maternity leave in a matter of days. Her work logs, her computer activities would have been under another agent’s direct scrutiny in your office. Her trail could have been discovered.”
I let the words settle. “You’re wrong.”
“The alternative is a monster under the bed,” Mila said softly. “The alternative is that she never loved you, she used you, and then she framed you to look like a traitor. She murdered your friends. She made you a pawn.” Mila pulled a face. “I want to know what you truly think, Sam. You worked some of the most dangerous jobs in Europe. You cannot be a man easily fooled and have survived. Tell me what you really think.”
No one had asked me that in so long. “She’s not a traitor. We were both framed. They took her, to find out what she knew. The Company’s been trying to break the back of the new order of transnational crime rings, especially those with ties to governments, whether friendly or not.”
Mila waited.
“Lucy would be valuable to those kinds of criminal networks. She knew more about our infrastructure, our computer systems, our ways of tracking financial data. She would be more useful to them than I would be. They would have targeted her. I think she warned me to save my life.”
“Yes, she is useful to them,” Mila said. “And you are useful to no one now, except me.”
“Useful to you. How?”
“I could give you the freedom to find the truth.”
“Freedom?”
“Time. Resources. It’s hard to conduct an international search for your wife and child when you’re ordering tonic water by the case and cleaning the beer taps and under constant surveillance. And if they catch you now?” She shrugged. “You’ll be in their prison for the rest of your life. The waterboarding was a bitch. I’ve seen the tapes.”
“I won’t be free as long they’re hunting me. And as long as I don’t know what’s happened to my family.”
“They made you into a soldier for the shadows; they made you play a role where you would have been tortured to death if you’d been discovered. Smuggler, hired gun. They made you their weapon, and they don’t need you anymore, Sam. How long did you last on the waterboarding? A minute? Most people don’t make it past the twenty-second mark. You are strong.”
“How are you not Company but you’re watching Company tapes? Did you find it on YouTube?”
Mila risked a smile. “According to the file, you were never waterboarded. According to your file, your wife is considered missing in action and you have resigned from the CIA. Your file indicates you did not do field work, but were a minor administrator with limited duties. They’ve rewritten your history to make you unimportant.”
“All neat and tidy. It never happened, like Howell likes to say.”
“If Lucy was a traitor, she may have compromised a hundred agents in Europe and beyond. She might have given them secrets in trade for your life. Maybe that’s why they let her save you.”
The thought was crushing. “Please don’t say that.”
“Sam. You are aimless. That’s a waste. You should be aimed, like a handcrafted bullet.”
“So where would you aim me?”
“At some very dangerous people.”
Recruitment. Mila wasn’t Company, but she was… big. Mila was capable of accessing my no doubt top-secret file and could have a jet helicopter intercept and search a ship, with an armed team. “I’m offering you a chance to do the work you’ve been trained to do, with support, and to regain your credibility and dignity.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Of course you are. The Company believed for months that you were a mass murderer and a traitor. Now they simply believe you’re an idiot who was played by his traitor wife.”
“They said I was innocent, that they had proof.”
“The only proof in your file was that you never broke. That you never changed your story. Howell argued for you to be put out as bait. That Lucy, if a traitor, would come out of hiding to kill you to eliminate you as a loose end or to keep you from coming after her. Or if Lucy had been kidnapped, then putting you out was no risk. If you ran, you ran, and they would find you.”
“If she wanted me dead, she didn’t have to get me out of the office.”
“Unless you living was useful to her, in the moment and its aftermath,” Mila said. “Traitors are not rational. They live in a bizarre limbo. Not poster children for the good adjustment.”