Nate struggled with competing emotions. He knew the career reprieve bestowed by Benford was dependent on his continued good behavior, and on the successful recruitment of the profligate General Tan Furen in Macao. Stopping in Los Angeles and seeing Agnes did not seem to Nate to constitute unacceptable behavior, but he was unsure if Benford would view it as recidivism. He likewise struggled with the situation with Dominika: With Benford breathing fire, and Dominika’s refusal to contemplate retirement before the unspeakable happened and she was caught, were they finished? Would they ever even see each other again, much less be together? Nate knew he loved her, that had not changed, but he faced the possibility that she might truly be out of his life as permanently as if she had been caught putting down a drop in Moscow, tried, and executed in the basement of Butyrka Prison. Mortification over his recent professional missteps had morphed into loneliness and a desire to be able to talk to a friend. Gable was gone; Benford was unapproachable; and Forsyth had his own problems as a division chief.
Seeing Agnes perhaps would be a salve to his screwed-up emotions. She was smart, brave, earthy, and, even pushing fifty, impossibly sexy. She knew the work, she knew the life, she understood. And judging by the response to his call, she still liked him. He looked forward to being with her, as a friend.
* * *
* * *
Agnes was in the brightly colored Mazatlán Mayan woven hammock hung from the overhanging eaves of her little house in her small moonlit backyard. Bamboo tiki torches, guttering and stinking of kerosene, cast jumpy shadows on the flagstone patio, and on the ferns, cacti, and flowering bushes that filled the garden. It would have been a more bucolic scene had Agnes not been lying naked across the width of the hammock with her toes hooked onto the ropes, her legs extended out in a vee, swinging the thing back and forth, each upswing bringing her mons into contact with an equally naked Nate, standing a foot away on the flagstones, braced for each collision while desperately calculating trajectory and windage for the next kinetic docking. Agnes’s head hung over the other side of the hammock as she moaned mocniej, which Nate only later found out meant “harder” in Polish, which was just as well because any harder would have knocked him backward into the ornamental fish pond.
Later, in a short belted kimono, Agnes showed Nate a wooden panel, part of a 1534 altar from a chapel in Florence that may or may not have been painted by a student of Michelangelo. She had a deadline and had been given permission to bring it home to work on it. “I’m keeping you from your work,” said Nate. Agnes smiled, shook her hair, and put her hands on his shoulders.
“Michelangelo I can see every day,” she said. “You’re here now with me, in my little house, and that’s all I need. Do you remember what I told you in Romania? Czuje miete dla ciebie, I feel mint for you, I have feelings for you.” She brushed a strand of hair off her forehead, and leaned to kiss him, slowly at first, then more urgently. She suddenly stopped and looked him in the eyes. “Is that other woman still in your life?” Agnes asked. “I can still feel you carry her inside.” Nate had forgotten how perceptive Agnes was. She didn’t have a witch’s white forelock for nothing.
“It’s still very difficult,” said Nate. “It involves work, and it didn’t go well. I may have put her in danger, and that’s inexcusable.”
“I hope she is safe,” Agnes said softly. “I miss the work, the excitement; I miss the old colleagues, and I miss Poland.” She was silent for a moment. “I won’t ask you anymore about her. I am glad you came. Are you hungry? Come and watch me.”
They went into the kitchen, where Agnes quickly prepared foil-baked salmon and a Polish cucumber salad called mizeria, misery, because it was a staple of peasants. They sat outside in the dark eating by torchlight, Agnes watching Nate’s face as he ate. Beyond the garden fence a peacock shrilled its creepy mating call that sounds like a soprano trilling “help me, help me.”
“The last time I heard a peacock howl like that I was in the woods in northern Greece, meeting someone special,” said Nate. “Scared me to death at the time.” Agnes leaned forward, her chin in her hands, smiling at him.
“I do not think you are scared very easily,” said Agnes.
“I don’t know, feels like I’m scared more now than when I was younger,” said Nate. “That’s what experience does to you I guess.”
“Do I scare you?” Agnes asked.
“No, Agnes, I think you’re wonderful,” said Nate. Her eyes were shiny with emotion, and Nate felt a wave of tenderness welling up inside him.
“When you return it would be nice to have you visit longer, take a vacation,” she said. “I could sneak you into the museum workshop and show you the Medici panels; they are special.” She searched his eyes for a reaction.
“I’d love that,” said Nate. “But no more of that hammock. I think I have a hip pointer.”
“What is a hip pointer?” Agnes said.
Nate got up and put her hand on his bruised hip bone. “See? Hammocks are out, please.”
“I have hurt you? Jeny kochane, oh dear, what can I do to relieve your pain?” she said, mock concerned. Nate kissed her, and she pressed against him, nuzzling his neck and softly biting his lower lip. He held her by the hand and led her to her bedroom, where Agnes flopped onto the bed on her back. Nate stood over her, slowly undoing his belt buckle. From outside, the peacock called “help me, help me.”
“I know how that bird feels,” said Agnes, untying the belt of her kimono.
* * *
* * *
Nate took the Airport Express from Chek Lap Kok Airport, looking out the window as the train rocked past emerald-blue lagoons and the dark-green peaks of the islands scattered in the South China Sea. The gleaming downtown rail terminal in Central Hong Kong was a beehive of orderly activity. The rank of cherry-red taxis waited for passengers, and the rear doors of the vehicles swung open automatically at the push of a button, striking Nate as quintessentially Chinese, welcoming foreigners to the Orient with a bow. The taxi raced through the teaming downtown business district, sidewalks jammed with pedestrians, and deliverymen pushing carts stacked with boxes. The cab rocketed up steeply curving Garden Road and came to a squealing stop in front of the US Consulate, a four-story concrete box with square tinted windows, the American flag hanging limply in the humid air.
Nate slid his passport under the receptionist’s glass—she was a Foreign Service National, a local Hong Konger—and was buzzed through to the Marine Security Guard Post One where Nate’s passport again was examined by a young steely marine in Blue Dress “C” uniform, a crisp khaki shirt and necktie, and a holstered sidearm at his hip. A young woman came to the lobby to collect him, leading him through the hard-line door, and up an elevator to the fourth floor. Appraising the newcomer with a sidelong glance, she introduced herself as the Chief’s secretary, and punched a red button to open a thick vault door that swung outward with an electric whine. They stepped up into a huge furnished container with blue-gray carpet on the floor and up the walls, an acoustic-shielded enclosure impervious to outside electronic eavesdropping. Inside it was chilly and dry, people at a dozen desks in the container wore light sweaters.
Chief of Hong Kong Station Barnabas Burns sat in the largest of a row of enclosed cubicles with sliding pocket doors, as cramped as a ship’s cabin, nothing like the grand offices of Station Chiefs in stately European embassies, an uncomfortable necessity in a CIA Station operating in Chinese-controlled territory. Burns was fifty years old, gray haired and square jawed, whipsaw tough with ropey forearms sticking out of his rolled-up shirtsleeves. He came around his desk to greet Nate with a nutcracker handshake, and nodded at a small couch against the wall of the cubicle for Nate to sit on. Burns lobbed Nate a plastic bottle of water taken from a small refrigerator in the corner, and sat on the couch beside him, stretching out his legs. Half Marlboro Man, half James Bond, thought Nate, taking a sip of water.
“Should have been a beer,” said Burns, “but it’s not five o’clock yet. Your flight okay? Not too beat?” Nate shook his head.
“We got you in a nice temporary apartment, just up Old Peak Road, on the other side of the botanical gardens. It’s a brief walk downhill in the morning, through the zoo—they even got a leopard—but your shirt will be soaked walking uphill at night. You’ll get used to that in Hong Kong, sweating.”
“It’s my first time here,” said Nate. “From the little I saw, it’s going to be tough spotting surveillance on the street.” Burns laughed.