The Police Lieutenant's Wife

Prologue

At the center of every romance story is the beating heart of hope. We turn the pages looking for the idea that the passion, adventure or love that we want exists - and perhaps the map to find it for ourselves. If it turns out tragically, the few moments of the experience might be enough - the tragic, but beautiful romance that died. But, a spy story, it is different, it is the unraveling, the breaking open of a misdeed, something gone wrong. However - the spy romance, the hunting down of the events as they unfold in the dark and sordid places, where hope is hard to find and so easily lost, that is this story.

One hot day in the Phoenix heat, Allison was sitting next to the backyard pool with her mother and sister. It was the 1970's. She was six, and her sister, Cathy was three. She had picked out a kaleidoscope from the store on a shopping trip with her mother. She was fascinated by the patterns it made and didn't understand how it happened. Her very pretty, petite blonde mother explained when they got home. They were sitting in the grass outside, taking turns gazing through the kaleidoscope. Her mother explained that the pieces never changed. As you held the kaleidoscope up to the light and turned it, it wasn't the pieces that changed at all, it was the mirrors, the light, and the positions that made the picture change.

Years later Allison thought about that - kaleidoscopes, when she had become a family and child therapist. Every story, every family, every event in time has the same pieces. But, every person has a different view. For example, Cinderella would tell a different story than would her step sisters and her step mother, yet they were all part of the same story. Would any of their stories be less true? It would mostly be perspective, a turning of the kaleidoscope. And so it is with many events in our lives, and so it is with spies, and with love. It is the same within ourselves, often-times we are different people at different places within our lives, if we go back to look at why we did something, it is a turn of the kaleidoscope. All the pieces are there, but the way the light enters in alters the picture.

2012, Winter, San Jose, CA and Washington, DC:

Geoff was rifling through mail and Andy came up and kissed him on the cheek. It was hot outside and his hair, which he usually wore spiked with gel, was wild all over. "Ummmm," she said, "You look hot today." He gave her a half-cocked grin, and paused from sorting through the bills to savor the compliment, "Yeah?" and kissed her neck, lingering just a moment... The moment was interrupted from the mechanical ring on his Blackberry. "Damn," he said, as he turned to answer it. It was 3:17 PM, and technically he was still on-the-clock. Geoff was in marketing analytics for IBM and worked from home, most of the time in San Jose, California. Sometimes he traveled to clients. His specialty was a newer, esoteric field called text analytics, and he was one of the best at it. It meant taking unstructured data like social media, emails, anything free form and applying algorithms to discern patterns that could be applied predictively. On that day in July, it was hot out, he was tired, and he wanted to call it an early day.

Geoff was a fun-loving guy who gone to good schools - Stanford and prep school before that. His kids were involved in sports. His father had been in the military as an engineer and his wife had been a debutante and a California girl. They were a church going, happy-go-lucky, hard-working family. They did the "right" things, worked hard, played hard, and were mostly pretty happy. He picked up the phone, and just before he put it to his ear, he realized it was an unknown number, but it was too late to put it down.

One the other end was a deep voice, somewhat raspy, male. The man said, "I'm with the CIA. We are sending you a ticket to your corporate email. On Wednesday you'll be arriving to Dulles. We need to you to perform an analysis using text analytics. You'll have Thursday to do the analysis, present the results in the evening, and then we'll send you home. You won't speak of this to anyone, not even your family."