Even at his father’s funeral, he’s never seen his mother cry.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pregnant at seventeen.
In love with a hard body: hot, dreamy, her forever boy, Dennis Troon, and his blue bedroom eyes, who too late she came to understand would do anything for her—anything, that is, except be something her father had warned from the get-go Dennis was not nor would ever be: employable.
A minor detail that Jeremy needn’t ever know.
Silty Bethesda sunshine glints off windshield trim and resurrects her dull headache. Low-slung stone-and-glass buildings rise like oversize tombstones from an undulating terrain of well-fed bluegrass under the standard well-pruned arboreal canopy. The term industrial park is, Sentro thinks, such a free-market fuck-you.
She slips her Audi wagon through a guard gate into the fresh inky asphalt of the Solomon Systems parking lot. Her cell phone hums. Text: Where are you? Here. I’m here, she thinks. Always here. She texts back: Walking in. The engine ticks with heat as she gets out, and like an earworm, the rhythm hounds her all the way inside.
Baby Jeremy was not even six months old when she enlisted. She did it mostly to secure health care but also with eyes on the GI Bill to pay for her college afterward, because Dennis was getting his AA from the University of Phoenix and the high-paying medical lab job they’d practically guaranteed in their brochures. The plan was for her to work until he finished, then let him support her while she went back to school. Jenny arrived four years later, a happy consequence of Sentro’s reconciliation with Dennis in the wake of the troubled Berlin posting that had estranged them. Not exactly an accident, but the second child guaranteed Sentro would re-up, since by that time army intelligence had found her, used her, and, by way of apology, fast-tracked her into a West Point program with a covert detour through Langley. It meant Pentagon pay and silver bars on her collar and sundry other officer’s entitlements no family of four (carrying the sizable student debt Dennis had, while she was overseas, racked up in successive well-intentioned but unrealized for-profit-college career moves like his AA in political psychology or the bogus certificate program in elevator repair) could walk away from.
Regret never figured into it. Life unspooled, and they gathered it as best they could. It was only from the outside looking in that a more conventional world would, now and then, intrude and pass judgment. She didn’t care what the world thought. The reverse-role thing that her son is so curious about? No, Dennis never felt emasculated, never ceased to find the softness in her, loved her unconditionally, called her by her maiden name because he rejected the notion that anyone should have to lose themselves in a marriage, and she steadfastly believed, more and more as she drifted deeper into the darkness of the shadow wars and became addicted to it, that he was by far the better one to raise their kids.
What would he have said to Jeremy at lunch?
Her husband.
Has it really been nine years?
Hushed cubicles and shared work spaces squared in by a perimeter of glass-walled private offices, airy, bright, plants in pots. Sentro hurries through. She has a pace she keeps, faster than the engine ticking, which began after that cataclysmic first posting in Berlin as the wall came down and the Cold War took a turn to something even colder; it comes from never wanting anything to overtake her again. When they were little, her children complained about it, falling behind her on errands, on walks to school, at museums or amusement parks during her time off, dragging their feet and whining. She’d slow for a moment, then, invariably, return to her natural pace again, and they’d have to skip-hop to keep up.
Coworkers greet her, office banter; she banters back reflexively. These are not friends so much as coconspirators, but she’s comfortable here, plays well with others; they all speak a common language. Click of keyboards. Scent of burned coffee. The familiar soft compression of sound and light, low trill of landlines ringing, and her feet on the carpet dull. It reassures her, speaks of safety and civilization.
Her space is in the corner, tidy and spare, big windows overlooking the river, light streaming in. Unless they paid close attention, a casual observer would take it for middle management digs, which is misdirection but also the goal. Clients expect a high level of invisibility. And Solomon wants to afford them the illusion of calm. Just another day at the office.
Hers has few personal touches. Hand cream she never uses. Old picture of the husband and kids. A bowling trophy someone gave her as a joke, unaware that it was one of the few activities she had shared with her father growing up. In a bottom drawer, sexy blue spike heel pumps she bought on impulse once for an embassy cocktail party and never wore again but loves to look at. Corkboard map of the world with pushpins of all the places she’s been. A generic abstract watercolor that matches the color scheme of the building. Bookshelf, binders with no labels. Her long career has led to this, and she’s content with it. But lost in tangled thoughts of concussions, consequences, Jeremy and Jenny, and what a suddenly seemingly uncertain future may bring.
“Where the hell have you been?” A colleague she’s known for years has poked his bristly head in. She has no intention of telling him. But for a moment she draws a blank on his name and feels a hollow panic. “Ready?”
“For what?”
“Peer review of your Cyprus thing.”
Reno. His name comes back to her with a rush of relief. Retro flattop that reminds her of the cut grass of the parkway; in fact, stubble encircles his head, crown to chin, like one of those head warmers you wear under a ski helmet. Sentro suspects his wife trims it with pet shears. Their little boys—there’re three of them, right?—have the identical haircut but nothing on their chins yet.
“Did you forget? I texted you. Ten o’clock.” Reno—someone nicknamed him “Lucky”—Elsayed. “Jeez Louise, Aubrey, where’s your head?”
Where indeed?
“Reno—” The trick to improving memory for names is to use them more often in casual conversation. She read this once, in an airline seat-back magazine.
“What?”
Wait, what was she going to say? Is it Reno Elsayed who has the annoying habit of compressing everyone’s name into a single-syllable hip-hop sobriquet? No, that can’t be right.
“Earth to Aubrey.”
Cyprus.
“You okay?”
“Much better now. It was mostly the jet lag.” Cyprus. She laughs. “Of course I haven’t forgotten the meeting; I was just . . .” She wasn’t “just” anything, so she lets the thought hang. “Never mind. Tell them I’ll be right in.”
He lingers, though, frowning, so Sentro quickly gathers papers together from the orderly disorder on her desk. Cyprus. The hotel hostage swap and exfiltration in Nicosia. She had forgotten about the debrief. Fuck. Into a stray empty folder she slips charts, surveys, cell intercepts, surveillance transcripts, and satellite imagery of the city, the Mesaoria plain, and the river Pedieos. Digital photographs of a blown-out building, dead bodies—definitely not your standard middle manager fare.
“You want me to have them push it back a half hour?”
“No.” She stands up. “Good to go.”
But he stays in the doorway. “What the heck happened over there?”
Sentro says, “Oh, you know.” Folder in hand, she’s squeezing past him. “The usual fuck the what.”