David Ignatius - Agents of Innocence

But the next morning the emptiness and sense of failure returned for Rogers. Jane wished that he would be less polite and scream out his unhappiness. But that was against the rules, too.

What saved Rogers from utter despair in those weeks was his daughter Amy. Her health preoccupied Rogers. He took her to the doctor, checked her temperature and pulse every morning, tested her reactions with a silver mallet. And he rejoiced when the signs from all these tests confirmed what the doctor said. She was getting better. Rogers found that some days his daughter was the only person in the world he truly wanted to see. He would sit with her in his lap in the evening and rock her slowly to sleep. Sometimes he would even bring her with him into his study after dinner and let her play on the floor while he read. It was as if her physical illness and Rogers’s spiritual wound had combined in Rogers’s mind and become extensions of each other.

Jane resolved to see the difficult period through. She gave Rogers room to brood, made few demands on him, and waited for the clouds to clear.

As she lay awake in bed on one of these somber evenings, Jane thought of a boat in the fog. It was a boat her parents had chartered one summer, and they were cruising off the coast of Maine. In the thick fog she could hear the sound of waves breaking against the rocks on the shore, and the sound of foghorns from other boats, and the occasional clanging sound of a buoy marking the channel. But she couldn’t actually see anything beyond a few feet, the fog was so dense. She saw her father, staring at the ship’s compass, glancing from time to time at a chart, steering a course toward the next mark. He was muttering to himself as he tried to keep the boat on its compass heading.

I know where I want to be, her father had grumbled, but I don’t know where I am.

That muttered remark in the fog off the Maine coast was the very heart of the truth, Jane thought to herself. You could hear and feel the world around you, but you couldn’t see anything clearly. You did your best to steer a course by dead reckoning, with no certainty even that you were heading in the right direction.

Rogers ignored Fuad. The Lebanese agent was part of an operation that was dead, as far as Rogers was concerned. Rogers approved his expense vouchers and signed a weekly report for the auditors, but otherwise he left Fuad alone. Eventually, after a few weeks, Fuad became restless and left a message in one of the dead drops requesting a meeting with his case officer.

“Have I done wrong?” asked Fuad when they met. “Why do you ignore me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Rogers. “I’ve been very busy.”

Fuad nodded. Rogers was, for him, such a towering figure that it would not have occurred to him that the American might have problems of his own. It would have been easier for Fuad to imagine the sun not rising.

“I am at your service,” said Fuad. “If there is any project you would like me to undertake, I am ready.”

Rogers heard the eagerness and loyalty in Fuad’s voice and felt ashamed. Agents are like children, he thought to himself. They are utterly dependent on their case officers for work, protection, meaning, survival. They cannot live alone. The part of them that was independent has been destroyed by the process of recruitment.

“Fuad,” said Rogers in as commanding a voice as he could summon. “There is one thing I would like you to do.”

“What is that, Effendi?” asked Fuad. He already looked a little happier.

“I am going to be very busy with other work for a while. So I won’t be able to meet with Jamal. I’ve asked other people to help out on that.”

Fuad nodded. He was disappointed, but trying not to let it show.

“I would like you to keep an eye on Jamal for me,” Rogers continued. “Make sure that he is adequately protected. That he has enough bodyguards, that he isn’t spending money too wildly. That he isn’t leaving himself vulnerable to anyone. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Effendi,” said Fuad. His posture had changed. He was a man restored.

Rogers was not. After rousing himself to deal with Fuad, he fell back into his numbness. Indeed, the brief discussion of Jamal only made him sorrier that his role in the operation had ended in failure.

Hoffman, who had been watching Rogers’s melancholia mount day by day, eventually decided that he had had enough. There was room in the station for one prima donna, and that post was already filled by Hoffman himself. One afternoon in late June, the station chief called Rogers into his office.

“Sit down, my boy,” said Hoffman when Rogers arrived. “Listen to me carefully, because I’m going to tell you three crucial words that will matter a great deal in your career.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers dutifully.

“Illegitimi non carborundum,” said Hoffman, reciting a Latin phrase.

“What?” asked Rogers.

“Illegitimi non carborundum,” repeated Hoffman. “Those are the three words.”

“What do they mean?” asked Rogers.

“They mean: ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ ”

“Where did you learn that?” asked Rogers, rousing himself slightly.

“Harvard,” said Hoffman.

“Harvard?” said Rogers sitting up straight in his chair. “I didn’t know you went to Harvard.”

“I didn’t,” said Hoffman. “I went to Holy Cross. But we used to play Harvard in football.”

“So?”

“So when we played in Cambridge, I made a practice of listening to the Harvard band. They were the smart ones, you see, and they liked to sing in Latin just to show everybody how smart they were. When everyone else sang ‘Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,’ they sang their Latin number, ‘Illegitimi non carborundum.’ Would you like me to sing it for you?”

“No thanks,” said Rogers.

Hoffman started singing anyway, bobbing his large head until Rogers finally cracked a smile.

“Gaudeamus igitur,” sang Hoffman vigorously.

“Veritas, non sequitur!” His hands were gesturing in the air like a conductor’s.

“Illegitimi non carborundum. Ipso, facto!” He bowed slightly in Rogers’s direction when he had finished.

“Not bad,” said Rogers.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” repeated Hoffman.

There was a brief interlude of silence. Hoffman resumed his tune, humming it sotto voce.

“God damn it!” said Rogers, raising his voice above the sound of Hoffman’s humming, finally allowing himself to get angry at something, in this instance Hoffman’s relentless good humor.

“What’s bugging you, anyway?” asked Hoffman.

“What’s bugging me?”

“Correct,” said Hoffman. “You.”

“Isn’t that obvious?” answered Rogers. “They’re trying to take my case away from me!”

“My boy, they are not trying,” said Hoffman. “They are taking your case away from you. It’s done. Over. Finished. Kaput. So wise up, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Thanks,” muttered Rogers. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

“It could be worse, my boy. They could have fired you.”

“They probably should have,” said Rogers. “I let them down-especially Stone.”

“Forget Stone.”

“He tried to help. When I went back to Washington a few months ago, he took me to dinner at his club and gave me a long lecture about control and self-control. He was on the mark.”

“Did you say he gave you a lecture about self-control?”

“Yes.”

“In this little lecture, I don’t suppose he told you his story about the Brit-‘C’-and how he cut off his leg with a penknife, did he?”

“As a matter of fact, he did,” said Rogers. “What of it?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What?”