Eleanor pulled into the garage then came around to help Talbot heave himself out of the car. He stood, rocked unsteadily, and offered a small, apologetic smile. Leaning heavily on the car, he reached for her hand and drew it to his lips. “My beautiful wife. You are, you know. Beautiful. But man, I’m kinda tired all the sudden.”

  His little nap had sobered him up a bit, dampened his ardor.

  “I know, Talbot. You’ve had a long day. Okay, let’s get inside and get you into bed,” said Eleanor, relieved she would not have to demonstrate her gratitude for the surprise party on this particular night.

  “What time is it?” he asked suddenly, working to focus bleary eyes on his watch.

  “A little after two-thirty. What—you have an appointment?”

  “Can you do me a favor, Ellie? I’m gonna sleep just a little more, but I gotta make a call in an hour or so. Just a check-in. Can you make sure I’m up and moving?”

  “I can do that, Talbot. I’ll set my alarm and have some coffee ready.”

  He slipped his arm around her as they made their way to their bedroom. “I’m a lucky man, Ellie,” he proclaimed. “You know what I need, and you give it to me, you support me, and I hope you saw that tonight with the party…”

  “We’re both lucky, Talbot,” she interrupted. “Lucky we found each other.” She helped him wrestle out of his shoes, his pants. “Amid all that chaos, the Fates brought us together.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Eight months earlier, September, 1959

  Cabin John, MD

  Helen Sizemore waited in a booth at the back of the diner, silk scarf knotted under her chin, face half-hidden by oversized sunglasses, weighing whether she had time to order another Coke as cocktails, unfortunately, were not on the menu. She ran her palm across the sticky Formica table, brushing crumbs from someone else’s meal onto the floor, noting a spill of salt near the napkin dispenser. She’d leave that for the waitress to clean up. A pair of women perched at the counter, hunched over midafternoon milkshakes, talking, giggling like girls between slurps, enjoying their freedom, perhaps, now that the school year had resumed. They seemed flighty, insubstantial to Helen, who felt fortunate she held a responsible job, a serious position, one that required her discretion and judgment. One customer, then another stopped in to pick up an order but it was mostly quiet—too early for the dinner rush.

  Outside the window, Helen saw nothing out of the ordinary—no one settled on a bench, fixated on a single page of the newspaper, nobody having an extended conversation in the phone booth on the corner, no car circling and recircling the block. Just schoolchildren, stepping exuberantly from their bus, sweaters slung around necks and waists in deference to the warm September afternoon. Helen wondered if Indian-summer days like this made the students harder to wrangle. “Perhaps I should have listened to my mother and become a teacher,” she mused, not for the first time. “It would have to be less stressful.”

  At lunch, Helen had left two sheets of paper—a carbon slipped in between—in the carriage of her IBM Electromatic typewriter. He had placed a single crumpled tissue in his trash can to confirm. A single sheet in the carriage would designate their meeting point at an inn south on Route 123, farther from the city, at the cusp of Virginia’s horse country. No time for that today. The diner was only a few miles from DC in Cabin John, Maryland. She’d discovered it over the summer after this whole thing began. Small and verging on seedy, it was not a place their colleagues would wander into.

  Helen had been recruited to CIA out of the College of William and Mary. A double-major in foreign affairs and romance languages, she was fluent in French and Spanish, managed pretty well in Italian, got by in Portuguese. It baffled her that Talbot had served overseas and met his wife in Italy but never cultivated much beyond the rudiments of a second language. She had already inquired at the Defense Language Institute about beginning a course of study in Russian. Helen hoped her linguistic facility would help propel her beyond the secretarial pool. She’d met women who worked as reports officers at CIA, and she hoped securing that role might launch her into the agent ranks. The personnel officer she consulted told her that perhaps after a year in Washington, she would be eligible to apply for clerk-typist jobs overseas.

  “These days, there aren’t many foreign postings for female agents who look like you,” he had insisted. “We need women with Asian features for work in Indochina.”

  There was no hint of that in Helen’s round green eyes and light brown hair. Given that the CIA personnel office wasn’t always transparent about such things, Helen stayed attuned to movement around the office, openings that could lead to a new assignment. If she’d been old enough during Second World War, she often said, she would have forced her way into the Office of Strategic Services or maybe the British Special Operations Executive and been willing to employ whatever ruse was needed—sexual coercion, blackmail—to help win the war. Once she became fluent in Russian, she’d gladly take a placement behind the Iron Curtain.

  But her assignment to Talbot’s office had complicated her picture of what the future might hold. Barely a week into the job, when she was still finding her way around the building and still getting to know her boss, Talbot had asked her to retrieve lunch from the cafeteria for the both of them, so they could continue work reviewing a set of files. She brought up trays of meatloaf and salad, Talbot rushing to help her lay it out on the table in the conference room attached to his office, asking if he could pour her a coffee from the office pot.

  They sat, finally, Talbot at the head of the table and Helen to his left. He reached a hand and clasped her wrist, locked his dark eyes on hers. “Dressed or undressed?” he asked, waiting a beat before he pointed to his green salad.

  “Undressed,” she responded.

  “Excellent, Helen. Undressed is what I prefer. Always.”

  She looked away, hands fluttering to her hair then fussing over her meal as she considered how to respond. It took a moment for her to gather her courage to look him in the eye. “Good then. Glad I did it the way you like it,” she said, shocking herself with her eagerness to play out this flirtation.

  His hand slid from her wrist up her arm, stopping just below her shoulder, where he squeezed. “I’d say you’re batting 1000, Helen. You’re gonna do just fine here.”

  Settling happily into her role, Helen watched Tal deploy his smooth magnetism throughout their workplace—not just with her but with receptionists and cafeteria workers, with the girl who brought the briefing pouch each morning, with his male colleagues. Helen marveled at the connections he made and the trust he developed. Like most in his orbit, she was captivated by the athleticism in Tal’s movement, the relaxed way he stood, mature and boyish at the same time. There was something both compelling and disarming about Talbot that made others want to move in his sphere. His role overseeing a top-secret project that had him reporting directly to Director Dulles added to his allure. But as far as Helen observed, it was only with her that Talbot fully exercised his skill at innuendo, patiently drawing her in, waiting for her to absorb a suggestive comment. This was evidence, she believed, the two of them were moving towards a unique, intimate connection.

  When he emerged from his office into the reception area where she sat, to bring her a document or make a request, it took discipline for her to stay focused on the topic at hand. He had a habit of looking directly in her eyes and holding her gaze, daring her to be the first to look away. She liked to think of it as their private little contest. They developed a habit of lunch together in the conference room, where they chatted about his wartime service and her years at William and Mary, eventually nibbling around the edges of his marriage, of her career ambitions. A month into her tenure, Helen engrossed in her typing, Talbot drifted to her desk and placed a hand on her neck. He squeezed and left it there, his thumb massaging. Helen held her breath, leaning into the pressure on her skin.

  “I need the notes on the folks in Adana,” he said, extending an arm around her, presumably to reach her desk top to look for it. His Old Spice aftershave wafted around her head, earthy and male. She closed her eyes as she breathed in the scent then wheeled her chair around to face him. His eyes locked on hers, and instead of continuing to reach for the file he claimed to need, he reached for her chin, pulling her mouth to his, pressing softly before opening his mouth and inviting her to do the same.

  “I’ve never met anybody like you, Miss Helen Sizemore,” he murmured into her hair. And she believed him.

  In subsequent weeks, through hand signs and scribbled notes, they established the signals needed to arrange their assignations, which began with coffee together, then cocktails, then much more. An uncrumpled tissue in his trash can meant no meeting that day. A red pen left aside his coffee cup meant he wished her to find a new meeting place. In response, she would hand him a Life or Time magazine article ostensibly related to their work, key words underscored to direct him to an upcoming rendezvous point. The Washington Post, folded in half with the Local section on top, left in her chair when he was in a meeting, was her cue to enter his office with an immediate need to review his schedule with him, all to create the impression for whomever he was meeting with that Helen irritated him with her efficient but myopic focus on her list of to-do’s. When the Post was folded in quarters, he had left it there for her to read.

  Having met his wife several times, Helen didn’t feel particularly guilty about stepping into the Bentley marriage. They didn’t have children, for one thing, and Eleanor’s attentiveness to her husband seemed to come and go. From what he described, she wasn’t the type to meet him at the door in the evenings, cocktail in hand, décolletage on view. More than once, he’d mentioned arriving home to an empty house and a cold stove, Eleanor blustering in later, apologizing for getting caught up in some project or another at her job at the Arlington Public Library. Episodes like these made Helen feel competent, superior, and affirmed. She interpreted Talbot’s sharing of such stories as de facto praise of her, that he knew Helen would never lose track of time in such a messy, thoughtless way. But perhaps what he really meant was that he didn’t foresee Helen losing her focus on him, situated as he now was, at the center of her life.

  Infrequently, Eleanor came to the office for a lunch date with Talbot—something Helen hated. She usually greeted Eleanor with appropriate warmth, made a bit of circular small talk, then retreated to Talbot’s office to let him know the wife had arrived. While Eleanor waited in the reception area, Helen and Talbot sometimes groped and grabbed at each other—the proof Helen needed before he headed out the door that he was devoted more to his secretary than his wedded wife. These intense interludes gave Helen the wherewithal to wave and smile at the couple as they departed for their lunch—but she still resented Eleanor’s incursion into space she saw as hers and Talbot’s.

  When he traveled, Eleanor never phoned Helen for schedule updates or to inquire where he was staying, unlike many CIA wives, Helen heard, tended to do. To Helen, this was proof of Eleanor’s basic, disqualifying disinterest in her husband and fueled Helen’s own efforts to support and love Talbot because of what he didn’t get at home. Even men having affairs expected their wives to inquire occasionally as to their whereabouts when they were traveling, didn’t they? Only fleetingly did Helen allow herself to consider that the dearth of phone calls might be because Eleanor trusted her husband and believed in the strength and surety of their marriage.

  Twice, Helen and Talbot had the good fortune to be dispatched on a business trip together. The first took them to a testing ground north of Las Vegas, Talbot overseeing its decommissioning and insisting he needed her with him to handle documentation. The second was a trip to London where she did little more than bring coffee during several days of meetings. On both trips, Talbot had requested adjoining rooms when they got to the hotel, loudly explaining they would be up half the night preparing for the next day’s meetings. And they were up half the night. But not for that. After Talbot swept for listening devices and cameras in both their rooms, they commenced with their private festivities. The sex, the travel, the prospect that she, one day, might be an intelligence officer with her own portfolio of assignments—her own assistant at her elbow—left her exhilarated, in a persistent state of anticipation of the thrilling things ahead of her. That they were permitted to travel together, unchaperoned and unquestioned, led Helen to wonder if the spy factory recognized that CIA officers who took the kinds of risks the country needed them to take were also inclined to take sexual risks too—that it was better for all this to take place within the family, so to speak, with women who had passed background checks, instead of outside-the-bubble extracurriculars.

  Helen had not gone looking for this. Had one of her friends been involved in an affair with a married man, Helen would have been scandalized and counseled her to quit it immediately, to recognize that she was being taken advantage of. But what had begun with a surreptitious kiss and spilled over into rushed, overheated trysts, had now become something wholly different in Helen’s mind—redeemed because Helen was deeply in love. The physical encounters with her older, handsome, and sexually adept boss, created inside Helen a deep attachment and a need she wanted only Talbot to satisfy. Like every young woman who fell into bed with a married boss, Helen believed they would be together someday because it was meant to be. She craved him when she couldn’t have him, even making up a phantom boyfriend (unmarried, of course) named Walter so she could share little vignettes of their conversations with her girlfriends.

  Their meeting at the diner now was something she would not have tried to shoehorn into his schedule even two months earlier. They had slipped away together only last week. Talbot preferred they not meet in back-to-back weeks, and Helen was careful to avoid creating discernible patterns of travel or unaccounted for blocks of time within his schedule. But a suddenly canceled staff meeting opened his calendar for the afternoon, and Helen seized the opportunity, succumbing to her pervasive, accelerating need to see him alone, if only to feel his fully clothed body pressed up against her in the front seat of his car. The crumpled tissue he left in his trash indicated in Helen’s mind that he felt the same. That it was sprinkled with pencil shavings indicated he would meet her near the diner.

  Helen looked around to flag down the waitress to refill her Coke. Does this diner have a basement? she wondered—a question she now regularly asked herself. Bomb shelters were now de rigueur in DC—everyone was building one, stocking it with canned goods and water—accelerated by the Sputnik launch and the vast array of missiles the Soviets paraded through Red Square last May Day. Her duplex in Bethesda had a basement and the landlord had already moved supplies in, even if it wasn’t yet properly sealed. Signs were going up all over the city to apprise visitors of the closest fallout shelter. Helen found the signs ticked up her anxiety, with their harsh black and yellow design and the stark typeface. She had learned they would soon be posted in every public building, so if the Soviets attacked, at least some Americans would survive. Helen was acutely proud to be serving her country in this perilous moment, helping navigate the high-wire tension, especially because she was doing it alongside Talbot.

  Her Coke replenished, Helen reached into her pocketbook to withdraw her pack of Salems. Searching the depths of her bag for her lighter, her hand clasped the tiny Minox camera Talbot had used during the war. She gripped it, loving how the smooth metal felt in her palm. She’d found it several months earlier when she was loading office supplies into Talbot’s desk—legal pads, pens, paper clips. She’d opened a drawer to neaten it, and there was this shiny, silver gadget. She’d pulled it out and held it up to him.

  “What is this? A lighter?”

  “Not quite.” He’d smiled. “That’s my little Minox. Used it all over Europe during the war. It’s a camera, Helen. They issued me that when I served in OSS. Took some pretty important photographs—people turning up where they weren’t supposed to be, meeting with people they weren’t supposed to know, and documents that contradicted what the Nazis were saying publicly. Forgot I still had it. I haven’t seen it since I moved into this office. But boy, that little gem did the job when I needed it.” He reached to take it from Helen’s hand.

  “Does it still work?”

  Talbot examined the miniature camera, turning it over and using his shirtsleeve to give it a polish. “Yeah. I think so. There’s still film in there, and these things were pretty sturdy. No reason to think it wouldn’t work.”

  “Why don’t you put it on your console to show it off? You can put it next to the commendation plaque, the Churchill victory ashtray, that photo of you in Turkey.”

  “Nah. Just put it back in the drawer. I don’t want to advertise that I still have it. They might make me turn it in.” Helen gave the thing a bit more buffing then did as he had asked.

  She could not have explained why she went back later and took it, why she dutifully placed new legal pads into the drawer, straightening them into neat stacks, before plucking the camera out and slipping it into her pocket while he was busy at his file cabinet. She just liked the idea of having something he seemed so attached to in her possession, liked the idea that she was close enough to him to know what it meant to him. She didn’t need it—but neither did he. He hadn’t even noticed it was gone.

  Helen slid the Minox back in her purse, retrieved her lighter, and as she put a cigarette to her lips, his car rounded the corner. She rose, dropping the unlit cigarette into the ashtray and cash on the table. She turned down a short hall to the restrooms and, after a quick look around, stepped noiselessly out the service door of the diner and cut across the parking lot to intercept Talbot at the intersection a block away. Climbing into his Corvette in her pencil skirt while trying not to flash passersby was a bit of a losing proposition, Talbot noting the show of garter and lace, sliding a hand up her leg in approval.