The Director by David Ignatius

Author:David Ignatius [Ignatius, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

23

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

James Morris had vanished. He wasn’t answering his phones and he was ignoring all electronic messages. His location was concealed from his CIA colleagues, and even from the staff who worked for him in the joint NSA cover office in Denver. He had given his contact information in East Anglia to only one person. So Morris knew that it could only be that very particular friend who left an unsigned letter for him with the receptionist downstairs at the Fudan–East Anglia Research Centre. The note read: Meet me at 5:00 at The Silver Locket. The handwriting was distinctive, small letters, sharply formed, branching like spindly roots.

When Morris received the note, it was nearly four-thirty. He told Dr. Li to delay the last interview; he needed to take a walk and would be back as soon as he could. It was dusk when Morris set out, and in the low light the fields were plush green and the furrows and hedgerows a deep velvet. He walked quickly toward the pub on the outskirts of the little town. Morris passed the memorial to Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet who had made the village modestly famous. Morris didn’t care about poetry. The only poems he could remember liking had been generated by an AI program he’d created when he was at Stanford: You typed in the theme, say love, and the names of the characters, the setting and a metric scheme, and out came a poem.

Morris went into the Silver Locket and asked the barman for a pint of lager. It took a few moments before his eyes adjusted to the light. Then he saw Ramona Kyle, sitting at a table in the corner. She was drinking a glass of fruit juice. Morris sat down beside her. She was wearing a wool sweater with a crew neck, the kind that teenage boys wear in prep school. Her red curls were tied in a tight ponytail. She closed her eyes and formed a kiss with her lips, without touching him. He smiled.

“Hey, you,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I was in England seeing some people, and I got worried about you. I thought you might be lonely.”

“Me? No way. I hate people. I like being alone.”

Kyle smiled. She looked to the other tables. The pub was beginning to fill with people coming in after work.

“That’s my man,” she murmured. She put a finger to her lips for quiet.

“Seriously,” he whispered, “why did you come? I’m okay. Nobody knows I’m here. I want to keep it that way.”

“The truth?”

“Always.”

“I was afraid you might be getting cold feet. I wanted to check your temperature.”

“I’m chill. I’m recruiting my last engineers now. This is going to be the hack of the century. Don’t be nervous about me, K. I’m all in.”

“Good. You have to move soon. The heat is on the Independent again after that story. Eventually it will be on you.”

Morris’s face lost what little color it had. He licked his lips, which had suddenly gone dry.

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