not that Exley would mention any of this to the Sophisticated Ladies. Much less the early-morning phone call she had gotten two weeks before. She poured herself another glass of wine and decided to try to relax. “Girls,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

Gretchen, a petite gray-haired woman, leaned in. “So. ”

“So?”

“Don’t play dumb with us, Jennifer. How was your date?”

Exley didn’t feel like having this conversation again. “Isn’t it amazing?”

“What?” Gretchen said.

“The five of us, we’re all attractive. All financially stable, all reasonably sane.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lynette said, getting a laugh.

“No, really. And we’re lucky to get, what — two dates a month? Not two each. Two for all five of us.”

“Hey,” said Ann, the lawyer. “I got propositioned just last week at this conference in Atlanta. I mean, he was married, but he did take off his ring before he asked. I thought that was sweet.”

This time the laughter had an edge. The Sophisticated Ladies got plenty of propositions from married men at bars — or, worse, at work. They got invitations to cocktail parties from guys who had never married and were probably closet cases. What they didn’t get were real dates from divorced men their own age. Unless they didn’t want more kids, those guys inevitably wound up with women at least a decade younger.

“Stop stalling,” Gretchen said to Exley. “How was it?”

Normally Exley submitted to these interrogations without much resistance, though privately she wished they would spend less time talking about men. Nothing ever changed, so what was the point? But tonight she had no appetite for Gretchen’s questions. She wanted to sit and drink her wine.

“Must have been good,” Ann said. “You look tired.”

“Leave her alone,” Lynette said. “Least let the lady finish her wine.”