***
The lights came on in the conference room. An aide turned off the television and asked if it was desired that the video be replayed. It was not. The men at the table drank their mineral water, smoked their cigarettes, shuffled the papers before each of them, their copies of a dossier, of interrogation transcripts, of articles from the Washington Post in Russian translation. They did not look at each other. None of them spoke. Then, suddenly, they began to chatter and babble in words carefully chosen to convey no meaning. The prurient among them: Is that all? The ludicrous: Do we still employ people like that? The simple-minded: How terrible!
Finally, a man raised his hand. He was small but extremely fit, with pale grey eyes and pale blond hair. Everyone grew silent. Their stupidity had been exhausted. The man picked up his copy of the dossier, then dropped it back onto the table and spoke very quietly.
“And if their imbecile CIA had taken her up on her offer…would that have been so bad?”
EPILOGUE: MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: REDEMPTION
It was very late at night in the Lubyanka. Olivia, who during the exhaustion of the long days of interrogation, had slept hard, far beyond nightmares but also without true rest, now slept deeply, untroubled, and calm. She was not, however, too deep for dreaming herself back to the dacha, where Suslov took her face in his hands, and she gave herself to him without reservation or fear, kindness like a benediction between them, beyond all need for anyone’s pardon. She knew even in her sleep that he was sharing the dream with her.
In a windowless cell below ground, her sense of time distorted by prolonged interrogation and odd meal schedules, her body still knew when it was morning. The arrival of the prison matron, who took Olivia for her first shower since she had arrived, only confirmed that.
She asked; the matron knew nothing. It did not matter. For, very early that morning, before the matron arrived, the dream still vivid in her mind, Olivia had made her peace. There were things she still wanted to do with her life. But there was solace and satisfaction in her past. She had lived her life as she had needed to, had wanted to, had willed herself to. She had accomplished more than most people ever would. She had good memories of many people, including one particular man. If that was not enough to fulfill a woman’s life, nothing was. She wanted to live very much, but if she had to die or go to prison for years, she was content.
She’d also made another decision. If she were set free, she would demand her old life back, or at least seek a new one, equivalent. She had not left the frustrations of America, the enforced mediocrity and pointlessness, just to endure them here.
After she was clean to her satisfaction, she dried herself. She found her valise waiting for her when she returned to her cell. The cuffs of the very plain, elegant blouse in fine ivory silk crepe, ornamented with only the most perfect stitching and slightly bell sleeves, fell like froth from the cuffs of the blue pinstripe that had once been tailored to fit her, but now hung loosely off her frame. She had lost five kilos, she guessed. Also some perfume, the echoing beauty of flowers growing amongst ruins.
She had nearly finished dressing when the door of her cell opened. “Come in, please,” she said, a bit amazed that a prisoner could invite someone into her cell in that manner.
Irina Borisovna stood in the threshold.
Olivia looked at her, wondering what her presence meant and if she should grieve for her. She could think of only one thing this might mean and it provoked a different, less terrifying but far deeper fear than when Kristinich had walked into the interrogation room. Was this a test of loyalty, as well as an extraordinarily cruel punishment of brother and sister? Olivia wondered. It was far from unthinkable; it was in fact the only thing she could think of.
“If you have come to keep me the promise you made at Tver, that if you ever had to kill me, it would be face-to-face, I am deeply grateful. If you like, I will absolve you of it.” Her voice shook but her eyes were steady.
Suslova did not dare trust her voice. After a long few seconds, still unable to speak, she shook her head, simply pointed at Olivia’s valise where it lay on her prison bed, then crooked her finger.
Olivia understood, put her knitting away, closed the valise, took it up, walked to her.
Irina Borisovna took her face in her hands and kissed her with great intimacy on the mouth in the Russian manner. But it was more than that. Olivia wondered if it was the kiss of death, or perhaps the kiss of peace. She could not know and so she simply kissed her back with the same intimacy, a thank-offering for all she had been given. Then the FSB officer wrapped her arm around her and they clasped hands. Suslova led her to a private elevator that took them up and out of the cell levels.
The elevator’s rise puzzled Olivia. She suspected that if the FSB had needed her signature, for a confession, perhaps, or on the disposition of her personal effects, they would most likely have her sign the documents in her cell. Or would they? Was there a certain ritual to be followed, a certain form for prisoners of a certain status? She did not want to hope and be disappointed, and lose her composure at the end.
The elevator opened onto a long corridor, where a male guard guided the women to an office suite midway down the hall, then left. A secretary motioned them toward an inner door.
Before Olivia went in, Irina turned to her, her voice at last under control, her dread during the last week finally beginning to dissipate. “Behave yourself in there.”
“I’ll try.”
“Do better than try. You know that General Trimenko is even now ordering my idiot brother ...”
“I hope he’s also told many people that Russia cannot live without my gifts,” Olivia said hastily.
“Russia will survive without your gifts. Or mine. Or anyone else’s. But why should Russia always have to be deprived of her best?”
They kissed each other again, this time on their cheeks, and then Suslova left her.
Olivia was not surprised to see the Getmanovs, both looking very stern, standing by a large desk. The man at the desk, General Schwartz, seemed to be staring intently at an uneaten muffin. She noticed that it was still intact, although cut into precise pieces and, seemingly, ready to fall apart.
“Doctor Tolchinskaya,” he said as he looked up. “You do understand that it is Saturday and you’re the only reason why I’m working today.”
“Senior FSB generals now supervise individual executions?”
“Sometimes,” he said calmly. “It is a vast improvement over the days when Stalin would scrawl on a list of thousands of names, Shoot them. I assume that, since you are dressed in your own clothes, you know what decision was reached.”
She finally allowed herself to hazard a guess. “That I am free to go.”
“Yes. Also, this matter will be expunged from the record. People will remember, but in the eyes of our law and the FSB, this never happened.”
“Thank you,” she said, bowing her head until she was able to control her voice.
“What are your thoughts?” he asked when she lifted her head.
“I am thinking,” she said slowly, “that in the past week I have traveled a bit of a path that many millions of Russians have known. I hope that this affair has made it a bit easier to keep other Russians from walking it in the future.”
“Perhaps it has,” Schwartz replied. “I thank you for making no comparisons between the United States and Russia.”
“I have no such comparisons to make, General. Nor would any be appropriate. I would ask you to tell me the particulars of my freedom.”
“Very well, Doctor. In essence, this. You are free to go. When you leave, we will return to you your papers, your handgun, everything. I believe that this event was unfortunate but I shall not apologize to you. It was also a matter of state security and we are a people who take such matters seriously.”
“I understand. No apologies were expected. None are needed.”
“You committed a world-class act of stupidity in Vienna but you haven’t d
one anything wrong. Not that that would have saved you under the former regime. I do not have to tell you what your fate would have been, and the fates of all who knew you.”
Lyudmila took Olivia’s hand, felt it clench down hard on hers for a second before she remembered her strength and eased off. “I know that, General.”
“Of course, under the former regime, you’d have never had anything to do with us.”
“Also true.”
“At this point, we still don’t know what to do with you. I suspect that you’re uncertain yourself.”
“Madame Getmanova explained yesterday what my options might be.”
“Then I will clarify a bit. One is, of course, to return to America. This would have to be voluntary on your part. It was decided last night that, because of your contributions here, we would refuse any American request to extradite you and would deeply resent any attempt to spirit you out of the country. This will not change. Do you wish to return to America?”
Olivia paused, then raised her head and looked at him out of remote eyes. “Perhaps someday. But not now.”
He understood that she was speaking very politely out of long loyalty and answered her in the same manner. “Very well. That is a matter between you and your government. I would recommend that you contact your embassy to get a sense of what might await you, if you do wish to return. I am no expert on your laws and procedures dealing with those who hold state secrets or have done classified work, such as you. But there may be a statute of limitations. Or perhaps the authorities may simply decide, as we have, to drop the whole thing.”
“I will investigate that someday, General.”
“Another possibility, which I am sure Madame Getmanova has mentioned, is Israel. Do you wish to pursue this possibility?”
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
“May I speak honestly?”
“Please.”
“I am a Jewess and hold a great respect and a certain measure of fondness for Israel. But there are only two reasons why I would go there. One is, the world has returned to its former ways regarding Jews and I have no other option.”
“One hopes that never happens again. And the other reason?”
Olivia looked at Lyudmila, then turned back to Schwartz. “I left America because, among other reasons, I would never accept a consolation prize life. I would never voluntarily submit to being less than I am. I came to Russia to do important work. This is not my country, although I’ve grown to love it deeply. Still, I came here to work. If I can’t work here to my fullest and I can’t go back to America, I am certain that Israel could use my talents.”
“Indeed, they could,” Getmanov said.
“So,” said Olivia calmly. “I believe it comes down to this. I either resume my former life, or something equivalent, or…”
“Olivia,” Madame Getmanova interjected quietly. “Aren’t you forgetting someone?”
“Who?”
“General Suslov.”
Olivia remembered him saying late at night, If they will not free you to your life that you have made so I may marry you, then I will go to the FSB and demand imprisonment and execution with you, before he had made it impossible for her not to accept the pleasure he wanted to give her. She stood in silence for a moment, remembering also the dream they had shared, at last allowing herself to accept its full meaning, then answered, “I’m an idiot.”
“Yes, dear. You are. Perhaps before making any more pronouncements, you might consult him.”
“It’s just that…”
“Yes, dear?”
“The idea of marriage to a Russian general makes me very nervous. Particularly when Russian general officers and their wives keep encouraging it. I keep saying everything I can think of to distract Russians at such moments and it never works. You are a stubborn people.”
“And Jews are not?”
“Only when we have to be.”
“Which seems to be, all the time,” Lyudmila said, patting her on the shoulder. “I understand. We all do. But as I told you yesterday, being married to a general has its rewards. Wouldn’t you say so, General Schwartz?”
“So does being married to a general’s wife. At least in my case.”
“And mine,” General Getmanov added.
“I should say so. Now,” Schwartz turned to Olivia, “I take it that it is your intention to remain with us?”
“If I can go back to work.”
“That is not my decision. But I believe that would be possible. I will certainly work to make it so.”
“If it happens, I will need a new laboratory administrator.”
“You don’t believe Mister Borodkin is still suitable?”
“I will take that statement as your prelude to telling me what will happen to him.”
“Oh, I don’t know. From our point of view, he hasn’t done anything terribly wrong and the Bering Strait could always use another coast watcher, in case you Americans invade. He will remain with us, hopefully in that or some similar capacity. We will find you a new administrator.”
Olivia shook her head. “I think it would be better if I found my own candidates, whom the FSB may vet and approve.”
Schwartz stared hard at her. “You are extremely lucky not to have been shot and now you’re telling us how to do our job?”
Lyudmila and her husband could not help looking at each other. Now this is our Olivia.
“I’m sorry, General. Mister Borodkin may have been an able administrator but he was an utterly untrustworthy man. I’m certain that any candidate acceptable to both me and the FSB would be trustworthy.”
Schwartz kept staring at her while she looked straight back at him, bemused. Eventually, he gave up and let his mouth twitch into a brief smile. “Well played, Doctor.”
“Thank you, General.”
“Are there any other conditions you wish to place on your freedom?”
“At some point in the near future, I’m going to need a few days off. I seem to have a wedding to plan.”
“Has he in fact proposed?”
“From what his sister hinted to me, I’m not sure if he has a choice. And before I came here, he implied that if we survived, I didn’t have a choice. I don’t know if it’s a proposal, but it works for me.”
“Very well then. We will need to unseal your home and your lab. Please stay away from your lab until you are authorized to return. Your home should be available in a few hours. In the meantime, what would you like to do?”
“We can have food sent up from the canteen,” Lyudmila said.
“Yes, we can,” said Schwartz, “although nothing there really appeals to me.” He looked back at his desk. “And to tell the truth, I’m thoroughly sick of muffins.”
Olivia had a thought. “Perhaps the three of you will join me at McDonald’s for breakfast? And perhaps we might invite Colonel Suslova, if she is still in the building, to join us?”
Schwartz stared at her again. “First you decide to stay with us and now you wish to rub our noses in American cultural imperialism?”
“Hardly, sir. I wish to take you to breakfast. I would never say McDonald’s is a good thing, but their hash browns are to die for.”
The Russians looked at each other in silence, all thinking the same thing. An unfortunate choice of words in this building.
“Erm,” Olivia coughed and blushed furiously as she realized what she’d said.
“So,” asked Schwartz, quietly laying a white cloth napkin over his muffin, “what is this ‘hash brown’?”
“Kartoffel kotlet,” Lyudmila translated. “And she’s right. McDonald’s is in many ways a stench in the nostrils of the Lord. But their hash browns are excellent. Far better,” she added, looking at her husband, “than anything to be found at IHOP.”
Coloring faintly along her cheekbones, Olivia smiled. “It would please me greatly if the three of you, four counting Colonel Suslova, would permit me to take you to breakfast at McDonald’s.”
r /> “If I accept your gracious invitation, would you also be so kind as to explain to me about Boris and Natasha?”
“Done deal.”
Schwartz began to laugh. “You know, in some ways, you really may turn out to be a bridge, after all.”
“In some ways, maybe,” Olivia answered quietly, her heart full almost to overflowing with an emotion she did not recognize there, in that place. “In some ways, maybe someday. Yes.” After some examination, she realized it was the most extraordinary happiness.
AN AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE READER
Someone Else’s War takes place 1993–1997, in Russia and America. It is, like all novels, about people: human beings. In this case, it is also an examination of what would drive a woman with a lucrative future in America to choose to take her chances in Russia, in the brutality and chaos and corruption of the Yeltsin years and the Chechen Wars.
This book has been a long time coming. Growing up in the American Midwest, daughter of a pair of conventionally liberal college literature professors, I had two great intellectual passions: military history and Soviet samizdat (dissident) literature. I began trying to write this book in December 1981, at age fifteen. As I set to work with adolescent vigor and naïveté, in Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and suppressed Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in the Warsaw Pact bloc. General Jaruzelski claimed he had imposed martial law to prevent a Soviet invasion. I suspect that he told the truth. The Soviets clearly wanted the Poles to handle Solidarity themselves, but reliable units from Russian and other Warsaw Pact armies were on high alert.
Some of those would have almost certainly been Soviet VDV (Airborne) units. In those weeks, when it seemed that Warsaw might once again be martyred, a junior VDV officer named Dmitri Borisovich Suslov, recovering from wounds received in Afghanistan, took up residence in my head. So did his sister, Irina Borisovna Suslova, a taciturn KGB (now FSB) officer who wouldn’t give James Bond and his harem directions to the nearest cliff. We had some interesting conversations about what they might or might not find themselves doing as their lives progressed, including if the Soviet Union invaded Poland. They themselves weren’t certain. From time to time, they changed their minds.
I have never yet understood why they would choose to move into in the skull of someone who had Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in translation on her bookshelves, someone who read both National Review and Ms. Magazine. Perhaps that was why. In any case, they were no longer characters in search of an author. They’d found me. Now all I had to do was become an author.
I tried to write about them on and off all though high school. It proved predictably impossible. So instead I wrote a senior paper on the Soviet abuse of psychiatry.
I set them aside during my undergraduate years at Indiana University, where I studied a little Russian, got a degree in history, an Army ROTC reserve commission, and a Marine husband. I tried to write about them again during my first marriage. Since I wasn’t working and my husband was often absent, I had the leisure. At that time, I conceived the Suslovs as so disgusted with what had happened to their country that it had driven them to emigrate to America. I think I now know why I plotted thus. Despite a certain amount of feminist activism and volunteering, I was paying insufficient attention to what America was starting to let herself become during a decade that may someday be known to history as “The Wasted Nineties.” In writing about their disgust with Russia, I was really writing about my disgust with America.
I struggled so long and hard and failed so utterly to write well about them, and became so grouchy, that my ex probably had grounds to name them as co-respondents in the divorce proceedings. Had I indulged in normal adultery, his home life certainly would have been happier.
I made my final failed attempt to write about them in the very late 1990s, after a stint at a federally funded national security research corporation, or “think tank.” My boss, a retired Air Force fighter pilot with considerable combat experience, once told me his job was “to keep the crap going.” By crap, he meant government contracts. And thus my introduction to the world of defense contracting and all the phony studies and reports that justify and defend the wasting of trillions of dollars and, inevitably, human lives.
Going to work there was my first mistake. My second was exhibiting my keen grasp of the obvious. When you hold no security clearances and are read into no programs, when you have a mere B.A. and no significant military experience, and you figure out how to defeat the very expensive stealth technology that was then regarded as key to American military invincibility, and you announce your findings and no one can dispute them…you’re not particularly well-liked. You’re also told to keep your mouth shut. Or else. And you do. But you don’t stop thinking. At that moment, Olivia Tolchin, the American defense engineer who illegally emigrates to Russia in search of intellectual and creative freedom, joined the Suslovs in my mind.
After that, I put Someone Else’s War away. I accepted that I had neither the skills nor the discipline to write well about them and if any more people moved in, I would have to have my head rezoned for multi-family construction. I then went to grad school, worked several jobs, and wrote non-fiction. I got research grants to study American female soldiers. This took me to Iraq in 2004 and Afghanistan in 2005; I was embedded with combat troops in both countries. My first book, Women in the Line of Fire (Seal, 2006), gave me the practical experience and literary tools to conceive, finally, of Someone Else’s War.
One matter remained. In late October, 2007, I summoned courage sufficient to tell my second husband, Philip Gold, himself a writer and former Marine officer (I like Marines), about the Suslovs. Hi, honey. You don’t know this, but you’ve been sleeping with a Russian paratroop general and a female FSB colonel. Also a female American engineer whom many people would consider not much better than a traitor. Philip understood, not least of all because he’d had some imaginary playmates of his own. Also, four years prior, he’d encouraged me to go to war(s) because he knew it would settle some unfinished business in my past, including my failure to be born male so I could have been a combat arms officer. Now he encouraged me to confront the Suslovs and Olivia; until I kept faith with them, I would be blockaded in other ways. Marines are smart.
We got to work. The initial 30,000-word rough cut, dark beyond belief, was done by Christmas 2007. Over the holidays, I realized that I no longer felt that way; I was no longer the same person. On New Year’s Day, I began rewriting for a happier ending. After some thinking, researching, and non-fiction writing, I began writing in earnest in June 2008. I finished major work in June 2009 and in the early days of 2010. At least, I thought I had. Now, at the end of 2013, I am finally satisfied.
Writing Someone Else’s War required hundreds of hours in conversation with Philip, who was doing a book of his own at the time and who sometimes welcomed the interruptions. As a former intelligence officer and interrogator, he gave me real-world insights into how things work and how they might be plausibly adapted for the novel. We surrounded Olivia and the Suslovs with a rich and vibrant world of their own, and it was great fun watching somebody else deal with my Russians and Americans. Minor characters got invented, then became real imaginary people. One in particular: CC Cooper, an eccentric retired US Army colonel who drives much of the final part of the book. He’s Philip’s creation, though based on a man, a very good man, I actually knew. Perhaps most enjoyable was Philip teaching me the value of humor in a book such as this, both for the lighter moments themselves and for the making of serious points lightly. Marines are funny. Sometimes they have to be.
But the time during which I wrote Someone Else’s War was unfunny in the extreme. I understood, as did anyone not willfully self-blinded by ignorance, hope, or ideology, that the American economy was not going through an old-style cyclical downturn. I knew that the “recession” was going to yield what is now called “The New Normal,” and that it would hasten the destruction of America’s middle class. T
his, indeed, is happening. And it makes Someone Else’s War, insofar as it predicts what has in fact happened, an urgent book.
America has surrendered to impoverishment and is beginning to surrender to chaos. I have watched my countrymen wander around in a state of learned helplessness, furious and despairing but unwilling to change. I have watched American conservatism cease to be a legitimate political idea and become a cult with nothing to offer save hatred and contempt. I have watched President Obama refuse to address our core problems, and liberalism continue its relentless pursuit of irrelevance. I have also realized that many Americans, in government and out, want foreign enemies and would, for reasons of their own, welcome a New Cold War. That this is the last thing America, Russia, and the world need—doesn’t matter to them.
While I was writing, I had an opportunity to look back at one of the major political and moral influences in my life: Soviet-era dissident literature. I reread the fiction, poetry, and essays of Soviet dissidents and I thought about what they dared and suffered in order to write that which they believed. It was impossible for me not to compare their work, for which they and their readers risked so much, to the writing that so many Americans consume. And I found myself reading interviews with people like Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, measuring their coherence and grasp of detail against that of similar American political figures, such as John McCain, Sarah Palin and George Bush or, for that matter, Barack Obama.
The comparisons weren’t comforting. In truth, it is neither my job nor my intention to make apologies for Vladimir Putin. He is a thorough-going authoritarian and I would not care to serve or live under him. But I will say this much. If one of the standards of morality in this world is, “Did you leave it better than you found it?” then who is the more successful leader? Vladimir Putin, who drew his country back from the edge of the abyss—or George Bush, who tossed us into one and his successor, who has so far refused to lead us out?
I write these things not because I’m a Russophile, a member of the Blame-America-First Club, or a believer in the “moral equivalence” of the United States and present-day Russia, let alone the old USSR. I grew up in that kind of household and punched out as fast as I could.
I wrote Someone Else’s War to provide a different perspective on what we’ve become—and on what we might also wish to be. The book that started out as an adolescent fantasy is now my gift to my fellow citizens. If it says things that some people might not wish to hear, so be it. But at least let them be honest about why they don’t want to hear them.
A final item. Someone Else’s War was originally entitled The Doves.
As a title, The Doves suggested an image of peaceful people, of those who want peace. My characters do. But I’ve taken the title from someone else. It’s a line in a poem by Anna Akhmatova, Russia’s greatest poet, and a dissident who somehow managed to intimidate (or at least fascinate) Joseph Stalin into letting her live and stay out of the Gulag. She wrote “To the Londoners” in 1940, when Britain was under Nazi bombardment and the Soviet Union an ally of Germany. It is not an easy poem for an American to understand. Poetry in translation always loses something; Russian poetry, especially so. And few Americans know, or care to know, the tenor of that year. The poem speaks to many things. It certainly issues a warning against denying the world’s realities, whatever those realities might be.
Time, with an impassive hand, is writing
The twenty-forth drama of Shakespeare.
We, the celebrants at this terrible feast,
Would rather read Hamlet, Caesar, or Lear
There by the leaden river;
We would rather, today, with torches and singing,
Be bearing the dove Juliet to her grave;
Or peer in at Macbeth’s windows
And tremble with the hired killer.
But not this one, oh Lord, not this one.
This one we haven’t the strength to read.
Some things never change. But others do. And it matters to remember that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR/CONTACT
Erin Solaro is the author of Women in the Line of Fire (Seal, 2006), based on her experiences as a journalist and researcher embedded with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her work has appeared everywhere from the Marine Corps Gazette and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings to the Seattle Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, and Baltimore Sun. She writes The Woman Citizen blog for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Erin was raised in the American Midwest and has lived in Malaysia. She received her B.A. in History from Indiana University and her M.A. in Military Science and Diplomacy from Norwich University. She has been a reserve lieutenant in the US Army, a professional dog trainer, a secretary, an insurance agent, and a program director for an international post-graduate management institute.
Erin lives with her husband, writer Philip Gold. Her current writing projects include My American Vacation, a sequel to Someone Else’s War.
Erin is best reached by email at
[email protected] or
[email protected] She can also be found on Facebook.
My American Vacation: A Novel of Russia and America
From a work in progress.
Vladimir Putin had thrown the world a party. Not everyone approved of the party. Or of Mr. Putin. The weather had not cooperated, but then the weather wasn’t cooperating much for anyone anymore. Still, all things considered, the party had gone reasonably well. There had been no boycott. The guests had mostly behaved. And, much to the disgust of Putin-haters both professional and recreational, there had been no massacre. Some among the media had also publicly expressed near-regrets.
Major General Irina Borisovna Suslova, Director of the Service for Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight against Terrorism of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the FSB, never expressed opinions regarding Mr. Putin. Or the weather. Both were facts. She dealt in facts. At the moment, three facts confronted her. The absence of terror at the Sochi Olympics had been very much her personal accomplishment. She was not proud; Irina didn’t do pride. She was, however, deeply satisfied. All those months of sixteen-hour days and sleepless nights, all those take-no-chances preventive and pre-emptive things she’d ordered done or done herself, but without unnecessary violence or repressions, had paid off. There had been the best of all possible outcomes. Nothing had happened.
But now she was exhausted. This, too, was a fact. Unfortunately, it led to a third fact that she didn’t care to consider. This was a new kind of exhaustion, the kind that a few days at some VIP Crimean resort or a brief stand-down at work or a new assignment wouldn’t assuage. This went deeper: it could even be assuaged by a long hunting trip in the most beautiful place on earth, the dangerous and remote Putorana plateau. The exhaustion had come upon her suddenly, as the sum of all the exhaustions she’d endured but never succumbed to or even really acknowledged during her thirty-plus years of service as an Army and security officer, an Afghan war widow with two young sons to raise and . . .
And at the moment, her boss wasn’t helping. Deputy Director Andrei Zotipov never had. These, too, were facts. And now, from somewhere within her exhaustion, she was considering them. In rage. In a rage that grew stronger and less controllable with every sneering sentence that droned from the old lizard’s wet and sputtering mouth. Nothing new there. He’d long been in the habit of dissing her at the weekly open-agenda conferences chaired by the FSB Director. The other men at the table—Suslova was the only woman—had long ago stopped listening, or even pretending that Zotipov’s digs at her weren’t what they were. Graceless attempts by a has-been, politically connected but no longer quite so protected, to evade acknowledgement of his own ineptitude, and the fact that only Irina stood between him and retirement-for-cause. For two years, Suslova had accepted the situation, serene in her own abilities and reputation and comforted by the silent, and sometimes not so silent, sympathies of the colleagues she respected and cared about. But now, sitting at the conference table a
nd aghast at the sense of watching herself about to do something unprecedented, she felt no power to resist, and no desire.
“Perhaps,” she heard her boss drone on, “the easy success of our lovely General,” he paused and glanced at her smugly, “indicates that there never was that much of a threat to begin with. Be that as it may,” he paused again, “our lovely General has spent so much time in the field that her other responsibilities have suffered seriously. I am uncertain as to whether she can . . .”
Suslova rose. For a moment, she said nothing. The men at the table tensed in expectation, and in an unspoken affirmation of, What took you so long?
Suslova faced her superior, her low voice cold and disdainful. “Deputy Director, you talk too much.”
Then she watched herself meeting his furious stare. She held him steadily in her eyes until, baffled and enraged and impotent, he looked away.
And then she turned and walked out, and no longer cared, and did not see her real boss, FSB Director Pyotr Stepanovich Bogdanov, smile. The other men at the table, all save one, smiled, too. Once, she would have cared about that, welcomed it, thanked the men with a small gracious nod and a slight crinkling of her green eyes above high Tartar cheekbones. But no more.
Major General Irina Borisovna Suslova, holder of two Hero awards, the highest decoration of both the former Soviet Union and the Federation that had replaced it, legendary among those few who knew, for her work in keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of the wrong hands—a legend to the CIA for other reasons, as well—returned to her office suite. Her personal assistant, Colonel Igor Mikhailovich Smoliakov, tall, strong, and slowly dying of old wounds from Chechnya and more recent injuries sustained elsewhere, was standing by the secretary’s desk. “Boss,” he asked, “Can I—”
“No.”
Smoliakov flinched. Olga Rodionovna, her stout, graying secretary, a woman compounded of fierce efficiency and equally fierce loyalty, looked at Suslova with the beginnings of concern.
“General . . .”
“No.”
Suslova entered her office, slamming the door behind her. Smoliakov and Rodionovna heard the turn of the lock, then the sound of objects hitting walls before landing hard on the floor. Books, most likely. Then a series of light crunches against walls, each followed by a tinkling sound. They looked at each other.
The Meissen.
“I think,” said Smoliakov slowly, “that Deputy Director Zotipov has finally provoked an intense personal reaction.”
“Pity he’s not here to serve as target.”
The crunches grew a bit deeper. Suslova, Smoliaknov concluded, had finished hurling the cups in her tea service and had started on the saucers.
“Do you think I should call the canteen and have them send up some of their crockery?”
“No. That would take too long. Let us hope that this burns itself out quickly.”
“That’s expensive china.”
“Indeed.”
“Perhaps one of us should . . .”
“Not me,” Smoliakov said with deep feeling.
The phone rang, the internal secure line on Olga Rodionovna’s desk. She picked it up but was not permitted even to greet the caller. “Olga Rodionovna,” a man’s firm voice said. “This is Director Bogdanov. How is my General?”
“In a rage, Comrade Director.”
“How intense?”
“She’s in her office, throwing dishes against the walls.” Olga held the phone a bit away from her ear and listened as the sounds grew deeper yet again. “My impression is that she’s finished with the cups and saucers and has started on the plates. She is, as you know, very methodical.”
There was a pause at the other end, perhaps a brief silent chuckle. “Not unexpected. The anger, that is. This wanton destruction of State property is certainly out of character. Very well. No one is to be permitted entry to or exit from the General’s office until I arrive. Which will be in about two minutes.”
“Yes, Comrade Director. If Deputy Director Zotipov shows up . . .”
“You will lock the outer doors, Olga. Immediately. If Deputy Director Zotipov shows up, say nothing through the door. He can spend his time admiring the portraits in the corridor. I’ll take care of the situation if it arises.”
Bogdanov hung up without waiting for response. He knew he needed none from Olga. It would be done. He also knew that Zotipov would not be showing up. Much as he might want the final word, he lacked the courage to face Suslova alone. Getting physical was certainly not beyond her in her present state, and he preferred not to have her hospitalize a man he’d been working on removing via retirement. Nor did he expect Suslova to leave her office. She was, he knew from long decades of experience as her colleague, then mentor, utterly averse to being seen in any state of personal indiscipline or disarray. What worried him was that she might decide to leave permanently.
Zotipov, the Director mused as he opened the door of the private elevator in his office and took it two flights down, had provided a useful cover. He’d complained and insinuated and protested, but he’d never interfered as Bogdanov had advanced Suslova, given her responsibilities beyond her position, educated her, prepared her for…what? To succeed him as the first woman Director of the FSB? Perhaps: she was already the most powerful woman in Russian history since Catherine the Great. But now, the Zotipov charade could end. Now, after Suslova’s latest success, Zotipov could be pensioned off. As for Suslova, whatever her future, he did not want it to end with…this.
Composing his face, unwilling to let either her assistant or her secretary see his concern, the Director marched up to the outer door, noted the absence of anything resembling Deputy Director Zotipov, and knocked firmly.
“Bogdanov.”
Colonel Smoliakov let him in. They heard a platter go splat. Bogdanov shook his head. “Have you considered ringing up the canteen and asking for . . .”
“I did,” Olga replied grimly. “Colonel Smoliakov said they wouldn’t send it up in time. He thought this would end quickly.”
“Apparently, Colonel Smoliakov misjudged. Ah, well. There can’t be that much left.”
An exceptionally loud crash made Olga Rodionovna and Colonel Smoliakov flinch. “I appear to have been proven wrong, also,” Bogdanov muttered. “Wish me well.”
He strode to the inner door. “Irina Borisovna,” he called, knowing she’d recognize his voice and open the door without the necessity of ordering it.
A pause. Then, in a low, deep growl that startled him, “Stay out.”
The timbre reminded him of nothing so much as a tiger. Did Suslova have a tiger in there? Not possible. Surely building security would never have let her bring in a tiger. And where would she have found a tiger and how would she have taught it to talk in so brief a period? A plate spattered against the door. No, he decided, tigers neither speak nor hurl dishes. Nor, most days, did generals destroy the magnificent china that had been Russian property since the Red Army had seized it from some dead Nazi’s estate in 1945. It had been a large collection, long since parceled out among senior NKVD, then KGB, then FSB officials. There was ample still elsewhere. But that pattern wasn’t made anymore, and losses couldn’t be replaced. Bogdanov decided to take charge.
“General Suslova, that china belongs to the people of the Russian Federation. Cease and desist immediately. Do not disobey me. I don’t want to have to add insubordination to what will doubtless be a difficult report to write. And open the damn door.”
A final thud, tinkle, crash. Then silence. Then the door opened. Bogdanov walked in and closed it behind him.
What a mess.
Suslova had apparently begun by pulling books out of the cases and throwing them to the floor via the walls. When that failed to satisfy, she had swept her desk clean of everything on it, which wasn’t much but had included the computer screen. Cyclamen in a pot that had survived its fall to the carpet. Silently, Bogdanov restored the vivid pink flowers to her desk, noting that the pictur
es of her family on the credenza behind her desk had survived unscathed. Also safe were the bulbs of narcissus and paperwhites blooming in blue-and-white delft forcing pots on the credenza, scenting the office. The little grace notes that made a visit to her office such a pleasure. He would come to her office and, often accompanied by a quiet, beautiful music, they would discuss the things that needed doing and the things that would advance her, while drinking tea from cups as fine as her own ivory skin.
“Well, Irina Borisovna,” he said as he picked up a couple books, noted their titles and replaced them. “Did you enjoy your tantrum?”
“Yes.”
“I believe. But all good things must end.”
“Bad things, also.” Letting out her breath in a sigh.
“No doubt. And now that this bad thing has ended, will you offer me tea?”
Suslova gave him a flat, hard look that softened into a smile as she surveyed the wreckage. Bogdanov smiled back. She cracked open the door and spoke in her normal voice: low, cultured, courteous. “Olga, would you please bring us some tea?”
“Just the pot, or will you be needing cups and saucers, also?”
“I’m afraid we will,” Suslova answered ruefully.
A few moments later, Olga, who knew her boss’s civilized rituals as well as Bogdanov, entered with a tray, ignoring the wreckage while exuding disapproval. She placed it on a coffee table before a long couch and left. Suslova and Bogdanov seated themselves, then drank silently for a moment while he studied the low celadon planter on the table, filled with purple and ivory violas, snowdrops, and grape hyacinths.
“You know, Irina Borisovna, back there in my conference room you reminded me of something I’d forgotten. When I was a very junior KGB officer, on my first assignment to the United States, I became a fan, as they say, of their Country-Western, I believe they called it, music. One song in particular. If memory serves, it was ‘Take This Job and Shove It’.”
“I recall it also, from my UN posting. Was I that bad in there?”
“Worse. A tirade would have been far more acceptable than such a deadly insult. Any residual respect that Zotipov might have commanded, is now gone. That could be a problem for me. But what’s done is done. The question now, General, is . . .”
“What next?”
“Next is, we clean up this disaster,” he answered. “I’d rather our comrades on the cleaning crews didn’t have to deal with it.”
“Not to mention, the security inspectors with their nightly visits.”
“Those also.”
They worked in silence, reshelving books and filling the waste baskets with Meissen, while Suslova slowly floated down from the high of her rage. Looking at what she’d done to some perfectly innocent books and dishes and began to be quite abashed, even ashamed. Bogdanov watched her. He saw a lean woman in her early fifties, tall for her sex—a centimeter taller than the Russian male average—and very strongly built, wearing one of the men’s suits she favored, tailored to fit and expensive once, now old and nondescript. He wondered, as he had for decades, whether or not she was beautiful. Perhaps. Perhaps not. She was clearly female but not remotely feminine. Most men would never look at her twice. That, he knew she preferred for both personal and professional reasons. Those who looked twice rarely looked again. Too intimidating. That, she also preferred. But those who looked carefully, who got beyond their preconceptions and their aversion to fearing a woman, saw skin like cream over gem-carved features and slanting Tartar eyes over high, broad cheekbones. Her eyes were the sometimes the green of olive leaves on a sunlit field, often of lichen on stone, and, very rarely, of spring moss between the roots of a birch tree beside a cold Siberian stream. Her wavy chestnut hair, silvering at the temples, was worn short, an elegant severity.
But beautiful?
No. Not really.
Still, those who looked carefully, might sense a cleanliness to her. If the rare was also the beautiful, then she was beautiful indeed.
They finished their chore, more or less, then sat again.
“Feeling better, Comrade General?”
A rueful smile as she refilled their cups. “Yes, thank you, Comrade Director. Now what?”
“Now we discuss what next, in terms of your future.”
“Assuming I still have one.”
“You do, although I can’t say today’s performance in my conference room did your prospects much good. What message do you think your behavior has conveyed?”
Suslova exhaled. “That I am tired beyond endurance.”
“Yes. You’ve lasted in this profession far longer than most men do. You’ve borne up under terrible stresses and dangers. However, as the Devil says, ‘Pay me now or pay me later.’ I fear that latter may be upon us.”
“Another Americanism, Comrade Director?”
“America has been on my mind of late. As have you.”
She paused. “May I ask if the two are somehow connected?”
“They are now.”
She paused again, in the manner of a patient awaiting her doctor’s diagnosis. Then she determined not to wait. “Explain, if you would.”
“Irina Borisovna,” he said, in the manner of a physician preparing the patient for unpleasant news, “you have risen higher in the security services than any woman. Ever.”
“For which I thank you.”
“But not too much. I mentored you and protected you because I saw your value. As a professional and as a human being.”
Suslova looked down and waited for Bogdanov to redirect the conversation, away from the personal. He always had.
“My hope for you,” he went on, “was that some day you would occupy my office.”
“Was?”
“Was and is. However . . . “ he steeled himself, “it is a fact in all organizations that the higher you go, the less room you have for mistakes or for the exhaustion that so often brings them about. The less room you have for erratic behavior. And if you are someone who has enemies as well as admirers, enemies who are enemies because they refuse to admire . . . well, Irina Borisovna, they watch for weaknesses most carefully.”
“So what are you suggesting? A month’s vacation?”
“No. A year’s sabbatical.”
“A sabbatical at this point in my career effectively takes me out of the running for promotion.” Dealing in facts, no matter how much they cost.
“So does your current condition. Unless you deal with it now.”
Another fact. “Yes. But what has this to do with America?”
“As the Americans say, America would be a good place to chill. Don’t you think?”
“If you happen to enjoy that way of life. Why send me to America?”
“To get the Americans to love us.”
Her laugh was appealing, the first sign of real life beyond exhaustion. “OK, as they say in America . . . Boss, you gotta be shittin’ me.”
Bogdanov grinned, suddenly boyish. “Not at all. Permit me to think out loud for a moment.”
She nodded.
“When our empire, then our nation, collapsed, the Americans reacted in predictable fashion. First, they congratulated themselves on how they weren’t congratulating themselves. Then for a couple years, they sent us food and economists. The food proved useful. Then, as our country staggered toward anarchy and abyss, they decided that we could be pitied, we could be scorned, but there was no longer any reason to take us seriously. Then Comrade Putin pulled us back enough to let us steady ourselves a bit. He proved once again that the standard is not perfection. The standard is the alternative. Where would we be today, had not he or someone like him told us, We’re going to survive, but we’re not going back to the old ways. And we’re going to survive as Russians.”
“And so we did,” she agreed.
“He made it happen. But not to American liking. And now the Americans hate him for it. He’s the latest in their collection of men they love to hate. Perhaps that’s because…” he smiled at some private memor
y, “if history asks, Did you leave it better than you found it?—who has done more for his country? Putin or Bush? Putin or Obama? Putin or whomever they disgorge into the White House next?”
“Not a comparison most Americans would enjoy.”
“Nor should they. But what do the Americans really know of us?”
“What did they ever?”
“They knew our power, they knew our faults, they knew our crimes. Now they think they know Pussy Riot and a couple billionaires and they think that’s all they need to know. At some level, they know that we mean them no harm. But to admit it would be to deprive themselves of their favorite punching bag. So they don’t.”
“True enough. But what has this to do with me?”
“Irina Borisovna, we Russians are hideously poor at what the West calls public diplomacy. No, not poor. We don’t even bother. Why try? Their minds are already made up. But,” now it was Bogdanov’s turn to laugh, “a while back, one of my research people brought me a tape of an American television show. A political comedy talk show. Do you know who was the guest?”
“No. There are so many American politicians who do comedy.”
“It was a retired chief of the Israeli Mossad. He was in America, on a book tour, of all things. Peddling his memoirs and hopes for his country and the world. I know the man. He’s tougher than frozen blini. But in America he came across as human, even likable.” Bogdanov looked at her directly. “Irina Borisovna, would you like to do the same?”
Suslova’s laugh was unhappy. “I’d have to watch the tape first. Then turn into a frumpy old man.”
“The first will be arranged. The second is expecting too much. Now,” he leaned toward her a bit, “this is what I want you to do. You don’t have to. But if you remain in this building in your present condition, I can’t guarantee your next promotion. Or your retention when I retire in three years. Or sooner.”
Suslova nodded, vaguely wondering where thirty years had gone, and how it was possible that a lifetime could come down to this. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
“You know Americans as well as any Russian in our trade who has not made them his specialty. You opposed certain CIA activities when we were in Afghanistan. You shut them down. Later, you worked with them on matters of mutual concern. You still have contacts with them.”
“One good friend. Now retired.”
“But still influential, if it’s the man I’m thinking of. You did your doctorate on American politics.”
“Back in the 1980s. On American neocons and their quest for endless enemies.”
“Still a relevant topic. You’ve also lived and travelled in America. Your English is excellent. You are impressive physically.”
“Thank you, Comrade Director, for the compliments. Now, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go there for a year, write a fast book, then hype it to the skies. I want you in their media, on their blogs and lecture circuits, at their conferences. I want you to take every opportunity to explain us. Why we do what we do, our hopes, the nightmare past we’ve yet to begin to come to terms with. I want you,” he concluded, “to become a celebrity.”
“Where will I do all this?”
“Your base will be a Washington, DC think tank.”
“And be infected by the anaerobic bacteria that they call analysts and scholars?”
“We’ll vaccinate you before you go. General, I want you to place our country before the American people in a way they’ve never seen us before.”
“And do it out of an American think tank?”
“Precisely. A university placement would take too long to arrange. But think tanks . . . for the right amount of money, they’ll take you as a resident fellow immediately. They usually have good media connections that you may use. We will, of course, provide you with the services of an American PR firm. They’ll also help you find a publisher.”
Suslova shrugged. “PR firms I know about. Whores.”
“But useful whores.”
She stood. “Comrade Director, the only difference between a brothel and an American think tank is that the people in the brothel are honest about why they’re there and what they’re doing.”
“You’ve been in worse places,” he said sharply.
She sat down again, sobered. “Yes.”
“At the very least, you’ll get a rest, do good work for your country and come back, as they used to say of Richard Nixon, tanned, rested and ready.”
“Or some such nonsense. If I agree, how long would it take to staff this through?”
“A few hours. The necessary expenditures to place you will come out of my private discretionary funds. You will remain on full salary, with an unlimited expense account. I can contact the institute I have in mind, well, now. The chairman of their board is a businessman with varied interests who is known to me.”
“Which institute is this?”
“If I told you that, I might have to kill you. In self-defense, of course. Why don’t you take until tomorrow to think it over? Talk with your family. Honestly, Irina Borisovna, don’t you want to have an American best-seller on your resume?”
“Will I have to reveal State secrets?”
“Only those we pre-approve. Now go home. Call your sons. Fine young men, both. Talk it over with Valentina. How is she?”
“I suspect,” Suslova answered, admitting the fact to full consciousness for the first time, “more than a little perturbed at my inattentiveness whenever I’ve been home these last few months. Perhaps . . . perhaps she could use a sabbatical, too.”
“I would not doubt.” Bogdanov stood. “Go home. I’ll see you tomorrow. And Irina Borisovna . . .”
“Yes?”
“You’ve come a long way, baby. Don’t blow it now.”
Major General Irina Borisovna Suslova, Director of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight against Terrorism of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the FSB, nodded solemnly. And then, in fine American style, she winked.
—30—
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