tried to get his arm up, but he was leaning forward, his weight going the wrong way. Metal cracked
into the side of his head. A web of pain ran in every direction around the world. Wells blinked, but when he tried to open his eyes he couldn’t.
No,
he said, or tried to say—
His legs went and he fell to his knees and the black swallowed him.
6
HONG KONG
2010
M ost of his life he’d had a different name. A different face. He’d grown up in Ontario, California. East of Los Angeles, west of Death Valley. Caught between hell and the desert, his dad said. His mom taught third-graders, his dad managed a dry cleaner. They weren’t rich, but they did fine. His mom always used exactly those words,
We aren’t rich, but we do fine
.
He remembered perfectly the moment he left them behind. Disney World. Not Disneyland, Disney World. They’d scrimped for a year to fly across the country and ride the exact same rides that they rode in Anaheim. He was on Space Mountain with his dad, second time that day. Suddenly he caught himself thinking,
I will not be these people. I will not be ordinary.
He was twelve. He felt something like shock.
You look green,
his mom said when they got off the coaster.
Too many Cokes?
Through junior high, he waited for the feeling to wane. Instead, it put vines in him. Only one problem. He had no idea how he would make his mark. The obvious routes to fame and fortune were out. He was five-ten, one-sixty, no athlete. He couldn’t act or play guitar. He was average-looking, with dark hair and brown eyes that were a little too small. He was smart, but plenty of kids were smarter.
What, then? Finally, he saw that he did have one exceptional quality, an uncanny ability to blend in. He was at home with the jocks, the theater geeks, the UN club. The teachers liked him, too. He simply shut his mouth. Everyone in the world wanted to talk. He listened. He let an endless stream of words flow over him, offered the right answers at the right moments. Over time, he grew to see conversations almost as a game. How little could he say? He never passed on the gossip he heard. X had cheated on her boyfriend? Y was cutting school to smoke pot? So what? Once he’d learned a secret, he no longer cared.
He’s so mature,
the teachers told his parents.
So empathetic.
In fact, he was the opposite. The right test would have revealed that he was close to a psychopath. But he wasn’t conventionally dangerous. He had no interest in hurting anyone. Not back then.
In eleventh grade, he took a modern history class whose syllabus included
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
When he read it, he knew. He belonged with these men who lied to one another and everyone else, who stood outside the world’s laws.
Finding a way into their world was straightforward. The era of Ivy League shoulder taps had ended decades before. He studied Spanish and international relations at UC San Diego. After graduation, he became an analyst at the RAND Institute in Los Angeles. RAND was federally backed, thick with former intelligence officers, a clear path to Langley. The agency called three years later.
You can’t tell anyone
, the recruiters told him
. Not your friends. Not your family.
The most thrilling words of his life.
He aced training and was sent to Peru. With the Cold War over, Congress was cutting the agency’s budget. But the news hadn’t gotten to Latin America, the last refuge for cowboy case officers who ran their own foreign policy with duffel bags of cash. For a while, he loved the job. Especially the tradecraft. Countersurveillance runs through the slums on his way to meetings. Growing into his cover as an engineer for a mining company prospecting around Machu Picchu. Helicoptering into the Andes with a briefcase full of cash handcuffed to his wrist.
After a year, the thrills began to fade. Slowly. Like a song he’d heard too many times. He realized the agency was a bureaucracy like any other, driven by its own perverse internal
into the side of his head. A web of pain ran in every direction around the world. Wells blinked, but when he tried to open his eyes he couldn’t.
No,
he said, or tried to say—
His legs went and he fell to his knees and the black swallowed him.
6
HONG KONG
2010
M ost of his life he’d had a different name. A different face. He’d grown up in Ontario, California. East of Los Angeles, west of Death Valley. Caught between hell and the desert, his dad said. His mom taught third-graders, his dad managed a dry cleaner. They weren’t rich, but they did fine. His mom always used exactly those words,
We aren’t rich, but we do fine
.
He remembered perfectly the moment he left them behind. Disney World. Not Disneyland, Disney World. They’d scrimped for a year to fly across the country and ride the exact same rides that they rode in Anaheim. He was on Space Mountain with his dad, second time that day. Suddenly he caught himself thinking,
I will not be these people. I will not be ordinary.
He was twelve. He felt something like shock.
You look green,
his mom said when they got off the coaster.
Too many Cokes?
Through junior high, he waited for the feeling to wane. Instead, it put vines in him. Only one problem. He had no idea how he would make his mark. The obvious routes to fame and fortune were out. He was five-ten, one-sixty, no athlete. He couldn’t act or play guitar. He was average-looking, with dark hair and brown eyes that were a little too small. He was smart, but plenty of kids were smarter.
What, then? Finally, he saw that he did have one exceptional quality, an uncanny ability to blend in. He was at home with the jocks, the theater geeks, the UN club. The teachers liked him, too. He simply shut his mouth. Everyone in the world wanted to talk. He listened. He let an endless stream of words flow over him, offered the right answers at the right moments. Over time, he grew to see conversations almost as a game. How little could he say? He never passed on the gossip he heard. X had cheated on her boyfriend? Y was cutting school to smoke pot? So what? Once he’d learned a secret, he no longer cared.
He’s so mature,
the teachers told his parents.
So empathetic.
In fact, he was the opposite. The right test would have revealed that he was close to a psychopath. But he wasn’t conventionally dangerous. He had no interest in hurting anyone. Not back then.
In eleventh grade, he took a modern history class whose syllabus included
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
When he read it, he knew. He belonged with these men who lied to one another and everyone else, who stood outside the world’s laws.
Finding a way into their world was straightforward. The era of Ivy League shoulder taps had ended decades before. He studied Spanish and international relations at UC San Diego. After graduation, he became an analyst at the RAND Institute in Los Angeles. RAND was federally backed, thick with former intelligence officers, a clear path to Langley. The agency called three years later.
You can’t tell anyone
, the recruiters told him
. Not your friends. Not your family.
The most thrilling words of his life.
He aced training and was sent to Peru. With the Cold War over, Congress was cutting the agency’s budget. But the news hadn’t gotten to Latin America, the last refuge for cowboy case officers who ran their own foreign policy with duffel bags of cash. For a while, he loved the job. Especially the tradecraft. Countersurveillance runs through the slums on his way to meetings. Growing into his cover as an engineer for a mining company prospecting around Machu Picchu. Helicoptering into the Andes with a briefcase full of cash handcuffed to his wrist.
After a year, the thrills began to fade. Slowly. Like a song he’d heard too many times. He realized the agency was a bureaucracy like any other, driven by its own perverse internal
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