15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(57)

He talked about moving to San Francisco so that we could be together for real. And then he said, “The part I didn’t tell you, couldn’t tell you, is that around the time Julie was born, the CIA asked me to come back on an ‘as-needed basis.’ I didn’t know they would need me so soon.”

We were driving north in the pitch bloody dark. Joe was telling me about his life as if we were on a date. Oh, my God. We’d had so many years between us, a full life, or so I thought. I was struck with memories of the night I gave birth to Julie. Joe was away on “business,” a consulting gig, he’d told me.

A ferocious storm had been beating the hell out of San Francisco when major contractions came on in force. From my bedroom windows, I could see trees and electric lines down on the roads. Cars had been wrecked and abandoned; 911 operators told me emergency responders were working without pause, and at last, the fire department answered my call for help. A gang of firefighters in full turnout gear had stood in a semicircle around my bed, telling me to breathe and push. That was the setting for Julie’s entrance into the world.

Where had Joe really been that night?

“Lindsay?”

“I’m listening. And I want to say that hearing about your secret life makes me feel like a complete idiot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. And I still haven’t told you everything.”

The tension in the car sparked like a downed electric line in the rain. I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, Come on Joe, cut the crap. It’s me. This is US.

If only.

If only he hadn’t kept so much from me.

I looked at him really hard. I wanted to see through the deep lies and casual disinformation. How could I know who he was? The man was a spy. Triple threat. Hard-core.

How could I believe anything he told me?

Still, the unasked question shot out of my mouth.

“Where were you the last two and a half weeks, damn it? Why didn’t you call me?”

He shook his head. He pounded the steering wheel with his palms. He was strapped into his seat. We were moving at sixty miles an hour. There was no getting away without answering me. I was sitting right there.

“Linds, I’ve always been committed to doing what needed to be done. For the country and ultimately for us. But you have to believe this.”

He stopped talking. We were crossing over a bridge with the Salish Sea to the left and the cliffs of the highway rising high on our right. But I didn’t know if there was a bridge strong enough to bridge the gulf between Joe and me.

“What, Joe? What do I have to believe?”

“That I love you. I love you and Julie so much. More than I ever thought possible. You have every reason to doubt me, but don’t. Because I swear to you, I’m telling you the truth.”





CHAPTER 87


I’D ALWAYS FOUND Joe open, accessible, honest— and real. My God, it was why I loved him. And now the truth was out. He’d lied deliberately and constantly all the time that I’d known him.

So why, when he told me he loved me, did I lean toward him? The answer was as simple as three little words. Despite the lies and deceit, I wanted to trust my husband. I loved him.

I said, “Don’t stop now, Joe. Tell me about Alison Muller. From the beginning.”

There were no other cars on the road at all. It was as if we were in a tunnel chasing two cones of light at high speed toward the edge of the world.

Joe was talking, telling me again that he’d lost touch with Alison until he’d come back to the CIA nine months before. He said it was around that time that the CIA became aware of Michael Chan, a naturalized American citizen who was spying for the Chinese. They’d learned about Chan: that he’d been born in China, had come to the USA as a student, had lived and worked in Palo Alto for the last eight years, and was now teaching history at Stanford.

Joe told me that just a few months ago, Muller volunteered to work a honey trap on Chan to learn what he was passing on to Chinese intelligence and to flip him to our side if she could. And according to Joe, because of his work history with Muller, he was asked to run the operation.

Joe said now, “I told you I thought Chan had fallen hard for Alison. Of course, he didn’t know that Ali was CIA and that he was her target. He believed her cover, her job, and the business trips that enabled them to get together. But Chan was going through a stressful time, and finally, he told Muller all about it.”

“And she reported this back to you.”

“Exactly. About a month ago. Chan told Muller that a Chinese intelligence honcho was about to defect to the United States. He said this defector had powerful and deep information that could take down the Chinese government.

“Muller told me that what was driving Chan crazy was that the defector was his father. Chan Senior was planning to come to California to be with his son. He’d gotten false documents using Michael Chan’s name and address and so on, and Chan was very worried. He’d heard that some Chinese-American men living in San Francisco had been assigned to kill his father as soon as his plane arrived in the States.

“Chan was just talking to his lover, you know, Linds? He was questioning his own loyalty to the Chinese government. He was desperately concerned for his father. And he had no idea that Muller was feeding this information to us.

“And still, the information was incomplete. Chan didn’t know what plane his father would be taking to the States. Muller was going to try to get this critical detail from Chan that evening in the Four Seasons—and then, as you well know, it all hit the fan.”