While Xin Zhu lived without dreams, or at least lost them by the time he woke each morning, Milo had been plagued over the last month by a repeating nightmare. Unlike Alan Drummond’s dream of spots on a computer screen changing color as people died, it bore no obvious connection to recent events.
It took place in a park that, from one angle, looked like Prospect Park, but from another resembled the area around Lake Devin in Oxford, North Carolina, where he grew up. He was with Stephanie, who in his dream was two years old, maybe three, and they were discussing the film of The Wizard of Oz. The foliage around them thickened, and an approaching man gave Milo a raised eyebrow and a hand signal-three flat fingers over his heart-as he passed. Milo knew that sign, knew that it was telling him to do something, but he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do. He reached for Stephanie’s hand as she said, “You no leave me, Daddy?” and he tried to hurry her up, but she buckled her legs, sliding to the dusty ground beside a park bench, and laughed, playing with him. Her act of rebellion terrified and enraged him, because now he remembered what he was supposed to do. So he scooped her up and ran with her through the trees, trying to cut through the park to the exit, but every time they emerged from the low hedges they were on the same length of trail, and each time a different man sat on the bench. The men always wore oversized trench coats, but the objects in their hands changed. One read a newspaper, the next talked on a cell phone, and the last peeled an apple with a knife. Though they said nothing, they were all demanding the same thing-three fingers rose to their hearts-and time was running out. The unspoken threat was that if he didn’t do as they demanded, neither he nor Stephanie would leave the park alive.
The hedges on either side of the trail formed a low wall, and he caught his breath behind one, squatting and setting Stephanie down. He was crying by then, doing everything to hide it from her, but knew he wasn’t succeeding. Still, she pretended that everything was all right. She asked a question about Dorothy’s clothes, but he couldn’t figure out what she was asking. He said, “Daddy has to go somewhere, Little Miss.” She repeated her question about Dorothy, the sentence streaming on with awkward pauses and unexpected half-words, so that he still didn’t understand it. Choking on his tears, he said, “You wait right here. I’ll be back soon.” She nodded, wide-eyed, trusting him absolutely. He kissed her in a frantic way until she pushed him away, laughing. As he stood, towering over her, he saw movement in the shrubbery, but the bench on the trail was empty. He whispered, “Stay here, okay, Little Miss?” She blew him a kiss with her fat-fingered hand.
He stepped around the shrubs to the trail and headed for the bench, but changed his mind and returned to the hedge, squatting on his side so that were he to reach through the impenetrable branches, he would touch Stephanie. He waited, hands pressed to his face. He heard, “Daddy?”-a light whisper. Then with concern, “Daddy?”
Movement. Heavy feet. Whispers in an indecipherable language that sounded like Latin with a Slavic accent.
“Daddy?”
He was weeping uncontrollably now, hearing and feeling the men converge on her, and her single repeated word grew louder and more hysterical, melting into a high wail of fear or pain that, until he broke, grew exponentially. He always broke in this dream, crashing back through the hedge, cutting himself on thorns and falling onto wet ground. Her imprint remained in the bent grass, but he was alone, writhing uncontrollably, tugging at his own chest and stomach, trying to excise himself of every organ.
He woke from these dreams to wet pillows, sometimes to Tina-who, irritated, would ask why he was waking her up. He’d mutter some excuse and wander to the kitchen and pour a glass of water, but he was seldom able to get back to sleep. Instead, he found himself picking apart the dream, trying to uncover the basic question of it: Why was he giving up his daughter to nameless thugs in the park? He understood that the alternative was death for them both, but why did they want her in the first place? He was asking for logic from his dream, and no matter how many times the dream recurred, a logical answer remained far away.
The more appropriate question was: Why am I dreaming this? He had a pretty good idea. Back in December, while still working as a Tourist, he’d been ordered to kill a Moldovan girl, fifteen years old, and had balked. He’d instead tried to save her but had failed. When, nine weeks ago, the dead girl’s father put a bullet in him, Milo had felt no sense of injustice. He might not have killed the girl, but if people like him didn’t exist, she would have lived-that was the undeniable truth. Milo was as guilty as the man who had actually broken her neck, and in his dream, the men whose language resembled Moldovan were exacting proper revenge. It was his eye for that eye, and no matter how much he despised the dream he knew it would probably visit him for the rest of his life.
A week after their dinner, on Friday the thirteenth, Penelope left a message on Tina’s phone. Alan wasn’t in town, and she was canceling dinner at their apartment. When Tina called back, Penelope didn’t pick up, so Milo called Alan’s cell. His old boss answered sounding unnerved, like a man desperate to hide his anxiety. “Where are you?” Milo asked.
“Well, I’m not in Manhattan. Don’t tell me you guys are that hard up for a meal.”
“Overseas?”
“You didn’t want any part of it, remember?”
“I don’t,” Milo said, but he had a sudden urge to know what, exactly, Drummond was up to. He hadn’t liked the man he’d talked to on his roof last week, hadn’t trusted that he could keep himself out of trouble, and the things Tina had told him about the Drummonds’ disintegrating marriage had just sharpened his worry. Alan Drummond was bound to rush things; he was bound to make a mistake. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.”
“How about next week?”
“Why don’t you guys invite Pen over? I’m not… well, we’re not together anymore.”
“Since when?”
“It’s nothing. As soon as I’ve taken care of some things we’ll see if we can’t patch it up.”
Though Tina had prepared him for such a turn of events, he was still surprised. “When did this happen?”
“Couple days after your place.”
“And?”
“And I’m not talking about my marital life on an open line. Got it? Just ask Pen. She’s already told your wife all about it.”
“I want to hear your side,” Milo said, because it wasn’t surprise he felt; it was fear. He’d seen how marital troubles could run like dominoes through social circles, bringing out the hidden fault lines in each friend’s marriage.
“How’d the interview go?” Alan asked. He wasn’t going to share.
“What?”
“You were about to join the ranks of the employed.”
“I have a feeling they actually checked my references.”
“If the department were still together we could’ve given you an excellent CV.”
“Watch out for yourself, Alan.”
“Invite Pen over, she’s probably lonely.”
Penelope was out of town for the weekend, visiting her brother in Boston, so she didn’t come for dinner until Monday evening. Milo noticed that she did have the look of a lonely person, humorless and quietly desperate for their company. Having Stephanie around throughout dinner didn’t help, and the girl’s explanation for the lack of tomatoes in the salad Tina had rustled up-“Mom thinks we’ll all die if we eat tomatoes. They’ve got fish in them.”-only left Penelope confused.
“Fish?”
“Salmon,” Stephanie said authoritatively.
“Salmon ella,” Tina corrected, “and I didn’t say we’d die. It’s just not a good idea to take chances. Over two hundred people have gotten sick-did you know?”
“No,” Penelope said into her lettuce. “I didn’t hear that.”
Conversation couldn’t really begin until Stephanie was gone, so once she had been packed off to bed they took positions around their guest. Tina sat beside her on the couch, while Milo took the chair across from her. It reminded him miserably of the interviewer he’d faced off with last week, when he’d known from the second question that they wouldn’t call him, yet stuck out the entire interview in order to seem professional. He slipped some Nicorette into his mouth, then said, “Where’s Alan? I talked to him, but he didn’t tell me where he was.”
Penelope shrugged and began on her fresh glass of wine.
“You’re not keeping in touch?”
“He hasn’t called me, if that’s what you mean. Maybe he’s finding himself a girlfriend.” She turned to Tina. “One can hope.”
Milo felt at a loss, so he let that sit and waited for Tina to take over, but all she did was stare back at Penelope, smiling sadly. He was outside for the moment, these two women staring at one another like melancholy lovers, and he wondered if Tina really had told him everything about their conversation. Perhaps she had found something to sympathize with in Penelope’s sudden lack of love for her husband.
Finally, Penelope turned to him. “I’m the one who did it. I kicked him out. That was… Sunday? Yeah. A full week ago. He told me he had to go on a trip, so I told him not to bother coming back. I’d had enough.”
“Enough of what?”
“The secrecy. The moods. All the things you can put up with if you really love your husband.”
Tina was staring at him. It was an indecipherable expression-did she want him to shut up? He saw no reason to stop, so he said, “Alan thinks he can set things right once he gets back. He told me that.”
Penelope nodded.
“You think that’s right?”
Penelope raised her glass to her lips.
It felt like a few interrogations he’d run. Coy silences, self-conscious smirks. In those situations, he’d felt the urge to slap the person in question, but now he simply felt confused. What, really, were they trying to get out of her? The key to a failed marriage?
Later, when the women had cracked their second bottle (Milo stuck to tonic water), Penelope turned the questions around. “You should tell me, Milo. What happened in March?”
“You know. The department was shut down. Alan blames himself.”
“Should he?”
Milo seldom thought in terms of blame, or tried not to, and now he had to take a moment to go through the sequence of events that had led to that computer screen and its flickering dots. If the blame had to be put on any one person, he would hand it to Senator Nathan Irwin, but there was no reason to tell Penelope about that. He shook his head. “No. The failures were in place before he took the job, and by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do. But Langley blamed him, which is why he’s having such trouble finding a job.”
“No,” Penelope said. “That’s his fault. He hasn’t even tried. He’s spent all his time in his office, or the bathroom, plotting the end of the world. So you tell me. What happened that screwed him up like this? He’s not the same man he was before he took that damned job.”
Milo wasn’t sure how much Penelope knew, nor how much she should know. He’d shared more than was appropriate, or even legal, with Tina, but Penelope… The fact was that she had gotten rid of her Company man, and who knew what she might decide to say in the midst of an acrimonious divorce? He knew far too little about Penelope Drummond.
So he kept to the minimum of facts. “The department wasn’t made redundant, and it wasn’t closed down. It was liquidated. In the space of two days, nearly all of Alan’s field agents were killed. The way Alan puts it, the department had been running well for sixty years. He took over, and it was wiped out in sixty days.”
As he spoke, he watched her face for signs, and by the time he finished he was sure that she’d known none of this.
“How many?” she asked.
He hesitated, but saw no reason for evasion now. “Thirty-three.”
Her face went slack. “Thirty- three?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well.”
Tina sat in silence, picking at her fingernails. She knew the story. She also knew that their deaths had been orchestrated by a Chinese intelligence officer, though he’d never told her his name.
Penelope finished her wine, then unconsciously wiped at her lip, reminding him of her husband. “That’s why he’s obsessed.”
“Yes.”
“And…” She frowned at the coffee table, then focused on Milo’s eyes. “And are you helping him?”
Tina was watching him again, expectant.
“I’m trying to get him to let it go.”
“Thirty-three people? Is that something anyone can let go of? Could you?”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing Alan can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Someone should be arrested,” Penelope said.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Tell her,” said Tina.
Milo blinked at her. “What?”
Tina sighed, then grabbed the open wine bottle between them and began topping off their glasses. “Tell her what you told me. About China.”
“I’m not sure-”
“Please,” Penelope cut in. “Tell me about China.”
Tina knew what she was doing, but she didn’t care. Things like national secrets and government bureaucracies, for her, paled in comparison to a woman sitting on her couch being ruined by her husband’s deterioration. He wondered what Alan Drummond would do in his position, then knew: Alan would become rude and sullen, climb to his feet, and leave. If Milo did that, Tina would simply turn to Penelope and tell her everything she knew. He could at least make sure she didn’t mix up the facts.
He stood up. “Come on, Pen. Let’s go to the roof.”
“Roof?”
“I had to do the same thing,” said Tina.
Penelope wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. “Why?”
“Bugs,” said Tina. “My husband is paranoid.”