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.It was made up of odd symbols—like an alphabet of a language she’d never seen before.One of the people in the shadows spoke to her.“We’re considering you for a very special program, Helen,” he said.She was pretty sure it was a he.She still couldn’t make out faces, but when he leaned forward, she saw the dull white of the collar and cuffs of his oxford shirt, underneath his black suit and tie.Dim light reflected off his wire-rimmed glasses.“We’re impressed with what we’ve seen so far,” he said.“But we need to ask you a few questions.”“Who are you? What’s going on?”She heard paper rustling.The man in the shadows continued as if she’d never spoken.“When you were four years old,” he said, “you stayed with your grandmother.She had a bird she named—rather unimaginatively—Petey.What happened to Petey?”Helen laughed.This had to be anxiety, mixed with too much fast food and coffee.She didn’t remember any damn—And then she did.It came back to her as vividly as daylight.“I don’t know,” she said.Her right arm suddenly sang with pain, like a razor blade slicing cleanly up to her shoulder.She gasped for air, and would have dropped to her knees, but something held her in place.It didn’t stop the tears from rolling out of her eyes.You weren’t supposed to be able to feel pain in your dreams, Helen thought.She was sure of that.“Please don’t lie to us again,” the man said mildly.“Now.What happened to the bird?”“I killed it,” Helen said, and it all came blurting out.“She loved that goddamn thing more than me.It bit me, and all I wanted to do was pet it, it bit me, and she wouldn’t do anything about it, so I got one of the little green pellets out of the rat poison box, and the greedy little shit took that right out of my hand—”He cut her off.“Thank you.That’ll do.”But the memory stuck in Helen’s mind: the stiff little body of the bird on the bottom of the cage, her grandmother’s tears, her mother taking her home early.Her grandmother never had her to stay again.“Next,” the man said, and the images vanished.“What happened to your first lover?”Helen didn’t try to lie this time.In fact, she was still a little proud of how she’d handled herself back then.She was a freshman in college, saving herself for the right guy, he was a TA, and it was all so predictable.She was in love, she thought, or something close to it, until she saw him exit another dorm room one morning, still wearing yesterday’s clothes.She went to a lawyer, the dean and the department head, in that order.In the space of two days, he was fired and expelled, and facing the threat of criminal charges.She didn’t have to pay another dime in tuition.“Thank you, Helen,” the man said, stopping her again.“I meant, what happened to him after that?”“He killed himself.Pills.”“Are you at all sorry?”“No,” Helen said, and felt the same flush of triumph she did when she’d heard the news years before.“He was weak.”“I see.” The sound of a pen, scratching notes.“So, what really happened in Montreal?”Helen knew she couldn’t tell the truth.Not to this one.As if sensing her reluctance, her arm began to throb with pain again.Helen’s mouth was dry.She swallowed hard.“Start at the beginning,” the man prompted.“We were there to watch a target named Khalil Haj-Imad.He’s gotten a little following in the past couple years.Young Muslims.Kids, really.Six months ago, some former members of his mosque turned up in pieces in Iraq, after they strapped on suicide vests and tried to get inside the Green Zone—”“Yes, yes.” Impatient now.“So what did you do?”“I wasn’t given much to do,” Helen said, unable to keep the resentment from creeping into her voice.“I maintained communications while the senior members of the team”—arrogant pricks, she thought—“tracked the target’s movements and evaluated the chances of removing him from the field for questioning.”“You disagreed with that?”“I felt I could convince him one-on-one.He liked blondes.”“I see.Continue.”“Then our cover was blown.All three of the other field agents were killed.”The images came back to her, in brilliant detail.Corman, the lead operative, half his head blown away, his brains all over a wall in a coffeehouse.Marta, her throat slit, her body found in an alley ten blocks from the mosque.And David—whom she kind of liked, actually—dragged from the wheel of his van, later found beaten to death on a back road.They didn’t get her, because she was safe in their rented room, behind a wall of computers and surveillance equipment.She was on a flight out of Canada, back to the U.S., when her team failed to check in.The worst she’d had to face was a cranky Customs inspector.“How was their cover blown?”“I don’t know.” she began, and this time the pain did drop her to her knees.She woke a second later—she’d never passed out in a dream before—with drool strung from her mouth.“Strike two, Helen,” the man in the dark said.“There won’t be a third.Do I need to repeat the question?”“I did it,” Helen said.It almost felt like a relief to get it out there.“I was sick of being stuck in the background.I thought I could move out front if Marta’s cover was compromised.”“How did you do it without your superiors finding out?”“That was the easy part.” A stupid surge of pride here.“I snapped a quick shot of her in the street with a disposable cell phone that had a camera.Uploaded that in an Internet café on a lunch break.Sent it through an anonymizer in Finland, bounced it back and forth through some message boards, and then made sure a Jihadi website picked it up [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]