Peter Kittredge rocked pensively on the chair in the hospital room, transfixed by the EKG readout that punctuated his boyfriend’s heartbeat. Except for the steady beeping of the monitor and the mechanically induced rise and fall of his chest, Charley Arlinghaus’ body showed little sign of life. He was still in a coma, demonstrating few positive signs of recovery.
The doctors had warned Kittredge to prepare for “diminished cognitive function,” which Kittredge reckoned was as sterile a euphemism as possible for the loss of a loved one’s personality.
But it certainly wasn’t time to give up hope. It had only been a matter of hours since the attack in the airport parking lot had left Charley with traumatic brain injury and a fractured skull. And the doctors had been sure to mention that while he remained unresponsive to stimulus, the rate of swelling had slowed. Charley wasn’t yet getting better, but at least he had stopped accelerating downhill.
Quinn had finally left, but Kittredge still felt, or imagined, a watchful Agency presence, a byproduct of the gross violation of privacy he experienced earlier in the morning. As if espionage weren’t enough—now they have plenty of compromising footage to blackmail me with, he mused darkly.
They. CIA, they had told him, and he was inclined to believe it. His five years in the Diplomatic Corps had taught him a healthy respect for the reach and resources of the Agency. He had known that US spies surrounded him on the embassy staff, and he’d had his suspicions about which of his colleagues might also have been Agency assets, but none of his suspicions were ever confirmed, and he certainly never voiced them to any of his colleagues. Doing so was strictly forbidden. It wouldn’t do to have embassy personnel speculating aloud about which among them might really be spooks.
In retrospect, selling information as an embassy employee was an exceptionally stupid move on his part. Had he thought more about it, he would certainly have realized that there were probably as many counterintelligence agents at work in any given embassy as regular intelligence officers. After all, embassy personnel spent their days living in the belly of the beast, as it were, and there were few other jobs whose hazards included being the target of regular recruitment pitches to switch sides and spy for a foreign interest.
In the end, despite his respect for the CIA’s capability and presence, he had grossly underestimated them. They’d probably been watching him for months. They probably had weeks of video footage. They probably knew his favorite positions and his favorite boy-toys.
I’m well and truly screwed, he thought for the hundredth time in the past twelve hours. He shuddered again, unable to shake the feeling of violation.
His eyes refocused on Charley’s heart monitor, and he thought again about how strange and disorienting the situation had become. You’re supposed to be in Caracas, you bastard.
As his Exel responsibilities had grown, Charley had made fewer and fewer trips back home. While the workdays were a bit longer, Charley’s life as a deputy section chief was a thousand times more predictable than when he was a lower-level functionary, and there were almost never any emergency trips back Stateside these days. So it was beyond strange that Charley should turn up in a DC hospital with a broken melon.
And it was stranger still for Charley not to have told him about the change in schedule. It contributed to Kittredge’s sense of violation, and had at least as much emotional impact as the CIA’s invasion of his privacy.
Kittredge did his best to control his thoughts, but he couldn’t stop himself from imagining that Charley had found a new relationship, which caused him to wrestle for long minutes with feelings of deep betrayal and isolation. Then a calmer voice momentarily prevailed, and he allowed himself to believe that a perfectly logical explanation must exist.
Those voices competed for prominence, and he wavered between anger, despair, humiliation, betrayal, and concern for Charley’s prognosis.
Kittredge also found himself replaying various episodes in their relationship over the past months, scouring his memory for clues that might betray a betrayal. Kittredge now wondered whether deception had become a characteristic of his relationship with Charley, which cast everything in an ominous light.
Kittredge knew that the human mind has nearly infinite capacity to stew over past events, and he even believed that such worry-in-retrospect was grossly counterproductive, but he couldn’t stop himself. Every askew glance or incomplete answer Charley had given him over the past several months had suddenly turned into a potential smoking gun.
Kittredge didn’t know what was going on, but he did know that something was off. He could have believed that Charley was the victim of a mugging or random act of violence in the airport parking lot, except that Quinn, the CIA thug, had been the one to inform him of the attack.
Plus, whoever had attacked Charley hadn’t bothered to take his wallet or cash.
It was beyond suspicious. Was the attack on Charley some sort of a warning? If so, why go to the trouble of bringing him to DC? Or was Charley’s presence in DC a separate but related thing, and someone just took advantage of the opportunity?
And who was the warning meant for? If it is about me, Kittredge thought, I can’t imagine what they might be trying to say now that they couldn’t have said when they had me strapped to the concrete last night.
It’s probably not about me, he concluded. But if the attack was about something going on in Charley’s world, what was it? That line of thinking brought him back to fruitless and neurotic re-examination of their recent history together, and the vicious cycle repeated.
It was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. Kittredge looked around to find the source, and located a wall phone adjacent to the door in Charley’s intensive care room. Kittredge expected the phone to stop ringing at any moment, but it droned on insistently.
Finally, on what must have been the twentieth ring, Kittredge answered the phone.
“How’s he doing?” asked a gravelly voice that Kittredge didn’t recognize.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Jim Bishop, Exel Oil.”
“Charley’s boss?” Kittredge was taken aback. He straightened up involuntarily at the realization that he was speaking with a big wig.
“That’s right,” Bishop said. “Peter Kittredge, isn’t it? How’s Charley?”
Kittredge said. “Charley’s had better mornings, but they say he’s stabilizing. He’s in a coma.” Kittredge’s voice broke, and he fought back tears.
“What a damn shame. Do they have any leads on the bastards who did this?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen any police officers, but a. . . well. . . A federal agent let me know about the attack.” Kittredge didn’t know what to call Quinn, and he certainly didn’t want to have a conversation with Charley’s boss about his recently-acquired Agency acquaintances – particularly since Exel Oil had been paying Kittredge a stipend in exchange for certain tasty tidbits culled from embassy message traffic.
Does Bishop know I’m Exel’s guy inside the embassy? Probably, but there was no easy way to find out for sure.
“Interesting,” Bishop said. “What kind of a federal agent?”
Fuck. I have no poker face. How did I ever think I could be a spy? “Well, I’m not quite sure.” That wasn’t a lie. He still couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that the CIA employed agents to kidnap and torture U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, so he really didn’t know for certain what Quinn was.
“Strange,” Bishop observed.
“It was weird.” The initial shock of the oil executive’s call had started to wear off, and Kittredge’s mind reawakened. “Mr. Bishop, if you don’t mind my asking, who let you know about the attack?”
“The embassy duty officer called me at home. I’ve asked them to notify me of anything serious going on with any of the folks in our Venezuelan contingent.” Bishop paused. “Such a tragedy, with Charley’s father in the hospital, too.”
“Charley’s father?”
“Yes, the heart condition and all.”
What the fuck? “Heart condition?” Kittredge asked before he could stop himself.
An awkward pause. “I’m sorry,” the oil exec said. “I thought for certain you knew, given that the two of you are, well, close.”
“No, sir,” Kittredge said, feeling his insides churn. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, I’m sure he just didn’t have time to call you before he caught his flight.”
In the cell phone age? Not likely, Kittredge thought. “Yes, sir. I’m sure you’re probably right.” Something is fucked up here, he thought. His heart raced, and his head swum.
“Anyway, Peter, I’m so very sorry that this happened, and please, do give Charley my regards and well-wishes when he wakes up, will you?”
“Of course. I’m sure he’ll appreciate knowing that you called.”
“And you’ll let us know as soon as anything changes with him?”
“I will.”
“And please, take care of yourself too, will you, Peter?”
“I will, sir.”
Bishop signed off. Kittredge slumped into a nearby chair, feeling nauseous. It just kept getting weirder. Charley had taken the time to tell his bosses about the trip to DC, but he hadn’t bothered to tell his live-in boyfriend? Kittredge shook his head.
And Charley’s dad lives in fucking Baltimore, he realized. And what heart condition? The man runs marathons!
It was now obvious that Charley Arlinghaus had a few secrets he’d been keeping, and Kittredge felt anger and bile rising. He looked at Charley’s inanimate form and swollen, blackening eye. Have we been living a lie, Charley?
He felt as though he might be sick. Nothing isolates like betrayal, and he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt quite so alone in the world.
Another troubling question arose in Kittredge’s mind: who had called the embassy’s duty desk to tell them about the attack on Charley? Kittredge cursed himself for not having thought to ask Bishop.
Then he realized the answer probably wouldn’t have been terribly instructive – if the CIA had thought to pick him up and bring him to the hospital, they would certainly also have thought of calling the embassy. And they would have played a pretty convincing role no matter who they chose to impersonate.
Kittredge felt despondency settling in. In twelve short hours, his life had come apart at the seams. The first wave of sobs took him by surprise, but he quickly gave himself over to paroxysms of fear and rage.