*
Breakfast was predictable: cereal, juice, an anemic boiled egg, low-fiber toast. Rita wolfed it down, then confronted the morning with a cup of weak coffee and growing boredom. Marianne returned, bringing a small pile of books and pamphlets with her: to Rita’s dismay they consisted entirely of testimonials for Scientology.
Rita had nothing against religion as such. Kurt had grown up Lutheran; Mom and Dad had occasionally taken her to church and sent her off to summer camps run by them, but their approach to such matters was very much that it was a social club. Rita wasn’t sure what she believed, beyond a vague sense that there was something Up There keeping an eye on things. Consequently she found Marianne’s pamphlets disturbing in their zealous insistence that Dianetics, and only Dianetics, held the key to realizing one’s full potential.
Spending the day reading advertorials for someone else’s scripture lacked appeal. So she unpacked and stowed her clothing in the wardrobe, just for something to do. That was when she discovered the musty, coverless paperback that Grandpa Kurt must have stuffed down a zipped side compartment of her carry-on. Normally she had no time for elderly pulp novels: but at least it wasn’t a religious tract.
There was nothing lightweight about The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The combination of the author’s paranoid outlook and his cautionary tale within a tale—set in a metafiction in which the Nazis had won the Second World War—made her head spin as she tried to understand it. But the lack of any alternative kept her chewing doggedly along until evening. Whoever had owned it previously had underlined a couple of passages in every chapter in thick, gray pencil, sometimes phrases or words and sometimes individual letters. Trying to make sense of the annotations gave her a little more to chew on, but ultimately that, too, was unproductive. Unfortunately it wasn’t a particularly fat book, and she reached the end all too soon. The end pages were blank, and she was about to close the book when something caught her eye.
As she turned past the end matter she found herself confronted by a page covered in tiny, very precise handwriting. Squinting in the illumination of the adjustable bedside lamp, she read the opening:
Dear Rita, if you need to talk to me in private, write by hand, trusting no keyboard. Use this book as your one-time pad, using the two methods described below—high risk, low content, fast; and low risk, high content, slow. I may not be able to help, but if you don’t ask you don’t get—Kurt.
Inscribed in the middle of the page, before the code instructions that followed, was a pencil sketch of a knot. As Rita looked at it, it made her feel oddly queasy: guts twisting, vision blurring. She blinked it away hastily, then covered it with her thumb, heart hammering. Oh, Gramps, what have you gotten us into? She began to read the rest of Kurt’s message. Boredom was suddenly very far away.
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: Okay, so our pawn has just leveled up to queen. What’s the state of play looking like now that our prototype is nearing deployment readiness?
COL. SMITH: Well, I think I’ve got a pretty good feel for her character, and she’s not perfect but things could be a lot worse.
AGENT GOMEZ: Oh? What’s not—
COL. SMITH: For starters, we are not dealing with a classic authoritarian follower personality: not even your typical Gen Z me-first narcissist with no patriotism and no loyalty. Instead she got your full-on liberal, nurturing, question-authority upbringing, with an added dose of extreme political cynicism from her grandfather. This doesn’t mean she’s useless—you can motivate anyone, given the right lever—but she’s going to take some work. She’s actually a lot better suited to the mission profile we’re looking at than someone who obeys orders blindly just because they feel good when Daddy tells them what to do. The key issue is that she’s an introvert. Self-contained is a job requirement for spies, especially solitary infiltrators. But it means she doesn’t open up easily and tell us what she’s thinking, and that will make it hard to manipu—motivate her. And it means she doesn’t do well in all facets of training.
DR. SCRANTON: Are we talking about her National Academy session?
COL. SMITH: Yes. I had to pull strings just to ensure she scraped a pass. I didn’t—I say I didn’t—rig it; I just made sure she got some TLC. Extra coaching. Let’s be honest: she’s not a cop, much less an officer on the leadership inside track. She didn’t belong on that course; she was a fish out of water. It’s to her credit that she finished it at all, even with a bare pass. Putting a twenty-five-year-old introspective liberal female actor through a graduate-level course in policing and leadership populated by ex-Army county sheriffs and upwardly mobile municipality lieutenants was a big risk. But she, she survived. She nearly wiped out but it didn’t break her. Which makes me think she’s got what it takes to operate in an unsympathetic environment as well as having picked up the insight she needs for Evasion Planning. If we can earn her loyalty, we’re gold.
AGENT O’NEILL: That’s the hard part.
COL. SMITH: You know the old saying? “Set a thief to catch a thief?” We were trying a new angle. Train a spy in security policing to avoid getting caught by the adversary’s secret police.
DR. SCRANTON: Nevertheless, it seems to me that failure would have had a significant impact on her morale, not to mention making it harder to keep this little red wagon rolling along. Oversight wouldn’t like it.
COL. SMITH: I’d have pretexted her out of there in an hour if I thought she was going to crack.
AGENT GOMEZ: So now we have this introverted liberal hippie actress chick with diplomas in police leadership skills from the FBI, Espionage 101 training, and, and DRAGON’S TEETH capability? In what way does this get us closer to our objective?
COL. SMITH: We ran out of time. You’re on the distribution. You got the memo about BLACK RAIN.
AGENT GOMEZ: Yes, but I don’t see how—
COL. SMITH: She was set for another six months of Clandestine Ops School, then two years pushing a desk with Operational Analysis before deployment. Under constant scrutiny, of course, and we were going to take the time to weld some handles onto her to make her easier to move around—