Portrait of a Spy

trailed by the security man. Gabriel remained on the bench, watching the childless swing moving in the wind. After a few minutes, he left the park and walked south down the gentle slope of Thirty-fourth Street. A pair of motorcycles ridden by slender men in black helmets roared past and disappeared into the darkness. Just then, an image flashed in Gabriel’s memory—a distraught raven-haired woman, kneeling over the body of her father on the Quai Saint-Pierre in Cannes. The sound of the motorcycles dissipated, along with the memory of the woman. Gabriel thrust his hands into his coat pockets and walked on, thinking of nothing at all, as the trees wept leaves of gold.

Chapter 20
The Palisades, Washington, D.C.

    A T THAT SAME MOMENT , a car pulled to the curb in front of a clapboard house located in the Washington neighborhood known as the Palisades. The car, a Ford Focus, was owned by Ellis Coyle of the CIA, as was the clapboard house. A tiny structure, more cottage than home, it had pushed Coyle’s finances to the breaking point. After many years overseas, he had wanted to settle down in one of the affordable suburbs of northern Virginia, but Norah had insisted on living in the District in order to be closer to her practice. Coyle’s wife was a child psychologist, an odd career choice, he always thought, for a woman whose barren womb had yielded no young. Her idyllic commute, a pleasant four-block stroll along MacArthur Boulevard, stood in stark contrast with Coyle’s twice-daily crossing of the Potomac River. For a while, he had tried listening to New Age music to calm his nerves but found it made him only angrier. These days, it was books on tape. He had recently completed Martin Gilbert’s masterpiece on Winston Churchill. In fact, due to repair work on Chain Bridge, it had taken him scarcely a week. Coyle had always admired Churchill’s decisiveness. Lately, Coyle had been decisive, too.
    He switched off the engine. He was forced to park on the street because the home for which he had paid close to a million dollars had no garage. He had hoped the cottage would serve as a beachhead in the District, a starter home that he could use to trade up for a larger property in Kent or Spring Valley or perhaps even Wesley Heights. Instead, he had watched in frustration as prices spiraled far beyond the reach of his government salary. Only the wealthiest of Washington’s residents—the bloodsucking lawyers, the corrupt lobbyists, the celebrity journalists who ran down the Agency at every turn—could afford mortgages in those neighborhoods now. Even in the Palisades, the quaint wooden cottages were being torn down and replaced by mansions. Coyle’s neighbor, a successful lawyer named Roger Blankman, had recently built himself an Arts and Crafts monstrosity that cast a long shadow into Coyle’s formerly sunlit breakfast nook. Blankman’s ill-mannered children routinely strayed onto Coyle’s property, as did his army of landscapers, who were constantly making small improvements to the shape of Coyle’s junipers and hedges. Coyle returned the favor by poisoning Blankman’s impatiens. Coyle believed in the efficacy of covert action.
    Now he sat motionless behind the wheel, staring at the light burning in his kitchen window. He could imagine the scene that would be played out next, for it changed little from night to night. Norah would be sitting at the kitchen table with her first glass of Merlot, leafing through the mail and listening to some dreadful program on public radio. She would give him a distracted kiss and remind him that Lucy, their black Labrador retriever, needed to be taken out for her nightly constitutional. The dog, like the house in the Palisades, had been Norah’s idea, yet it had somehow become Coyle’s task to oversee its bowel movements. Lucy usually found inspiration in Battery Kemble Park, a hillside of thick woods that was best avoided by unaccompanied women. Sometimes, when Coyle was feeling particularly rebellious, he would leave Lucy’s feces in the park rather than carry it home. Coyle committed other acts of rebellion as well—acts that he kept secret from Norah and his colleagues at Langley.
    One of his secrets was Renate. They had met a year earlier in the bar of a Brussels hotel. Coyle had come from Langley to attend a gathering of Western counterterrorism officials; Renate, a photographer, had come from Hamburg to take pictures of a human rights campaigner for her magazine.