The Psych Eval
A Story about Spies
“Reactive. Cagey. Hostile. Territorial. Defensive. Probably paranoid. Slow to trust. Quick to lose trust. Will be cool with you if you give him his space.”
Seldon looked up from the profile he’d been handed and raised an eyebrow at his boss. His boss smiled without showing his teeth. Seldon looked back down. In pen, someone had written the word, “Instantaneous” next to “Quick.”
“Tough,” remarked Seldon to his boss.
“We figured it was time for you to get your first taste of him. He’s the toughest one to work with.”
“Any advice on what to do?”
“Don’t provoke him. Don’t mess with him. Don’t give him any of that psychobabble or make him feel like you’re trying to show him how smart you are. He’s sharp as a tack even if he shoots people for a living. Don’t talk about any wacky theories you learned about in school. Just ask him the basics. Run him through the paces. He’s done this before. And while he’s adversarial, it’s entirely defensive. If you don’t stray outside the bounds, he won’t have a problem with you. Unlike some of the hotshots, he doesn’t try to turn the tables on you. Really, he doesn’t do anything other than sit there and answer your questions. Just don’t poke him or prod him too much. He’s touchy.”
“Been through a lot?”
“Yes. And I think he came to the agency like that. I think he’s naturally a defensive guy. He keeps to himself. Orphan. No family or friends. That sort of thing.”
Seldon glanced down at the profile again. “Agent Tarrio,” was printed across the top. Tarrio was just back from Cambodia. At least, that’s where he was supposed to have been. In all likelihood, he’d been in Laos and Vietnam, too, and maybe China. Seldon had been told Tarrio got more independence than the other agents. He was also given more difficult assignments. Seldon was glad he didn’t have to do the official debrief. He just had to be the psychiatrist. In six months on the job, he’d already seen things he never would have imagined. But his boss seemed more nervous than usual. Something told him Tarrio wasn’t going to be easy.
Tarrio was already sitting in the evaluation room. This meeting was to serve as psychiatric evaluation, informal debrief, and introduction. Seldon had been told that he would continue to work with Tarrio in the coming months. Tarrio was back in the States, at least for the rest of the year. In January, he’d probably be off on assignment again.
At least, that was the plan for now. Last time Tarrio had had six months stateside, he’d been pulled out to Monaco halfway through for a minor operation, which had turned into three-quarters of a year spent crawling all over Sub-Saharan Africa chasing a mole. It said all this on Tarrio’s profile. It said he’d come back from that trip complaining about trouble sleeping. No dreams and no nightmares. No racing mind. Just trouble getting his brain to shut off. He’d also come back with bullets in his shoulder and side, which had required a month of physical therapy.
It said on the profile that Tarrio was forty-six, but when Seldon opened the door, he was greeted by the sight of a much older man’s face on a much younger man’s body. Tarrio was a small and unassuming man. He sat quietly and watched Seldon enter. His face and arms were relaxed, but there was a hint of tension in his jaw, as though he were hiding it or holding it back. Something about him looked out of place, as though the chair wouldn’t hold him properly.
Nothing about Tarrio looked as though it fit with the profile description, except for the eyes. There was no threat in them, but there was pain. And a clear warning that they could become very threatening if they perceived something threatening. They were an animal’s eyes, and Seldon felt simultaneously chilled and empathetic. It seemed to him that there was a man locked away behind those eyes, a man who perhaps could not be reached. This scared him and saddened him.
Tarrio wore a short-sleeved shirt, so Seldon could see the scars on his arms from where he’d been tortured. He was struck too by a sense – a sense he’d never felt, even around the other hardened veterans – that here was a man who could kill him as easily as breathing.
“Hi,” Seldon said. As the word came out of his mouth, it sounded awkward and callow. He became aware that just as he was sizing up Tarrio, Tarrio must be sixing up him. “Kid,” he’d be thinking. “Maybe twenty-seven. Maybe twenty-eight. What does he know?”
Seldon was thirty-one, but bartenders still carded him. He swallowed, uncomfortably aware that his clothes didn’t fit right.
“I’m Dr. Terry Seldon,” he said, aware that he’d added the title to make sure Tarrio didn’t think he was an intern. Tarrio nodded at him.
“You’re Quentin Tarrio?” Seldon asked before he could stop himself. He realized how dumb this sounded. Who else would be sitting in the examination chair? Tarrio stared at him. Then he nodded again. He began to look around as though trying to find a clock. Seldon knew this was directed at him. Tarrio was perfectly capable of sitting completely still for hours without showing any signs of boredom. All agents had to be.
Seldon sat down. “I’m here to do your psych eval and your debrief,” he said, wishing he could come up with something to say which wasn’t completely obvious. Tarrio nodded again, as if telling him to get on with it already. He still hadn’t said anything.
“We’re just going to go through a series of preliminary questions. We have to ask these. Just something we have to do. Before we get into the debriefing questions. Have you been hearing any voices lately?”
“What kind of voices?” asked Tarrio. He had one of the most unremarkable voices Seldon had ever heard, which seemed like it should be a contradiction of some sort.
“Voices which don’t have a person attached to them.”
“No. I’m not a schizophrenic.”
“Great. Glad to hear it. How many drinks of alcohol would you say you consume in a week? Ballpark.”
“None.”
Seldon glanced up. Most of the agents drank to relieve stress.
“You don’t drink alcohol?” he asked.
“It should say that on your clipboard,” said Tarrio. Seldon looked down. He found the section in question and realized that he had overlooked this bit of information.
“Ah. I see. And you aren’t, um, using any other recreational substances?”
“I smoke cigarettes occasionally. Less than a pack every two weeks. I drink coffee. It says that on your clipboard.”
“Yes. Well, um, thank you. Yes. It does say that. Let’s see. Are you currently single?”
Tarrio stared at him for a moment. His fist clenched and unclenched, very quickly, but not quickly enough that Seldon didn’t notice it. Tarrio looked away.
“I am,” he said quietly.
“What was that?” asked Seldon.
“Yes,” Tarrio said more loudly, looking back at him. “Yes.”
Seldon watched him. Tarrio had grown visibly more uncomfortable.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked him.
“No.”
“Well, is there something the agency should know?”
“I don’t know that it’s any of your business.”
“So, there is something?”
“Not something you need to know. Ask me a direct question. I’ll answer it. I won’t hide. But I’m not going to tell you my life story or go on about anything you don’t need to know.”
“How long have you been single?”
“A month.”
Seldon looked down at his clipboard. “It says here that you were single when you left for Cambodia. Did you meet a woman over there?”
Tarrio’s face was ice. “Yes,” he said.
“How did you meet?”
Tarrio frowned and his face twitched. “At a bar,” he said. “Ask me another question.”
“Who did she work for?”
“A local shop. She wasn’t working for any of our enemies.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know.”
“How can you be sure?”
Tarrio sighed. “Obviously,” he said. “I scoped her out. Did a background check. Vetted her. Do you think I’m new to this? Do you think I’m eighteen years old? I’ve been burned before. I don’t trust my own relatives – those I have left anyway. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust anyone I’ve just met. You think I’m going to trust some pretty face I met in a bar? You think I can get turned that easily? You know how you get to my age in this business? You’re young and stupid first, like you. You make mistakes and learn the hard way.”
“I see,” said Seldon. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Tarrio repeated the question back to him.
“What ended the relationship? You said it ended a month ago.”
“She died,” Tarrio said, looking Seldon straight in the eye.
“She died?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Tarrio looked at the gray-painted wall. He kept his face blank, but his lip kept twitching as if he was gently biting the inside of it. Seldon waited.
“How did she die?” he asked after the silence had gone on too long.
Tarrio let out a breath. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“We need to know something about her in case…”
“She wasn’t,” interrupted Tarrio. Seldon watched him. “There wasn’t anything about her that you need to know. She wasn’t a threat. She wasn’t compromised. She didn’t know anything about us or about our adversaries. She was just a normal person. She wasn’t in it.”
“How do you know?” asked Seldon, but he saw Tarrio’s fist clench and he decided to try a different tack. “Sorry, I just mean that if she was attracted to you there might have been a reason. Some women like the excitement of…”
“She didn’t know,” said Tarrio. “I didn’t tell her what I was doing. I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t break cover with her until things got hot and we were being shot at and then she needed to know.”
“You lied to her? Even though you clearly cared about her.”
Tarrio’s face tensed. Seldon could see the muscles in his neck contract. Tarrio’s non-clenched hand ran back and forth over the aluminum armrest of his chair.
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“The agency needs to know…”
“What does the agency need to know? What do they need to know? My life hasn’t been my own since the day I signed up, and I knew I signed up for that, but the agency can’t abide the thought that I might want a private minute to myself. They have to pry into every little thing. They have to act as if they don’t trust me. I’ve been nothing but loyal to the agency. I’ve given them everything I can give. I’ve risked my life hundreds of times. But I don’t even get a little bit of my own life to myself. They have to touch it, as if anything they don’t touch is a risk to them. It isn’t. I just need a little space. Do you get that? A little space and I’m cool. But the agency has got to poke. Poke and poke. I can’t even take a…”
Seldon interrupted Tarrio. “Okay,” he said. “I get that. I really do. But listen to me for just a minute. You’ve been nothing but loyal to us. Okay. I believe you. But in the time you’ve been with the agency, how many agents have gone rogue? How many more were plants or moles or turned coat? How many have been caught selling secrets?”
“Four,” said Tarrio. “And six. And two. I’ve been here almost thirty years. And that’s why I don’t trust you and I don’t make friends anymore.”
Seldon quickly checked his notes in surprise and saw that Tarrio had joined at eighteen. He didn’t think the agency accepted agents who hadn’t completed college, but perhaps that policy was new.
“So, you tell me,” he said. “Why would the agency have problems trusting agents?”
Tarrio nodded. “Some of them were bad men,” he said. “I wasn’t surprised. Others I was surprised.”
“Febos was your friend?”
Tarrio’s face darkened. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t bring that up.”
Seldon nodded. Tarrio went on. “But if the agency has trouble trusting people, maybe they could consider how the constant suspicion drives people insane. Maybe they could consider if they didn’t have a role in pushing some of these traitors to turn coat.”
Seldon breathed deeply. This was one of those things he’d been warned about. It certainly sounded like a red flag. But something about Tarrio made him suspect that it wasn’t. It sounded more like honesty to him than anything else. Besides, it made sense.
“I get that,” he said with a nod, “I feel that too a little. It is a little stifling sometimes in here.”
“I couldn’t stand sitting around headquarters every day. If they ever took me off duty and put me in front of a computer, I’d shoot myself.”
This was another red flag – mentioning suicide – but Seldon laughed. Tarrio began to relax a little. Seldon thought he saw a way in. Maybe Tarrio wasn’t such a hard case after all.
“Look, man,” he said. “I don’t want to mess with you. I don’t want to know every little detail. I don’t want to pick at you or poke you. I’m not gonna play any games or try to trick you or take anything from you. I will try not to touch the things you don’t want us to touch, or go the places you don’t want to go, but you’ve gotta understand there are some things we do need to know a little bit about. Not everything. But enough to reassure us – I know you’ve told me you’re loyal and I don’t believe you’d lie about that, but you know that twelve defections in fifteen years means the folks up above want hard proof, not just agents’ words. So, I’m gonna let you have some space. But you’ve gotta cooperate with me a bit. We’ll try to wrap this up as quick as we can. I don’t have any desire to prolong this either. But you’ve gotta help me out a bit. Can you do that?”
Tarrio nodded. His jaw tensed again and relaxed. His shoulders began to drop and his fingers uncurled. His hand stopped running up and down the armrest.
“Why did you lie to this woman?”
“Because… she was normal. She wasn’t caught up in any of this. I didn’t want to mess that up. I wanted a taste of a normal life. Just for a little while. Don’t tell me it can never end well and that the lies just build and that eventually she’d have to know. Don’t tell me I couldn’t pull off a double life. I know that. I knew that then. Don’t even tell me I probably got her killed. I know that, too.”
“What happened to the men who killed her?”
“I killed them. They didn’t get away.”
“Did she have a family?”
“No. No. Her parents died when she was young. She had no siblings – she was from China. Living in Cambodia.”
“You’re sure she wasn’t a spy?”
“No. She didn’t know how to use a gun. If she had she might be alive. She barely knew how to drive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
Seldon ran through a few more questions, and then moved on. He didn’t notice any more red flags during the conversation. Tarrio was straightforward, almost cooperative even. He gave one-word answers when he could, but Seldon managed to get enough out of him to mark the eval complete.
“That’s it,” he said, putting down the clipboard.
“We’re done. No more questions?”
“We’re done.”
Tarrio nodded. “Good,” he said. “These things are like a colonoscopy.”
Seldon suppressed a smile. He turned to go.
“Good to meet you,” said Tarrio.
Seldon turned back in surprise. “Good to meet you, too,” he said with a careful nod.
“You’re not like the others,” said Tarrio.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s a good thing.”
Seldon nodded and then he hurried out of the room. His boss asked him how it went.
“I think it went well.”
“You came back without any bruises,” joked his boss, “so that means it went well.”
“He’s defensive alright,” said Seldon, “but not all that complicated.”
“Oh yeah?” remarked his boss. “You’re the only one who thinks that. Everyone else doesn’t know what the hell to make of him. You think you got a handle on him, you have my permission do to his eval every time he comes back from a trip.”
“Alright,” said Seldon. “I can do that.”
His boss regarded him. “I like that,” he said. “I like a young guy who doesn’t shy away from tough cases. You’ll do well here, kid.”