So he stayed. If he couldn’t win the war, at least he could lose himself in it. Most case officers left Iraq after a few months. He spent more than three years in Baghdad. For eighteen months, he worked as an analyst for the agency/military task force that targeted top terrorists. With phone intercepts and interrogation reports, he pieced together networks in villages that he’d never seen. He felt like a kid who’d been given a jigsaw puzzle that had a trillion pieces and no edges. But at least the task forces had a clear mission, unlike everyone else in the Green Zone. And though he was under no illusion that killing Abu al-Zarqawi’s jihadis
would turn the tide of the war, he wanted them to die. He’d seen enough of their videos to know that they gloried in torture and murder.
He worked himself beyond exhaustion. In October 2006, he was caught sleepwalking while holding a loaded pistol.
Time to get out,
his boss said. He was so deep inside the war that he couldn’t imagine leaving.
You punched your ticket. You know that, right? You’ve got one assignment until February, a paid vacation. And figure out where you want to go next. I mean anywhere. You’re at the top of the list.
Sir—
Don’t argue. You’ve earned it. Just thank me and pack.
—
He went home. He hoped Ontario would seem more real to him than it had as a teenager. He imagined he’d take care of his parents, bond with them in their slow decline. Love, one emptied bedpan at a time. Mom and Dad had other ideas. She was sixty; he was sixty-two. Their years of saving had paid off. They weren’t interested in bedpans. They’d bought an RV for an Alaska-to-Florida road trip. They loved him, but dimly, almost abstractly. They called him a hero, a meaningless word meant to free him of responsibility for the choices he’d made. They saw his sadness, but they knew they couldn’t help. They looked at him in a kindly, puzzled way, like dog owners who wished their Maltese would stop peeing on the floor.
He left after ten days, lonelier than ever. He rented a room at the W Hotel in Westwood and made up for his years of celibacy. The women in L.A. were even easier to take home than they’d been a decade before. Internet dating and drunk texting had erased the last vestiges of shame from one-night stands. Then he had a torture dream, more vivid than he remembered, amplified by what he’d seen in Iraq. He knew that these cruelties were real. He feared what that knowledge might allow him to do.
He quit the bars, wondered if he should try to find Julia. But that wound was both too raw for him to touch and too callused for him to care. His time in Baghdad had destroyed every instinct except survival, every memory except yesterday.
Yet his puzzlement and anger at her infidelity remained. He still didn’t know why she’d slept with Veder. Had he seduced her, or the reverse? Had that afternoon in the apartment been their first time together? He’d imagined she loved him. Why hadn’t she told him when she felt herself slipping away? The questions gnawed, but he would never ask her for the answers. Not after the way she’d walked out. Not after what he’d seen.
He wished he’d killed Veder.
He left California, spent the rest of his time off traveling, a month in Africa, then Thailand, the land of misfit toys. He drank himself stupid in Bangkok and Phuket and watched the low comedy play out each night, lonely
farang
s
fulfilling their fantasies on the cheap. The men all had sob stories about women back home, who were too fat or cared too much about money or thought they were too good to do the dishes. Every tale finished with some version of
These girls here, maybe they don’t understand English, but they understand
me
. They love me. They see me for who I
am
.
Yeah, right. For the first time, he joined the world’s talkers, knowing the men around him would love every miserable detail of what Julia had done. Sometimes he even embellished—
I had the ring in my pocket and I wanted to surprise her—
Don’t say it, man—
I walked in—I couldn’t even see his face, do you understand what I’m saying?
I would have killed ’em both. Let’s get another, my friend. That calls for another.
—
He wondered if he should quit, but he had nowhere to go. He considered asking to be posted to Bangkok, but he feared he would become one of the whoremongers he despised. He chose Hong Kong. The city was the opposite of Baghdad in every way, glamor and neon, filled with hundred-story skyscrapers. Aside from the occasional gang fight, it was basically nonviolent. Money was its sole religion.
He was pleasantly surprised when the agency kept its word. He waited a few months in Langley for a spot to open, but by fall 2007, he was living in an apartment in Kowloon and studying Cantonese. A year passed. His station chief was pleasant enough and kept a respectful distance. His work in Baghdad had bought him credibility.
Take as much time as you need to learn the language, and when you’re ready to get back into the field, let me know.
Day by day, Hong Kong’s energy flowed into him, sweeping aside his memories like a flood cleaning out a polluted canal. He felt almost lucky. Like he’d been given one more chance. Then fate intervened, in the form of a BP tanker truck speeding west on a two-lane highway outside Fairbanks, as his parents’ Winnebago headed east. A state police lieutenant politely encouraged him to save himself the flight to Anchorage. The remains were unidentifiable.
We aren’t rich, but we do fine . . .
But they were rich after all. The lawyer back home told him that between their estate and BP’s settlement offer, he would wind up with more than two million dollars. His catastrophe was complete.
—
Gambling is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, but Hong Kong has no legal casinos. Bettors ride ferries forty miles west over the gray waters of the Pearl River Delta to Macao. For centuries, Macao was Hong Kong’s ugly cousin, a corrupt, dingy Portuguese colony known mostly for gang wars. But in 1999, China took control of Macao. The People’s Republic invited major casino companies to set up shop—and allowed millions of its own citizens over the border as customers. In a few years, Macao became the world’s largest gambling center, far bigger than the Las Vegas Strip. The action centered on an artificial island called Cotai, a postapocalyptic place where fifty-story temples of misery loomed above eerily empty avenues.
In his first year in Hong Kong, he’d gone to Macao three times, lost a few hundred dollars playing blackjack and craps. No big deal. Everything changed when the wire transfer from his parents’ estate hit his HSBC account. His new balance: $2,452,187.19. He knew how casinos treated high rollers. If he lost a couple thousand dollars playing blackjack, he’d get a free room, a five-star meal. At ten thousand, he’d rate a private helicopter flight from Hong Kong, no need to share a hydrofoil with the commoners. Another level up, women and drugs would find their way to his suite without his having to ask.
He held out for three weeks. Then he took one hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars, about $13,000, to the newest, shiniest casino in Macao, the 88 Gamma. The Gamma was a sci-fi-themed palace, sleek and edgy. It had an oxygen bar and a shark-filled aquarium that encircled the casino floor. He sat at a blackjack table and watched the faces around him shrink into themselves as the night passed and the house edge triumphed over prayers and promises. Yet no one cared. They went to the ATM and returned with bundles of fresh cash.
He was lucky that night. He broke even. He forced himself to leave the casino at dawn. On the ferry to Kowloon, he closed his eyes against the screaming sun and dreamed of blackjack. He was back the next weekend, and every weekend after that. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him what he was doing. He believed that losing his parents’ estate would bring them back. He’d have another chance with them, a chance to replay his whole life.
But gambling gained its own power over him. He craved the anesthesia of the table, those rare nights when the chips piled up. Beating the house meant beating death itself, reversing time and entropy. He knew he was succumbing to the ultimate fallacy, that hot streaks were a function of probability just like cold. But at five a.m., as he looked at a ten and a six and curled his fingers forward and watched the dealer slide a five from the shoe, the truth meant less than nothing.
The girls were another kind of anesthesia. They were young and desperate and did whatever he wanted, to him and to one another.
In a year, he lost everything. More than everything. He was $550,000 in debt by the time Gamma cut him off. He had lost an even three million dollars. And he had missed so many workdays that the head of security for Hong Kong insisted he take a polygraph. He failed it and the drug test that followed. The agency fired him.
Only then did reality strike him. He had
nothing
. He couldn’t even go back to the Gamma. Gambling took money, and he didn’t have any. He begged the agency for another chance, but no one in Hong Kong knew him well enough to stand up for him. He was written off, another promising case officer ruined by Iraq.
The end.
—
His depression resolved into simple self-loathing. He had squandered three million dollars. He was worse than a fool. The money had vanished as completely as his parents. He debated killing himself. The act seemed like a rational response to the mess he’d made. He imagined diving off the Star Ferry into the murky waters of Hong Kong Bay. But as deeply as he hated himself, he didn’t want to die. He didn’t see heaven in his future, which left hell and oblivion as his only options. Neither appealed.
His limbo lasted three months.
The knock came at eight a.m. on a Saturday. Light but insistent. A woman.
He lay in bed, nestled beside a three-quarters-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He tried to imagine who might want to talk to him. No one came to mind. He wondered if he might be dreaming, but the pain behind his eyes convinced him otherwise.
“Mr. Mason? Glenn Mason?”
An unfamiliar voice, but a familiar name. His. His real name. His California name. He sat up, too quickly. “Hello?” His voice scratched like a garage-sale LP. His balance was all wrong. His brain seemed to have been doused in gasoline and set afire. The Johnnie Walker bottle had been full the afternoon before.
More knocking. He pulled on a T-shirt and boxers, staggered to the door. He dropped the chain, opened up. Lousy tradecraft, but at this point anyone who wanted him could have him.
The woman outside was medium height, mid-thirties. She had short brown hair, Mediterranean skin. She wore jeans and a khaki jacket that were expensive enough to get her into a three-star restaurant, anonymous enough not to be noticed. She pushed into his living room.
“You look awful.” She wasn’t American, but he couldn’t place her accent.
“Who are you?”
“I’m here to save your life.”
—
She bought two large coffees, led him to the little park on the harbor by the Star Ferry terminal. “We could go for a ride, but you’d mess up my shoes.” They sat close on a bench. Anyone watching would have thought them lovers. “Are you ready to get back to work?”
“You seem to think I’m someone I’m not.”
“Don’t be stupid. I know your name. Shall I tell you your résumé, too?” She wrinkled her nose at the whiskey pouring off him. “If I had a match, I could set you on fire. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re too far gone for this.”
“I don’t even know what
this
is.”
“I’m looking for an experienced case officer. The pay is fifty thousand dollars a month. American, not HK.”
The pain in his head was so steep that he could hardly focus. He wondered if he was hallucinating. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your name?”
“You can call me Salome.”
She had to be joking. Yet she seemed serious. He waited. He still knew how to listen.
“You’ll work directly for me. I need an operations officer.”
“This is a private security agency, like Blackwater.”
“Nothing like Blackwater. We’re not in the profit-making business. We’re not for hire.”
“Is this an off-the-books agency op?”
“You know better than that.”
He was glad she’d said no. Otherwise he would have had to write her off as a liar. The CIA didn’t run secret ops outside its network of stations. It happily broke laws all over the world, but it didn’t violate its own bureaucratic rules.
“But you have funding. From somewhere.”
“Unlimited. You can work in your accustomed manner.”
“Meaning a lot of memos from human resources that no one ever reads.”
For the first time that morning, she smiled. She had small, perfect teeth. “Safe houses, secure coms. Tech. Whatever you need.”
“Is this one mission, or several?”
“It has an indefinite time frame. First I need a team. And that starts with you.”
“And you plan to operate in a—an extralegal manner.”
She sidled closer. “We’re on the side of the angels. This is about nuclear nonproliferation. By any means necessary.”
“I never would have guessed you liked Malcolm X.”
“Who?”
He couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“Assassinations. Industrial sabotage. Things America should be doing but isn’t.”
He wondered if she worked for Israel. But the Mossad was already running these operations against Iran, and it would never have trusted such sensitive missions to non-Jews.
“But you need to understand. That grand machine you worked for all those years, it won’t be happy with this. I doubt you can ever go back to the United States.”
“Lucky for both of us I don’t much care.” Despite himself, he began to be impressed. Every intelligence officer dreamed of this, a black network unbound by rules and bureaucracy. “The CIA or Mossad will destroy you. Even if they agree with what you’re doing.”
“Not if they don’t know we exist. Not if they can’t find us, don’t have anywhere to look. And you’re right, the Mossad will take the blame for a lot of what we do. The more they deny it, the less anyone will believe them.”