Read Money for Nothing for Free Online Page B

been trying to think where to start." It was easier if he looked at the bits of white clapboard siding he could see past the scrub pines. He said, "I think maybe I should start with the checks."
    "Checks?" She was utterly baffled. "Josh? What is this about?"
    "Seven years ago, before I met you—"
    "Josh!"
    "Please," he said, "let me figure out how to tell this."
    "I won't say a word," she said, and folded her arms, which meant, he knew, that as soon as she had it straight in her mind what she should be mad at, she intended to be
very
mad.
    Much safer to look at the white clapboard. "Seven years ago I got a check in the mail for a thousand dollars. No explanation, nothing. From something called United States Agent."
    "You get envelopes from them," she said. "I've seen them sometimes."
    "Every month. A check for a thousand dollars."
    "But—"
    "Let me tell it, Eve. It's hard enough anyway."
    "I won't say a word," she said, and unfolded her arms.
    "Seven years ago," he told the white clapboard, "I was broke, I needed the money, I thought maybe it was government somehow, something to do with the army. I deposited it, and it cleared, and the next month I got another one. And ever since."
    "And you never knew who sent them or why?"
    "Not until now."
    "Something happened," she said.
    "Oh, boy." He shook his head. "I tried to find out who they were, years ago, but their phone never answers, and the address just says K Street, no house number."
    "In Washington," she said. "I thought they were something to do with the government."
    "So did I, at first."
    "But they're not. What are they?"
    He said, "Here's where it gets weird. It turns out, there's this guy, I don't know, he's Russian or Ukrainian or something, I'm not sure what, but he's a spy."
    "A spy," she said, in a flat voice, and he knew, if he were to look away from the clapboard he would see skepticism on her face.
    "It's true," he said. "It's just as true as the checks. Nine years ago, this man started a scam to steal from his government or his spy funds or whatever — for when he'd retire. So he pretended he'd recruited these people to be what they call sleepers, deep cover spies they could activate if they ever needed them, and he pretended to pay them each a thousand dollars a month, but he was actually keeping it all for himself."
    "But you
are
getting it."
    "Because he got involved in a spy trial, I read it online in the
Washington Post
, you could read it, too. And it meant, he lost that job he had, and somebody else got that desk, who thought the sleepers were really sleepers and started sending them the money."
    "Including you."
    "Including me."
    "You mean," she said, "for seven years you were being paid to be a spy."
    "And never knew it."
    "But now you do."
    He sighed. "They activated me," he said.
    There was such silence from his left that he had no choice; he had to look at her. Her face now was a study in complexity, or abstraction, or something. Like a person eating a Fig Newton for the first time? Or a person not sure if that dog is friendly.
    He said, "It's serious, Eve. Take a look at this," and drew the bankbook from his pocket, to slide it across the rusty table to her.
    She looked at it for ten or fifteen seconds before picking it up, as though not sure she wanted to be a party to this thing. But then she did pick it up, studied the cover, studied the first page, studied the second page, and then, holding it open, frowned at Josh. "It says you have forty thousand dollars there."
    "And I do," he told her. "I went to their website, and it's real. The money's there."
    She studied the bankbook some more. "Opened on July fourteenth," she said.
    "The man who activated me," Josh said, "gave it to me last Friday over in Bay Shore. While I was waiting for the ferry."
    Her frown deepened. "You knew about this for a
week
?"
    "I didn't know what to do," he said. "I knew I was in some kind of trouble, but I didn't know what kind, and then the man who started the scam