“Lie,” she said. “And lie well, all the time, even to the people closest to you.” A thing like that could have easily sounded accusatory, a rhetorical question born of resentment and betrayal. But if he’d read her tone correctly, she wasn’t angry. She was—seemed, anyway—genuinely curious.
“Well,” he said, hesitantly. He was about to be as frank as he’d ever been with her, so he thought he’d better make damn certain. “Are you sure you want me to talk about this?”
“That’s why I asked,” she said.
He leaned back, resting his head casually against his fist, and took a deep breath. “The first thing you have to remember is that I had training. Lying was part of my job. Part of who I had to be. We had professional actors and former conmen coaching us when we were training. We learned how to convince anyone of anything.”
“But it can’t be just a matter of—technique,” she said. “I mean, you have to sustain it for so long, so completely. . . . There has to be more to it.”
“You’re right,” he said. “There is. It’s—well, it’s a constant struggle, to begin with. The truth is always fighting to come out, and if you let it, it will. For the untrained, it’ll come out in overt ways—nervous laughter, flatness in your voice, unnatural or exaggerated tones.... But even if you can stop it from showing in the obvious ways, the truth can betray you in the tiniest of details, in ways you don’t expect—tics and small gestures and involuntary reactions.”
“That’s if you don’t trip up outright,” Alex cut in. Her eyes were bright and sharp with interest, and she was leaning slightly forward as she spoke.
“Right. Forget your story or get caught in a contradiction, and you’re toast. It doesn’t make it any easier that humans are natural lie detectors. And the more and longer you lie, the more likely it is that you’ll let something slip.”
“So how do you do it?” she asked.
“You have to remember and practice a couple things,” he said. “First, change as little as possible. The fewer details you have to keep straight, the smaller the chance you’ll screw up in a way that gets you killed or captured. That goes for stuff like your birthplace to what your spouse is like to . . . your children. For prolonged undercover assignments, we even used our real first names.”
“Really? How come?”
“Imagine you’re sitting in a public space and someone yells out your name. What do you do?”
He could tell she saw immediately where he was going with this. “Turn to look.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“But obviously I’m not going to do that if I’m trying to hide who I am.”
“You think you have more control over yourself than you actually do. You’re naturally conditioned to look when someone calls you. No matter how much you try, you can’t erase that completely. And it’s not just your name. It’s telling the truth. That’s your first instinct, and it’s hard to suppress completely and consistently in the easiest of circumstances. Perfect control is extremely difficult. Even if you have just a small reaction, it can be enough to betray you when the stakes are highest.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “So that’s the first one. What’s the second?”
“Have total, complete commitment to what you’re doing. Never question the lie as you’re living it. If you have any doubt about your purpose, about the rightness of the lie, the truth’s going to get the best of you.”
“But didn’t you always teach me to question everything? I know that’s how you live your own life too. How do you square that with believing in something completely?”
Sharp. Morgan smiled despite himself. “Yes. There’s a time for questioning, always. But eventually you have to have the confidence to commit to something and see it through—and sometimes, that means lying. But the thing they don’t tell you is that, above all things, it’s lonely. Not being able to share who you really are with the people you love—it’s not easy. Even if, say, most of what your family knows about you is absolutely true, they still don’t know the complete picture. They never know you, not as totally as they would when you’re a normal person, someone without these kinds of secrets. So, along with the other difficulties, you need to know that this is what you’re up against as well. It’s a life of secrecy, even from the people you love the most.”
Alex hunched down, frowning, her chin resting against both her hands, and Morgan could practically hear the gears in her head grinding. She finally spoke.