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EXCERPT ONE: "BEGIN WITH A VOICE"

Begin with a voice, everyone says; finding one was hardly my problem. The voice that I heard never shut up. The first time I heard it was the day I moved into my apartment complex in Washington. I was in the lobby, fumbling with the key to my new mailbox, when a door slammed several flights above me and a voice, rapid-fire and insistent, began to echo down the stairwell. I couldn't make out what the woman was saying, but she was surely saying a lot of it. The voice began descending from the top to the ground floor, accompanied by the chattering click of high heels. The babbling and clicking grew louder. There was a sudden pause in both the heel clicking and the babble as for a moment she stopped to listen to someone; then a resumption of clacking and jabbering, then an crescendo of clacking and jabbering, and then at last a leggy, slender black woman burst into the lobby, a bright yellow scarf tied elegantly around her head and fixed above her forehead with a glittering broach. "Hold on one sec," she said to the cell phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder. "Well hiya, new neighbor," she said to me as if she'd known me for years. "Welcome to the building. I mean, you must be my new neighbor, I saw all your boxes. You need a hand with those? I'll drop by when I get back." Without waiting for me to answer, she returned her attention to the cellphone and began babbling again. Still talking, she gave the mailbox next to mine a vigorous karate chop with the side of her hand. It flew open. She pulled from it a stack of letters, flyers, brochures and postcards, leafed through them quickly and shoved them back in her mailbox. She opened the last letter and — still talking — quickly skimmed the contents. She squinted and frowned. "Dang it, he didn't even proofread it." She balled up the paper and tossed it over her shoulder. "Gotta run, honey," she said to me, "but I'll drop by later and say hello to you proper." And with that, she pranced off, leaving a cloud of babble in her wake.

I had not said one word.

Some prurient instinct prompted me to picked up the piece of paper she had just tossed to the ground. I smoothed it out, checking furtively to make sure no one saw me snooping. "Charlene, FYI" was written by hand at the top of the page.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LAWSUIT SEEKS TO CHALLENGE CIA'S
CENSORSHIP OF FORMER BLACK OFFICER'S MEMOIRS

Washington D.C. -- Charlene Pierce, an African-American who is suing the Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") for racial discrimination, today filed a new lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the CIA's decision to censor her memoirs. Formerly employed as a CIA Clandestine Service Trainee (CST), Ms. Pierce asserts the CIA is abusing the classification system to defeat her discrimination lawsuit.

I looked at the label on the mailbox she had just opened. It read C. PIERCE.

I looked behind me again, puzzled.

Later that evening, my mysterious new neighbor dropped by with an apple cake. "Hey there! I'm Charlene, and I just wanted to be neighborly, I'm from North Carolina and that's what we do. You need any help with all those boxes?" I opened my mouth to thank her but didn't get past the first syllable. "Hey, you have a better living room than mine! Can I step in for a sec?"

I thought I had happened earlier upon a secret, or at least something private, but I was quite mistaken. It took her no more than fifteen minutes to tell me that she was suing the CIA and that they had fired her, ostensibly for her indiscretion, but really, she claimed, "because they're a big bag of shitbag racist jerks." She had been relieved of her position when the Agency's security officers, tipped off by an anonymous informant, caught her sending email to her sister describing the skills she was acquiring in spy school, where she had been training to become a CIA case officer. "You know, like how to do land navigation? With a compass? Which is nasty, by the way. Out there in the woods with ten billion mosquitoes, and chiggers, and gnats, and bats, and poison ivy, and poison oak, poison you name it, and these ticks that have what's-that-disease? That gives you a rash? And these things in the woods made noises, oh, man, it was nasty. So I told my sister, you know? But talking about chiggers — that's no big deal. That stuff's all on the Internet anyway. Lots of white folks at the CIA do things just as bad as talking to their sisters about chiggers. Happens every day. They don't get fired. They get some damned administrative warning."

I supposed.

Charlene and I palled around a lot that year, and I don't believe she was ever once silent. Much as I was charmed by her and wanted to take her side, I could see exactly why they had fired her. "Hey, do you want to read my memoirs?" she asked me one evening as we shared a bottle of wine on her balcony. "They're technically still classified, but I know I can trust you." She had known me for three weeks.

Of course I accepted — who wouldn't? The manuscript was not particularly well-written, but it described the CIA's secret training program in great detail. What intrigued me most was her account of her downfall. She suspected that her jealous boyfriend, another CIA trainee, had turned her in after snooping through her mail, looking for evidence of infidelity.

The CIA never let Charlene publish her memoirs, but they didn't go to waste.