It had been seven years since I had seen that body. I knew every inch of it, and yet it was entirely new and strange to me. I reached out my hand and stroked the side of her hip. I was in a trance, as if I had fallen out of consciousness into the dream life where she had been living for all these years. I wanted to see, touch, feel every inch. She whispered into my ear, “Now!” and pulled me toward her.

When I awoke on the couch, it was night. Annie’s head was cradled against my chest. She fit so perfectly. As I first opened my eyes I felt as if we had been asleep for seven years, and awakened exactly as we had been before. But nothing is ever that way.

As we lay together, half awake, I called her name. I had so much that I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I was wandering into territory I didn’t know or understand.

“What?” she said sleepily. She nestled closer to me, her breast soft against my side. I didn’t answer. The folds of sleep gathered around me again.

“Annie,” I asked again a few minutes later, “have you ever imagined that you were a spy?”

“Of course,” she said dreamily. “Everyone does.”

26

26

Alicia Ginsburg was a plain, thin woman with a reedy voice that croaked in the upper registers. Rubino had told me the essentials of her biography. She had come to work at the agency in the mid-1960s, immediately after receiving her doctorate in cell biology from the University of Maryland. From the start, she specialized in the somewhat obscure field of chemical and biological warfare. She had been part of the agency team that handled the major BW emergencies of the last twenty years: from the mysterious anthrax epidemic in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1979 to the “yellow rain” in the 1980s to the Iraqi biological-weapons program in the nineties. She was a tough, unstinting woman; a person who had lived most of her adult life entirely within the national security bubble. She pledged absolute loyalty to that world, and had been rewarded, late in her career, with the title of division chief.

Rubino had arranged for me to meet Ginsburg at an unmarked office building on I-270 in Rockville that housed part of the agency’s Science and Technology complex. It was an ordinary enough building from the outside—no different from the offices of dozens of start-up biotech companies that dotted this part of Montgomery County. But inside, the building was very different from its neighbors. It had the security regime of a place where compartmented, highly classified research was done. Everyone wore a badge, including the man buffing the marble floor of the lobby.