How to Catch a Russian Spy by Naveed Jamali

Author:Naveed Jamali
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 13

* * *

AGENT TRUST

It didn’t happen quickly, but I felt like the FBI agents were growing more comfortable with me. I kept getting little signs. One summer day when we met for breakfast at the Metro Diner on Broadway and 100th Street, they came as dressed down as I was—Ted in jeans and a short-sleeved polo shirt, Terry in chinos and a button-down with rolled-up sleeves. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe they were just sick of walking around like a couple of funeral directors on a house call. But as we sat together in a back booth, some of the stiffness seemed to evaporate from our interaction. It didn’t feel so much like I was reporting in to them or they were directing me. It was more like we were talking and trading ideas and giving each other shit.

“You know that guy on Lost?” Ted asked me. The plane-crash TV show had just finished its third season. “That dude who plays the Iraqi guy? He could play you in a movie.”

“That’s racist, Ted,” I told him, trying to look offended. “You’re Irish. What if I told you Colin Farrell has to play you? Or Mickey Rooney? Or even worse, Mickey Rourke?”

In the short time I’d known Randi, everything had been so businesslike with her. Even when she and Terry were teasing, she was a straight arrow with me. But over time, with Terry and Ted as my team, the tone between us loosened up. We often talked the way I talked with my friends. “Seriously, dude,” I said to Terry at the end of the meal, motioning at his plate of neatly piled and completely untouched potatoes, “how are you still alive? Remind me, what is it that you do eat?”

Every single time I had been in a restaurant with Terry, he had done exactly what Randi had accused him of, refusing to consume fruits, vegetables, or anything that didn’t owe its very existence to a chemistry lab.

“I am a finely tuned machine,” he declared with total seriousness as he moved the uneatables around the plate.

“Of processed food!” Ted jumped in.

I looked at my breakfast omelet. “So wait. Do you eat cheese?”

“Yes,” Terry said. “Yellow cheese.”

“No, man,” I objected. “That doesn’t count. That’s not real cheese. It’s as fake as Oleg’s cover story.”

We all laughed. But Terry still didn’t eat his potatoes.

When there was a lull in the laughter, I decided it was time to come clean about something that had been bothering me. “Look, guys,” I said, “there’s something I need to, um, admit to you. I’ve been carrying around this secret for a while now.”

Ted and Terry glanced at each other nervously. I noticed Terry fidgeting in his seat.

“You guys really fucked me over in a big way,” I told them. “Not you, Ted. You weren’t here yet. But Terry was.” I told them about the day that Ava had uncovered the bright yellow maxi-pad wrapper in our apartment.

As I finished telling the story, Ted had a shit-eating grin on his face.

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