8

       August

       East Africa.

      Harry O’Neill had made a mistake.

      In fact, he had made the biggest mistake a case officer can make.

      He had fallen in love.

      With one of his agents.

      All case officers, it is said, sleep with their agents—surely an exaggeration—but they don’t fall in love. It is the falling in love that is the mistake.

      And he knew it was a mistake, and he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been in his life, happy in a way that reconciled him to his father’s snobbery and his ex-wife’s nastiness, to his own self-doubt and to the dangers of his mistake. If his life ended tomorrow, he told himself, he would say it had been worth it.

      “I love you,” he said to her. “You make me happy.”

      Elizabeth Momparu looked at him. Her eyes were slightly swollen from sex and sleep and fatigue, and when she half-closed them to look at him, they seemed to turn up at the corners. She had a fair idea of how she looked to him but no notion of how she really looked to him—the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most enchanting woman in the world. She had had a lot of men, white and black. Some of them had said they loved her. She had thought she had loved three. She had never known one like Harry.

      “I like being with you,” she said. “I like being safe with you.”

      They were sitting on the terrace of a game lodge in eastern Kenya. Night was almost there, coming fast; the retreating day had left a reddish light that made everything—waterhole, thorn trees, sky—seem like an old color slide that had lost all its blue and green. In front of them was a low wall, and a dropoff of twenty feet to an artificial waterhole that would be floodlighted later. For now, only rock hyraxes the size of gray squirrels were there, scrambling up over the wall and taking crumbs from the tourists. It was a safe place, she was right; O’Neill had looked for a long time before he had picked it. None of the Hutu Interahamwe would ever come there.

      “Why don’t we get married, and you can feel that way all the time?”

      “Harry—!”

      He smiled, shrugged, as a man who has asked the question before will shrug. He would go on asking it, too. One day, as they both knew, she would say yes. He touched her fingers, and she twined hers into his.

      The reason it is the worst of mistakes for a case officer to fall in love with an agent is that he endangers his very reason for being when he does so. An agent, cut it how you will, is expendable, but a lover is not. At the same time, the agent is rarely unique, is more likely part of a network. When the case officer wants to fold the agent into his real life, he destroys both of them, and often the rest of the network, too.

      O’Neill knew these things. He was thinking of them as he sat in the near-dark and seemed to watch the hyraxes. He had already decided that he didn’t care, at least not about the theoretical part—his job, his career, the Agency. He did care about disentangling her from her role as agent.

      “I don’t want you to go back,” he said.

      She squeezed his fingers. “I have to.”

      “I want you to fly to Paris. I’ve made a reservation for you.”

      “Oh, Harry—”

      “You’ll be safe. Somebody will meet you.”

      She was silent for so long, she seemed to have forgotten. “You know I can’t,” she said at last.

      He knew she wouldn’t go. He had to do it, had to make the arrangements, as if she would. Maybe she would. But of course she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t for the reason—one of the reasons—that he loved her: because she wanted to stop the killing. She had first allowed Hammer to recruit her because once she knew what he was doing, she thought that helping the Americans would bring their power and what she saw as their idealism into it. The Americans would stop the killing, she had thought. But the Americans hadn’t stopped the killing, as it turned out.

      “I have to go back there,” she said. “You know you need me there. Six months, then maybe—”

      “I’ll get somebody else.” He knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was close to the leadership; he’d never find anybody so close, with all the turmoil. It would take years to replace her. That would be somebody else’s problem.

      “Maybe,” she said, “things will change next year.”

      Things wouldn’t change in a hundred years. They both knew that. But it was what people told themselves all over central Africa: maybe things will change. Meanwhile, the uneasy truce in Rwanda had become a preparation for war in Zaire, using the refugees there as a weapon. O’Neill had agents in Uganda and eastern Tanzania and Zambia now, and they all said the same thing: a splinter Zairean group in Tanzania was going to be supported in a takeover of Zaire. The other nations would all profit, grabbing slices of territory—buffer zones, minerals. The Hutu refugees were a kind of shield for all sides, behind which the Interahamwe sheltered and the potential invaders hid their intentions.

      “What if I quit my job and we went home?” he said. Home was the States. She had been there on a holiday—Disney World—but she couldn’t think of it as home.

      “You’re being silly. People like us don’t have a home. Nobody in my country has a home any more. We’re all refugees, even me, and I own a villa. You made yourself a refugee when you took your horrible job.”

      “I’m an expat, not a refugee.”

      “Yes, you’re American. Americans can’t be refugees, can they. They own the world.”

      “I told you, I’ll quit the horrible job.”

      “No, you won’t.”

      They sat another twenty minutes. By then, it was black dark. Lights had been turned on in the trees below them, but no animals had come to the waterhole yet. They stood to go in to dinner. When she was facing him, close to him, she said, “I—” and stopped. She wasn’t looking into his face, rather down into the trees.

      “What?”

      She had a habit of pushing out her lower lip and pushing her tongue up against her lower teeth when she was challenged, getting an expression faintly like a chimpanzee’s. She shook her head. “We’ll talk about it later.”

      She