Free The Counterfeit Agent by Alex Berenson Page B

incentives. The CIA’s primary mission in Lima was helping the Peruvian army fight leftist guerrillas who called themselves the Shining Path. By the mid-1990s, the Path was unraveling. Its violence had alienated the peasants who formed its core. The CIA could have encouraged the army to stand aside, let the Path commit suicide. Instead, it kept paying for ops that mostly killed civilians.
Anybody ever think about dialing things back?
he once asked his station chief. A casual question over beers.
    We have a budget. Budget means ops. Don’t get any points for saving it. We don’t spend it, they don’t give it to us next year.
    —
    A few weeks later, he fell in love.
    He’d never been in love. Never even had a girlfriend, though he’d slept with scores of women in California. The girls were usually a little overweight, a little older. They were needy and unhappy, and they always told him what a good listener he was. After he moved to Los Angeles to work for RAND, he began to dream about hurting them, dreams that always ended the same way, him taping their mouths shut.
    What the hell?
He wasn’t a killer. He’d become a vegetarian in college because he couldn’t abide the taste of dead flesh. He stopped going to bars. Maybe his brain wasn’t wired for love. But he resolved to stop the listening game, look for a real relationship. To his surprise, he found one.
    Julia was a Peruvian who worked as a translator and reporter for the Associated Press. She was small, almost scrawny. She wore her hair long and had deep brown eyes, the most beautiful he’d ever seen. He met her at the ambassador’s Fourth of July barbecue, a cheap way for the embassy to build goodwill with reporters in Lima. She filled her plate like she was training for an eating contest. In forty-five minutes she plowed through two hamburgers, two ears of corn, a plate of ribs. She didn’t make a mess, but she left nothing behind.
    “They must not pay you enough.”
    “They don’t.” She said the words without heat.
    “I’m Ron—” His cover name.
    “Julia.”
    He waited for her to talk. People always spoke; they couldn’t bear silence. Their voices relieved them. Once they started, they never stopped.
    But she didn’t start. After a minute, she walked to the pie table, the highlight of the afternoon, a half-dozen varieties, plus cans of Reddi-wip flown in by the case from Houston. She came back with wide slices of lemon, apple, and pecan. She ate carefully, relentlessly. He felt her responding to his stare. Maybe even putting on a show for him. All this in silence.
    She finished, reached into her pocket, slid a card across the picnic table to him. “Call me sometime.” She walked away.
    He looked at the card—
Julia Espada, Associated
Press—
and wondered if he could fall in love with someone over the way she ate.
    —
    The fact that her English wasn’t great helped. He didn’t always understand her. She had to repeat herself. The irony did not escape him. But mostly they didn’t talk. Translating tired her tongue, she told him. The quiet relaxed her. They sat together, reading and companionable. Drove along the coast road as Pacific waves crashed into the rocks. Cooked in his apartment, the kitchen hushed as an operating room in the middle of tricky surgery.
    They saw each other two and three times a week, but she wouldn’t sleep with him. He should have been frustrated. In truth, he respected her for her restraint, so unlike the women at home. After two months, she offered herself to him with no false ceremony.
Tonight I’m staying over. I hope you have condoms.
The word sounded small in her mouth, the syllables precise and separate.
Con. Doms.
    Their sex was quiet, too. In California, he’d learned not to believe the screamers, who were mostly parroting the porn that guys made them watch. But Julia was nearly silent.
Is something wrong?
he finally asked. She told him not to worry.
    Later he would wish he had.
    She moved in eight