The Prime Minister's Secret Agent(74)

She took off her jacket, laid it on the rock, jumped down, and took a few steps toward the water. Maggie took a deep breath and shook out her limbs.

She closed her eyes, breathing in and out, taking in as much oxygen as possible. With great deliberation, she began a series of movements, done slowly, gracefully—more like modern dance than martial arts.

She remembered what her first teacher had said: “First, it will teach you how to breathe. When you breathe, you relax. When you relax, you clear the mind. Clearing the mind allows you to focus, and being focused allows you to live in the present moment.

“As you begin, you step out, then turn in, with your weight in your bent knees—double weighted,” she remembered. “Let all the weight sink into the balls of your feet, keeping the bend in the knee.”

Maggie continued her sinuous movements. “Now relax into the knees and let the energy fill you up, from your toes, up into the arms, and out into the fingertips. Now you want to relax and bring the arms back into the body, relaxing the hips, letting the weight sink back down into the balls of the feet. Let the energy draw back up into the fingers, then relax the arms back down to your sides.”

She wasn’t the best at it, but remembered her instructor’s words: “Breathe. There is no great and no terrible here. Just doing and not doing. And you’re doing.”

She took another deep breath of cold salty sea air and did the sequence again. And again.

“You could spend your whole life trying to get this move right, and it would not be a wasted life.” She’d never before known what that meant, but now she did, her movements slow and graceful, her mind at rest, focused only on the present. She was both in it and of it, connecting with the sand, the water, the sun, and the sky.

In that moment, she felt strong again.

In that moment, she felt truly alive.

She felt a lightness, a change. Her cheeks were now rosy—flesh and blood instead of wax. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Maggie thought. She’d read it at school, but now she finally understood.

Finally, Maggie floated her hands down to rest at her sides. There were tears in her eyes. She looked out over the water, at the large black rocks rising above the waves, and saw that she’d attracted an audience. Eight gray seals had stopped to sun themselves there, and perhaps wonder at the sight of the curiously moving human. There was a brief moment when seal eyes met human eyes and the light changed just slightly to a more rosy hue, and the wind gentled, just a little.

Maggie suddenly remembered all the times she’d come to the shore and thought of death, of filling her coat pockets with stones, like Virginia Woolf, or swimming out too far, like Edna Pontellier.

Maggie took off her wristwatch. She removed her shoes and sweater, then dropped the rest of her clothes. She walked naked over the sand to the water.

She stepped in and gasped. The water was icy on her toes, then feet, then legs, until she was up to her neck. She dove under the water, and came up giggling. It was cold, but agreeably so, the Gulf currents making it less frigid than it looked.

Something bubbled up inside her, warm and delicious, and for a moment she didn’t know what it was.

Then she remembered.

It was happiness—and it flowed through her veins until it reached her mouth, turning it upward into a smile. For a moment she was afraid to move. But then she realized, it was like the waves—even if it disappeared, even if it disappeared for a long, dark time, it would eventually come again.

“I think,” Maggie called to the seals, who were still regarding her curiously, “that after I teach my class today, I’ll have that bullet removed.”


It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Washington, chill and blue. The streets were still quiet, with birdsong louder than the usual traffic. Dead leaves swirled and eddied in the breeze.

Bratton and Kramer were in the “Magic” room, going over the fourteenth part of the message from Japan to the United States as it came in, the clicking of the typewriters loud in the silence. Both men had stayed up all night and were pale and hollow-eyed. Their jackets were off and ties askew.

Bratton read the latest decrypt, translating it as it came in: “Will the Ambassadors please submit our reply to the United States government at precisely one P.M., December seventh, your time.” He looked up at the row of clocks. “What the hell’s the significance of one P.M.?

Bratton kept reading and translating. “After deciphering part fourteen, destroy at once your cipher machine, all codes, and secret documents.”

The two men looked at each other. “They’re going to attack at one, Eastern Standard Time,” Kramer said.