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Kellynch had taken the issue as settled and, after instructing the Company’s late-night analysts to meet with Darcy to discuss travel and equipment, the director dismissed them.

He made it clear in a brief, firm decree that Darcy was to be in charge of the team. Lizzy understood that but railed against it silently. Bad enough to be working with a team, but to have to work under Darcy, an MI-6 agent—it galled her.

Darcy spoke briefly with Charlotte, who instructed him on the way to the conference room where the analysts were waiting for him. After she finished, he stepped away from her desk and spoke softly to Lizzy and Charlie. "I will get in touch with you both later this morning. I expect our mark to leave D.C. soon, maybe as early as today, so be ready to leave on short notice." He made a final glance at Lizzy―at her dark hair―then turned from her and Charlie and walked down the hallway with long strides.

Charlie shrugged and smiled at Lizzy, narrowing his eyes as he considered her hair, too. "Trying to imagine you blonde…"

She sighed. "Is it that hard?"

"Maybe. Guess not.” He shrugged again. “After all, it's just a disguise, part of a cover, a mission. I grew a mustache once for one."

Despite her lingering anger and frustration, she smiled, finding it as hard to imagine Charlie’s boyish face with a mustache as he seemed to find imagining her with blonde hair.

"They say blondes have more fun…" he offered weakly when he saw her smile. She thought she heard Charlotte scoff softly.

Lizzy looked down the hallway at Darcy's retreating, tall form. "Not on this mission." She waved a farewell to Charlotte, said a quiet goodbye to Charlie, and headed toward the exit.

She needed to make a stop at a twenty-four-hour drugstore, and then she needed sleep.

***

Unfortunately, after the stop at the drugstore, sleep eluded her. She kept replaying the scene in Kellynch's office and cursing herself for a fool, twisting and turning in her blankets.

She did not like missions of this sort―honeypot missions. It was bad enough as a woman constantly to be objectified, but to objectify yourself, and so ruthlessly, and for so long…

It was awful.

She had done it a couple of times early in her CIA career, fresh from the Farm, which was the school for agents run by the Company. In those days, still proving herself, she had practically no say in her missions. She had not complained when the honeypot missions ended, but she was glad that they did.

She had gone into her training at the Farm almost immediately from college at Haverford, where she had double majored in English and Psychology. She had been recruited early in the Spring Term of her senior year. That had been a dark, tumultuous time in her life, unsorted, marked by emotional upheaval. She’d had a crisis of confidence in her planned career as a Literature professor upon the death of her beloved father during the Christmas break.

She had not been sure that she had the patience necessary to succeed at her intended career or even to secure that career. English departments―humanities departments generally―were marginalized, colleges conceiving of education as almost exclusively pre-something: pre-law, pre-med, pre-business. The notion, then dear to Lizzy, that college was to acculturate students, and that culture was activity of thought, sensitivity to beauty and humane feeling—that notion seemed to have no purchase on the imaginations of the other students, even at the small liberal arts college she attended in Pennsylvania. As a result, positions of the sort she wanted were becoming rarer and rarer, English faculties shrinking, and the competition for the few open positions fierce.

She had already been despondent about that when Christmas break arrived. Then her father had died suddenly, unexpectedly, of a massive heart attack just a few days before the holidays.

The house had plunged into chaos, all of it descending onto Lizzy. Her mother, never emotionally stable even at her best, had been crazed with grief. As the only child, Lizzy had been forced to cope with her own quiet, intense, private grief while struggling to contain her mother's loud, wild, public grief. She had arranged and coordinated the thousand details required by a death: funeral, burial, will. Lizzy had returned to Haverford's campus thin and stretched, talking her mother down by phone almost every night while trying to keep up with her classes.

The CIA recruiter at the job fair, Jane Simons, had been a tall, attractive woman. She was blonde, charming, and still quite young herself, only a few years older than Lizzy. She possessed remarkable candor for someone recruiting people for a career of keeping secrets, and she won Lizzy over personally in just a few minutes. Before becoming a recruiter, Jane had been a CIA analyst.

By the time Lizzy left the recruiting table, she had a handful of brochures and Jane's card as well as an appointment to have dinner with Jane that evening. Over dinner, Lizzy made her decision. She would join the Agency and become an agent.

And so she had. A darkling decision in a dark time.

***

Her first honeypot mission was her third mission overall, the first where she worked alone, without any direct supervision, without a handler. It had not been a honeypot mission initially, not what Kellynch―himself new to the directorship at the time―had told her to expect. She was only to use her administrative access to the mark’s schedule, datebooks, visits, and calls, seeking information needed for the CIA. The inexperienced Lizzy had allowed herself to be too eagerly attentive to the man in order to gain his trust, and he took that attentiveness to signal a more personal interest in him.

It was predictable, and Lizzy should have anticipated it. She had contacted the analyst assigned to her mission to report this change. Kellynch himself returned her call on a secure line, the only time he had ever done so during a mission. He’d reminded her of what she’d learned in her manipulation classes at the Farm, the goal being to use the relevant passion—lust, in this case—as a weapon against the mark.

The mission had been a complete success. The mark and his henchmen had been arrested, stolen arms recovered, and Kellynch had been happy with Lizzy. It had been the beginning of her rise in the Company.

But she never forgot how it made her feel to dress to arouse a man for whom she had no desire, making herself into his object―worse, into her own object―for the sake of a mission. It was her first bitter draft of the reasoning that pervaded the Company.

Personal integrity did not matter; results did.

Without saying too much about it, she did afterward convey her distaste for the mission to Kellynch, and for a while, no more such missions came her way.

***

Lizzy rose from bed and walked to the bathroom. She turned on the light and stared at herself in the mirror, at her heavy, chestnut hair, mussed and tumbled from the pillow and her sleeplessness. A box of the blonde hair dye she’d purchased at the drugstore stood on the bathroom counter.

She could have gone back to Langley and had her hair dyed there by experts, the dye job perfect, undetectable. But Darcy's comments about her―his conviction that she was not the agent to manipulate Wickham―still made her seethe. As if bra and cup size were the measures of a female agent! Competency determined by tape measure!

Lizzy had decided, before leaving Kellynch's office, that she would not just be blonde the next time she saw Darcy. She would be a brassy bottle blonde. And she would still convince Wickham she was everything he wanted.

After she picked up the box and examined the directions, she put it down. It would be easier with help . She left the bathroom, turned off the light, and went into the kitchen.

The sun was up. Its early beams stretched through her kitchen window all the way to the opposite wall and ended in a pattern of yellow rectangles, the negative of the crisscross wooden frame of the window.

She made coffee, watching the clock. As soon as the digits indicated it was seven a.m., she picked up her phone and called Jane.

Jane and Lizzy had remained friends, although their friendship was unexpected for both of them. They had liked each other immediately at Haverford, and their dinner together had been natural, relaxed, and fun. Jane had obviously expected that once Lizzy became an agent, she would move in different circles than a Company recruiter. Instead, Lizzy had sought her out, and they had become best friends.

Jane answered, muttering Hello in a disoriented, sleepy grumble.

"Hey, it's Liz. Have you ever dyed hair?" This was how they were with each other, no ceremony, always to the point.

Before answering, Jane yawned, perhaps trying to remember. "A few times, I guess, back in high school…college. Yeah. Why?"

"I need to dye my hair blonde for a new mission."

Ignoring the color change for a moment, Jane seized on the other news. "New mission? Already? You're just back from the last one! We haven't even had a chance to go out or drink too much wine at my place or yours! Catch up on all the non-redacted details."

"I know, and I'm sorry, but something came up. Kellynch called me late last night, early this morning."

"Need-to-know stuff?"

"Yeah, need-to-know."

"Well, I don't need to know, but I can help with your hair. Langley could do it better than I could, though. Movie star quality. I'm strictly amateur hour."

Lizzy chuckled. "Let's just say I don't care about being starlet blonde. Better a little harlot blonde."

"Lizzy, you say the damndest things!" Jane said with a mock gasp and a trailing giggle. "When do you need to do this?"

"Now? It's early, but I just made a pot of strong coffee, and I'll make you pancakes to go with it if you hurry. I bought blueberries yesterday. If I don’t use them up, they will rot in my fridge. Come to think of it, you can take the extra home."

"Blueberry pancakes, strong coffee, and ‘harlot-blonde’ Lizzy? I have the day off, it turns out. I'm there! Give me forty minutes."

Lizzy ended the call, poured herself a coffee, and liberated the pantry and refrigerator items needed for pancakes. She sat and sipped the brown-black brew, staring into it between sips, dark. She could not see the bottom of her cup…and it reminded her of Darcy's eyes.

***

The other honeypot mission was over a year after the first. This time, Lizzy knew about it going in, although the situation was vastly different. Her mission was to push a Company asset to resume his work on cryptologic algorithms.

What made this worse was that she liked the man, though not in a romantic sense. She admired his keen mind and quiet, quick humor. But he’d had no experience with women and was shy around them. Upon meeting Lizzy, he fell fast. She kept him interested and hoping for more than friendship. With her encouragement, the asset returned to his CIA-funded research with vigor.

Then she vanished, the exit orchestrated by the Company―a note in his departmental mailbox and a few withdrawn and withdrawing texts.

Lizzy hated herself the whole mission.

The memory plagued her periodically ever after, though she always pushed the remembrance aside. Better to let her sleeping lies lie.

***

The two women looked into the mirror. Lizzy was in a kitchen chair, a towel around her shoulders. The dyeing was done.

Jane had done a good job, given the boxed dye and her amateur status. The color was even with no dark roots. It was brassy, very light, edging toward white blonde. At first, Lizzy felt as if a stranger was gazing back at her from the mirror. The hair made her complexion seem slightly darker. Her eyes, too―the bright hair brought them forward, making her gaze seem more intense.

"Well," Jane said, tilting her head one way and then another, " that's surprising! I don't know if I like it, but I don't not-like it. It's like someone dipped you in a vat of Cindy Lauper." They both laughed, and then she began to hum Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

Lizzy hummed along, too, but then stopped. "Wait, wasn't Lauper's hair red…or reddish when that song came out?"

Jane chuckled as she shrugged. "Maybe. But brassy —like you."

Lizzy stood, and Jane helped her with the towel. They walked back into the kitchen together, to the table still covered by breakfast dishes. Lizzy's Company phone also sat on the table.

Grabbing the half-empty coffee pot, Lizzy poured them both more coffee. Once she returned the pot to the coffee maker, she sat down. Jane, who had continued humming, stopped and gave her a careful glance. "So. Honeypot assignment? Not asking for details, but wondering about the hair."

Lizzy nodded, her nod small. "Yeah."

"Non-gentlemen prefer blondes?"

"Something like that. It's an odd assignment, a team thing."

One of Jane's eyebrows levitated. "Really? I didn't think you did the team thing? ‘Lizzy against the world’?"

"Kellynch's choice, not mine. The team."

Jane pursed her lips and frowned. She had never liked Kellynch. Although she was a successful recruiter, she had turned her back on her previous analyst job in the Company. Kellynch never quite forgave her for that; he considered her taking the recruiting job as her demoting herself, becoming less serious, less essential. Frivolous. Their very different attitudes toward the director caused the only tension between Lizzy and Jane.

"He's an ass, Liz. He likes you, but you shouldn't let that keep you from seeing him for what he is: an ambitious, stingy, career bureaucrat, part of the Eternal Boobocracy."

"And you say I say the damndest things!" Lizzy shook her head. "But I do keep an eye on him."

Jane gave her an unconvinced look. "So, when do you leave?"

"Later today, I think. I haven't heard yet. My go-bag's ready. And now, with my new hair, I'm fully prepared."

"It's impossible to be fully prepared for any mission, Liz. And didn't someone, maybe Thoreau, say that you should beware of all enterprises that require new hair?"

Lizzy choked a bit on a sip of her coffee. "Warn me next time you decide to distort a quotation!"

In college, Thoreau’s book had been Lizzy’s Vade-mecum. That had been years ago. She had not looked at it or thought about it in ages. She was unsure why.

Jane laughed, but there was a wariness in the sound. It had taken her some time to tell Lizzy why she’d stopped working as an analyst. She had been working closely with a team in the Middle East and, in a sudden, desperate situation, forced to feed them information in real-time, she had misinterpreted chatter that had led the team into a trap. Two of the four members died.

It was not Jane’s fault, but she had never quite forgiven herself. While she refused to continue as an analyst, a sense of debt and loyalty to the agents who died kept her working for the Company.

Lizzy never could fully wrap her mind around it; it was an opacity at the center of her friend. But she accepted it. One thing her life in the Company had taught her was that no one is fully transparent―not to anyone else, not even to herself.

Her phone beeped. It was a text…from Darcy.

B will pick you up at 1 pm. plane will be ready

"So…time to go?" Jane asked with a small smile.

"Soon."

Jane stood up, her smile disappearing, seriousness in her eyes. "Break a leg, Liz."