Page 2 of Whisper

He’d bitten his lower lip.

“Wanna get out of here?”

Kris had thought he’d never ask.

They made out in the parking lot, pressed against the attorney’s BMW, before trading blowjobs in the back seat. After, Kris straightened his clothes and headed to his car, going home. Alone.

He was a professional now, or trying to be. Holding down a job. His college days of waking up in a different bed almost every day of the week were behind him.

“Maybe I’ll see you next week,” the attorney had called after him.

“Maybe!”

Buoyed by the night before, Kris had wound his way through the North Virginia traffic to Langley early in the morning. He’d smiled at the guards who glared at him as he badged his way into headquarters, and then to CTC. The guards had shut up about the Monday night game as he passed. As if him hearing their conversation would somehow mean something. He’d smirked and twiddled his fingers.

At his desk, he’d read the overnight cables, shaking his head over the reported suicide bombing of General Ahmad Massoud of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Massoud had been one of the better men in the dusty backwater of Afghanistan, a force against the Taliban.

He’d risen to get his second cup of coffee, wondering about the future of the tiny, forgotten country he was in charge of monitoring. Would the Taliban seize control of the entire nation? Would that be the end of the rebellion against the Taliban’s chokehold? What about al-Qaeda, shielded by the Taliban? In the breakroom, he had to start a second pot of coffee. Everyone always let it run dry, down to the dregs that burned and stank.

He was pouring his creamer, wondering, for the thousandth time, about updating his résumé and getting out of the CIA when he heard the first whisper of a plane crash in New York.

The CIA was shaping up to be a rough career. Kris was surrounded by Type A personalities, people who stared unflinchingly into the darkness of the world and believed they could bend the globe’s swirling maelstrom to their own will. Kris could barely get the security guards to say hello to him. Who was he to change the world?

He stood out, with his tweed sport coats and ascots and crisp button-downs. In a world of clandestine operators in rumpled khakis and polos with coffee stains, he was a Milan fashion model. In 2001, thatmeantsomething, in a man. Everyone, of course, noticed. Everyone talked. He could count on one hand the few people who spoke regularly to him, who were friendly.

Maybe that was why he was isolated on the Afghanistan desk.

Maybe it was time to start looking for another career.

Back in 1999, a man had stopped him outside his Advanced Farsi class at George Washington University. He’d hung in the corner of the hallway, keeping obsessively to himself, like he lived in the shadows by choice. He’d had two cell phones on his hip. In 1999, barely anyone had a cell phone.

“Mr. Caldera? Kris Caldera?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’d like to talk to you about a possible job.” He’d handed Kris a business card with the CIA’s logo on the front.

He hadn’t known then what it meant that he was being sought out by the CIA. He was a gay Puerto Rican kid on a poverty scholarship to GWU and he didn’t have a single ounce of blue blood in him, not one single connection or friend of his father’s he could call on. It was only four years since President Clinton had rescinded the ban on homosexuals being allowed to hold security clearances, only four years sincepeople like himwere allowed to serve openly in sensitive national security positions.

Not that anyonedidserve openly. The closet was still shut and barricaded from the inside.

“Why me?” He’d stuck out his hip, and he had lip gloss on and smudged eyeliner from waking up in Beta Theta Pi’s frat house that morning.

“We hear you’re good with languages. Particularly ones we’re interested in.”

He loved languages, loved the way the mind skipped and danced over converting rules of grammar, syntax, and expression, twists of phrase and linguistic layups. He’d grown up speaking Spanish at home and English at school, and a mix of everything on the streets, where he ran with other brown kids in Lower Manhattan. In middle school he’d crushed on older boys, writing long love letters in French that he dreamed of whispering to the shortstop on the school baseball team. In high school, he’d worn his school uniform the sassiest way he could, his tie just past scandalous, and regularly smacked on enough tinted lip balm to make it look like he’d been kissing for hours. He’d made it a point to stare at the football players until they barked at him. He’d laughed in their faces.

One had tried to kiss him after school, smearing his lip balm all over his cheeks. He kept the boy’s secret, though.

Later, he’d crushed on a swarthy waiter from Rome who worked in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant while moonlighting off-Broadway, and he’d learned Italian just to flirt with him. As often as he could, he’d trekked up Broadway, ignoring the stares he got when the wealthy white people watched him flounce past.

Then one day, the waiter showed up with a white boy toy from the Upper East Side, and Kris never spoke another word in Italian.

The harder the language, the better he was. He’d taken Arabic throughout his junior and senior years in high school and earned a scholarship to George Washington University in DC.

Not Georgetown. They’d never accept someone like him.

But George Washington was only a few blocks away, and they offered as many languages as he could gorge himself on. He’d thought if he did well, maybe, just maybe, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service would accept him for a Masters. He could try to join the State Department, or the United Nations.