We decided that Yelena should give the real prototype to the Iranians, in order to keep her cover. We went back to her apartment. While she made the delivery, I decided that it was time to call Edward and bring him up to date on the recent developments. After the usual rigmarole in getting him to read my file, I told him the big news.

“What do you mean, she remembered you? I thought nobody could,” Edward said.

“I think it has something to do with us being handcuffed together in Barcelona.”

“This is terrible,” he said. “You’ve been compromised. What if she describes you to a sketch artist? If people are on the lookout for you, it will—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s not a threat any more.”

He was silent for a moment. “I know you don’t like killing, but it had to be—”

“I didn’t kill her!”

“Then how do you know she’s not a threat?”

“I recruited her. We just pulled off a successful op together. She had my back: I’d be dead without her. So I trust her.” Now that I said it, it did sound a little reckless, but it had paid off.

Edward sighed. “Look, son, you can’t just recruit a former SVR operative who went over to the mob.”

After I explained the situation with her sisters and recounted what had happened at the Bukharin headquarters, he grudgingly conceded that Yelena might not be a danger.

“You’ve always told me it would be better if I could have someone backing me up on operations,” I said. “It would never work with someone who could forget me, but Yelena’s perfect for the job.”

“You’ve fallen for her, haven’t you?”

“What?” I’d heard what he said; the question just caught me off guard. Had I fallen for her?

“It’s not surprising that you’d fall in love with her, since she can remember you. I can understand your fascination. But getting romantically involved with a foreign national could make you a security risk.”

“I’d never turn against our country,” I said. “I’m loyal.”

“I don’t doubt you,” Edward said. “What I’ve read of your past missions supports the idea that you can be trusted. But you have to understand, according to the notes in this file, there was some objection to recruiting you in the first place. Some people wondered how we could ensure the loyalty of someone we can’t even remember we hired. You could vanish with no trace and then start working against us, and we wouldn’t even know it.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I had known there were doubts about hiring me, but I’d always thought the doubts were about the reality of my ability, not my allegiance.

“And yet you’ve already compromised the mission for her, by letting her turn over the real prototype to the Iranians, instead of the fake with the tracker.”

“Oh, come on! That mission failed the moment she caught me trying to make the switch,” I said. I felt a little angry that my seven years of loyalty to the CIA were being repaid with doubt. “Since then, I’ve recruited Yelena to help us locate Jamshidi’s lab. Turning the prototype over to the Iranians helps her gain their trust. Have some faith that I know what I’m doing.”

“I have faith in you, Nat,” said Edward. “For now, I’ll note this in my file so I’ll know about it, but I won’t pass it up the line.”

“Thanks.”

“Just be careful. Don’t let a woman turn your head so far you lose sight of what’s important.”

“I won’t.”

* * *

“Nat.” Yelena shook my shoulder.

I opened my bleary eyes. It took me a moment to realize where I was: stretched out on Yelena’s couch. I propped myself up and said, “You’re back. How’d it go?”

“I made delivery. They have new assignment for me.”

“That’s great. That means they trust you.”

She sat on the edge of her coffee table. “Maybe. But new assignment is more difficult than InterQuan.”

“Between the two of us, I’m sure we can handle it.”

With a tired smile, she said, “I thought I could count on you. We have plane to catch in morning.”

“Where are we headed?”

“Tel Aviv.”

I’d never been to Israel. Hopefully there would be time to do a little sight-seeing before the job. After a job, I was usually out of the country as soon as I could manage. “How do you say ‘Where’s the bathroom’ in Hebrew?”

“You can ask flight attendant.”

“What’s our target?”

“ChazonTec. They are a small startup company still looking for capital funding.”

From experience, I knew startups often had fairly lax security, because they couldn’t afford anything better. “What makes them tougher than InterQuan?” InterQuan had been well-funded.

“They rent office in Qela Industries building. The man who started the company worked for them.”

“Ah,” I said.

Over the past few years, Qela Industries had become a major defense contractor for the Israeli military. Because Qela’s Slingshot drones operated by remote control and kept Israeli personnel out of harm’s way, Israel now had more armed drones than manned tanks and planes put together.

Two years ago, Edward and I had looked into stealing something from Qela and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Security at Qela’s building would almost certainly be the toughest I had been up against. On the bright side, they were less likely to torture and kill me than Dmitri Bukharin.

“What’s the thing we’re supposed to steal?” I asked.

“The Iranians called it a—” Her brow wrinkled. “ — ‘quantum remote viewing device.’“

“That probably just means it’s a quantum TV,” I said, displaying a bravado I wished I felt. “An infinite number of quantum channels, and there still won’t be anything good on.”

* * *

After Yelena went to bed, I helped myself to some borsht from her refrigerator and sat at her kitchen table. As I ate, I thought about what Edward had said about my having fallen in love with Yelena.

I’d met plenty of women who were beautiful, smart, and resourceful. I might have gotten a little infatuated with some of them, but I always knew I couldn’t really fall in love because there was no chance for a true connection.

But Yelena’s ability to remember me changed that. She might be the only woman in the world with whom I could have a normal relationship. It was only natural I would start falling for her. And it didn’t hurt that I found her attractive. It would have been a real downer if the one person in the world who could remember me had turned out to be a ninety-nine-year-old babushka.

I daydreamed about our life together, after we’d located Jamshidi’s lab and rescued her sisters. We’d get married, have a few kids. Maybe we’d even live in a house with a white picket fence. It would be the kind of life I’d wanted since I was a child: normal, just like everyone else.

Then I started thinking about it from Yelena’s point of view. She could remember me, but no one else would. The guests at our wedding would remember her being jilted at the altar because I never showed up. The neighbors would think she was a single mom because they could never remember seeing me. Our children would even forget I was their father.

It was silly to believe that somehow we were fated to be together. I had given up on believing in destiny after the fire — it was a simple accident that made me lose my mother, and it was another simple accident that Yelena and I were connected now. If the Bukharins had sent a male thief, I might have ended up connected to a Boris.

And while Yelena might be the only woman in the world I could have a real relationship with, her options were not so limited. What could I offer her that no other man could? Only the burdens of my talent, with none of the benefits.

She deserved better. So I had to give up any romantic notions about her.

That’s when I knew I really had fallen for her.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” said the airline ticket agent behind the counter, “but I only show the one seat reserved.” He tapped a few keys at his computer. “I don’t see another.”

Yelena said, “But I reserved two. Look.” She pulled out a printed sheet of paper and handed it over.

“Yelena,” I said, “it’s my fault.” I was so used to having the CIA arrange my flights that it hadn’t occurred to me the Yelena would run into trouble.

“Your fault?” she said.

I turned to the agent and said, “My plans changed and I called to cancel the seat. Then the change in my plans didn’t work out, but I forgot I had cancelled this trip.” I pulled out my wallet. “Just let me buy a ticket now.”

“You cancelled the flight?” Yelena asked. “Why?”

“I’ll explain later.” I gave the agent my Bob Daniels passport and a CIA-issued credit card in the same name.

After running the card, he printed my ticket and our boarding passes. Yelena waited until we were in the security line before asking, “Why did you cancel the fight?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “The airline computer forgot my reservation. As far as it was concerned, you only reserved one seat.”

“But everything is on computers now,” she said. “Do you have to buy your tickets at the airport every time?”

“No,” I said, as I took off my belt and shoes. “The CIA books people on flights all over the place all the time. So when they need me to go somewhere, they find one of their people who already has a reservation that fits what I need. They issue me a passport and other documents with that person’s name, and tell that person their trip has been postponed.”

Yelena put her carryon bag on the conveyor. “But I booked your flight using the name in your passport.”

“But you were booking the flight for me,” I said. “So the computer forgot the reservation.”

“That is crazy,” she said. “How can the computer know the difference?”

I didn’t answer her until after we had emerged from security into the gate area.

“Think of it this way,” I said. “Computers want to act like I never existed. If I didn’t exist, you would have only made one reservation instead of two. So that’s what the computer remembers. But if I didn’t exist, the CIA still would have made the reservation for the real Bob Daniels so he could fly to Moscow. So the computer remembers that reservation even though I’m the one using it.”

She didn’t say any more until we were sitting at our gate. “What causes it?”

“You mean the forgetting? I have no idea. I’ve been this way since I was born.” And then I told her about my mother and how she raised me, and eventually how I had lost her.

“Your mother, she is still alive, but does not remember you?”

I nodded. “She remembers being pregnant years ago, but she’s sure she must have lost the baby and just blocked that out of her mind. She thinks that and my father leaving is why she became very depressed, quit her job, and just lived alone for the years when I was at home.”

“How terrible,” she said.

“Her life is much better now,” I said. “She thinks that she came out of her depression after the fire. She’s remarried, and has a very memorable little girl named Amber.” It still stung a little that my mother was better off without me, but I couldn’t begrudge her happiness.

And every month, an envelope with several hundred dollars in cash showed up in her mailbox, with no return address — just a note that said: From someone who owes you more than he can ever repay. I wasn’t sure, but she probably assumed it was from my father.

I didn’t send him anything.

“But don’t you want to see her?” Yelena asked.

* * *

“But a DNA test would prove you’re my mother,” I said. It was a month after the fire that had destroyed our apartment and all my mother’s journals and Polaroid photos, and we were standing in the living room of my mother’s new apartment.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what scam you’re trying to pull, but it won’t work.”

It was my third try, and the first two had ended this same way — she would rather believe her false memories of the past thirteen years than believe she had forgotten her own son. Even the Polaroid I’d taken of the two of us during my first attempt she simply dismissed as a digital fake.

I realized that in our old apartment, with my obviously lived-in room and the sheer accumulation of journal entries and photos, she had been able to convince herself she was my mother, but in this new home, it would take something more than a simple picture.

“Mom, please list—”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. She strode to the door and yanked it open. “Just leave or I’ll call the cops.”

Across the hall, a woman carrying two bags of groceries paused her struggle to open the door and peered at us.

“Wait, I can prove the forgetting thing is real,” I said to my mother. Raising my voice, I said, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you need a hand with those groceries?”

The woman answered, “No, thank you.” She quickly opened her door and entered her apartment. The lock clicked behind her.

My mother scoffed. “What does that prove, other than your real mom taught you to be polite?”

“Just wait a minute, then go ask the lady across the hall if she’s ever seen me before.”

She stared at me. “You seriously believe this. You need help.”

“Please, just try.” I held up my hands in surrender. “If she remembers me, I’ll leave with no more fuss.”

After a moment, she stepped into the hall.

“Wait,” I said. “It takes a minute.”

When time was up, she knocked on the door. Footsteps approached on the other side, the lock turned, and the door opened a few inches. A chain prevented it from opening further.

“Excuse me,” said my mother, “I know this sounds crazy, but you remember this young man offering to help with your groceries as you were coming in just now, don’t you?” She pointed to where I stood in the doorway.

“No. And if he did, I wouldn’t’a let him. Can’t trust kids these days. Probably run off with them.”

“But you’re sure he didn’t—”

“Never seen him before. Go away.” The door slammed shut, and the lock clicked.

“See,” I said. “I told you, Mom. People forget me.”

Her shoulders slumped as she turned to face me. “It can’t be true. How could I forget my own child?” Tears brimmed in her eyes.

“It’s not your fault,” I said as she walked past me and sat on the couch.

“You look like your father,” she said. “I should have seen it before.”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember him. You raised me.”

“I thought the fire was a wakeup call,” she said. “I was finally getting my life back together, finding a job, making friends. But it was you, wasn’t it? My life for the past thirteen years is a blur because I can’t remember you, not because I was depressed.”

“It was me.”

She let out a half-choked sob, which reminded me of how often I had found her crying in the mornings, and how if I asked her what was wrong, she always said it was nothing. It had been me, all along — every day as she woke up and discovered the truth, she had cried.

“I must have been a terrible mother,” she said.

“No, Mom, you were the best.” For the first time in my life, I saw the real sacrifices my mother had made to raise me. “I love you and always will, no matter how many times you forget me.”

That only made her sob more.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“For what?”

“For coming.” I turned and walked out the door.

When I heard her call for me to come back, I began to run.

* * *

“She gave me all she had for thirteen years,” I said to Yelena. “I can’t ask any more of her.”

One of the gate agents announced boarding for our flight, so Yelena got up.

“Stay sitting down,” I said. “We have to wait until almost everyone has boarded.”

“Why?”

I held up the airline ticket I had purchased. “This got me through security, but when they put it under the barcode scanner, the computer’s going to claim this ticket was never issued. The gate agent is going to say he can’t let me on board because I’m not in the computer. I’ll argue for a bit, and then, when there’s no line and I can make it to the scanner in less than a minute after the ticket is printed, I’ll say, ‘Fine, I’ll just buy another ticket.’ So I’ll do that, and get on board and everything should go smoothly until we change planes in Athens.”

Her eyes had grown wider during my little spiel. She continued staring at me for a moment after I was through. Then she flopped down in the seat next to me and said, “You have done this a lot, yes?”

“More than I can count.”

“I am sorry for the trouble.”

I shrugged. “It’s how I do things when the Agency isn’t arranging my travel.”

“But you have to pay for the ticket over and over, and is so expensive.”

I laughed. “No. It’s not a problem for two reasons. First, the credit card isn’t mine: it’s a copy of Bob Daniels’ card.”

“But will he not notice the charges?”

I shook my head. “Second, since I’m the one making the charges, the credit card company’s computer will forget them. I’m taking this trip for free.”