Free The Mulberry Bush by Charles McCarry

that way if I hadn’t known it was a safe house was another question.
    Sam used his smart phone to turn off the alarm system and unlock the door—two dead bolts. We went inside.
    â€œNobody home yet,” Sam said, as if in my untrained state I wouldn’t have noticed this without help.
    He showed me around, as if teaching me how to case a joint: decent, worn furniture, rag rugs and samplers ( LET ME LIVE IN A HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND BE A FRIEND TO MAN .) in the living and dining rooms, linoleum in the kitchen, varnished woodwork and flowered wallpaper throughout. Two bedrooms and one bath with tub but no shower upstairs, faded, mended Walmart clothes in the closets and drawers, a spare roomfitted out like a home office: old desk, outdated computer with no Internet connection. No printer. A rotary dial black telephone.
    Sam said, “Don’t use the phone. Store nothing on the computer’s hard drive. The CD and flash drives are disabled. Can you cook?”
    â€œI can use a microwave.”
    â€œGood. The nearest McDonald’s is ten miles down the road, and you’ll have no wheels after the other guys go home at the end of the day, so it’s heat up this stuff or go hungry.”
    Tires crunched in the gravel drive. Sam held out a hand.
    â€œSo long,” he said. “Have fun.”
    As the front door opened and another total stranger entered, Sam went out the back door. The newcomer, tall and lean, wore jeans and an old shirt and brand-new Converse sneakers. He, too, held out his hand. I wondered if there was a secret Headquarters grip and if I would learn it as part of my training. The newcomer was totally bald, with bushy eyebrows and an incongruous postage stamp of beard on his lower lip.
    In a hard-edged midwestern voice he said, “I’m Fred. What do you want me to call you?”
    â€œSuit yourself.”
    â€œYou have no preference?”
    â€œNo.”
    He said, “OK. I’ll call you ‘You.’”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œWhile you’re here I’ll be your acting case officer. You know that term?”
    I didn’t answer the question.
    Eyebrows raised, Fred said, “That’s a yes?”
    â€œI’ve been to the movies.”
    He said, “Look, relax. I know all this must seem odd and you’re wondering if we are what we say we are and why or whether you should trust us, but we mean you no harm. Pretty soon you’ll be able to tell the difference between our ways and insanity. My function is to be with youthroughout this process. While it lasts, I am your best and only friend. My function is to answer your questions, protect you from discovery and harm, vouch for the other people who come through the door, make sure you have what you need and, prime objective, make sure you have absorbed the Knowledge, capital
K.
”
    â€œLike a London cabdriver?”
    â€œMore like Mark Twain’s riverboat captain. The practice of espionage is like the Mississippi. You want to have the whole river in your mind, know where the channel is, where it’s shallow, where the hidden sandbars are located, where and how to find the safe landings and send a message in a bottle if the need arises. But the river changes with time and the weather—sometimes very suddenly. It isn’t like a city where the streets have names and always take you to a certain destination and nowhere else. So you have to keep your eyes peeled and your wits about you every minute.”
    He sounded just as rehearsed as Sam. No doubt Fred had spoken these words to many neophytes before me, but his fluency, his command of the language, his confident manner and tone, impressed me all the same. Their lines might be memorized, but so were Shakespeare’s, and like Shakespeare they made you want to hear what was coming next. They had a belonger’s kind of humor that was all their own. This came to me as no surprise. Headquarters people,