Spy Mom Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Original Sin

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  To Sin Again

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Copyright

  DEDICATION

  For Mike

  1

  I know I’m not crazy. I know this because it said so in my file, which I stole out of Director Gray’s office on a drunken dare from a guy who eventually disappeared in Somalia. Somewhat emotionally detached, the file said, and loose with the truth, yes, but in the eyes of the Agency, these were positive attributes. A red star at the top of the file corresponded to a note stuck to the inside cover. Refer to Simon? the note said. The question mark has always troubled me. They were never sure I could cut it.

  So how to explain what I’m doing right now. Gardening? Searching for a lost contact lens? Seeing if there is a stranger crawling around under my shrubs waiting to sneak into my house and strangle me with a length of piano wire?

  It is Tuesday morning, the San Francisco sun is shining and the fog is starting to recede back toward the ocean. It’s as regular as any other morning except that on this morning rather than sitting at my kitchen table sipping a scalding cup of coffee, here I am in the backyard crawling around on my knees under the juniper trees, muttering to myself like one of the local shopping-cart pushing, bottle-collecting loonies.

  “There is no evidence here,” I whisper. I am holding tightly to a brightly painted set of Matryoshka dolls, shaking them as if to make a point to my invisible audience. If I were really thinking, I would have picked up the cast-iron frying pan, still warm from this morning’s pancakes. Cast iron is generally accepted to be a better choice of weapon than a bunch of Russian nesting dolls. I continue to crawl forward under the scrubby trees.

  “There are no tracks, no shell casings, no cigarette butts or discarded coffee cups. You are simply having a paranoid attack that, most likely, a hit of caffeine will alleviate. Now get up and go back in the house.” Yet from my position here in the garden, I can’t help but notice that the palm tree in my perfectly landscaped backyard is situated in just such a way as to allow direct spying in through my kitchen window. Someone with skills could even figure a way into the house from here. How could I not have noticed this?

  My neighbor Tom, a British gentleman who always looks slightly past his “use by” date, watches me from his own backyard, a curious expression on his face.

  “Problems with the trees, Lucy?” he asks as I crawl out, pulling twigs and needles from my unwashed hair.

  “Yes. Well, no, actually. I thought I heard a cat.” Oh please. “It sounded like it was in trouble. Lost maybe?”

  “No cats here,” Tom says. He looks left and then right with an exaggerated turn of his bald head. “None that I’ve seen anyway.”

  “Well, thanks for checking. Gotta go. Left a child inside unattended. You know how that can end up.”

  Tom stares at me blankly. I guess not. I start to pull the debris from my hair, trying not to look too particularly crazed on this fine morning. And then I see it, off to the side of the back stairs. Five years ago I would have known immediately the height, weight, eye color, and sexual orientation of the owner of this footprint. But today, I am not sure. Is it my husband’s footprint, the washing machine repairman, the woman who comes to read the meter? I haven’t a clue. But I have that sinking feeling it is not supposed to be here.

  I head up the stairs throwing Tom a half-assed wave over my shoulder. I know he is still watching me and will continue to watch me until I disappear into the house. Sometimes I think everyone knows and that I should hang a neon sign outside my bedroom window that says: YES, YOU ARE ALL RIGHT. THINGS ARE NOT AS THEY APPEAR TO BE.

  I have left Theo for one minute too long. Covered in applesauce, he’s trying, with great enthusiasm, to bite the cat’s tail. The cat is howling to be let go. Theo is howling in delight. And I swear that not ten minutes ago I heard someone crawling around under my house. But I am not crazy. My file said as much. Tomorrow, however, everything might change.

  2

  My name is Lucy Parks Hamilton and in addition to being paranoid, unshowered, emotionally detached, and a liar, I am also a stay-at-home mom. Ten years ago, I would have met the idea that I would be going on playdates and walking around with streaks of snot on my shoulder with absolute indignation. Nowadays it’s possible for me to wear the same pair of jeans for seven days in a row and not get too worked up about it.

  My son Theo is three. He attends Happy Times Preschool twice a week for three hours. During these long three hours, I could be doing things. I could be folding laundry or shopping for food or writing my autobiography. I could even get a haircut or wash the car. But no. I have to sit where I can see the bright yellow door of the Happy Times Preschool. And that happens to be by the windows at the third table to the left in the Java Luv, a small coffee shop across the street and about half a block away from the school. The folks at the Java Luv are all very pleasant and are in complete agreement with one another that I’m a little weird. Or perhaps a lot weird.

  “Good morning, Lucy,” the barista, a guy named Leonard covered in spiderweb tattoos, greets me. “Read any good books lately?” He laughs because it’s become something of a joke. I sit in the same seat at the same table and do nothing more than stare out the window. I never pull out a well-worn best seller or peck away on my laptop or socialize or pick my cuticles or anything. I just sit and watch that yellow door. So I guess they are right about me. Strange.r />
  But I do have a purpose. I am here to make sure that no one goes into Theo’s school who does not belong there. I want to know that my son is exactly where he is supposed to be until the moment I can retrieve him. Some people might say I have developed overprotective tendencies. They have not seen what I have seen.

  When Theo and I are together, we spend a lot of time engaged in potty talk to varying degrees.

  “Mommy, I have to pee. I have to pee NOW,” he’ll shout at the top of his lungs.

  “But honey, we went not ten minutes ago. Can we at least finish getting our groceries and go to the potty after that? Again?”

  “I go right here,” he’ll announce and squat down on the ground of whatever unfortunate store I’ve chosen to patronize on that day.

  “Okay, let’s go. Let’s hurry!”

  After a dozen such close calls, I discovered my son is simply a potty tourist, interested in visiting potties the world over. Let me tell you, it gets old pretty fast.

  When we’re at home and not crowded into the restroom du jour, we read Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who. Lately, in my head, everything is conducted in a pleasant ultra-violent singsongy Seussian.

  Is there a door in that store?

  A big door.

  A big purple door.

  Go through the big purple door in the big store and perhaps on the other side you will meet a s’more all covered in red gore.

  And so on. My brain is atrophying. I can feel it. But I’m not entirely sure how to stop its slow slide into mush.

  We sing. I can sing “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Old MacDonald” in several different keys and octaves. Occasionally I’ll throw out a verse in Urdu or Czech or Tagalog for practice. Yes, Theo looks at me funny, but I’m willing to bet I’m the only mom in the ’hood who can do so.

  It turns out I am a fabulous multitasker, at least in my own mind. I can dress Theo with one hand and arrange playdates with the other. I can simultaneously shower, play cowboys and horses, tie shoes, and make scrambled eggs. Occasionally the shoes end up in the eggs. Or in my hair. But nobody’s perfect, right?

  I do laundry, separating the darks from the whites from kid clothes and using a different detergent and water temperature for each load. I make organic applesauce and fix toys and spend so much time crawling around on my knees playing cars or dinosaurs that my knees now have more calluses than skin. I go to Whole Foods and squeeze the fruits and vegetables like we’re longtime lovers, spending perfectly useful minutes in the perfectly useless pursuit of the perfect melon. It is important, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I cook healthy meals with whole grains and fish and green vegetables. The fact that I wash them down with half a bottle of expensive red wine doesn’t trouble me in the least. I often find myself in conversations that seem to go like this:

  “So what do you do all day?”

  “I’m a stay-at-home mom. I take care of my son.”

  “Oh. Well. I think I need to go and stick a needle in my eye.”

  End of conversation. It’s a bum rap. Being a mother is hard. And I feel like I have a few data points in the “hard” category.

  I am thirty-six years old. I am fairly tall, with indistinct, brown, shoulder-length hair that could certainly benefit from a few highlights. I have blue eyes that some people say are so intense they find it unnerving. And I can still kill an adult male twice my weight with one precisely placed punch in the chest. This is not something I tell the other moms at the playground. It simply doesn’t come up all that often.

  “Hey, Lucy, I hear you used to be a spy. Got any extra wipes in that bag? Or maybe an AK-47 lifted off some rebel in Afghanistan? Or a small drop of poison I could slip into my husband’s Manhattan because I swear he’s screwing the nanny?” Like I said, it really doesn’t come up too often. And in reality, this motherhood thing hasn’t been so good for the old termination skills. I’m a little rusty in all areas except, it seems, paranoia. My paranoia is still largely intact.

  So these are the things that I do as a stay-at-home mom. Play, clean, shop, feed, sleep, play some more, repeat. There is no denying I am a long way from where I used to be.

  Places that included Cambodia, Vietnam, Budapest for a short while, Croatia, Nepal, Slovenia—but that was for a vacation with the guy who disappeared in Somalia—a number of desolate locations in Africa, Tibet, and more of China than I care to remember, and several places I’m still not at liberty to comment on but let’s just say the weather was terrible. In those days, I was not Lucy Parks Hamilton, wife of William Wilton Hamilton III, mother of Theodore Hamilton. Back then I was Agent 26, aka Sally Sin, of the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  The Agency, as you already know if you read the papers, is comprised of a bunch of analysts sitting around trying to figure out who has what, when they are going to use it, and on whom. And for the most part that’s true. But there is a single line on page 415 of the USAWMD budget that reads, simply, Operations—Additional. And that’s where we lived, a small group of spies trained to ferret out elusive information, the one missing piece of the puzzle. And on occasion we were called upon to disarm those individuals or groups who had become a little too proud of their personal stash of Armageddon. Oftentimes these folks would decide, logically of course, that blowing up all of Cleveland because the guy who cut them off in traffic had a Cleveland Cavaliers bumper sticker was perfectly reasonable. Agency policy required us to disagree, although there are plenty of people who don’t see the point of Cleveland anyway. But that’s another story. The covert agents of the USAWMD are out there every day trying to stop the bad things from happening by whatever means possible. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Most people remember the times when it doesn’t.

  There weren’t twenty-six agents. I have no idea how many there were but I think it was less than twenty-six. However, my boss, Simon Still, seemed to think I looked like Agent 26.

  “Hey, Sally Sin, Agent Twenty-six, I got something for you,” he’d yell through the labyrinth that comprised our office space.

  “Agent who?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Who are agents one through twenty-five?”

  “I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.”

  “So how am I supposed to know that I’m really Agent Twenty-six?”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Agent Twenty-six.”

  “Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

  And Agent 26 wasn’t nearly as bad as Sally Sin, which was a joke from the computer game that started this whole mess in the first place. We’ll get to that in a minute.

  My husband, Will, once made a ton of money as an investment banker. But then he had a transformative experience while visiting the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. As he stood staring out over the two thousand acres of waste, he says he began to hyperventilate and not only because of the stink. He started to see himself and everyone he knew swimming through an ocean of decomposing medical waste and old toys and rotten grapefruits. It must have been quite an image because days later he quit his seven-figure job and decided he had no choice but to dedicate his life to saving the planet. And I mean that literally. He managed to come up with enough seed money to start his own investment fund to support the development of green energy. Will speaks with a certain reverence about solar cells and geothermal energy, and if he catches me absentmindedly putting a piece of paper in the garbage rather than in the recycle bin, the pain is acutely visible on his face. He is a good person and he expects me to recycle with the same enthusiasm that he does. So I try. Honestly, I do.

  “Honey, this is a tree,” he says, gingerly removing the piece of newspaper from the garbage can. “It can be turned into so many other things, like egg cartons for instance. But you need to give it a chance to go on and do good in the world.”

  When I first met Will I thought he might be another hippie throwback talking the talk but finding the walk
part kind of inconvenient and opting instead for a quick trip to Starbucks. But not Will. As it turns out, he is the first person I have ever met who truly believes a single individual can make all the difference. It’s humbling.

  Despite my poor recycling habits and my inability to understand the complexities of trading carbon credits, he seems to like me anyway. I’m not exactly sure how that happened, but I try not to question my good fortune too much. And, of course, Will loves Theo to pieces and buys him all sorts of exciting sustainable wooden toys. In the interest of marital harmony, we both ignore the fact that I occasionally slip the kid a Matchbox car made in China. I do try and remember to recycle the packaging, however.

  We live in a modest house in San Francisco, California, with a roof covered in solar cells. The amount Will paid for the house still makes my throat dry, but Theo likes it here. He can play outside in February and rarely has to wear shoes. He is beautiful and I’m not saying that simply because I’m his mother. People approach us on the street wanting only to touch his silky blond hair. This, as you might guess, doesn’t go over particularly well with me. Remember the paranoia I mentioned earlier? In addition to the blond hair, he has my blue eyes and a dimple in his chin like his dad.

  My local friends want to know what it is I do when I’m not with Theo. They want to know how I spend those hours that I’m not playing cars or dinosaurs or reading Where the Wild Things Are for the eight thousandth time. I don’t tell them about my coffee shop vigil. I don’t tell them I stare at the front door of Theo’s preschool waiting for bad guys to appear and mess up my perfectly happy existence. My goal in this stage of my life is to fly under the radar. Being that weird is definitely not under the radar. And how would I explain that I occasionally slip out to Donovan’s Dojo, patronized exclusively by ex-cons and cops, to kick the shit out of a bunch of people who think my name is Amy and that I did time for armed robbery? Or that in a lockbox in my closet, buried under some sweaters, is a .45 caliber Colt Commander that I have used to kill people? And that sometimes I take it out and look at it to remind myself of what that was like.