Gary Pullman had spent seventeen years teaching seventh-grade history, which meant he had developed an almost supernatural ability to look completely unbothered by chaos. This skill, it turned out, would become his greatest liability.
He was in Lisbon for a reason that could not have been less glamorous: the International Symposium on Middle School Curriculum Development. He had not chosen to attend. His principal, Dr. Weiss, had chosen for him, citing Gary’s “obvious enthusiasm for professional growth,” which was administrative code for you haven’t complained about anything in three years and we needed someone to go.
Gary had packed sensibly. Two pairs of khakis. A rain jacket. A paperback copy of a Robert Caro biography he had been working through since 2019. He had no agenda beyond the conference sessions, one planned visit to the National Tile Museum, and a firm intention to be in bed by ten each night.
He checked into the Hotel Bairro Alto on a Tuesday afternoon. The lobby was all dark wood and brass fixtures and the faint smell of coffee. A man in a gray suit watched him from across the room. Gary did not notice, because Gary was trying to remember whether he’d packed his phone charger.
He had. It was in the front pocket of his carry-on, exactly where he always put it.
Room 412 was small but clean. Gary hung his khakis, set his Caro biography on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment in the specific way that men who have been traveling alone sit on the edge of hotel beds — not sad exactly, just quietly accounting for themselves.
He went down to the hotel bar at seven because the conference welcome reception didn’t start until eight and he wanted a glass of wine first. He sat at the end of the bar. He ordered a glass of Vinho Verde. He opened his book.
The man who sat down next to him was not reading a book. He was watching the door.
“Nice evening,” the man said.
“Sure,” Gary said, without looking up.
The man — whose name, Gary would much later learn, was Agent Dennis Hobart of the CIA’s Lisbon field office — interpreted this as a brush-off. A deliberate, trained brush-off. He noted it in a small way that agents note things, filing it under confirmation.
What Gary had actually meant was that he hadn’t been outside since three in the afternoon and had no opinion about the evening.
The misunderstanding that started everything was, in retrospect, almost poetic in its stupidity.
The symposium had provided each attendee with a name badge and a small canvas tote bag containing a conference program, a branded pen, and a USB drive with supplementary curriculum materials. Gary’s tote bag was, by a clerical error that the conference organizers would later describe as “genuinely inexplicable,” identical in appearance to a bag that had been left at the hotel’s front desk for a man named Gerald Pullman.
Gerald Pullman was not a middle school teacher. Gerald Pullman was a name that meant something to Agent Hobart and to Agent Hobart’s colleague, a woman named Reyes who wore her hair in a bun so tight it seemed structural.
Gary picked up the wrong bag on Wednesday morning. He didn’t open it. He put it over his shoulder and went to his first session, which was titled Engaging the Reluctant Learner: Strategies for the Modern Classroom. He took notes in the margins of the program. He asked one question. He ate a complimentary croissant.
Agents Hobart and Reyes watched him from the back of the room.
“He’s very good,” Reyes said.
“Too good,” Hobart agreed.
Gary was, at that exact moment, writing the words spiral review — ask Denise if she does this in the margin of his handout.
The tile museum was everything Gary had hoped. He spent two and a half hours there on Wednesday afternoon, which was longer than almost any other visitor that day, and he took photographs of the azulejo panels with the patient, methodical attention of a man who genuinely finds seventeenth-century Portuguese ceramic art interesting.
Hobart and Reyes followed him at a distance.
“He’s memorizing the layout,” Hobart said.
“Of the tile museum,” Reyes said.
“Don’t underestimate him.”
Gary bought a postcard in the gift shop. It was for his mother. He wrote Wish you were here — the tiles are extraordinary on the back, which Hobart, reading it later through a long lens, would describe in his field notes as possible coded communication, recipient unknown.
That evening, Gary ate dinner alone at a small restaurant two blocks from the hotel. He ordered bacalhau because he had read that he should. He found it acceptable. He had another glass of wine. He called his mother to tell her the postcard was coming. The call lasted eleven minutes and covered, in addition to the tiles, her neighbor’s ongoing dispute with the HOA, the results of her recent bone density scan, and whether Gary was eating enough vegetables.
Hobart, listening through a directional microphone from across the street, reported back: Subject made contact. Duration eleven minutes. Discussed extraction logistics — “getting out” mentioned twice.
Gary had said, regarding a potted fern his mother was worried about, I think you just need to get it out of direct sunlight.
Thursday was when things escalated.
Gary, who had a slight tendency toward social awkwardness in unfamiliar settings, had taken to eating breakfast at the same corner table each morning, arriving at precisely 7:15, ordering the same thing — coffee, two eggs, toast — and reading his book until 8:30. He did this because it was comfortable. He did this because routine, for Gary Pullman, was not a tactic. It was a personality trait.
For Hobart, it was devastating confirmation.
“Same table. Same time. Same order. He’s a creature of extraordinary discipline,” he told Reyes over their own breakfast, at which they had arrived at unpredictable times and ordered different things specifically to contrast themselves with their target.
“My uncle eats the same breakfast every day,” Reyes said. “He’s seventy-two and runs a dry-cleaning business.”
Hobart looked at her. “Your uncle isn’t carrying a bag with classified materials in it.”
Gary’s tote bag was, at that moment, sitting under the table. It contained: his conference program, the branded pen (now running low), his phone charger, a travel pack of Kleenex, and the USB drive he had assumed contained curriculum materials and had not yet tried to open because he hadn’t brought his laptop to breakfast.
The resolution came on Friday morning, in a way that Gary found deeply irritating and that he would describe for years afterward to anyone who would listen, usually at a level of detail that caused people to quietly check their phones.
He was in the elevator. Agents Hobart and Reyes stepped in behind him. The doors closed. There was a beat of silence that Gary, a veteran of a thousand awkward parent-teacher conferences, did not find particularly awkward.
Then Reyes said, “Mr. Pullman.”
“Yeah,” Gary said.
“Gerald Pullman.”
Gary turned around. “Gary, actually. Did you need something?”
Hobart and Reyes exchanged a look.
“You’re not Gerald Pullman,” Hobart said. It was not quite a question.
“Gary. Pullman. G-A-R-Y. I teach seventh grade at Maplewood Middle School in Akron, Ohio. I’m here for the curriculum symposium.” He paused. “Are you with the conference? Because I had a question about the Friday afternoon breakout session.”
A very long silence followed.
Reyes pulled out her phone and showed him a photograph of Gerald Pullman, who was, to Gary’s complete indifference, a lean man in his fifties with silver hair and the kind of jaw that gets described in thriller novels.
“That’s not me,” Gary said. He looked at the photo more carefully. “That guy looks like he works out.”
The elevator opened. Gary walked out. He had a session to get to.
It took Hobart and Reyes approximately forty minutes to learn that the actual Gerald Pullman had passed through the hotel on Tuesday evening, spent exactly one night, noticed the bag mix-up Wednesday morning, left his name and a forwarding address with the front desk clerk, and vanished. He was, by Friday afternoon, in Budapest. Or possibly Tallinn. The clerk wasn’t certain. The handwriting on the note was very small.
Gary retrieved his correct tote bag — the one with the curriculum USB drive — at the front desk that afternoon. The desk clerk handed it over with a small apologetic smile. Gary didn’t ask questions. He had learned, after seventeen years of seventh graders, that most situations resolved themselves faster if you simply accepted the outcome and moved on.
He attended the closing reception that evening. He had a glass of wine. He spoke briefly with a very nice woman from Finland who was working on a unit about the Bronze Age. He was in bed by ten.
On the flight home, somewhere over the Atlantic, he finally plugged the curriculum USB drive into his laptop.
It contained forty-seven PowerPoint presentations about differentiated instruction.
He closed the laptop, opened his Caro biography, and did not think about any of it again for almost a week, when he mentioned it to his colleague Denise in the copy room on a Tuesday morning.
“So two government agents thought you were a spy?” she said.
“Apparently.”
She considered this. “Did you at least do something cool?”
“I went to the tile museum.”
Denise nodded slowly. “That does sound like you.”
Gary took his copies off the tray and went back to his classroom. Second period was in four minutes. He had a quiz to hand back.
Feature Photo by Murry Lee
The Confusing Middle 