She walked over to a bookshelf and began staring at titles--the point was, she wasn't looking at me.
Her voice sounded nervous. "You're not going to believe this."
"You'd be surprised what I'd believe these days."
"I received a promotion. After the operation ended, I was made an SES 2. I'm Johnson's new deputy."
I shook my head, but not in disbelief. "Well that's really something."
"Nobody was more surprised than me," she said, pretending that it was true, which it obviously wasn't. She'd turned on her own husband to get ahead, and when that had fallen apart, she'd covered her own ass better than anybody. She had great instincts and wonderful reflexes. Why wouldn't they promote her?
"So how's your husband?" I asked, since there was still this five-month gap in my knowledge of anything that had happened outside the frozen wasteland called Camp 18.
"He's fine. After you left, a new lawyer was appointed."
"Yeah, I know. How'd he do?"
"You left him a birthday gift. We brought Eddie Golden over to the headquarters and made him listen to your tape. We were very blunt. We told him we could no longer support the charges of treason or murder. He wasn't happy."
"I'll bet," I said, trying to swallow my disappointment at missing that particular meeting. Of all the unfair things about this case, that was the most painful. I'd earned the right to see the blood drain from Eddie's face as he realized what a horse's ass he looked like after all those leaks and briefings to the press about Morrison. That's the thing about laying it all out for the public the way he had. When your face appears on the cover ofPeople magazine, you better deliver.
"After that," Mary continued, "a deal was worked out. Bill was allowed to retire as a major general in return for his confession on adultery."
"As a major general? But he was only on the list. He never even wore the stars."
She sort of dipped her head. "We wanted the deal very badly, and Bill was furious about this whole thing. We all agreed he had a right to be mad. We were willing to offer him a concession or two."
I was suddenly suspicious. "And why'd you want a deal so badly?"
She stopped looking at my bookshelf. She stared out the window instead, anywhere but at my accusatory eyes. "Because of the way we had to explain this, Sean. The story we eventually released was that we thought we had an impeccable source in Moscow. He made some grand claims and we believed him. We paid him a great deal of money to turn over certain documents we thought were authentic. Only later did we learn that he was a forger and the documents were fake. There was no traitor."
"You're shitting me!" I yelled.
She acted like I hadn't said anything. "It was embarrassing for the Agency to have to admit it had been gulled by a common thief, but we stomached it. It was a damned sight better than the real story."
"And why is it better?"
She finally turned around and faced me. "Because for fifty years, we and the Russians were pointing tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at each other. Because the current situation might not be perfect, but it's a massive improvement over the past. We're talking about cutting our nuclear arsenals in half. They're working with us on ending terrorism. Together, we're looking at hundreds of ways to cooperate and make the world safer and more peaceful. A whole new partnership is being born. Don't you get it?"
"And what about Viktor and his plot? That doesn't bother you?"
"Sean, for somebody so smart, you can miss the most obvious things. Look at it practically. He ended Communism. He ushered in a democracy. Do you think we and the Russians would be having the discussions we're having today if the old system was still in place? He's made the world a much better and safer place. We're not going to complain about how he did it. That's ancient history. The important thing is the future."
I stared hard at her for a few moments. She stared right back. And slowly, reluctantly, even painfully, it dawned on me. I didn't want to admit it, but it was true. If you looked at it practically, she was right. His motive and means might've been pathetic, but in the grand scheme of things, that was irrelevant.
Mary turned back and lifted a book off the shelf. She opened it halfway and acted like she was