Liberals and Treason

Liberals and Treason
by
Erin Solaro

There is a reason why liberals like myself are typically reluctant to call things, such as Major Hasan’s treason, by their proper name.

Two, actually.

The first is that you will be attacked, and quite savagely, by your fellow liberals. So-called. Anything is grounds: minor grammatical errors, using formal, dignified language. Facts (like a number of incontrovertibly dead bodies) become meaningless and context (shouting Allahu Akbar before butchering your comrades, as opposed to offering it as a prayer of gratitude for being allowed to save someone’s life) changes nothing. Everyone who’s spent any time on the internet knows exactly what I’m talking about and has probably experienced it once or twice. Anonymous people will feel free to attack you and other anonymous people will quote them. As someone whose real, legal identity is readily visible even when I write under a screen name, I have a word for this kind of behavior, whether on the left or right. Cowardice. (As an aside, I have to tell you that the largely conservative forum of which I am a member believes the issues it handles are important to us all, so it simply does not tolerate that kind of behavior.)

The internet is a giant vomitorium, largely because of anonymity, but that doesn’t mean that this behavior doesn’t go a long way towards justifying, indeed causing many people who are decent and moderate in their behavior towards others, to seek anonymity. But even when one has obscured one’s identity, these kinds of attacks are profoundly unpleasant. I’ve been subject to them more than once and I always feel contaminated by observing this behavior: disgusted and shamed for the perpetrators and saddened for my country and its culture. This is what we have done with our freedom. Many thoughtful, intelligent people are subjected to that once and decide Never Again. Not Worth It. I don’t blame them. I have, from time to time, a hope that spirited but very civilized public conversations are possible with people who are anonymous. I have unfailingly been disappointed.

The second is that you can quickly find yourself in some unsavory company. I had a woman write me about my assertion that Major Hasan’s actions are, in fact, a prima facie case of treason. Within two emails, she was asking me what I thought about people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright? After I got over my Who? reflex, I said that they had nothing to do with the problems America faces, but I knew of some Treasury Secretaries and Fed Chairmen who were very responsible. In the space of 4 emails, she went from telling me we were liberal conservatives or conservative liberals who could disagree with each other to telling me we couldn’t discuss politics. Then there was an email I received from a man who liked what I had written about Major Hasan who thought I would like to know that he had posted it on his website, along with a formal accusation of the usurper President and his evil wife for treason. I have an impulse, which I have so far resisted, to email the man back and ask him whether or not he is able to read. I know he can cut and paste: he excerpted from my previous post the Constitutional definition of treason. So in the off-chance he can read, I repost it here.

The Constitution defines only one crime, and that is treason. ‘Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.’ The Framers clearly had no intention of allowing policy disputes and political disagreements or even criminal stupidity and misconduct to defined as treason—much less on the basis of hearsay, rumor-mongering or racism. Moreover, the only evidence accepted is two or more witnesses to the same overt act, or a confession in open court. And every American attempt to expand that definition has failed.

I have come to accept that my experiences saying things that people don’t expect from someone of my political views are a reflection of this country. An ugly, unpleasant, profoundly true reflection. There is an enormous amount of justifiable anger out there: ordinary working people across the demographic spectrum have been sold out and betrayed by the political and commercial elites across the political spectrum and there is no end to that betrayal in sight. However, we are a nation far gone in learned helplessness and passivity: we pay people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and, very likely soon, Lou Dobbs to get angry for us. And if as a writer, you say something people disagree with or dislike and can’t refute, they explode with anger and vitriol, rather than face the oncoming freight train that is America’s future.

My poor country. My heart bleeds for this Republic that I so love.

Major Hasan and Treason

Major Hasan and Treason
by
Erin Solaro

The issue is not whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan is a terrorist.  It is whether or not he is a traitor.

Here are the known facts.

Major Hasan, a field grade officer in an Army of a nation at war contacted and maintained contact with for an unknown period, an imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, known to be linked to al-Qaeda, who is, if not a known operating agent, most certainly a known agent of influence. Major Hasan was a medical officer, not an intelligence or foreign service officer acting under orders and supervision.

Major Hasan’s emails have been described as pursuant to his official duties researching post-traumatic stress disorder, and their contents as relatively benign. “Relatively benign” is, of course, only in relationship to their very existence, which was profoundly malevolent. We can say with near-certainty that any information on PTSD al-Awlaki could have offered Major Hasan, Major Hasan could have obtained from far less problematic sources: Jonathan Shay, one of the world’s preeminent experts on combat trauma, is extremely approachable and if Major Hasan did not know of him, he was beyond incompetent. There is simply no good reason for a military field grade medical officer to contact someone like Anwar al-Awlaki. The standard of prudence for a field grade officer is not the standard of prudence for Private Snuffy or Joe Bag of Donuts.

We also know that Major Hasan is alleged to have cried Allahu Akbar while killing and wounding dozens of his fellow Americans. That is a jihadi war cry.

At this point, it is time to drop the nonsense about terrorism and the other nonsense about PTSD and understand that Major Hasan’s attack was an act of treason. The more so since Muslims kill other Muslims all the time. Nor was it an act of existential and professional anguish, such as locking himself in his office and downing too many pills and too much alcohol, or hacking up his wrists and bleeding all over his copy of Achilles in Vietnam. Or his case notes.

If Major Hasan is found to be sane according to the McNaughton Rule and there are not enormous extenuating circumstances, his acts were those of treason, not terrorism. 

Major Hasan chose to ally himself with enemies of his country and kill and wound his country’s soldiers. That meets the definition of treason laid down in the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” And this is true whether he acted alone, as is likely, or with accomplices.

Porn is What We Have Done with Our Freedom

Porn is What We Have Done with Our Freedom

by Erin Solaro

 

 

Relax. This is not your usual piece on pornography, your usual “We know porn does real and terrible damage to millions of human beings and their society, but no one seems to know how to deal with it.” Nor is this to sneer at those simple souls who claim they do know. Bring back that old-time religion? Fine, if that’s what you want for yourself. But this is an essentially libertarian, diverse society that should remain so, and God is not a citizen. Nobody’s God. Other simple souls, religious or not, demand renewed censorship: an alternative that founders on the small matter of who does the censoring and what happens once they get rolling. Others, usually feminists and often not so simple, would like to see porn, carefully and narrowly defined, subject to civil action for damages because it hurts real women and devalues and contributes to the degradation of women as a group. An approach with some merit, especially for those directly hurt in the production of porn or by porn’s consumers, but one that misses a few larger points.

Rather, I should like to address this issue by noting a bit of etymology and then ask and answer a simple question.

The word “pornography” derives from the classical Greek; its literal meaning is “the graphic depiction of whores.” The Greek pornē were not high-class hetaerae, mistresses, courtesans, or beloved companions. They were the sex slaves of public brothels, to whom virtually anything could be done with impunity. Nor are we talking here about fancy frescoes on walls or cute little paintings on urns. This is about, literally, the exploitation and degradation of some human beings for the profit and pleasure of others—a matter that is never noted in the standard definition of pornography as reading or viewing material intended primarily to excite sexual interest.

Now to the question. What is so great about pornography that we are willing to pay such a high price for it, individually and as a civilization, in so many horrific ways? If it were only a matter of sexual arousal for a Republic that would collapse without constant immersion in commercialized sexuality, we could conclude that we’re simply insane and let it go at that. But more is involved. Much more. For porn is something we do with our freedom and is, in many ways, symbolic of many other things we’ve done with our freedom. We tolerate it, not just for the titillation, but because porn is an accurate depiction of who we are.

Today, there is scant debate, even among First Amendment absolutists, that the harm ascribed to porn is real and irrefutable. The women and girls brought into porn are almost invariably poor and often desperate; some are slaves. Many have arrived via prostitution. (Here we might note that because porn involves the exchange of sex, this time public through the images made of it, for money, it is itself a form of prostitution.) Many others, perhaps nearly all, have experienced prior sexual abuse. Some have known little else; many accept such abuse as their normal way of life. As for how children are entrapped with pornography to be sexually used by pedophiles, and what it does to them: we need not itemize here.

Economically, porn is a means of making sexual slavery and trafficking more profitable. It is also an adjunct to other activities, some criminal. Porn really is used in sexual assaults: by the assailants to desensitize and arouse themselves, and to train their longer-term victims. Porn really is a factor in divorces and estrangement between lovers in less permanent but nevertheless profoundly important relationships. How would you feel if your lover or wife couldn’t approach you without first immersing herself in images of the degradation of other men…or simply preferred the company of such images to yours and proved it every night by locking herself away with her Internet products? When she reaches climax, can you hear it through the walls? And if she doesn’t, how happy are you to have her emerge and expect to be serviced?

An occasional psychotherapist argues that porn “legitimizes” the unusually intense desires of those who have them, but might be reluctant to explore them and seek their fulfillment. But it might be more accurate to say that porn forces these people to contend with the fact that their desires, wonderful when shared with a loving partner, have been dirtied by the commercialized degradation of women, and men, and sex, that is porn. And porn really does make it harder for men to relate to women and for that matter other men, as genuine human beings.

In very real human terms, porn harms almost everyone it touches, users or not, most deeply women. But it also corrupts manhood. What it does to children need not be itemized here.

Those who will argue that porn is simply “free speech,” are free to do so. I would use my right of free speech to point out that this particular freedom isn’t free and that those who espouse this freedom aren’t the ones who pay directly for it. Perhaps an analogy might be useful. On some brutally cold nights of winter 1986/87, Ed Koch, then mayor of New York, ordered his public safety and health people to get the city’s homeless off the streets and into temporary shelters. The ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union responded by passing out little cards to the homeless, reminding them of their right to stay on the street. The libertarian attitude was clear. They didn’t deny the reality of mental illness or that their little cards might contribute to the deaths of others. They simply chose to regard this as a civil liberties issue, even if people froze to death.

Others take a more humane approach. Many feminists argue—to me correctly—that one simply should not harm other human beings, or use products derived from that harm, for one’s pleasure. But this elides the larger issue of why we as a society not only tolerate it but glorify it and permit it to fester in and infect our culture. Is it because, in America, everything gets reduced to entertainment and entertainment more and more means either porn or clearly pornographic motifs? And if so, what does that say about us?

Porn, like entertainment, is a huge global enterprise: Family Safe Media  estimates that in 2006, pornography generated, worldwide, a $97 billion in revenue—larger than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined. (This estimate includes only sixteen nations reporting and does not include the related industries of prostitution and human trafficking. If it did, we would be talking trillions.) Of this $97 billion, America was directly responsible for $13 billion. But the American involvement goes deeper than dollars. Over four million web pages, or twelve percent of the total, are pornographic. The leading producer of video pornography in the world is the United States; we are responsible for 89% of the world’s pornographic web pages. Although the porn industry has been affected by the recession, that $13 billion/year American “industry” was nearly 5 times the $2.7 billion Internet revenue that American Journalism Review  estimated went to newspapers in 2007.

One of economics’ (few) great truths is the concept of “opportunity cost.” Money is fungible. The real cost of anything is all the alternatives foregone. That $13 billion would have been enough to fund a flourishing newspaper industry, for example. What might have been done with the rest of that money in the under-developed world? Opportunity cost also includes the time and energy spent using porn, or dealing with someone who uses porn, could have been spent tending to and being tended by, one’s spouse or lover or just about anything else. For the 10% of Americans who admit to Internet sexual addiction, porn represents time and money that could certainly be put to far better uses.

Then there are those, who use it, at least occasionally, but would not if they had to seek it out. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they wouldn’t use it if porn and pornographic motifs weren’t thrown in their faces a hundred times a day. Remember: By definition, porn is designed primarily to appeal to and excite sexual interest, whether the mercantile goal is to sell videos or soap or beer. In this sense, porn is a continuum, from the pandering commercials and entertainment that cheapen our culture to the hardest of the hard core excrement of the spirit. For ours is a culture more and more dominated by pornographic motifs that drive out all else. It is what we have done with our freedom in so many ways, screaming at us from computer screens and television screens, from bookstore shelves and supermarket check-out aisles, from magazine ads and music, from athletic events and so much of the merchandise available in our malls. Screaming: Come on, you know you want it. Perhaps we do, even those of us who would never visit an Internet porn site, patronize a prostitute or visit a “gentlemen’s club.” Perhaps we want it because this is what we’ve done with our freedom. Perhaps this is what we are.

Of course, “Come on, you know you want it” does not provide the constitutional justification for regarding adult porn as protected free speech. For several decades, the Supreme Court wrestled with pornography as a First Amendment issue, crafting a series of decisions that focused on porn as free speech, regardless of the harm it did. This free speech über alles fixation was ratified, not to say enshrined, in the decision American Booksellers Association v Hudnut, 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1985, upheld without comment by the Supreme Court. This decision explicitly acknowledged the harm porn does, even as it found unconstitutional an Indianapolis ordinance that carefully defined porn, then established such material as a civil rights violation subject to civil suits. The Circuit Court’s reasoning here must be understood:

“The ordinance discriminates on the ground of the content of the speech…. The state may not ordain preferred viewpoints in this way. The Constitution forbids the state to declare one perspective right and silence opponents…. Therefore we accept the premises of this legislation. Depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets…. Yet this simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech.”

In short, the 7th Circuit and thus also the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged the genuine human suffering of women whose actual rapes were modeled on specific pieces of porn and who were forced into porn—both raped women who testified themselves and raped and murdered women whose surviving next of kin and estates testified for them. The Court nonetheless found the pornographer’s “speech” trumped their lives and their right to be free from unwanted contact and unwanted photography and films.

But the 7th Circuit Court’s opinion that porn is free speech regardless of the physical acts—including prostitution, rape, torture, murder, kidnapping and slavery—involved in producing it, is a standard that applies to no other type of speech. Obscenity, which is defined far more ambiguously than the porn that the Indianapolis Ordinance addressed, is not constitutionally protected free speech. Historically, obscenity has been used to suppress the dissemination of accurate information on birth control. The federal gag rule on abortion funding violates the First Amendment. Sexual harassment is not constitutionally protected free speech, even when it is entirely verbal or if it involves the forcing of pornography on women (and men) through, for example, the display of such materials in the workplace. Neither are such highly verbal crimes as bribery, terroristic threatening, incitement to crimes, hate speech and fighting words, racial and religious discrimination, libel and slander, insider trading and price fixing, conspiracy and accessory to after the fact. Child pornography is not constitutionally protected speech. And need we add that free speech has no legal standing whatsoever when it comes to prohibiting or regulating advertising for tobacco, alcohol or other legally salable products, no matter how humane the conditions of their production.

Further, in many other areas, such as environmental regulation, the law restricts activities in order to prevent harm, even when no harm to specific persons has been alleged. Has anyone ever claimed that a dirt-spewing chimney or a toxic landfill are actually “symbolic speech”?

And one final example. In 1954, the Supreme Court overturned the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal”. In Brown v. Board of Education, it relied heavily on the testimony of experts to conclude that separate was never equal, whether or not harm could be proven in any particular case. The mere existence of “separate but equal” facilities, even if materially equal, screamed loud and clear that some people were lesser than others. Why does the tonnage of evidence that porn is harmful to everyone and deadly to some, not receive the same humane regard as the psychological damage done to African Americans even in the absence of physical harm?

So what does America get out of pornography that justifies its huge human, financial and opportunity costs? What is so spiritually enlightening about this form of “speech” that we grant it freedoms available to no other form? What is so socially and culturally redeeming about it that we tolerate its ubiquity? And let’s add to this another set of considerations:

If porn were to vanish tomorrow, would Americans stop fucking? Would those who have intense, loving sex stop? Would all our imaginations be curtailed? Would those who write and draw erotica for their lovers and themselves no longer be able to write, or read, or draw or imagine? Would we all suddenly be unable to react to the sexual stimulus of non-pornographic material? Would we no longer be able to mine cherished memories for ideas about current pleasures? Would we stop having children? More largely, would we be unable to obtain accurate information about birth control or homosexuality? Would our political speech be curtailed? Would we speak to each other any less? Or maybe, with porn no longer taking up so much of our common world, would we perhaps speak to each other a bit more? We all know the answers to these questions. So why, then, do we insist that porn is some kind of right when we know full well the harm it does, and offers some kind of redeeming and vital benefit when we know it does not?

The Roman historian Tacitus, no enemy of the Roman Empire, said of that when Rome brought rebellious provinces to heel, it made a desert and called it peace. Today it might be said that we have made a cesspool and called it freedom, and that we celebrate our freedom by wallowing therein.

Porn is something we do with our freedom. Of course, we do other things with our freedom. Perhaps they fit together. Although other nations spend more on porn, America is the world’s largest producer of porn and the largest exporter of porn in terms of videos and web pages. We are also the largest exporter of weapons, often to nations whose governments are not as democratic and humane as most Americans would prefer. We are one of the world’s largest exporters of tobacco, especially cigarettes.  We are the world’s largest exporter of wheat, corn and sorgum, thanks to a corporate agriculture that ruins American farmlands and faming communities to feed Americans unhealthy food in such vast quantities that obesity and related lifestyle diseases are now major public health concerns.  We are the largest producer and exporter of trash pop culture short of porn and all that it entails.  And if you consider pollution generated overseas through the manufacture of goods to be imported here, we are the world’s largest producer of pollution.  What we’ve done to ourselves we also do around the world.

America poses as the world’s beacon and its benevolent hegemon even as America has also become the chief polluter, not only of the world’s ecology but also of the spirit of civilization. Porn, the porn of a country that purports to believe, not only of the equality of women and men before the law, but of the equal human dignity of all people, is a horribly apt symbol of what America has become. From “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to “Come on, you know you want it”—it’s been a long and graceless way down.

To put it even more bluntly: For every foreigner who thrills to the words of our Declaration of Independence, millions thrill (if such is the word) to our garbage. And millions more despise it…and us for producing it and thrusting it upon them.

Now, it would be comforting to say that, whatever porn’s ubiquity, only a small percentage of us are heavy users; of the crimes committed by pornophiles, most are the work of serial predators. It would be true. But the fact remains: That we should tolerate this ubiquity and criminality bespeaks either insanity or an agenda. It would be comforting, also, if we could dismiss this agenda as First Amendment absolutism and leave it at that. But to say that porn is something we have done with our freedom is also to say that porn is something we continue to do with our freedom. We did it throughout decades of prosperity and the long-overdue lifting of some outworn repressions. But we continue to do it now that the old easy-credit rampant consumerism (“Come on, you know you want it”) is gone and there ain’t a whole lot of repression left. Why?

The appeal of porn—this is not an easy thing to say in a society that has come so far toward genuine equality and mutual respect—is not so much that its users want to hurt and degrade women. It’s they want to watch others doing it for them, and to know that those women are out there for them to hurt and degrade in such ways, should they so choose. To be very honest, this is particularly important in America. Equality is good in the abstract. But when you’re on the downwardly-mobile slide and your future is vanishing and you can’t even pay for necessities, other values and emotions kick in. To understand this requires no great wisdom, although it takes a bit of honesty to understand that it has, does and can happen here, this brutality associated with loss of status and prospects.

We’re angry these days, we Americans. Angry about a lot of things. At the same time, we may well be the most stupefied nation in history. We know all about the Russians and their vodka habit; we remember how, not so long ago, they used to forcibly medicate dissidents with psychoactive drugs. But who needs the KGB when we do it to ourselves? Millions of us cannot exist or function apart from psychoactive drugs. Millions more depend upon them whenever things get rough. Liquor is everywhere, including endless new brands of potent, cheap white liquors, such as vodka. So are the illicit drugs that numb so many millions of our underclass…and above. In this sense, porn doesn’t simply incite. It also numbs and is, along with popular culture, drugs and alcohol, one of the ways we stupefy ourselves against what is happening to us economically and in the world.  And porn does so in a way that inherently pits men against women, rather than leaving them natural allies in the quest to live in the world. In this sense, porn is hate speech.

The horrible truth, one that I never, ever thought I would write about my country is that porn has become what we do with our freedom and symbolizes what we have made of our civilization. Porn has come to define our sexual freedom and our freedom of the press, of the written and spoken word; it has come to define artistic freedom. Not accomplishment or value, just freedom. And we accept that there is no accomplishment here, nothing of value, only freedom to produce the same dreary product, over and over.

So what to do? Most attempts at “zoning,” from parental controls and ratings systems to forcing porn parlors and related enterprises into certain (usually and unjustifiably) lower-class districts, are palliatives at best. The aggressive prosecution of pornographers who use not just children but also trafficked women and men, and confiscation of all such images and profits, could help. There is, after all, no right to retain the profits of illegal activity. Except when porn is involved. But the final answer to porn lies in refusing to tolerate it in our lives, no matter how badly we want its transient whatevers. For if there was no demand, there would be no porn. And one of the things porn says, primarily to men, but also, to a startling extent, to women, is, Come on, you know you really want it. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s always available. Men, you need this. Women, if you don’t like it, you’re prudes, while if you are sexually intense, this is what you need and want too.

If we’re not going to return to censorship or enforced “traditional values,” if we’re not going to keep on pretending that this stuff is harmless or benign or that we wish to live saturated in it…how to say No? For some, “Just Say No” is enough. But just saying No is not enough for most people. We need to know Why, no easy question to answer in a society indoctrinated with the strange notion that all values are inherently equal and no one is ever to judge. But Why is the first question we ask and one of the most important we will ever ask. “Why?” and “Why not?” lead us out of the realm of authoritarian ethics, where the only issue is, “The rules say…” no matter who made the rules, to what end, and what those rules actually say, and into the realm of what is known in philosophy as virtue ethics. Here the fundamental question Is not, “What are the rules?” but “How shall I live?” Virtue ethics do not tell us how to live. They tell us how to think about how to live. They make us understand that this is the most fundamental question each of us will ever face, the question that determines our attitudes and actions. How shall I live?

One of the tests of the worth of a thing is how we feel about it—after, not during. Many of us have done things during which we cursed ourselves for fools and worse, only to reach our goal and look at our accomplishments with stunned satisfaction. Do I really want to do this? we ask ourselves as we commit to the project, whether football practice or knitting delicate lacework. Rather often, the question lingers throughout. At the other extreme, there are things that we want—come on, you know you want it—when we want them, but which fill us with perplexity and disgust afterwards. Why did I do that? What was I thinking of? And why on earth am I doing it again?

So which is porn: the difficult thing that exalts and ennobles us or the easy thing that cheapens and disgraces us? Or to put it differently, when somebody important to you asks, “What did you do last night?” would you answer her (or him) proudly, “Porn.”

But if we decide that we do not wish porn in our lives, that this is not something we do with our freedom, we must do more than shun it. We must shun the products associated with it and the motifs that now permeate our civilization. None of us in our right minds would buy a book entitled Incompetent Horsemanship: How to Ride Like a Sack of Potatoes or How to Abuse Your Right to Bear Arms and Endanger Your Family and Neighbors by Sloppy Weapons Handling. However, such things, were they to exist, would be less of an insult than How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (which apparently consists of making noises like a poorly-tuned engine and trying to remember whose name to call while being genuinely hurt, physically and emotionally).

The decision to shun porn and its motifs is personal and has nothing to do with holier-than-thou censoriousness. As a feminist and an American citizen, I’ve always despised porn. But I realized that I had made the decision to shun porn only as it happened, one day at the mall. I have a weakness for perfume and a perfume store had just opened up. It turned out that they had a scent I was interested in, for a very reasonable price. I was appreciating the scent and the genius behind the scent when I realized something about the store bothered me. A lot. I looked around to find a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton staring at me. I couldn’t help myself, for I spoke without any thought whatsoever. “I see you’re selling the whore’s perfumes.” For whatever the truth about how that pornographic DVD went public—and I should never speak this way about some anonymous performer or a woman who had risen above such a video—her career (what exactly does this woman do?) has taken wings after its release. Nothing about it, or her, attests to any appeal other than the sexually salacious.

The shop girl looked at me as though I had said something we all knew to be true but none of us dared say, and was therefore best ignored. “Yes,” she replied chirply, shock appearing to have disconnected her voice box from her brain. “Would you like to try it?” She was referring to Can-Can, Hilton’s latest perfume release.

I smiled. “Thank you, no.” And I walked out without the Cabotine I’d admired and craved.

There was a saying amongst Western gunfighters. I don’t get my courage from a bottle. I don’t get my erotic imagination from porn. My pleasure is not purchased with the suffering of other human beings. I do not get my orgasms or my ideas by watching other people being hurt and degraded. I do not watch it done, whether for real in porn or “simulated” in pop culture. If you do, you are either a sadist or a masochist and either way a voyeur. You are also supporting a multi-billion dollar industry that deals in the mass production of sexualized cruelty. And while it may be your “right,” it really is an evil things and I’m not going to help you pretend otherwise.  Porn is what the producers think we are worth, and when you buy it or tolerate it, you agree with them.

Has porn been worth it? Has it made us happier in our personal lives? Has it made us a nation to be proud of in the world? Are we proud to say that this is what we have done with our freedom?

A final thought, for those (of both sexes) who think that porn is either a necessary or a desirable part of being male. My husband, a former Marine officer, has told me of his experiences watching young American servicemen, the first time they encounter the degradation that some humans inflict on others for the sake of selling it to others. The venues may differ—Saigon, Subic, Court Street, 14th Street, a thousand other locales. But the process is always the same. The young man realizes, consciously or not, “How I respond to this will tell me what I am.” Many, perhaps most, try it once or twice, then recoil or drift away. Others become heavy users and, as always with heavy users, crave company and the validation that the participation of others can bestow. So many of those young men knew instinctively that porn (and prostitution) were wrong but lacked an explanation they could articulate. Unless they could claim religious faith, marriage or a committed relationship, and sometimes even then, they risked the opprobrium of being labeled—an evocative word at many levels—”pussies.”

Yet virtue ethics provides all the answer they or anyone needs. I don’t use porn and I shun it’s motifs because I don’t want them in my life. I choose not to participate in this with others because I don’t want them in my life, either. Why don’t I want such things and such people in my life?

Because I’m better than that.

Work In Progress

I write and knit at the same time.  Write a few words, knit a few stitches, write a few, knit a few. 

I am now working on Defiance in Time of Peril:  An Open Letter to America’s Young Womanhood.  At the same time, I have begun knitting what will be a sweater coat, “Morocco”, from Joyce William’s Latvian Dreams:  Knitting from Weaving Charts.  I calculate that there will be approximately 150,000 stitches in this coat, worked on needles 2.5 mm in diameter.

This a coat entirely made in America.  Joyce Williams is an American, Schoolhouse Press, her publisher, is an American press that printed her book in America, and I am working this in approximately 1682 m (500 g) each of Alpine Violet and Storm in sportweight by Brown Sheep, which supports America’s dryland sheep farmers. 

I could say that it is people like these women who will repair this country, if indeed it can be, not speculative energy traders like Andrew Hall, who is in line for a $100 million annual bonus for ruinous energy speculation.  And that is true. 

But I thought I would show you what can be done by an inexperienced knitter, one stitch at a time.

This coat is made in pattern repetitions:  the lower center back panel is one, 77 stitches wide by 77 rows high, and on either side I show 1 of 5 24 w x 77 h repetitions.  (The lower center front panel is split in half by what are called steeks.)  These pictured were taken about 24 rows into that first 77 row chart.  So what you see here is about 3125 stitches, not counting the Storm facing below.  (All told, I’ve worked about 14,000 stitches so far.)

Left 24 stitch chart

Lower Center Back Panel

Right 24 stitch rep

Women, Handguns and Civilization

For a law-abiding citizen to bear personal arms is an act of civilization.

Not just an act of self-defense or an act in defense of civilization, but an act of civilization.

This is true for men and it is even more true for women. For a woman to bear personal arms means that she will not be deprived of her legal rights: to go any lawful place she pleases at any time; to be free in her body, meaning that she need not be defenseless against assailants; to live. And it means that the uncivilized, those who would deprive her of life and the liberties of a free citizen, including freedom from unwanted sexual contact, do so at absolute risk to their lives.

That is the fundamental moral principle. These are the facts.

A handgun is not magic. You need to learn to use it and you need to be willing to use it, i.e., to employ deadly force. If you are unwilling or unable to do this, then guns are not for you.

However, a reliable handgun of man-stopping caliber (most commonly, 9mm and .45) is a terrific equalizer. And equality is the basis of citizenship.

This is the foundation of civilization: that we live and posses our property and are free in our bodies by no man’s leave, but by right under law. This is as true for women as it is for men. And unless civilization includes women, it does not exist.

The “argument from prudence,” otherwise known as “yes, but . . .” has no place here. Our rights as women citizens are unalienable, and the argument from prudence inevitably segues into “blame the victim” and the attempt to limit or abrogate those rights – to argue that there are things we may not do, places we may not go, ways we may not dress or behave, because we are women.

For women to bear arms routinely and commonly, in order to defend their lives, their property and their liberty – the simple freedom of a realtor to show a client a property, to use the gym and shower during unstaffed hours, to drive cross country alone, to go for a walk or a hike or a run or a ride alone, to be at home alone, all without fear of being overpowered – to not need a chaperone or a protector – is our right. It is also an act in defense of civilization, if only because those who commit violent crimes against women are often sadists for whom pleasure provides much of the motivation, and thus serial predators. And it is an act of civilization because it insists that we are part of civilization, a full and equal part. These things may not be done to us with impunity.

Now, try saying this to other women. Especially feminists, like myself. They’ll look at you as though you’ve suddenly grown horns. Then they’ll respond with a litany of objections that I know by heart. Yes, there are women, as there are men, who refuse to defend themselves with potentially lethal force for religious or philosophical reasons, or because they know themselves to be genuinely incapable of it for other reasons. But for the vast majority of women, the refusal to consider firearms or to grant the legitimacy of that choice to others, is based on little more than cowardice. What matters now is to review the standard objections, then determine why they amount to not just physical, but also intellectual and moral cowardice.

These come in four flavors of cowardice, and you can tell the degree of cowardice by the degree of departure from reality. All of these objections have been said or written to me. I am making none of them up; in one case, I still have the correspondence.

First is the use of incomplete, distorted or simply wrong statistics to prove the following:
· Guns cause crime.
· Guns cause crimes in cities.
· Guns cause crimes in poor and minority neighborhoods.
· Guns cause otherwise law-abiding people to kill each other or themselves.
· People rarely use guns in self-defense.
· Children will be accidentally killed by guns. Yes, and any idiot adult who permits children access to firearms should be punished. But the vast preponderance of gun deaths and woundings of children don’t happen to genuine children at all; they involve late-adolescent criminals, often gang members.
· Guns cause crimes against women.

In truth, reliable statistics reveal precisely the opposite. John R. Lott, Jr., an economist at the University of Maryland, College Park, presented his findings in a 2005 interview with the University of Chicago Press. “States with the largest increases in gun ownership also have the largest drops in violent crimes. … For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines 3%, rape by 2% and robberies by over 2%. … When states passed shall-issue laws ["These laws allow adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness"], the number of multiple victim shootings ["These were incidents in which at least two or more people were killed and or injured in a public place; in order to focus on the type of shooting...shootings that were the byproduct of another crime, such as robbery, were excluded] declined by 84%. Deaths plummeted on average by 90% and injuries by 82%. … The total number of accidental gun deaths each year is about 1,300 and each year such accidents take the lives of children 14 years of age and under… . Children are 14.5 times more likely to die from car accidents than from accidents involving guns. … An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men. … High crime urban areas and neighborhoods with large minority populations have the greatest reductions in violent crime when citizens are legally allowed to carry concealed weapons.”

Some will automatically complain that Lott is a conservative, as if that invalidates his research. So let’s turn to an interview with liberal criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University, the world’s preeminent expert on defensive gun use, in the Winter 2009 issue of Research in Review. Kleck’s research played a role in D.C. v. Heller, which overturned Washington, DC’s handgun ban. After the handgun ban was passed in 1976, homicides increased, and even when they dropped, the proportion of homicides committed with handguns was higher than before the ban was passed. Kleck notes that the common pro-gun-control claim, that when victims attempt to use guns defensively, which they did approximately 2.5 million times in 1993, for example, nearly three times as often as the 850,000 criminals used guns in that year, offenders will take them away and use them on the victim is simply false. “Over the period from 1997 through 2006, an annual average of 4.8 police officers in the U.S. were killed with their own guns, out of a total of 665,555 full-time, sworn officers in the nation. … [As for civilian crime victims being hurt because they used a gun to defend themselves] It wasn’t using the gun that got them hurt. [“Researchers reported instances of people being hurt and using guns defensively, but these were cases where someone was first hurt and then used the gun for self protection, Kleck explained.”] And once this flaw in the research was fixed, it was found that people who use guns for protection are almost never injured after that. … Criminals interviewed in prison indicate that they have refrained from committing crimes because they believed a potential victim might have a gun. … Victim defensive use of guns almost never angers or otherwise provokes offenders into attacking and injuring the resisting victims. It’s extremely rare that once a victim shows or uses a gun, he is injured. …” [“In any case, Kleck says, summarizing this crime scenario, it is clear that regardless of whether gun use occasionally provokes the offender, the net effect of victim gun use is to reduce the likelihood that the offender will hurt the victim.”] Kleck has also run statistical simulations that suggest that if criminals substitute long guns (rifles and shotguns) for handguns, the result would be more homicides, for the simple reason that these weapons have longer ranges and are more lethal.

The second form of cowardice reduces itself to “Defending me is somebody else’s job, not mine.” The most common argument here is that it is the job of the police and the judicial system to stop crime, and if a woman feels endangered, she should get a restraining order. Leaving aside the widespread, well-known reluctance of the law enforcement and judicial system to take crimes against women seriously, the police do not so much stop crime as manage it in the interest of public safety. In Castle Rock v. Gonzales the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a woman does not have the right to have a restraining order enforced. That’s optional on the part of the police. In this case, the police department’s repeated refusal to enforce led to the murder of the plaintiff’s three children. Castle Rock went far beyond the common sense rule that none of us have an automatic right to a police security detail to make the very clear point that if a woman and her children need their intervention in a crime in progress to prevent their murder, they are not part of the public to be protected and served.

And now we come to the “rational (more or less) hypotheticals.” The problem would be solved if only:
· We should make law enforcement take these crimes seriously! (Yes, we should, but they’ll still be doing it after the fact.)
· What about a restraining order? (Even had the Supreme Court had ruled 9-0 in favor of Gonzales in Castle Rock, it is paper, not protection: approximately a quarter of women killed by domestic abusers have restraining orders against their murderers.
· You might have an accidental or negligent discharge. (True, but people do far worse, far more often, with cars and swimming pools.)
· Most crime against women is committed by people they know so it wouldn’t help women in that situation. (As if reducing stranger assaults is bad and no woman will defend herself against an intimate or domestic abuser.)
· You might kill your assailant. (Considering the highly recidivistic nature of sexual crimes, you’ve saved yourself, many other women, probably some children and possibly even a few men from a lot of really ugly memories that your assailant wanted to impose.)
· Your best way to protect yourself against sexual assault and domestic violence is to be really, really careful in where you go, how you dress, how much you drink, and with whom, who you choose to be involved with, then pray you’re right. (Take this argument to its logical extreme – burkhas, chadors and sequestering women. Maybe you don’t, but a billion or so other people do.)
· We might make a mistake and 1. shoot the wrong person, 2. misunderstand their intentions, and 3. shoot someone we really didn’t have to. (Sexual assault victims are similarly impugned all the time by rapists, their defenders and apologists. Now we have women, feminist women, doing the same to women who refuse to be victimized.)
· We don’t want men to be afraid of retribution. (In the immediate aftermath of a crime, why should your assailant believe you can do nothing but call the cops?)
· Your assailant might kill you rather than just beat you or rape you. (Just barely within the realm of statistical probability, but he’s far more likely to if you are unarmed. Why do you assume you can’t win when you it is extremely likely you will?)

Finally there are, to put it kindly, the delusional.
· Most women shouldn’t own and use handguns in self-defense because it’s too easy and too cheap. (Why it should be more difficult for a civilized person to defend her life and liberty and property than for the uncivilized to take them from her? )
· It’s terribly difficult to use a handgun accurately and reliably when you’re tanked on adrenaline but it’s very easy for you to rip off a man’s ear, crush his throat or just simply pass him out in a life-or-death situation. However, because of the average strength differential between men and women, women should not use handguns because they can be taken away from them.
· I bought my daughter a knife; she can just poke an attacker with it and run away.
· The violence is in our heads. (Not when other women are raped and murdered, it’s not.)
· I want women to be respected by law enforcement and the judicial system. (If you’re not willing to kill in self-defense, why should others be willing to die for you?)
· You’re terrified of the world around you, think men are the enemy and women are victims by nature. (See my writings from Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the first few chapters of my book Women in the Line of Fire .)

And my so-far-all-time favorite:
· Feminists like you, who believe women should use handguns to defend their lives and liberty, do more harm to feminism than sexists, including those who murder and torture and terrorize women for being feminists.

Understand that when we hear these arguments, the speaker or the writer is not a rational woman making a rational decision for herself, based upon, for example, a serious problem with depression, or such anger for the real crimes committed against her that the justice system refuses to punish appropriately that she fears punishing the innocent. Owning and carrying a handgun isn’t for everyone, male or female, no matter how law-abiding and even brave, or even the same person at all the times in her life. And that’s OK.

When we hear these arguments, we are dealing with cowardice and a slave mentality. And the more ridiculous the arguments against a woman owning and carrying, such as “You might go into Starbucks, find a teenager brandishing what looked like a real gun and threatening to kill people, and kill him only to find out that he was only 13 and it was a toy,” the deeper the cowardice.  (Incidentally, I worked very near and frequently walked past a DC Starbucks where three people, unarmed because they were law-abiding citizens, were shot to death.)  The more you hear idiot statistics and hypotheticals, the more you know you’re dealing with cowardice. The more you hear women telling you how much they’d give up or suffer just to stay alive, let alone how much you should give up or suffer just to stay alive, the more you are dealing with the mentality of slaves. There is a rule about being killed: being killed clothed involves far less suffering and humiliation than being killed naked. You get bonus points (in terms of reduced pain and degradation) if you die standing.

One of the most poignant things I’ve heard was, “Women who’ve been battered (like children who’ve been abused) have often had their sense of self and self-worth deliberately destroyed as part of the process therefore you can’t expect them to believe they have a self worth defending.” That is so terribly true. And hearing from women that they should not defend their lives, their liberty and their property with deadly force, is not going to help them resurrect their selfhood, their belief that those who try to take that from them deserve to die. They need to hear loud and clear, starting with women, especially feminist women, including in the anti-violence movement, battered women’s shelters and rape crisis movement, then continuing to the police and law enforcement, that their lives and liberty and property are worth the lives of those who want these things from them.

The truth is that many women carry around a great deal of fear, fear that is profoundly realistic. The belief that our bodies are not our own and rape in particular is a tax upon our existence in the world, a tax we should pay, is alive and widespread and very well. We fear that we can’t defeat an attacker and so we engage in many magic rituals and a great deal of magical thinking: if I don’t wear this skirt, if I don’t shower at the gym or go running after dark, or hiking alone or… or… or… I’ll be safe. Because I can’t possibly win a fight.

But that’s simply wrong. The magic rituals and the magical thinking will not keep us safe. But we can defeat an attacker. A handgun that you can use effectively and are prepared and willing to use that way is a powerful equalizer. You don’t need a lot of training or money to buy a good handgun, learn to use it safely and well, and carry it discretely just about everywhere doing so is legal. A handgun is simply the single best means for a woman to defend herself.

Tell me again why this is controversial.

Feminism is the simple proposition that women are equal in human and civic worth to men. Either our lives and liberty and property are as valuable to us as men’s are to them, and we have not only the personal right but the responsibility of the citizen to civilization to defend them with deadly force or we don’t.

If you don’t think they are and we don’t, you’re not a feminist, you’re a misogynist, which is to say someone who doesn’t.

Yes, it really is that simple. And no, we can’t agree to disagree. This is death ground, where you have to fight or die. If women do not fight for their lives and liberty, they will continue to be murdered and raped and assaulted with their perpetrators assuming little, if any, risk. We’ve seen enough of that.

No more victims.

The Doves, Chapter 24: The Master Plans of the Moment

This chapter finds Olivia under extended interrogation in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison. Three years prior, the day before leaving Vienna for Moscow, Olivia had contacted the US Embassy and offered her services as a possible “bridge” between America and Russia. The CIA man she talked with, blew her off, then promised to write a memo about her offer. The Russians have acquired the memo through a CIA mole. Neither the Russians nor the Americans really believe she’s a spy. But the Russians don’t want this incident to get out of hand and intend to settle it quickly, one way or another. Now three Americans try to help. Maxwell Fajans, the CIA station chief at the Moscow embassy. Rebecca Taylor, a diplomat turned Washington Post reporter who knows about the memo. And CC Cooper, a retired US Army colonel spending a year as a guest lecturer at the Voroshilov General Staff Academy–the man who gets the CIA, the FSb and the Washington Post to agree.

 

All bureaucracies have rules.  The larger they are, the more rules they tend to have.  Amongst the most important of bureaucratic rules:  no surprises. 

By late Tuesday afternoon, Raduyev had a sense that there weren’t going to be any surprises.  It would take time to go through her lab, but initial interviews indicated nothing untoward in Olivia’s behavior or relationships with her employees.  A preliminary search of her flat showed that her personal computer was very clean of work-related material, even unclassified material, or of anything suspicious.  She may have worked long hours, but when she was home, she was home.  There were no unaccounted-for withdrawals or deposits of money in her personal accounts, and her spending was wise and reasonable.  Her prescription drug usage was minimal:  a small dose of valium a few times a week, mostly before she exercised; codeine afterwards a few times a month; morphine a few times a year.  She drank in moderation, enjoyed a small circle of close friends and a larger circle of acquaintances, and was a highly skilled knitter.  She wasn’t religious in any conventional sense.  She didn’t socialize with dissidents, human rights agitators, or bohemian types, although she did have a few artistic friends.  She had one, no, two, foreign contacts, both American.  Her love affair with Major General Suslov was cause for substantial gossip, no matter how correctly they behaved in public, but there was no evidence of any infidelity on her part.  The most exciting thing at her flat, Colonel Raduyev thought dourly, were the Japanese knitting magazines she subscribed to, since Japanese was not listed amongst her language skills.  A copy of a Japanese pattern was tucked into her valise, along with the work itself.  He had to admit that it was very beautiful.  He would ask about that. 

The next phase of her interrogation began in mid-afternoon.  Matrons escorted her from her cell back to the interrogation booth.  She sat down in the chair across from the opaque, one-way window, placed her hands on the table, and waited.  After a few minutes, two very muscular young men entered.  She knew that interrogators sometimes identified themselves truthfully.  Other times, to gain advantage, they went in with false names or ranks or affiliations.  There was, however, a limit to the play-acting.  A sergeant could no more convincingly claim to be a colonel than someone like Raduyev could pretend to be a conscript.  She guessed their rank as senior lieutenants, perhaps junior captains.  Politely, she half-rose and inclined her head.  One took the seat, the other stood besides him, arms folded, the window unimpeded.

“Good afternoon, Doctor Tolchinskaya.”

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.  May I know your names?”

“It is not necessary for you to know our names,” said one.

“We will ask the questions.  You will answer them,” said the other.

She scanned the two young men, decided she was not intimidated, then startled them by saying, “Let us begin.”

“If you don’t mind, we decide when we start and stop.  This phase of your interrogation will concentrate on your activities and contacts since coming to Russia.  Since you have been here for nearly three years, there is much to review.”

They began with her foreign contacts in Moscow.  She knew precisely two:  Rebecca Taylor of the Washington Post, and CC Cooper, a retired US Army colonel teaching at Voroshilov.  When had she met them?  Where?  What had they done together?  Had she reported them?  

The questioning, dull and dreary and repetitious, went on the rest of the day and into the early evening.  Sometimes the two men stayed in the booth, one pacing beside the table or standing behind her.  Olivia was not permitted to turn toward him, even when he asked a question.  Sometimes only one stayed with her.  She knew the technique from her American experience and a few vaguely remembered television shows from her youth.  Mutt and Jeff.  Good cop, bad cop.  But this version of Mutt and Jeff behaved precisely the same and were in many ways indistinguishable.   

They finally took a break.  In the corner of the booth, Olivia rose and began stretching, her back and legs making hideous popping noises.  The guards took her to the latrine.  Upon her return, she found Colonel Raduyev in the room, along with a guard who’d brought dinner for two on a tray, paper cups and plates, no utensils.  Although she had no watch and there were no clocks in the room or anywhere else, her stomach told her that it was past dinner and reminded her that she hadn’t eaten that day, or the evening before.  They were deliberately distorting her sense of time, and that she knew it did not mean it was any less disorienting.  She remembered reading somewhere that, bereft of outside stimulation and left to its own devices, the human body recycles to a thirty to thirty-six hour cycle.  She could not remember how long the recycling took, so the information was of no immediate use.

 “I will join you for dinner, Doctor Tolchinskaya.”

“In the hope that I eat more?”

“Yes, in fact.  It is one of the most important points to be made when armies train their people how to behave as prisoners.  Eat everything they give you.  You do not know when you’ll eat again.  It is important to keep one’s strength up.”

“I will try.”  She examined the contents of the tray they guard had placed before her.  Included were two pills, valium and codeine.  “We assume you need these.”

“Thank you.  Prolonged sitting used to be almost unendurable.  Now it is merely extremely unpleasant.”

“How do you cope at your lab?”

“I pace a great deal and I often work at a standing desk.  My office is not big on horizontal tables, but an entire wall is white board.  I hope my drawings weren’t erased.”

“They have not been.  What are you working on?”

“I am thinking about being able to activate sensors and other circuitry through signals sent over a commercial cell phone.  I don’t think that’s quite possible now, and I know I made a mistake in those schematics.  But I was not able to find it when I left the lab on Monday.”

“We found some magazines in your flat.  They’re in Japanese.  You have not noted that as one of your languages.”

“It isn’t.  You need not know Japanese to be able to read a Japanese knitting pattern, although I know a few kanji, or characters.  I recognize for example, the kana for silk.  But if you look at the pattern in my valise, you’ll see it’s almost entirely graphical and that the graphics correspond to the texture and shape of the fabric.  If I taught you how to read the graphic, you could knit the pattern.”

“But you said you don’t know Japanese.”

“I don’t.  Knowing the kana for wool does not mean I can read Mishima Yukio’s novels.  Or even ask where the toilet is.”

“But you said, you don’t know Japanese.”

“I do not.  I recognize a few kanji, that’s all.  If you like, I will write you a list of the kanji I recognize, in Russian, because I cannot write the characters themselves.  I can show you how to read and work the pattern I am knitting so you can see for yourself that you do not in fact need to know Japanese to knit a Japanese pattern.”

Raduyev’s sense of the absurdity of the case was growing stronger.  “How do I know that these patterns do not contain coded instructions?”

She looked at him oddly.  “The patterns would be very wrong, and the magazine’s subscribers would let them know.  Loudly and angrily.”

“No, I mean, what if certain patterns were prearranged signals and…we’ll pursue that later,” he heard himself say hastily.  “Have you had any contacts with any Japanese nationals while in Russia?”

“No.  I order off the Internet.  It’s all done by credit cards.”

“But those are Japanese sites.  Therefore, you have had contact with Japanese nationals.”

“No, the sites are hosted in Japan, but I deal with a graphical user interface.”

“A what?”

“A computer screen.  I have had no human contact.  The companies have fulfilled my orders promptly and completely and unlike, say, computers, I never have to call customer service.”

“How did you come to knit Japanese patterns?”

“I was introduced to them by Madame Getmanova.  As beautiful as Russian and Shetland lace styles are, Japanese lace is from some other universe.”

Raduyev thought and then chose to say nothing although he would ask the general’s wife about that.  Between question and answers, Olivia was picking at her food again, not really eating.  “Will you please eat?”

“Yes.”  She chewed and swallowed politely. 

“What else do you correspond with Madame Getmanova about?”  Olivia looked at him.  “Yes?” Raduyev prodded her.

“Russian marriage and family traditions and customs.”

“I see.  Did you save this correspondence?”

“Was I supposed to?”

Slightly frustrated, Raduyev glared at her.  “Do you often answer questions with questions?”

“It’s a Jewish thing.”

“You would do well not to remind us that you are Jewish.”

“Shall I also not remind you that I am an American and a woman?”

“If you answer a question with a question one more time…”  He caught himself.   “You do know that all our sessions are being video-taped, don’t you?”

“Yes, you told me so.  What is the problem?”

“The problem is that you’re making me look unprofessional!”

“I am?”

“You are.  You seem to have a tendency to take things over.”

“I do?”

“Stop that this minute!” 

“I don’t know if it’s the same here in Russia, but in America, children have the tendency to drive their parents crazy by asking why.”  She thought for a second.  “Also how.  Forgive me, but you sound like an American father who has been asked one too many questions.”

“In Russia, our children know better than to push things beyond their limits.”  He needed to terminate the conversation.  It was too human.  “I’m going out for a cigarette.”

“You do know those are bad for you, don’t you?”

Raduyev stalked out.  Mutt and Jeff returned, except that this time it was two new Mutt and Jeffs—or was it Mutts and Jeffs, she wondered—making a total of four.  Like the first two, they were young, strong, and indistinguishable.  This time they carried paper, pens, and what looked like a thick dossier.  It was certainly thick.  The repetitive questioning, the always probing for inconsistencies or changes, began again.  Olivia began to become aware of a strange awarenesss of the world behind the window.  During the afternoon, she had sensed Raduyev, then sensed an absence, as though the recorder might be unattended.  Now she sensed the afternoon team behind the screen, watching her.  Nothing telepathic, only the survival skills of a new prisoner who is learning fast.

 After several more hours, everyone was becoming a bit dazed and lost.  Olivia could read Russian upside down but she didn’t need to look at their question lists even right side up to know the sequence.  One young man, looking down at the sheet and rubbing his eyes, paused a moment.

“‘Have you used any illicit or unauthorized drugs?’” she prompted.

“No,” both young men replied automatically, and then, realizing what they had done, began to stammer an admonition.

“I know.  I know,” she said, gentle and weary, “I’m supposed to answer the questions, not ask them.  Isn’t that right?”

Raduyev and the first team, watching from behind the mirror, shook their collective heads.  This had the makings of an extremely unfunny personal and professional joke.  He dismissed the two young men, then walked into the interrogation booth.  “I think we’re all done for the night, gentlemen.  Doctor, a guard will escort you to your cell.”

At the Wednesday noon meeting, after another four-hour shift, this time with Olivia one-on-one with each of his interrogators, Raduyev had the beginnings of a quiet, low-grade mutiny on his hands. 

“Have we found anything on the good Doctor?” one of the young men who had answered the question about illicit drugs, asked.

Raduyev shook his head.  “And we’re starting to run out of places to look.”

“Comrade Colonel, sir, with all respect, we have a list of people in this building who need our attention,” the second young man who had answered the same question, replied.

“Are any of them more important than this?”

“No, sir, but they’re scum,” another young man, the one who had told Olivia she was there to answer questions, said.

And there was the crux of it, thought Raduyev.  The good Doctor, as even his interrogators were starting to call her, was clearly not scum.  An idiot from time to time, but not scum.  He’d heard of more than a few interrogators responding this way to the dissidents of the former regime.

Another interrogator working a different case spoke up.  “Look, you need answers from this woman that she’s not giving, you can let me and Nikolai here spend some time with her.”

Raduyev’s pale brown eyes showed no emotion.  “We can make her say anything we want her to but we are interested in her telling the truth.”  And you are dead in my organization because I am not passing false information to my superiors.  “All right, gentlemen.  Those of you on Doctor Tolchinskaya, keep it up.  I’ll take her for lunch.  After that, two shifts of two, three hours each, and I’ll take her again in the evening.  I know it’s boring and disheartening to keep going over the lists.  So let’s just start talking with her.  Maybe she’ll let something slip.  But please…don’t let her take over the interrogation.  Again.”

 

The process plodded on through Wednesday and into Thursday. After they worked through the standard list of questions several times, from her sex life to her drug use, her comings and goings in Chechnya, her acquaintances and her personal habits, her interrogators began to feel more and more abashed.  They’d come to admire her poise and calm dignity; they were more than a little in awe of her intelligence and strength.  And of her record in Chechnya. 

“Doctor, we see here that you were awarded the Order of Valor.”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell us about that?”

She paused.  “I suppose I could say that a gentlewoman does not discuss her personal kills, but I don’t think that would be appropriate in this setting.  Tell me, have you ever served in the military?”

“Yes.  Both of us wanted careers in the security services and military service is a good way to come to the attention of the proper people.  Along with university.  As you may know, it is not possible to apply to the security services in the manner of applying for an ordinary job.”

“I did not know that.  In America, you can apply for the CIA the way you would apply for…”

“Yes?”

“I was about to say, a job at McDonald’s.  However, given my present circumstances, I would have to say that I have more respect for the people at McDonald’s.”

“Doctor, do not change the subject.”

“Very well.  Have you been in combat situations?”

“No.  Our service was cut short when we were selected for this.”

“I see.  In combat, most people have two major emotions.  One is fear.  The other is excitement.  You try to balance them because if you let them get out of balance, you are in trouble.  You want the adrenaline, you want the excitement, but you also want the fear.  At least enough fear to keep you cautious.   Then there is training.  The better your training, the more things you can do automatically, so your brain is free to concentrate on the moment.  Fighting a battle is in many ways a very mechanical process.”

“We understand.  But what did you do?”

For a moment, Olivia could not speak and she needed to wipe her eyes.  “In Chechnya, I had a personal security detail, led by a Warrant Officer Simonov.  A wonderful young man, perhaps a little younger than you.  He loved the Army and he loved life and he and his men were very kind to me.  I always felt safe with them.  He was killed when we went into a building that we had been told was secure.  When someone close to you is killed like that, the normal fear and excitement fall away.  You enter a state of mind where you do things that you never thought you could.  Revenge does not begin to describe it.  You become something of an avenging god, destroying utter evil with no sense of anything but the fullness of what you’re doing.  Prisoners were taken out of that engagement, but I didn’t contribute to that.  I didn’t give anyone I encountered a chance to surrender.  I was enraged and I was in pain, including the pain of being shot.  The Chechens set the building on fire, but I wasn’t going to leave my friend’s body to burn.  I wanted his widow and their child to have his body.  So I brought it out.  If there were living Chechens in that building when I left, they didn’t live long.  I hope their deaths were painful.”

“You were very close to him.”

“To all of them.  We knew what we were thinking before we said it, as all good partners in war do.”  She watched their faces and decided to make things a little easier for them.  “Was this sexual?  No.  We were too close for that.  We were brothers and sister.  When we were apart, we barely thought of each other.  But when we were in the field together, especially out with the units, it was a closeness where sex had no place.”

“How did you pick the units you worked with?”

“Outside the brigade?  Word of mouth.  Good people know good people and good people have good people for friends.  I worked with regular motorized rifle, armor, and Airborne units, It was very simple to determine which were the right units that would provide proper testing for my equipment, then use it properly later.  Is this a disciplined military unit, or is this a rabble with uniforms and weapons?  I wouldn’t send my employees to a unit in which I wasn’t confident.  If the Chechens killed them, that was one thing.  If they got killed or hurt in an accidental discharge because someone was careless or drunk or vicious or criminal, that would have been something else.” 

Then Olivia held up her hand.  “Please, a favor, if we are going to be talking like this.”  The two young men stared at her, startled.  She had never asked for anything.  Not food, not water, not a bathroom break, nothing.  In normal interrogations, it was a significant advance if the source asked for things.  It meant he was accepting his dependence on the interrogator.  But this was different. 

“If we can.”

“I know that you wish me only to answer questions.  Machine to machine, almost.  But it is very hard to talk to you as human beings if I don’t know your names.  I do know Colonel Raduyev’s name.” 

They looked at each other.   She had now taken them so completely off-script they couldn’t go back.  “Doctor, we can’t tell you for security reasons.  Proper procedures require us not to tell you our names, unless there is some compelling reason to do so.  Colonel Raduyev introduced himself to emphasize that this is an interrogation that is of interest at senior levels.  We do not have that option.”

“But if we’re going to be spending all this time together, courtesy requires that I call you something.  Would you make up names?”

“We’re sorry.  That is something that can be done at the beginning of an interrogation when it would seem honest.  It is too late for that now.”

“Then may I choose?”

They both shrugged.  “If you like.”

“Boris.”  The name popped out automatically and she wondered where it had come from.  At first, she thought of Borisovich, Suslov’s patronymic.  Then she realized, no, that’s not where it came from.  She suppressed a giggle.

The first young man smiled his acceptance.  His partner asked, “What is my name?”

“Boris,” she said again.

“But he’s Boris.”

“You’re now Boris, too.”

They stared at her, baffled.  “And Arkady and…the other team.  Who are they?”

“Boris.  And Boris.”

They looked at each other and began laughing helplessly, bringing the guard in from his post outside the door.  He just stared at them, shook his head, and left.  Laughter was not something you heard very often in the Lubyanka, and when you did, you often wished you had not.  This was different.  Everything about this case was really very different.  Not that they’d ask his opinion, but he thought they should either shoot her or let her go back to work.  This was a waste of time.  He’d started out thinking they should shoot her, and he was OK with doing that himself.  Now, he was thinking that they should let her go, and that idea made him happier.

One of the Borises asked, “Very well.  As long as we’re playing this game, what may we call you?  Would you prefer something other than Doctor Tolchinskaya?”

“Natasha,” she managed to gasp out between giggles, afraid that if she was not careful, her giggles would turn to tears.

“Why Natasha?”

She re-imposed control over herself and her emotions.  “It’s an American thing.”

“An American thing?”

“Indeed, an American thing.”

 

General Schwartz required twice-daily reports from Raduyev, who delivered them personally.  He read that one and shook his head.  “Why Boris?  Why Natasha?  And what is this ‘It’s an American thing?’” 

“Shall I pursue the matter?” he asked dourly.  “It could be our first big break in this case.” 

Schwartz looked at him, chin in one hand, and drummed the fingers of the other on the table.  “I think not, Colonel.  She’s clean.”  It was extremely hard to prove a negative, of course, and the FSB, like any intelligence service, did not operate according to the principle of innocent until proven guilty.  But chances were extremely good that if it had four hooves, a mane, a tail, and neighed, walked, trotted, cantered and galloped, it was not a duck. 

“Yes, she’s clean.  We resolved that in the first fifteen minutes.”

“I will ask General Getmanov about this Boris and Natasha.  Of course, he will probably have to ask his wife.  In the meantime, let the men continue the questions and conversations, some occasional pressure, not much, unless she changes and becomes difficult.”

“She’s difficult now.”

“Yes, but…how can a woman be so intimidating and so charming at the same time?”

“I’d call it interesting, sir.”

“Yes, of course.  Interesting.  It is hard to keep pressing for something that you know isn’t there.  But I want you all to continue.”

“Each and every Boris?”

“All the Borises.  For now.”

“You know we have scum here who need our attention.  You might let us attend to them before every Boris in the building falls in love with her.”

“How many Borises have we?”

“In the whole building?  The entire complex?  Do you wish me to check the rosters?”

“It might make more sense than what we’re doing.  No. Just continue. I may decide to send in a new interrogator for a final attempt.”

“May I ask who, sir?”

“Major Kristinich.”

Raduyev felt himself turn dead white.  “General…”  Kristinich was a possible witness against her, although his debriefing had turned up nothing more than baseless innuendo.  To allow a witness to participate in an interrogation was something well outside the bounds of acceptable practice.  It virtually guaranteed tainted information.  And then there were Kristinch’s methods.

“Don’t worry, Colonel.  His interrogation will be, shall we say, well-supervised,” Schwartz said blandly.  “Many outcomes are possible.  Or so I’m beginning to think.  And oh, by the way, have you read that Washington Post story?”

“Yes, the minute you sent it down.  Doctor Tolchinskaya has not been made aware of it, per your orders.  May I inquire if the reporter has been arrested or deported yet?”

“Not yet.  I have learned that the reporter has some sort of acquaintance with one of our best people.  I’ve asked Colonel Suslova to contact her and learn what she can.”

“I hope this works.  May I say, the General is taking the latest events very calmly.”

“Only on the outside, Colonel.  However, there may be some chance that we can turn this to our advantage.”

“In what manner?”

“Perhaps by demonstrating how stupid our relations with the Americans have become.  As General Getmanov put it:  smart countries, foolish choices.  For another, it may help us not to make quite so many foolish choices in the near future.  We shall see.”

 

All bureaucracies have rules.  The larger they are, the more rules they have.  One rule, however, is universal.  No surprises.

Maxwell Fajans, CIA Chief of Station, US Embassy, Moscow, was not expecting any surprises.  He was actually having a very good Thursday morning and he planned on mentioning  it to God the following Sunday.  Raised strict Lutheran by a family whose idea of exploring the world was an occasional weekend venture from Queens to Manhattan, he’d abandoned his faith while still a child.  A few years and some nasty scrapes in places like Vietnam, Laos and the inter-German border later, he and God reached an agreement.  Every Sunday morning, he would think about going to church.  After being reassured that it was not necessary, he would report the events of the preceding week, ask for praise or censure as he felt he deserved (usually praise), receive it, then close out his dedicated circuit to the divine for another week.

Divine approval on such an extended basis had other benefits.  He and his wife, Kate, a very successful Washington, DC realtor, had been married for coming up on thirty years and raised three daughters, all of whom were launched into careers they loved, good marriages, and children of their own.  Over the past several months, he and Kate, who’d cheerfully (and wisely) refused to give up her thriving business for one last stint in Moscow, had begun to discuss divorce.  Their conversations were benign.  It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other or enjoy each other any more.  But they’d spent so much time apart that they’d grown apart.  They no longer considered themselves husband and wife in any volitional sense, only members of the same family and that would never change.  Still, each was wondering what it might be like to be married again to someone of choice.

They had broached the issue in a joint email to their daughters, and they had received an email back from Emily, the eldest, a Foreign Service Officer back in DC between gigs in Yemen, which she’d unaccountably loved, and Saudi Arabia, which she was unaccountably prepared to tolerate. 

Dear Mom and Dad:

The Fajans Daughters in Family Meeting have considered your situation, protestations and malfeasances regarding the continuation of your status as bound together in the bonds of Holy Macaroni.  After considerable debate, some sober, some not, we have reached a unanimous conclusion.  Should you be unaware of the meaning of the word unanimous, your attention is invited to any English dictionary currently available to either of you, either in book form or on the Internet.

Our Decision:

There will be no divorce.  Mom, you’re too old to start over.  Dad, you’re too ugly to start over.  And none of us has any interest in stepparents, stepbrothers, stepsisters, step-aunts, step-uncles, step-cousins or step-pets.  Not to mention half-parents, half-brothers, half-sisters, half-aunts, half-uncles, half-cousins or half-pets. 

You may if you wish appeal this decision but frankly, we don’t know where the fuck you would go to do so, so please accept our wisdom as final.

[Signed] Your Loving and Legitimate Children.

 Life is good together, dear Kate, he thought. I think our children like us.  Let’s see if we can make it to the finish line together. 

Maxwell Fajans had joined the CIA as a poli sci grad straight out of Dartmouth in 1962.  He’d chosen the CIA because he’d been genuinely moved by John Kennedy’s challenge to ask himself what he could do for his country, a choice made easier because Dartmouth had the standard Ivy League connections with the Agency and a few discreet faculty inquires sufficed.  The events of October of that year, when the United States and Russia nearly agreed to blow up the world, and the events of November 1963—he still wept at the memory—only deepened his resolve.  He’d spent three years in Vietnam and Laos because that was where the action was.  In 1973, he was doing an obligatory Langley tour, pondering what next as America lost interest in Southeast Asia.  For weeks, he found himself in no good mood regarding his country, his employer, or himself.  Then he heard it said that Henry Kissinger was going around proclaiming that his job was to negotiate with the Soviets for the best second-place deal available to America.  Fuck that, pal.  And fuck you, too, while you’re at it.  He’d then taken his boss to lunch and poured a few more gin and tonics into him than usual, prior to informing him that he was transferring to the East Europe/USSR division.

“Max,” his boss had sloshed out a protest, “you don’t even speak Russian.”

“I will after I finish a year at DLI.”

“And how do you expect to get to Monterey?”

“You will arrange it as your departing gift to me after all my loyal service in your section.  Quickly, boss.  The Defense Language Institute awaits.”

“Why are you doing this?” 

“First, Southeast Asia’s now a career dead end.  Second, I’ve never been comfortable with Asian languages and I’d rather learn Russkie than Chink. And third,” he repeated Kissinger’s comment, “whenever you get an asshole like that as national security adviser to the president, this country needs me.  Bad.” 

He was on his way to Monterey within the month. 

Fajans was not surprised to find he enjoyed learning the Russian language.  And as his career progressed, he discovered that he liked the Russians he dealt with.  Not all the Brezhnev-era people were corrupt, cynical apparatchiki, faking their Communist beliefs.  There were plenty of those and in general, they’d done very well for themselves.  But there were any number of good people struggling to help their country move beyond what so many Russians had inflicted upon other Russians.  Not all of them were dissidents; some showed up in surprising places.  And a few months of Russian experience led him to reject, utterly and forever, the notion that there was, as so many American academics loved to claim, a permanent social contract between the Communists and the people.  The people would submit and accept in exchange for things getting a little better, each generation.  Just a little.  But things were not getting better, even a little, as anyone knew who spent time there.  Fuck the theories.  Go look at the lines outside the stores, waiting for hours to purchase whatever the Kremlin had decided they would have for dinner that night.  Try making a phone call.  He marveled at the CIA’s estimates of the USSR’s steadily advancing prosperity and was one of the first to realize that whatever prosperity they’d achieved was crumbling under the weight of their lunatic military expenditures and their utter refusal to enter the computer age.

He recalled, always vividly, the day he realized that the Soviets also knew what was going on.  It was the Gorbachev years and the two countries were ramping up what became known as MBFR, the conference on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions.  Conventional forces, tanks and planes and artillery and the manpower:  starting to scrap the forces that had stared at each other in Central Europe since 1945.  He’d been assigned to the US delegation.  He’d been drinking with an intriguing new acquaintance, an ethnic Russian colonel, a GRU type whose interests seemed to go far beyond counting things.  The Soviet Army, he explained, was having great difficulty coming up with decent figures on what it had, since it had no idea what it had.  Fajans had countered that, if the USSR didn’t know something as simple as how many tanks and planes it had, how could it know what shape its economy was in?

“No problem,” Colonel Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov had replied.  “We use CIA statistics and reports and adjust our plans accordingly.”

“But that garbage is based on your official figures and you know they’re worthless.”

“I know.”

“But you can’t run a modern economy that way.”

“I know.”

“The whole thing’s going to collapse on your head.”

“I know.”

And so it had, much to the delight of Maxwell Fajans:  a delight that included the chance to stop being a Soviet expert, which he’d always hated, and become a Russian expert, which he’d always loved.  And so he did.  Now he was at the end of his career, the Moscow job a final special posting for a man who’d served well, and he had a chance to maybe do some good.  And he had, quietly, taking whatever unexpected opportunities came his way, working mostly with the men and women his age who were determined to leave their country better than they found it.  From time to time, Major General Getmanov had provided such opportunities.    

Count me happy, he thought.  I have left the world better than I found it.  I have served my country well.  And my family still loves me.

There wasn’t a lot going on in Moscow at the moment.  Perhaps he’d go home to his wife for a few days.  He had his pretext:  helping out with some delicate Russo-American negotiations regarding future aid and IMF loans that were in the works.  Checking in with Langley regarding a few other items, from missing warheads in Kazakhstan and possible nuclear proliferation to the all-too-real proliferation in Moscow of American business people with questionable ethics and connections.  Some of these guys had been deported after brief arrest.  One or two had vanished.  Good fucking riddance, he thought.  Russia has enough problems without that kind of crap, especially from thugs who regarded the US Embassy as there to serve them, no questions asked.  He considered the possibility of surprising Kate.  Neither of them had ever cheated and weren’t about to start sleeping around now, so walking in on something untoward wasn’t a concern.  What was of concern was… he’d once seen a movie wherein a widower said to the soul of his wife, Thirty years did not cool our bed sheets, Madame.  He liked the concept and wondered if Kate might, too.  It had been a while.  To judge by the reaction the thought had produced on its journey from his upper to his lower brain, he still had juice sufficient for the deed.

“Better read this, chief.”

“What is it?”

“Just off the fax.  Washington Post.”

“What is it?”

“Just read it.”

Max Fajans stared at the copy a moment, then reached into a desk drawer and withdrew an item he kept available for just such moments.  It was a dinosaur fossil, a genuine, certified, four-inch long bit of dinosaur bone that he’d been given as a memento by a Polish paleontologist after a rather bizarre encounter involving the return of some World War II items seized by the Germans:  art, jewelry, rare books, dinosaur bones, a samurai sword (probably given to the Germans by the Japanese, but who could be sure?), a gown allegedly worn by Our Lady of Swoboda at her consecration as a prioress, a set of priceless wooden spoons without handles, a…

Max Fajans took out the dinosaur bone, stuck it between his teeth, started chewing, then started reading.  His young assistant left his office quietly, closing the glass door behind him.

“How’s he taking it so far?” asked his secretary.

“Mad enough to chew dinosaur fossils.”

“Oh, Jesus.  Here we go again.”  

 

AMERICAN WOMAN HELD IN MOSCOW ON ESPIONAGE CHARGES.

By Rebecca Taylor, Washington Post Moscow Bureau.

MOSCOW, Thursday, January 9th, 1997.  

During the Cold War, Americans in Moscow were occasionally arrested on charges of espionage or subversion and imprisoned in the dreaded Lubyanka.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a few Americans have been detained.  These have generally been fraudulent or otherwise offensive businessmen, criminals, tourists and students who brought their bad habits with them, or activists run afoul of the authorities.  With the fall of the USSR, everyone assumed that the espionage era was over.  But now an American national, a woman, is once again being held as a spy.  Neither government has yet issued any official statement.  However, from what is known, this incident has the makings, not just of a spy thriller, but of an international love story with a war and some high-tech military miracle gear thrown in.

 According to Russian and American sources in Moscow, on, Tuesday, January 7th, Dr. Olivia Tolchin, an American electronics engineer who once did top-secret work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was arrested by the FSB at the dacha of her lover, a highly decorated Russian Major General named Dmitri Borisovich Suslov. According to a Russian source, in 1993 Tolchin accepted an offer to come to Russia to design tactical ground combat sensors for the Russian Army. According to the Russian source, she established a special laboratory in Moscow, developed these sensors, and personally supervised their testing and use during the bloody and still-simmering war in Chechnya. Apparently, she also participated in combat and was decorated for courage by the Russian Army.  In recent months, Tolchin, a tall, attractive blonde whom the Russians call “Tolchinskaya,” has been seen around Moscow, often in the company of General Suslov.  She has not been seen since last Monday and, according to the Russian source, both her laboratory and her apartment have been sealed.  General Suslov’s whereabouts are unknown.

Tolchin apparently came under suspicion when Russian state security organs obtained a copy of a CIA memo about her.  How they obtained it is unknown, as are the exact contents.  The Russian source believes the memo, written in 1994 before Tolchin arrived in Russia, indicates that she had, at the last minute, offered her services to the CIA, but not as a spy.  “It seems preposterous,” says a Russian source familiar with her activities here.  “Tolchinskaya has done excellent work as a contractor. We are in her debt.  However, one cannot be too careful, even today.  The Cold War may be over but many tensions remain.  It is unfortunate.”

 An American source, also familiar with the situation, says:  “I don’t know if she’s a spy or not.  If she isn’t a spy, if she really came here on her own, she certainly violated a lot of regulations from the conditions of her previous employment and probably a couple laws.  If she was actively fighting in the army of a foreign nation without prior consent by the US government, that breaks some other laws.  Whatever she is, she doesn’t seem to be a traitor or defector in the usual sense of the word.  But if I was her, and the Russians let me out, I’d have to think long and hard before I returned to America.”

At the moment, if in fact Tolchin is under arrest and held in the Lubyanka, she has more immediate problems to consider.  Perhaps the greatest of these problems is that, unless she really is a spy, none of the standard categories apply to her.  Neither do the standard protections that countries sometimes accord each other’s operatives.  This is what makes the case, if there is a case, deserving of attention.  A strange new situation in a strange new world.

 Statements by both governments are expected soon.  Sources indicate that both governments wish to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.

    

Max Fajans took the dinosaur bone out of his mouth, inspected it for new teeth marks, noticed several, then wiped it clean with his handkerchief.  He knew his phone was about to begin ringing with some very senior people back in America asking some very direct questions.  He took a deep breath and screamed for his assistant.  The glass vibrated.  The assistant tumbled in.  Fajans got out his strongest New York accent and screamed in native dialect:  “Why the fuck don’t we know anything about this?”

“Easy, chief.  We’re looking into it.”

“What have you learned?”

“Not much so far.  We’ve had reports of a woman who fits the description here in Moscow.  We’ve heard stories for a year or more about a tall blonde out with the Spetznaz in Chechnya.  But we’ve never followed them up because…”

“Because what?”

“Because it seemed too ridiculous.”

“Doofus, this is Russia.  It exists to be fucking ridiculous.  What do you know about this memo?”

“Hey, chief.  That’s Langley.  Not us.”

“Yeah?  Well, don’t tell that to Langley.  In about a minute, that phone’s going to starting ringing and…”

“Sorry, chief,” his secretary called from her desk.  “No minute.  You’ve got a call.”

“Langley?”

“Uh…not exactly.”

“Can it wait?”

“Better not.”

“OK,” said Fajans, popping the fossil back between his teeth.  He took a deep breath, rotated his fossil and got his voice under control.  He picked up the receiver.  “Fajans.”

“Getmanov.  Are we holding one of your people?”

“I don’t know.  Are you holding one of our people?”

“No games, Max.  It was a long flight and I’m still tired.  We need to get to work on this very quickly.  Before it explodes in all our faces.”

“If you say so.  Good to hear your voice again, by the way.  How long has it been since our last personal encounter?”

“A regime or two ago.  I still have fond memories of the MBFR talks, arguing over how many of our fifty thousand tanks actually worked.  You said twenty thousand.  I said five hundred and forty-six.  I was closer to the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah.  But I got it right on all those movies about how your tanks were able to snorkel across river bottoms so you didn’t have to build bridges.  You people fucking paved the river beds before you made the films.”

“In America, you would call it special effects.”

 “Look, Yuri, at the moment I can’t speak for anybody but myself and that’s hard enough.”

“If would be easier if you took that fossil out of your mouth.”

“How do you know?”

“I am sensitive to dialect.”

“Look, if she’s what this article says she is, you’re welcome to her.”

“She’s much more than that.”

“In my book, she’s nothing but a traitor and one thing I know about you is that you hate traitors.”

“True.  But we’re beyond that with this woman.  She has betrayed you not at all and has given us some incredible technology that she offered your Defense Department and they turned down over and over.  And over.  We’re five years ahead of you in ground sensors.  Maybe ten.  You’re an intelligence officer, show some curiosity and see what you can learn about her.  You might also get hold of this Taylor, assuming she has the total lack of sense to still be in Russia.”

“She’s probably that dumb.”

“Yes.  The more I learn about smart American women, the more I wonder.”

“The more I don’t.  What will you be doing at your end?”

“Calming down my superiors.  I’ll let you know what happens.”

“Thank you.”

“And Max…”

“What now?”

“That memo is genuine.  It was written by one of your people in Vienna.  A certain Mr. Jay Lyons.  Tolchinskaya did not offer to spy.  She offered herself in some undefined capacity so that our two nations might work together a little better.  He dismissed her, and I am quoting from memory, as alcoholic, drug-addicted, probably promiscuous, certainly delusional.  He then wrote a memorandum for the record and filed it and there it sat until…”

“Until what?”

“Until we obtained it.  You said that I never liked traitors.  I don’t.  I like even less traitors who hurt good people.  You might ask your Langley to consider how this memo came into our possession.”

“I’m sure they already are.”

“Do me a favor?”

“What?”

“If you have any more alcoholic, drug-addicted, probably promiscuous, certainly delusional women like Dr. Tolchin, please send them to us.”

“Not my department.  But if what you say about this Lyons jerk is true, I may recommend that we lock him up and beat him until he’s better.”

“We used to do that in my country.  It did not work.  Please emulate only our good qualities.  As for how we obtained the memo…Seek and ye shall find, my friend.  Seek within and ye shall find.”

“Fuck you, Yuri,” Fajans snapped happily.

“Yes,” Getmanov answered.  “They say it’s better here.  My wife agrees.  Let’s get together before I return to Washington.”

“If you return.”

“Life is full of ifs, my friend.  Goodbye.”

 Fajans hung up the receiver.  It felt good to have the blood going again.  He opened his mouth to bellow for his assistant.  The fossil fell onto his lap.  He wanted to tell his assistant to call the Washington Post Moscow bureau and start asking questions.  Then he realized that the number was in his Rolodex.

“Hell, I’ll do it myself,” he growled, his eyes twinkling.  “Should be fun.”

 

Dmitri Borisovich Suslov no longer knew what he felt, or if he felt, or if he would ever feel again.  His world had gone silent.  He could break that silence any time he wanted, by turning on a radio that reported nothing about Olivia, or by his own voice, that had nothing to say.  So he chose silence, the silence of the grove beyond the house, the silence of a telephone that did not ring.

For a day and a night, he’d alternated between fury and fear.  Then the two had melded together and slowly burned out.  Then there was nothing to do but live.  General Trimenko’s aide had provisioned him well.  There was easily food for two weeks, maybe a month, and enough vodka, brandy and wine to host a small party, or perhaps not so small a party.  He was thankful that this had come when he was only a student, not a commander.  He wondered if he would ever command anything again.  Or would want to.

More than once, he’d asked Olivia what it was like to feel oneself a stranger in one’s own country.  He had not fully understood her answers.  Russia to him, whatever else it might have been or might become, was Russia.  Always his.  He could no more imagine leaving his country than he could imagine crawling out of his skin.  But now, he wondered if the country that might imprison, torture, or kill Olivia could really be his anymore, or if he could ever serve it again.

Suslov stared out his window at the birch grove, wondering how many millions of Russians, dying at the hands of other Russians, could even then be certain, This is mine.  Then he remembered what he had told Olivia at the end of one of those talks.  A Russian, he’d said, would never believe that those who were destroying the country somehow had more right to be there than those who worked to save it.  To be a stranger in one’s own home meant that one had surrendered that home to evil, and while Russians might submit, they never surrendered.  Now he was not so sure, and as the hours passed and the telephone did not ring, the silence of his world began to speak to him.  It had little to say.  One question, only.

When are we going to stop doing this to each other?

 

 “Taylor.”

“Ms. Taylor,” said a strong voice with a gravelly New York accent.  “I’m surprised you’re still in Russia.  My name is Maxwell Fajans.  I’m with the embassy.  Interesting little article you wrote.  I’d like to talk to you about it.”

“I’m a reporter.  This is my beat.  I’m very busy.”

“I’m sure you are.  You did some good work in Chechnya.  But you’re a long way from home and the Russians haven’t quite figured out freedom of the press yet.”

“Who are you?”

“Maxwell Fajans.”

“I worked at the Moscow embassy when I was Foreign Service and I haven’t heard of you.”

“You were before my present posting.  Which is also my third tour here.  I assure you that the embassy staff knows who I am.  I can also assure you that if you don’t come voluntarily, I have the authority and the resources to bring you in.  Please be here within the next two hours.”  He hung up and laughed, put his dinosaur bone away and decided, hell, why wait for his doubtless apoplectic superiors to call when he could further complicate their lives.  He picked up the phone again and asked for Langley.

Five minutes later, Rebecca Taylor’s phone rang again.  “Taylor,” she said cautiously.

“Rebecca, this is Irina Borisovna, your occasional running partner.”  Her voice was utterly uninflected, the Russian accent very strong, the message clearly, Don’t make me be Colonel Suslova.  “I should like to speak with you about your article.  I recommend that you accept my invitation.  If you don’t, you may find yourself talking to someone less courteous.  You have an hour to let me know your response.  You have my number.”  She hung up.

Her bureau chief had seen her on the phone, noticed her shaking.  It was something he’d expected.  He went to her cubicle.  “Problem, Rebecca?”

“Umm, no, not quite, boss.”

“You can tell me.”

“No problem, Howie.”

“You damn well better tell me.  Or just let me guess.  Representatives of two governments are suddenly interested in talking with you now and are giving you to understand that this won’t be a social chat.  Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Probably too late to get out of Dodge.  Also correct?”

“Correct.”

“OK,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder.  “You think it over and tell me what you want to do.”

“I will.”

She thought it over, then made another call.  The voice at the other end was calm, with a trace of good-natured amusement.  “Howdy, Miss Rebecca.  Been wonderin’ when you was gonna call.  What took ya so long?”

“I was being intimidated by representatives of two governments.”

“Ours and theirs.”

“You got it, Colonel.”

“Please, CC. Or better yet, Zakuska.”

“CC, would you please be serious!”

“If I get any seriouser, all joy will go out of my life.  I’m an old, old widower and I know you wouldn’t want that to happen.  OK, hon.  Who was it?”

“One call was from an FSB officer who wants a response from me within the hour.”

“This person already known to you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how they usually start off.  Who is he?”

“She.  Lieutenant Colonel Irina Borisovna Suslova.”

“Any relation?”

“The General’s sister.”

“My oh my, ain’t this gettin’ cozy?  How do you know her?”

“Olivia introduced us.  We run together from time to time.”

“I guess that relationship is on hold for a while.  Anything else?”

“We go to McDonald’s.”

“A Washington Post reporter and an FSB colonel go to McDonald’s together?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you order, Happy Meals?”

“No.  Big Macs and fries.  Hash browns when they have them.  Olivia says they’re to die for.”

“Sorry I asked.  You got a good number for Suslova?”

“Yes.”

“Lemme have it.” 

She read it off.  “CC, do you know anyone at the embassy named Maxwell Fajans?”

“Can’t say as I do.  He’s your other caller?”

“Yes.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he was…”

“Neither would I, hon.  Tell ya what.  You just hang where you are and I’m gonna do me some fancy expeditin’.  I’ll be back to you in a few minutes.”

From his flat at Voroshilov, Cooper dialed the embassy and asked them to place a call for him to a number that rang on the desk of another old Army colonel, an Army intelligence officer who’d retired on a Friday and gone to work for his new employer in another branch of the government the following Monday.

“Hey, Clem, how you been?”

“Fine, Coop.  How the Russkies treating you?”

“I’ve acquired a new appreciation for appetizers.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a Russian thing.  Hey, Clem…”

“You want something, don’t you, Coop?”

“Just a little something.  Hey, remember that time at Long Binh when them B-30s was comin’ in on us like hailstones flyin’ flatways and I…”

“Coop, you started working that one before the rockets stopped falling.  Just tell me what you want.”

“Well, Clem, it’s like this.  I’m thinkin’ about taking this embassy guy out for some drinks.  Name’s Fajans and I wanna know if he’s who I think he is.”

“Dunno, Coop.  Who do you think he is?”

“I think he’s who I think he is.”

“Then I guess I think he’s who you think he is.  Anything else, buddy?”

“Yeah, I’ll give him your regards.”

“Please don’t.”

“OK.  I won’t.  Take care, Clem.”

That’s my boy, Clem thought, ringing off and looking once again at the front page of his Washington Post.  Dunno how he got himself involved in this one but I got a feeling that he’s having fun. 

Cooper poured himself another bourbon, then called the embassy back.  “Colonel Cooper for Mister Fajans.  Priority call.  Matter of fact, I’d make that operational immediate.”

“Fajans.”

“Max, you don’t know me.  Name’s CC Cooper, Army colonel, retired.  I’m a visiting professor from the War College at Carlisle Barracks, teachin’ out at the Voroshilov General Staff Academy.  General Suslov is one of my students.  Ain’t seen him in a day or three, though.”

Max Fajans lit up within.  “And what can I do for you, Colonel?”

“Well, first of all, Max, I can’t have you scarin’ my little zakuska when the FSB’s already got her wonderin’ if she’ll see the sun come up tomorrow.”

“Your zakuska?”

“That’s right.”

“A zakuska’s an appetizer.”

“Affirm on that.  You sure got your Russian shit down.”

“Look, pal, just get to your point.”

“My point is, poor Miss Rebecca’s pretty distraught and I’d sorta kinda like to ease her pain, if you know what I mean.  So why don’t you and me and Miss Rebecca and that nice Colonel Suslova from the FSB all get together and have us some drinks.  My treat, since I’m the one what’s issuin’ the invites and since I’m sure all three of you got all kindsa rules on who can accept what from who, drink-wise.  I’m bettin’ that if I got y’all together, we might be able to get a thing or two straightened out.  I know this little restaurant, Mama Zoya’s, in the Arbat.”

“I know it.  I’ll be there.”

“See ya in two hours.  Now I gotta issue some more invites.”

“And what if only you show?”

“We’ll still have each other.”

Next, Cooper dialed Suslova’s number.  She greeted him in a stream of Russian that ended with one word he understood, “Privet.”  I am listening.  

“Colonel Suslova, you don’t know me.  My name is Colonel CC Cooper, US Army, retired.  I’m a visiting professor at Voroshilov.  General Suslov is one of my students.  I also know Dr. Tolchin and Rebecca Taylor.”

“Continue.”  A cold, quiet voice.

“I’m arranging a little cocktail hour this afternoon with the three of us and a fourth you may know by reputation, if not personally.” 

“Continue.”  The voice was still very quiet, still very hard, but not quite so cold.

“Max Fajans.”

 “I am aware of Mister Fajans.  Do you have a place and time in mind, Colonel?”

“I do.  Food’s pretty good.”  He gave her the information.  “About two hours?”

“Two hours, Colonel.”

Taylor’s phone rang again.  “Taylor.”

“CC.  OK, we got us a meetin’ in two hours with Max and Irina and you and me.  Here’s the address.  Be there.”  He hung up.  Rebecca’s bureau chief, who’d been jumping every time she picked up the phone, came over.  “What now?”

“Zakuska’s somehow lined up a meeting with everybody in two hours.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go, of course.  You were wondering if my Pulitzer might be posthumous.”

“I still am.  Are you?”

“Me?  Hell, Howie, I may be the first reporter to be killed by a joint CIA/FSB hit team.”

“Now, that would betoken an improved relationship.  Not to worry.  I’ll write you a splendid obit.  Anything else you’d want me to mention?”

“Yes.  ‘Rebecca was also one of the original members of the Moscow Chapter of the Russian-American Women’s Hash Brown Running Society.  Not that it did her much good.’”

 

Georgii Genrikovich Schwartz had never been a big-picture man, the kind who fretted endlessly over the cosmic implications of his next report up the chain.  He’d learned early on, such concerns led to two kinds of distortion.  One kind involved giving his superiors the information he thought they wanted to have, regardless of truth.  The other kind involved giving his superiors the information he wanted them to have, regardless of truth.  Both kinds led to withholding, manipulation, and worse.  Instead, he’d chosen to keep it honest and play it straight.  No matter what was going on around him, he could be trusted to be truthful:  an honesty that included admitting his errors immediately.  And that had kept him alive, his service on track, and his conscience clean in that regard.

This was about to change.  Never before had he staged anything for the purpose of reporting it.  Never before had he attempted to manipulate those above him.  But now he had no choice.  As a junior intelligence officer, his superiors had been other intelligence officers; his work got folded into the efforts of others and he had no way of knowing how much of it reached policy circles, or in what condition.  But his immediate superiors were no longer intelligence officers; now he reported directly to policy people.  That made things different.  He was no longer merely an analyst, an operative, a manager of the efforts of others.  He had access.

Schwartz sat at his desk, a surface now covered with material regarding Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchinskaya.  A television on a cart sat before him.  He hit the “play” button on his remote.  A video of an interrogation came on.  He watched and listened for a minute, then turned it off.

Very well.  He would do it.  For the first time ever, he would deliberately manipulate those above him to achieve a result he desired but they might not.  Schwartz buzzed his secretary, had her summon Colonel Raduyev and, a few minutes later, told him his plan.  Raduyev protested, as expected.  But Schwartz reassured him as he had earlier.  “Don’t worry.  The interrogation will be well-supervised.  And many outcomes are possible.”    

 

From the very moment the four sat down together at a small table in a quiet corner of Mama Zoya’s, it was clear that someone had to be in charge.  The only question was, who.

“I thank you all for comin’ on such short notice,” said CC Cooper genially.  “I know you all got bosses and other duties and I’m just the outsider here, but I’ve been doin’ some outsider thinkin’ and I reckon if we all just get down to business, we can get this thing squared away in no time.”

 “Colonel Cooper,” Suslova said calmly, “You are certainly right about being an outsider here.”

“You may also be violating the Logan Act,” Fajans added.

“Logan Act?” Suslova inquired.

“It forbids private citizens from negotiating on behalf of the US government.”

“Oh, pshaw, Max.  I ain’t negotiatin’ nothin’.  I’m just hostin’ a leetle get-together.”

Suslova’s face betrayed no flicker of amusement.  “Before we go any further, I need to know certain things.”

“Shoot, Colonel.  But don’t ask me about my relationship with Miss Rebecca here.”

“Very well.”  She turned.  “Ms. Taylor, what is your relationship with Colonel Cooper?”

“He’s my zakuska.”

“Yeeeee…hah!”

Everyone turned to Cooper.  “Sorry,” he said.  “But I just died and went to Heaven.”

“Coming back any time soon?” Fajans asked, disgusted.

Suslova turned to Fajans.  “It appears that we are the professionals here,” she said, still very calm.  “Perhaps we should proceed accordingly.”

“I’m a professional, too,” Rebecca Taylor added helpfully.

Suslova stared hard at her.  “We know.”

“Colonel Suslova, ma’am,” Cooper interjected.  “Y’know.  I’m kinda fond of your brother, specially after that tour of Borodino that he gave me.  What’s he up to these days?”

“Trying to stay warm, I imagine.  Nothing else.”

“Have ya talked at him since all this started?”

“No,” she said, her voice still cold and quiet and hard, her face still impassive, but for an instant her eyes could not hide her pain. 

Cooper saw, and with his own eyes let her know he had.  “Colonel, ma’am, this must be awful hard on you personally.  Tell me, how do you feel about all this?”

Irina Suslova looked at him from a great distance.  “I am not given to revealing my emotions to strangers.  In any event, my English is inadequate.”

“No problem.  Miss Rebecca will help.  Miss Rebecca, would you please confer with the colonel and make sure she’s got the proper vocabulary.”

Taylor and Suslova whispered to each other for a moment.  There was the sound of a soft laugh.  Then they broke apart and Suslova said in perfect English, “In the beginning, I was conflicted.  Now I’m just fucking pissed.”

Cooper beamed.  “That’s better.  Good to get it out, ain’t it?”

“Is this a serious meeting or group therapy?” Fajans fumed.

“Little a both,” Cooper answered.  “Little a this, little a that, it’ll all work out…”

“Colonel Cooper,” Fajans went on, “don’t you know anything about procedures?”

“Surely do.  That’s why I ignore them.  Used to work with you guys in Vee-et-Nam.  Taught me ever-thing I needed to know.  Ever been to Vee-et-Nam, Max?”

“Three years.”

“Yeah?  Me too.  Remember that little place on Tu Do Street…”

“God damn it!” Fajans roared.

“Enough!” growled Suslova, low in her chest.

You leave my zakuska alone! thought Taylor, then said, “CC, you’re getting on everybody’s nerves.”

“Exactly my intention,” said Cooper, shifting from dialect to forthright.  “Now that you’re all mad at me, maybe you won’t be quite so mad at each other.”

Why,” Fajans asked himself aloud, “do I get a sense that Colonel Cooper may have a point?”

“Cause you’re smarter than the average spook.  Shall we get down to work?”

They looked at each and at last nodded.

“OK,” said Cooper.  “This is what we do.  Basic rule is, anything anybody says here, anybody else is free to use in any way they want.  I’m going to control this meeting because I’m the one with the least to lose.  I’m going to lay my cards on the table and then ask a few questions.  OK by everybody?”

It was.

“Tuesday morning, General Suslov was called out of my class.  When he returned, it was clear that he wanted to talk with me.  After class was over, we were walking down the hall and he told me that Olivia had been taken to the Lubyanka and he was headed for house arrest at his dacha.  He asked me to get in touch with Rebecca, said she’d know what this was about and would know what to do.  That’s what I did and that’s how that newspaper story came about.  It was based entirely on what Olivia had told Rebecca some time ago about what had happened when she tried to contact the CIA in Vienna.  Rebecca and I assumed that the memo had in fact been written and that somehow it had made its way to Russia.”

“Made its way…” Fajans growled aloud.

“For the moment, Max, all we need to know is that it did.  Now.  First question.  Does anybody have reason to dispute what I’ve said so far?”  No one answered.  “OK,” Cooper went on, “then we’ll go on the assumption that the story is pretty much correct as written, even though we were shooting in the dark on much of it.  Now we get to the next question.”  His eyes went around the table.  “Mr. Fajans, to the best of your knowledge, is Tolchin a spy?”

“To the best of my knowledge…no.”

“Rebecca, do you have any reason to believe that she is a spy?”

“No.”

“Colonel Suslova, you met Doctor Tolchin through your brother?”

“No.  I was one of her intake interrogators when she first came here.  The personal relationship came later, as did her affair with my brother.”

“I see.  So you know her better than any of us here.  Much better.  What is your thought?’

Suslova paused, then nodded.  “Nothing that I have learned of her, nothing in my professional experience, nothing…nothing human…tells me that she is anything other than the woman we know.  She is not a spy.”

Cooper leaned back in his chair.  “Then it’s unanimous.  Whatever else we may think of her and what she’s done, she is not a spy.  That brings us to the next question.  What do we do about it?”

“Cooper,” Fajans said darkly, “it’s one thing to host a discussion.  When you start moving into policy and actions, you have no authority to…”

“Well, Max,” Cooper replied.  “Sociology tells us that there’s all different kinds of authority.  There’s traditional authority, legal authority, rational authority, charismatic authority.  Traditional authority I ain’t got.  Legal, neither.  Rational?  Who, me?  So I guess we’re just gonna have to make do with charisma.  Now, we ain’t none of us got no power here, except the power to make recommendations and, in the case of Miss Rebecca, the power of the press.  We are in agreement that Olivia is innocent.  What do we do?  Let’s start with Max.”

Fajans shook his head, then laughed.  “Cooper, you sure know how to run a meeting.”

“Deedy do.  That’s why I’m going to ask you again.  What are your intentions?”

“My intention,” said Fajans, “is to report this meeting to my superiors, along with my conclusion that Tolchin is not a spy.  Nor can I see that she’s done anything wrong, much as I don’t like it.  My recommendation will be that we ask the Russian government to release her, but not necessarily into our custody.  We’ve got too many people, here and in the States, who would be happy to fry her for what she’s done and that would just keep the case open.  If she wants to come home, that’s a different kettle of worms.  We can deal with that when and if, not before.”

“Anything else, Max?”

“Yes.  There are some delicate negotiations going on right now regarding aid to Russia, loans, whatever.  This case is an irritant that nobody needs.  I’ll recommend that if we don’t make a fuss about her being an American, neither does Russia.”

“Well said, Max.  Well said and wise.” Cooper turned to Suslova.  “Colonel?”

“I will report this conversation to my superiors and report that I am in total agreement with Mr. Fajans, with one exception.  There are domestic considerations here.  Our economic situation grows worse with each passing month.  Our secessionists and terrorists may be quiet for the moment, but they are far from defeated.  Our society is in turmoil; our politics are often unable to address our needs.  There are many people in the FSB, many people in Russia, who want a return to the former ways.  They will be happy to use this case to further their desires.  We all know how it works.  They start by investigating those who have known Olivia.  That means many senior Army officers.  That means FSB people.  It means GRU people.  They may find nothing on her, but things start turning up on other matters and other people in the course of the investigations.  People are accused.  Then they start to investigate who knows the accused and in a while, Olivia is forgotten and things are out of control.”  She looked around the table.  “This would be tragic for Russia and the world.  So my recommendation will be that we terminate this matter as quickly as possible.”

“What do you mean by terminate?” Cooper asked quietly.  “By any means necessary?”

“Yes,” Suslova answered.  “In this case, Tolchinskaya’s innocence would be a more effective termination than other measures, since the imputation of guilt would remain for those who wish to use it.  Either way, it may become desirable for Tolchinskaya to leave Russia.  I would ask Mr. Fajans to reconsider the option of our turning her over directly to you.” 

“Even if it means locking her away in an American prison?”

“Yes.”

Cooper folded his hands.  “Will you recommend that to your superiors?”

“I will remind them that as long as Tolchinskaya remains in Russia, some people will remain interested in exploiting her alleged misdeeds.  Innocence may be asserted, even proven.  But the events of the past few days will remain.”

“Very well.  Rebecca?”

Taylor exhaled deeply.  “I…I’m going to proceed as planned, CC.  An op-ed on all this for tomorrow’s Post.  It may not make the print edition until Sunday.  But it will be on the website as fast as they can get it up.”

“No names,” Fajans cautioned.

“No names.  Not even the usual anonymous sources, if I can avoid it.  Just me this time.  Just me.”

“Not exactly,” Cooper answered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, honey, I’m gonna help.  Just like last time.  You and me.”

“Why don’t I just quit and you take my job, CC?”

“Cause I’m gettin’ too old to start any more new careers this week.  OK, folks.  Anybody got anything else?”

“Yes,” Fajans asked, “what the fuck is this zakuska thing?”

“You married, Max?”

“Yes.”

“Happily?”

“Very.”

“Then you don’t need to know.”

               

Irina Borisovna Suslova completed her report.  Schwartz thanked her.  The chain of events was now clear.  So were the necessary actions.

“What will you recommend, Comrade General?”

“I will recommend that we accept the recommendations your little collective agreed upon.”

“Including Tolchinskaya’s possible deportation to the United States?”

“If it becomes necessary.  What will your brother do if that happens?”

“Remain in Russia.  Probably suicide.”

“Then maybe it would be best if Tolchinskaya remained in Russia.”

“It is always better not to punish the innocent for…”

“Were you about to say, the sins of the guilty?”

“No, Comrade General.  I was about to say, because of what the evil might do.”

“I tend to agree with you.  Good night, Irina Borisovna.”

“Good night, Comrade General.”

 

Three hours later, CC Cooper watched with satisfaction as Rebecca Taylor hit the Send button and her op-ed made its instant journey back to DC, copies to Maxwell Fajans and Irina Suslova.

“Nice job, Miss Rebecca.”

“Thanks, CC.  Couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I know.”

“Conceited bastard, aren’t you?”

“Nope.  Just respectful of my own abilities.  You going home?”

“No.  I’ll be here all night, in case the editors need me.  Won’t be the first time I’ve slept here.”

“Should I stay?”

“No reason.  You’ve got classes tomorrow.  Also, Voroshilov’s a good place to be for keeping your ear to the ground purposes.”

“I know.  I’m outa here.  Say, Rebecca, honey…”

“I know what you’re going to ask.”

“What?”

“Did I mean it when I said you were my zakuska?”

“You see through me like a piece of glass.”

“I’ll answer, but first you have to explain what you mean.”

Cooper explained.  Rebecca Taylor looked down, then up, then smiled wryly.  “Sure, I’ll be your zakuska.”

“You will?  Honest?”

“Absolutely.  But you’ll have to get the rest of your dinner somewhere else.”

The Doves, Chapter 13: Kristinich

At this point, Olivia has moved to Russia, established her laboratory, and gone to Chechnya several times to test her equipment in combat with a Russian Spetznaz (Special Forces) brigade. She has met her future lover, the brigade commander, Colonel (later General) Dmitri Suslov. She is also getting boxing lessons from Major Vladimir Malinovsky, the brigade’s chief of reconnaissance, who has become a kind of brother. This chapter, set in Moscow and Chechnya, gets into their relations, and her friendship with Warrant Officer Konstantin Simonov, head of her personal security detail. But most of the chapter is about her reaction to witnessing a brutal interrogation conducted by Major Mikhail Kristinich, an attached FSB torturer. She will encounter Kristinich again, in an interrogation booth in the Lubyanka Prison.

 

 “Two things I want you to think about while I’m in Chechnya this time, Mister Borodkin,” Olivia said.  “The first is, how feasible is a new kind of self-destruct mechanism in these sensors, more reliable and safer than acid?  The second is silicon-germanium.”

“If I understand correctly, that line of semi-conductor research has been abandoned by all the companies that pursued it, including IBM.”

“You are correct.  However, I have just learned that while IBM at least officially abandoned the silicon-germanium research, some scientists and managers at IBM have gone underground, calling in chits and diverting, err, reprogramming, money.”

“You can do this in an American company?”

“Sometimes, just as you can do it in a Russian one.”

“How do you know this?”

“I correspond with my father through channels.  It takes a while.  But he does tell me things he thinks I should know.”

“Does he approve of your being here?”

“I don’t know.  I did not discuss my plans with him before I left.  But I do take such comments as that as a sign of approval.  At any rate, I like the fact that although there have been a lot of failures with this material, IBM is at least unofficially pursuing it.  Perhaps it is perverse of me, but I am mistrustful of easy successes.” 

“And yet it seems that is what you have had.”

She laughed.  “I spent eleven years trying to do this in America.  I have those years of failures and false starts and having my projects cancelled or destroyed by others.  Some of these were the sort I could learn from.  Good lessons intellectually, technically, tactically.  Also bureaucratic, from which I tried not to learn, although eventually I had no choice.  Which is why I came here.”

“In Soviet engineering, there was no failure.  There was sabotage and there were personal shortcomings.  But there was no concept of failure as part of creation.”

“And many, many American engineers avoid failure.  They avoid studying what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t.  They can’t, not when the bean counters are breathing down their necks.”

“Bean counters?”

“An uncomplimentary term for accountants.  One of the things that’s destroying American business is that too many corporations are run by accountants and lawyers who only care about money, not what you have to do to produce.  My father made sure I never made that mistake.  When I was a girl, he told me about John Roebling, who was an absolute master of the suspension bridge.  He preferred to study failed bridges.  That’s why the beauty and strength of his work has lasted.”

“We had a similar problem not so long ago,” Borodkin said bitterly.  “Impossible pressures from people who had no idea how to create anything.  Not to mention, how every chance we could, we stole what worked.”

Olivia’s eyes softened.  “Bitterness, sir, is vulgar.  Your country did what it had to, to survive.  Had it not, this conversation would be moot.  Neither of us would have been born.  So we are stealing what works because we can’t start from scratch but we are also going to steal promising failures, because Mister Borodkin, we will innovate here.  In this lab.  So as my administrator, this is another thing you are going to think towards while I am gone.  We are going to need more engineers and more technicians, and we are going to need some expanded production facilities.”

Borodkin found himself feeling a wave of real pleasure, interrupted by fear and the resentment that fear occasioned.  It had become a daily pattern with Borodkin.  His resentment of Olivia protected him from himself, a resentment that grew ever more complex, nuanced, and serrated.  “Yes, Doctor.”

“Good.”  She rose abruptly, awkwardly, catching her right hipbone hard on the edge of the desk.

In the aftermath of the accident, her ligaments, which connect bone to bone, and so tend to lie beneath the tendons that connect muscle to bone, had knotted up to support the breaks and fractures.  Many of them were still corded, one in her lower right back so much so that it felt like bone, stubbornly resistant to all her attempts to stretch it.  With the normal flexion between her pelvis and lower spine greatly reduced, she felt the impact deep in both structures.  It felt like her body was being torn apart and set on fire. 

Taken by surprise, without the least opportunity to prepare herself, the pain overwhelmed her in an instant.  She found herself choking back vomit until she could locate the wastebasket behind her desk.  Olivia knew she would never make it to the bathroom, so she didn’t try.  She motioned to Borodkin and said, “Water, please.  Paper towels.”  Borodkin complied, his concern for her vanishing into resentment that he should have to do such a thing, then sudden pleasure at her incapacitation.  He returned with the items, then looked away as she rinsed out her mouth, spat into the wastebasket, covered the remains of her lunch with the toweling while struggling to gain control over her breathing.  She had morphine although she rarely used it, but this pain was as bad as anything since rehab.  She thought she could feel, with great precision, the breaks and the metal pins.  Her hands trembling, she reached into her purse and found the bottle, shook out a tablet and washed it down with the dregs of her cold tea.  After a few minutes, she was able to force composure into her voice and manage a coherent murmur.  “I will be worthless for the rest of the day, so please call a car for me and I will see you in the morning.”

Borodkin obeyed with sullen happiness, sullen at having to obey another order, happy that, for the rest of the day, he was free.

The next morning, beginning her daily routine of stretching in bed while she was still under the warm covers and continuing in the hot shower, a near-necessity everywhere but in Chechnya that took at least fifteen minutes and sometimes was simply fucking hard, she felt she had just the slightest bit more flexion in her lower spine and pelvis.  It might have been her imagination but she set about ruthlessly exploiting the possibility.

 

The boxing ring, such as it was, that she shared with Major Malinovsky was now in Gudermes, Chechnya’s second city and the focus of fighting now that Grozny was more or less pacified.  But it was such a world to itself that it could have been anywhere.  It had four corners, sometimes demarcated only by chairs or buckets.  When she stepped into it, when the lesson began and the fear abated, she found herself in a place of floating sensations.  When she sparred with him, time did not exist in any ordinary sense.  It slowed down and accelerated.  She saw what they did with great slowness, sometimes watched their combat develop so slowly she was able to understand what he had taught her.  Sometimes she was able to react before she heard his clear, even tenor telling her how and when to hit, telling her what to do with her feet.  She had once read a thriller that described boxing not as a sweet science; there was nothing scientific about it.  But it was all art, but as the holy trinity of hitting, timing, and footwork.  That writer was correct and wrong.  It was a trinity and it was also holy.  But it was also a sweet and holy science. 

The simple fact was that Malinovsky liked to hit people, a lot—but only if there were rules, and only if they could hit back, hard and effectively.  He had never had the slightest interest in hitting people who couldn’t hit back, found it a disgusting perversion of boxing, of manhood, of the soldierly virtues.  So he had begun very gently, as a man working with a woman, as a teacher working with a new student.  He never forgot that he had the advantage of twenty kilos of muscle, a quarter of a century of experience, and no serious injuries over someone who had been horribly hurt and permanently damaged.  He had quickly realized that she was far more afraid of hurting him than he was of her.  At first he thought it absurd, ridiculous.  And then he had realized, watching her move, seeing how tightly she was braced in her lower spine and pelvis, that she probably knew more about pain than he could imagine, even though he could imagine a great deal.  So he had begun hitting her sooner and harder than he expected to.  Still, he pulled his punches; he would never hit her with full force.  But he also realized that the only way to get her to hit him with conviction was to hit her hard enough to get her attention, then teach her how to discipline her anger and aggression. 

By mutual consent, they avoided full-power shots at each other’s heads.  Olivia avoided low blows, Malinovsky avoided high blows.  He had, of course, been thinking about her breasts, even though Suslova had helped her find a chest protector in Moscow.  You used them in judo, too.  Breasts mattered.  She didn’t look like any woman he’d ever seen but she also didn’t look like anything else, either.  It could be unnerving.

 Malinovsky hit low, a body blow, and Olivia deflected it lower.  She watched his gloved fist impact her right hip, had a fraction of a second to prepare herself for appalling pain, and instinctively braced herself hard.  Strange, that.  It went completely against both her common sense and Malinovsky’s training of her.

The sound of her pelvis and lower spine being jarred loose from each other, the sudden impact of the blow breaking the compression of that ligament, was obscenely loud, like a pistol shot.  The pain was there and it was intense, but to Olivia’s surprise, it wasn’t horrible.  She could feel the deep heat of blood being able to circulate freely, rather than the sensation of her body being torn apart and set on fire. 

For a moment, Malinovsky struggled with the fear that he’d broken bone, possibly even rebroken her hip.  Then Olivia backed away, got her right leg under her, feeling the sharp tingles of long-impaired circulation resuming.  She let out her breath, circled to the right, then the left.  Malinovsky could see the new flexion in her lower back, buttock and upper thigh, could see for the first time the power starting to come up her thighs into her lower back as it should. 

“Nice hit,” she said, beginning to breathe normally again.

“Continue?” he asked shakily through his mouth guard.

“Please.”

 

Alternately murderous and benign, Konstantin Eduardovich Simonov had a cheerful round face, pug nose, and freckles.  Originally from St. Petersburg, he had become a warrant officer in an unusual way.  He’d opted to be drafted, rather than continue to pursue a university education that he knew he wasn’t really mature enough to benefit from.  He did this much to the disgust of his parents, low-level apparatchiks who had worked very hard to make sure their children would rise higher.  The Army was no place to rise higher.  Then Gorbachev released all university students from their military obligation, a blatant attempt to curry favor with the intelligentsia, the apparatchiks, and the West.  His ugly gesture had tremendously insulted all those who were in service because they wanted to be or felt they were needed.  Simonov was one of those who refused to quit the colors.  He liked the Airborne, and he ended up liking Spetsnaz more.  The training was inherently extremely interesting.  And he realized that he liked combat.  He had suspected he would like it before he partook, but the actuality of liking it had taken a lot of getting used to.  He feared becoming addicted.  A very wise officer had sensed it and told him, you just needed to keep that pleasure, like all pleasures, in its particular place.  Simonov took the lesson to heart and began to ponder his future as a soldier who wanted more out of soldiering than combat.  He didn’t want to remain in the enlisted ranks.  But he didn’t want to become an officer.  Too much responsibility, too much hypocrisy, too little pay.  Becoming a warrant officer allowed him to be a soldier with some status and pursue what quickly became his second-favorite military pleasure:  training other likely lads and turning them into soldiers.  Real soldiers. 

Of course, real soldiers didn’t spend their time providing security details for an American engineer who had once worked for the American Department of Defense.  Much less a woman.  Let alone a pretty woman with a really excellent doctorate and mind.  Nor did he ever expect to have the experience of a very pretty American woman engineer with an excellent doctorate and mind flopping down beside him one day in a ruined building in a secured neighborhood where they were training, and then having her lie back on her rucksack and ask him what he wanted by way of technology.

“You can’t be serious, Doctor.  People like you don’t ask people like me what we need.  People like you aren’t even supposed to be here.  Least of all, women.”

Olivia looked into his eyes and felt a sudden playfulness, long suppressed, with this young man.  Colonel Suslov had assigned Simonov to run her personal security detail and had told Olivia, sternly and in his presence, that she would obey him immediately and without question whenever danger arose.  Since then, Simonov had barely spoken to her, even in the line of duty, except to bark an occasional “Down!” or “Into that building!” or some such.  His attitude had clearly been, “You’re here.  I have my orders.  So do you.  That’s all there is to it.”

 At first, she’d regarded him as little more than another minder, another Borodkin.  But she’d watched him as he’d watched her, and over time they’d acquired a certain abstract respect for each other.  Olivia decided she liked him, in the way Americans often liked 1950s juvenile delinquents or difficult dogs.  You never quite knew whether to beat them or scratch them behind the ears.  Today, exhausted but happy and with things going well, Olivia decided to do some scratching.

“You’re right,” she said calmly.  “But I have my reasons.  I’d heard that Russian soldiers are most excellent in bed, and as a professional woman well over thirty, my chances of marrying an American man were worse than my chances of being hit by a meteorite.  Or so I was told by the experts on all the TV shows I never watched and in all the books and magazines I never read.  I decided to become, as we say in America, proactive.  My way of improving my marriage odds involves hauling around twenty kilos of crap on a wrecked back, being cold, dirty, hungry, and thirsty most of the time, obeying you unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, even when it involves diving into sewers, and occasionally even shooting at people I can’t see, just to keep their heads down.  I can’t tell you how sexy I find all this to be, so I thought that as an even more exciting form of foreplay I’d ask you what military technology you wanted.”

For an instant, Simonov had a sensation of blowing hot tea through his nose.  Then he started laughing.  Olivia joined him and they found themselves trying to stop, looking at each other, then laughing again.  After it finally ended, with two sets of ribs hurting, Simonov wiped his sprouting beard.  “But you talk to the Kombrig and the chief of reconnaissance about what they need.”

“I do.  And I talk to people at echelons well above them about what they need.  But I also talk to the commander of my security team and his troops about what they need and want.”

“Russian boys are stubborn.  It takes a while for us to figure some things out.”

“Americans, too.”

“I believe,” he said.  “I will think about your question.  For now, we need to move on down the street and see how your others are doing.”  They gathered themselves and stepped outside.  Fifty meters later, as they approached the door of yet another ruined building, Simonov stopped, then pointed to a wire, nearly invisible amid the junk and garbage on the ground before them.  He backed her off two paces, then stopped.

“Do you see the wire, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

 “Do you see the secondaries?”

 “Yes.

 “So do I.  Note what they’ve done.  The door is wired.  But so are the logical places where you might take cover in event of ambush.  There may be more wires behind us.  Let’s give thanks whoever made this set of traps isn’t here to spring the ambush.”

“Or maybe doesn’t consider us worth the effort.”

“Then we’ll give thanks for that, too.  Now let’s turn around and walk back to where we were, one step at a time, eyes on the ground for wires or anything that looks like mines.”

Simonov took her wrist.

“No, Warrant Officer.  We walk ten meters apart.”

“Very well, Doctor.  But I must tell you.  You’ll never find a husband like that.”

 

Three days later, on a long road trip to visit the detachments outside of Gudermes, they took fire from an ambush.  Their Uazik, the tough and reliable Russian idea of a jeep, took some rounds, which infuriated Simonov, who cursed and kept driving.  Olivia caught a glimpse of motion at an intersection before them.  Time slowed and accelerated as it did when she boxed.  Calmly, she put several rounds from her assault rifle into a Chechen man’s chest.  He dropped his weapon and fell.  They didn’t stop.  Olivia fired randomly in front of them.  Suppressive fire forward, eyes on the flanks.  What went on behind them, went on.

 They got out of the killing zone unharmed.  The ambush had been sloppy, inept, or perhaps they were just a passing target of opportunity that had yielded nothing except at least one dead attacker.  Simonov slowed the vehicle as, a half kilometer later, their detachment approached, told them what had happened.  They went into tactical formation and began their slow advance to the ambush site.  Simonov then turned to Olivia.  He was curious.  She was in the midst of realizing what she’d done for the first time:  killed another human being who intended her death.  Wait until you learn how much you can really like it, Doctor, he found himself thinking.  But that would take a different kind of contact, harder, longer, far more violent.  That was an experience it was his job to make sure she didn’t have.  “Very good shooting, Doctor,” he said softly.

“Thank you,” she murmured from deep within herself, and he saw within her eyes more than the usual array of emotions.  He saw a certainty.  I have killed.  I am still…me.  He understood.

Later that evening, he found her leaning up against a wall of a shattered mountain hut, watching the sun go down, holding a cup of tea in her hands with those odd fingerless gloves.  He took in the elegant profile of her face and the strong line of her neck, the way she leaned back against the wall, one leg tucked up under her, her rifle slung in front of her body, her desire liquid and intense.

This was a new experience for her.  Olivia had never reacted that way to simple danger, or to hunting animals.  This was a reaction to killing her own kind.  She’d heard about men needing to change their shorts after successful contact, but never about women needing to do so.  She needed to do so.  She wished Irina Borisovna were there for her to ask her about it.  Put it on the agenda for our next run together, she thought.

With a downward rush of blood, Simonov realized that he wanted to rape her about a dozen times.  No, not like that at all, that was no joke, just lay her down somewhere clean and soft and warm and quiet and fuck her hard until she was thoroughly satiated.  If a woman trusted you enough to let you do that to her, it was extremely satisfying to watch her floating on the sensation.  Do it once and you’d wonder why you’d ever wanted to get off fast.  Or at all. 

He was aware that she was watching him out of one glacial eye, and as if she knew his thoughts, he found himself turning scarlet.  “I apolo…”

She raised her hand and lowered it, a small gesture of just a few inches that effectively silenced him.  She sipped her tea and Simonov took refuge in his own mug.  After a while, she spoke, her voice dry, bemused, gentle.  “So.  Have you given any more thought to your needs?”

Simonov exhaled a great deal of tea all over the sprouting orange tufts of beard that he kept hoping would turn into something terrifying or at least impressive or at least decent or at least inoffensive to the Kombrig, none of which would never happen.  “Doctor?”

“Your technological needs.  Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he laughed.  “There is something I must relay to you.  This afternoon, our boys went back into where we were…driving.  They brought in two prisoners.  One seems to be some sort of bomb maker.  They call such persons, engineers.”

“I did not know that.”

“It does seem wrong.  It may have been the man who made that trap we found ourselves in.”

“What is being done with him?”

“He has been given to Major Kristinich.”

 

Wisely clean shaven, Simonov rapped hard on the door of Suslov’s quarters, such as they were:  just a quiet alcove in the underground warren of cellars, a former honey factory that was the brigade’s forward headquarters in Gudermes.  There was room enough for his rack and some shelves, enough empty floor space to stretch out, and a door for privacy. 

Suslov lay on his rack, pondering how Olivia had impacted his schedule.  He had groups, the Spetsnaz equivalent of platoons, all over Chechnya, plus Dagestan and Ingushetia.  He had noticed that he tended, whenever possible, to coordinate his visits to any given location with Doctor Tolchinskaya.  He liked her presence.  She was calm in her own right.  His men were safer for her, and that made her very comforting for him to be around.  Russian units had been sent into Grozny back in January without satellite imagery, with tourist maps.  Whatever the FSB had been doing in Chechnya prior, it had apparently not been developing actionable intelligence.  The price paid in soldiers’ blood for that ineptitude had been very high.  Now, in addition to her audio/infrared sensors, Doctor Tolchinskaya had begun to develop aerial drones capable of quick-response, small-scale photo reconnaissance.  It was crude, still more of what she called a line of thought than any proper research and development effort, but so very much better than what they had.  The men had come to think of her as a miracle worker and Suslov had to remind them and himself that some miracles took longer than others. 

He liked, whenever he could, to watch Olivia and Malinovsky sparring.  An odd sensation, seeing two people for whom you cared very much, hit each other in very serious play.  Wistfully, not jealously, he envied them the ferocious clarity of their relationship.  His own feelings for the woman were very deep and, given the present impossibility of any decent way of discovering if she might return them, complex.  So he simply enjoyed her presence as he could.

He’d had a long day, most of it taken up by arguing about pay with a higher-echelon finance officer, finally shaking loose some back pay for the men.  Food was not such a problem.  The brigade usually had it and the men could sell it.  This was a very bad idea in any unit Suslov commanded.  But he understood why it sometimes had to happen.  In any event, it wasn’t like what the higher-ups did with the brigade’s pay:  putting it out at interest while inflation soared, making private fortunes, then releasing it the men after it had lost much of its value.  And then the bosses wondered why the soldiers wouldn’t fight, as if sane men fought for those who held them in such low regard while profiteering off their misery. 

At least I’m not married, he thought.  At least I don’t have children to worry about.  He’d never thought there would come a day when he’d be grateful to be divorced and childless, but it had.  It was a day due not to American military might, but to American economic advice and to the thuggish Russian understanding of private enterprise.  He’d been indoctrinated as a Communist and been proud to call himself one.  He had also been extremely aware of the shortcomings of Communism and like most Airborne officers felt quite free to express his opinions in ways that would have horrified any member of the Moscow and St. Petersburg intelligentsia, loyal or dissident.  But he’d come to the conclusion that capitalism, at least as Americans preached for Russians to adopt it, was just another way to impoverish and humiliate his country.  What he could not understand was why Russians were participating in it.  Especially Russians with more money than they would ever need.  Doing so at the expense of Russians struggling to stay alive.

“Kombrig?”

He abandoned his thought and looked up from the novel he was trying to read, when the cat on his chest would let him turn a page, which she had not for the past few minutes.  The cat, a grey and brown tabby female that, in keeping with Army tradition, he had named Mashka, was a goodly cat.  She slept on his pillow when he was gone, and usually beside but sometimes on top of him when he was there.  More than once he had woken in the night to hear her purring away, watching him protectively and affectionately.  Lately, she had taken to bringing him gifts that he did not eat.  When he was reassigned elsewhere, he would take her.  He could provide for a cat just as she tried to provide for him.  “Good evening, Konstantin Eduardovich.”

“Sir.”  He paused.

Suslov looked at his warrant officer closely.  “What troubles you, son?”

“Our American.”  He paused.  “She knows, she has some idea what is being done to the prisoner and it distresses her.”

“How do you know this?”

“We were walking back to our quarters when the screams began.”

“Has she said anything?”

“Not a word.  She has no authority and she knows it.  But it is obvious.”

“How is it obvious?”

“Kombrig…we drove through an ambush yesterday.  She killed a man.  Her first.  She is still coming to terms with that.  This is not helping her.”

Now that he paid attention, Suslov could hear the man screaming somewhere in the underground warren of cellars that was the brigade’s headquarters.  He knew exactly where, in fact.  How it could be, he wondered with a wonderment that had begun in Afghanistan and would never end, that the really horrible thing about combat was not what you did.  Survival was survival and he’d never had much use for the high moral standards of those who risked nothing.  The truer horror was what you became inured to, and what that loss of sensitivity made possible.  He’d made his peace with that long ago.  Indifference to the sufferings of others could be dealt with by a combination of discipline and pride in themselves and their officers…and by having such as Kristinich available.  What the men felt was their own affair.  What they did was his affair.  But he had no such authority over Olivia.  All he had to help her over this moment was himself.

“Thank you, Warrant Officer Simonov.  I commend you and your men for protecting Doctor Tolchinskaya.”

“She protects us, Kombrig.”

“Yes.  She does.  I will tend to her now.”   

Ten minutes later, Suslov knocked on the door to Olivia’s quarters, a room even smaller than his own that at least afforded her some degree of privacy.  The woman who opened the door was drawn, her eyes haunted, and he realized that her privacy had been a mistake.  It had imposed upon her a degree of isolation no man in the brigade had to endure.  At the beginning, it had been necessary.  But no longer.

 “I can hear quite clearly,” she said at last.  “I have been listening for some time.”

“I know.  Warrant Officer Simonov told me that you are in some distress tonight from events of yesterday as well as,” he shrugged, “the present situation.”

“It was kind of him to do so,” she said bitterly.

“He did so because he cares about you,” Suslov answered sharply.  “Do not blame him.  Also, please do not blame me for invading your privacy.”  Privacy was an American concept but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real to him.  “Under ordinary circumstances, I would ask you if you wished me to leave.  But these are not ordinary circumstances, things that can be put off until another day.”

“I can hear that.”

“Yes.  Now you must also see it.  Doctor Tolchinskaya, I would like you to witness this interrogation.”

“Why?”

The word was a challenge, not a calm and simple question.  Suslov suddenly found it hard to speak to her.  He was furious with himself for condemning her to isolation, furious with himself for not realizing that all this would inevitably catch up with her and furious with himself for making this plan to deal with it.  But none of the words he’d ever used with his soldiers now seemed to avail.  He examined her face and eyes closely for defiance but there was none.  It was an honest question.  But it was still a challenge.  “So you know that as bad it is, it is not as bad as you think.  You’ve already learned that lesson once, yesterday.  I am sorry that you must learn it again so soon.  But we do not always have the luxury of setting our own schedules in these matters.”

“I do not really have a choice, do I?”

“No.  Out of respect for you, I am speaking courteously, but this is actually an order.  Please follow me.”  He did not look back.  Underneath the screams, he could hear the faint awkwardness of her stride.  Outside another doorway, he halted and turned to her.  “You must be silent until we leave.”  His voice was absolutely level.  Out of a sense of mercy, he took her arm just above her elbow in a firm grip.  He felt her flinch from his touch but she did not resist. 

They went in quietly and were not noticed.  She didn’t know what she’d expected.  Kristinich, burning holes in people.  Kristinich, cutting off the prisoner’s fingers one at a time, the way the Chechens did, or disemboweling the prisoner in order to strangle him with his own entrails.  Last winter, such behavior by the Chechens had been unheard of.  But that was no longer the case.  She’d personally seen the body of one Russian they’d practiced on.  Often, the Russians repaid the debt in full.  Any captive would do.  Heating bayonets until they glowed, then cutting people open, seemed to be a favorite in the nearby motorized rifle regiment.  This, by contrast, was almost decent.

Olivia looked.  Across the cellar from them, one man was bound securely to a heavy wooden chair, wired up to a field telephone, specially adapted for the purpose by the addition of a small transformer.  The Chechen was struggling not to scream, then screaming.  The conscript medic, whose job it was to work the field telephone while not doing any damage, seemed in almost as much anguish as the prisoner he was condemned to torment, then patch up.  Major Malinovsky—Brother Vladimir—was pacing, his skin and uniform barely containing a physical rage that was a terrifying contrast to his meditative peace in the boxing ring.  At a nearby desk with a tape recorder, notepad, and reference files, under a bulb rigged to expose the prisoner’s face while shadowing the rest of the cellar room, Kristinich slouched in what seemed to be the FSB’s uniform of jeans, black sweater, and black leather jacket.  After a few seconds, Malinovsky lifted his hand, a signal Kristinich dared not disregard.  There was silence, except for the prisoner’s panting.  In the silence, the same voice Olivia knew from sparring with Malinovsky, the clear, even tenor telling her how to move and how and when to hit said to the prisoner:  “You are very brave and I salute you.  But you have no choice.  You will not be permitted to die or even lose consciousness.”

“We need to discuss your contacts, money, arms, and weapons caches,” Kristinich said.  The Chechen said nothing.  “We need to discuss certain political matters.”

No answer.

“Increase the voltage, Private.”

“Sir, that much voltage and he may tear muscles or break bones.”

“Good.”  A soft, leisurely word.

Instinctively, the young private turned to Malinovsky. 

“Danger of a heart attack, Private?”

“No, Comrade Major,” the conscript said angrily.  “Not even close.” 

Electricity was relatively clean.  If you were halfway competent, there was little risk of doing serious harm.  And when it was over, it was over, which gave the subject an enormous incentive to cooperate.  Increasing the voltage so that the Chechen actually broke bones against his bonds and the chair—Malinovsky now understood why Kristinich had been so particular about how the man was secured—negated both those advantages.

“Inspect him now.”

The medic complied.  “No broken bones.  No torn muscles.” 

“Then take him close to it, Medic,” Kristinich said sharply.

After a few seconds, Malinovsky nodded. 

Lack of viciousness did not mean mercy, Medic Tarasov belatedly understood. 

It began again. Hideous, Malinovsky thought.  Kristinich sensed his disgust and decided to play with it.  “We are both majors.  Not enough rank to draw too much attention, but enough to have some fun.  He will be killed anyway, so what does it matter how he gets there?”  A sardonic, seductive voice with its own diseased logic.

Malinovsky was trapped.  He had his colonel’s orders to keep it professional.  He had Kristinich before him, using the Chechen’s torment to manipulate and humiliate him.  And there was the Chechen in the chair, who had been too pious a Muslim to commit suicide.  Russians did that, not Chechens.  Any reasonable person would, but when had anyone ever been able to describe the Chechens as reasonable?  Chechens were even less likely to be reasonable than they were to be pious.

Malinovsky decided to act.  He walked to Kristinich, stood behind him, then sank his fingers into Kristinich’s shoulder, driving them hard to bone.  Kristinich became aware of the pressure, then the pain.  Still watching the prisoner, he squirmed in Malinovsky’s grip but dared not tell him to stop or turn to confront him.  From his breathing, Malinovsky knew he was hurting him without coming anywhere close to tearing skin and muscle.  Good.  A small taste of what you like to watch.

 “Pretend you are a professional,” Kristinich sneered, “even if you are a…”

“A Jew?”  Malinovsky now began to manipulate the bones. “Indeed I am, Major Kristinich.  That is why I am doing this.  It’s my way of letting you know when you become unprofessional.”  He relaxed his grasp a moment.  Kristinich sagged.  “So, Major,” Malinovsky went on.  “Every time you turn on the voltage, my Jew fingers will dig into your bones.  Every time you increase the voltage, my Jew fingers will increase the pressure.  If any of the Chechen’s bones are broken, well, as the God of the Jews commands us, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth…bone for bone.’”

Kristinich shuddered, sick from the pain Malinovsky was inflicting.  The screaming continued.  Malinovsky went on.  “Now, Major, should you wish to remove this inconvenience to your activities, you may either confront me physically or you may terminate the electrocution long enough to permit me to ask some questions.”    

Kristinich signaled to the medic to stop.  The Chechen sagged, exhausted and limp in his bonds, breathing hoarsely.  Malinovsky released Kristinich and went to the prisoner.  “I’m going to give you a moment to rest.  Then I’m going to ask you one question.  If you answer well, I will ask others.  If you do not answer, or answer poorly, this will continue.  The choice is yours.  We will repeat the procedure, fifteen seconds of electricity, one minute to rest, one question, until we reach whatever ending we reach.  You do understand that the rest intervals will simply make the next shocks worse.  My first question is simple.  What is your name?”

No answer.  Malinovsky returned to stand behind Kristinich and placed one hand on his shoulder gently.  “When I squeeze down on your shoulder, Major, you may order the medic to begin.  When I release, you may order the medic to stop.  The pressure will not be great, unless we find ourselves in some sort of disagreement.”

Kristinich nodded.  It began.  Malinovsky moved a bit to one side so that he could see Kristinich’s face.  What he saw on it, he had seen before, and Malinovsky wished he could dismiss it as sexual.  But it wasn’t.  It was the emptiness of watching another’s suffering, of causing another’s sufferings, and feeling nothing oneself, and taking pleasure in that.  It was more than impotence taking pleasure in degradation.  It was emptiness exalting itself.  And Malinovsky understood what a rabbi had once told him.  The Jewish Gehenna wasn’t the Christian Hell of everlasting physical torment.  It was the total absence of God.  Malinovsky had no use for a God, any god, who would permit these things to happen, even encourage and demand them.  But he’d understood about Gehenna as being thrown into an emptiness that tormented humanity by proclaiming, For you, there is nothing else. 

Malinovsky released his grip.  Kristinich signaled the medic to stop, then inspect the prisoner.  Then Malinovsky walked to the Chechen.

“Aslambek Baisultanov, you are a bomb maker and a very good one.  You have been in and out of Chechnya.  Major Kristinich will now recite your recent itinerary.”

Kristinich read off a series of names, dates and places.  Kizlyar and Makhachkala in bordering Dagestan were frequently mentioned, but so also were Sochi on the Black Sea, Rostov, Novorossiysk and Volgograd, or Stalingrad, all in Russia proper.  The Chechen mafia network, Malinovsky could guess:  a great deal of effort, of real work, had gone into obtaining that information, he knew.  “I would like to know more about your caches and contacts.”

Silence once more.  And once more, it began.  Baisultanov shrieked.  The medic operated his equipment in a trance.  Malinovsky guessed the lad had shut his mind down to the absolute minimum.  So had the man he was ordered to torture.  As the interval ended, Malinovsky took a cup of tea, crouched down before the Chechen, held the mug to his bloody, bitten lips, let him drink.  “I have said before, you are very brave.  I say this, one fighting man to another.  But courage here is worth nothing but pain.”

The Chechen drank, then snarled, “We would do worse to you, Jew, and much worse to that Russian dog.”  A whisper now, the defiance almost gone from the voice.

“Insha’Allah, I learned in Afghanistan not to be taken prisoner.  Give him what he wants and we can end this horror.” 

“So, will you now discuss caches and contacts with me?”  Kristinich’s intelligent, interested voice, a voice Malinovsky knew would be in his nightmares until he died, nightmares he knew would make him miss his old, violent dreams from Afghanistan. 

Involuntarily, the Chechen looked to Malinovsky’s battered boxer’s face.  Malinovsky nodded.  “Yes.”  A whisper.  Then, “Thank you.  Jew.”

Malinovsky nodded, then stepped away.  He heard Kristinich, now all professional, say to the Chechen, “It is important to be accurate and honest.”

In the shadows, Suslov could feel Olivia shaking in his grip.  Malinovsky and Kristinich noticed their presence.  Malinovsky felt an accession of shame.  Kristinich observed them for a moment, then turned away, pleased.  Olivia shuddered with the knowledge that, what he was doing to the Chechen so indifferently, he would have no problem doing to them.  The greatest evil, the one that makes the others possible…she put the thought aside.  Then it returned to her, unbidden.  The evil that makes the others possible is the unendurable knowledge of one’s own emptiness, and of the fact that others were not.  She wondered briefly whether what was said of greatness was also true of emptiness.  Some are born that way.  Others aspire to it.  Others have emptiness thrust upon them.

Silently, Suslov took Olivia back to his own quarters.  He wanted to say something kind to her, to touch her gently.  He dared not.  He knew that if he now offered her anything remotely sexual, remotely romantic, she would never forgive him.  She would regard it as an unspeakable betrayal of the thing that was between them, whatever that was, and she would be right.

“Sit down.”  He poured them both a measure of vodka.  Officially, conscripts in the Russian Army were not allowed to drink alcohol.  Unofficially, there was endless alcohol.  If you were wise, you used it to disinfect yourself internally and ease psychological distress while understanding there was not enough alcohol in the world to numb you out, and that alcohol and weapons were not generally a good combination.  “Drink this.”  She did as she was told, coughing hard as the unaccustomed liquor went down.  “You are free to speak.”

She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak.  She shook her head again, and he realized she was struggling for coherence. 

He poured her a second measure of vodka.  “Drink this, too.” 

She took a deep swallow.  “Colonel, how can you allow this?”  Then she stopped.  The vodka was having a mercifully numbing effect.

“Before I answer you, I must ask you a question.”

“What is it?”

“What do you think of the actions of Major Malinovsky?”

“I…I honestly do not know what to think.  I know all the proper words that proper Americans, no, I don’t mean proper people.  I mean the kind who get their moral stature berating others.  I mean…I don’t know what I mean.”

Suslov answered her gently.  “I do not want prisoners taken unless they are needed for interrogation.  When that is over, we shoot them.  I will tell you why.”  He did not pour a second measure for himself.  He needed to be sober as he ticked off the points on his fingers. 

“One.  I am committed to winning this war.  This is why I did not tender my resignation a year ago.  Many officers did, including some of my friends.  The commander and the entire senior staff of the Northern Caucasus military district were sacked for their opposition to this war, and many officers left quietly on their own.  I honestly sympathized with them and respected their choices because this is a filthy war that is already getting worse, but they were wrong.  They abandoned their troops rather than fight a necessary war that Russia has to win.  We need the resources, the water access, and the land routes over the Caucasus and into the Middle East under reliable, which is to say Russian, control.  And frankly, the Caucasus is Russia, has been for centuries.  Do you understand?”

“I do.  I’ve heard the similar things from officers who stayed in the American Army during Vietnam, though they knew how wrong the war was.  I believe they deluded themselves.”

“They did.  If Vietnam had been one of your states, or on your border, it would not have been a delusion.  This is where we live.  We have nowhere else to go.  We cannot afford to delude ourselves.  My second point.  I control how prisoners are treated only while I have physical custody of them.  Prisoners are a pain in the ass to handle, but if I knew they would be treated with mercy and dignity after we turned them over, we would take far more than we do.  The worst thing you can do for enemy morale is to make sure the enemy knows humane treatment is the norm.  I see no point in evacuating prisoners to filtration points to be tortured and raped, and then killed slowly, for amusement, or released for money, so they can spend the rest of their lives avenging what was done to them.  I certainly will not risk the lives of my soldiers for such an end.  Of course, the Russians who are allowed to do such things to other human beings will take their memories home to Mother Russia, where they will relieve their distress not on their commanders, who betrayed them by refusing to demand humane conduct, but on people who are blameless.  It prevents some very serious problems to simply refuse to take many prisoners, and to quickly kill those we do take when we are done. 

“Three.  I am responsible for providing accurate, timely information.  I have the normal responsibilities of any commander to my own soldiers and their families, but I am also responsible to the soldiers and the families of the commanders I support.  And to Chechen civilians.  If I fail in my responsibilities, innocent people die needlessly.  I have no control over Major Kristinich and I find him an abomination but he has his own mission and his own organization.  I can limit him to prisoners who will not talk to my officers or me, even with the assistance of the methods I am willing to apply, although he really does not care whom he tortures.  I think I would make him as happy as any Chechen.  I know that you certainly would.  His real value is in encouraging other prisoners to cooperate.  He also provides a splendid warning to my men as to what they’ll turn into if they indulge his habits.”

The vodka had hit Olivia full force on an empty stomach, taking the anger and the disgust out of her, along with most of what remained of her strength.  Carefully, she backed up to a wall and let herself slide down it until she ended up sitting on the floor.  She did not, however, spill a drop of what remained in her glass.  What was left was simply sorrow and a shaking fear.  “Is what I saw really necessary?”

Suslov folded himself up neatly and gracefully to sit on the floor beside her, looked at her out of the corner of his eye, sidelong and wise as a stallion.  “I was told you were badly hurt in an airplane crash caused by a student who chose a final approach to give you a demonstration of his epilepsy, which he had not bothered to mention before.  Nevertheless, you evacuated him because you did not want him to burn to death.  In the process, you did yourself further serious damage.  This is correct?”  She nodded.  “That pain was the value you assigned to the life of one not particularly good human being.  Now, you have been in and out of this brigade for half a year.  You owe your life many times over to Warrant Officer Simonov and your security team, and I think no one has insulted or abused you.”

“No, I have been treated with nothing but courtesy and even kindness.”

“So now let us assume I am a Chechen intelligence officer and you are my prisoner.  Are you going to tell me what I want to know, what I need to know to keep my people alive?  And if you refuse, the worst I do is shoot you in the head?”  Silent, Olivia took another swallow of vodka.  It was rough but it did what it was supposed to.

“Did you learn this in Afghanistan?”

He turned directly to her and she met his eyes.  Their faces were inches apart.  He made no attempt to close the gap, mercifully gave no sign of wanting to.  She could see the intricate network of fine lines around his eyes, even the pinpoint scars from the stitches where his face had been sewn back together after one of his wounds.  She could also see briefly the real pain behind the professional distance.  “My younger brother was killed in Afghanistan.  He was not career; he planned on doing his two conscript years as a sniper.  He was, like our mother, a wonderful marksman.  Then he planned on being a scientist, perhaps a geologist, perhaps a naturalist.  He was sorting through those ideas when he was captured alive.  The grenade he had saved for himself was defective.  His captors first flayed him alive, then disemboweled him.  I escorted the remains back in a sealed coffin.”

Suslov could not say why, exactly, he had told her about Aleksandr.  It certainly wasn’t the vodka talking.  He might not drink the way so many Russians did but he could still drink.  Then he realized that in some faint and delicate way, she reminded him of Aleksandr.  He pursued that thought with great care.  When Aleksandr had spoken of his interests, Suslov felt his younger brother could lead him straight into the heart of the world.  Doctor Tolchinskaya made him think that he could follow her straight into the workings of the universe.  He supposed it was no worse a reason, and certainly a more interesting one, than a large, firm bosom to find a woman intriguing. 

Olivia watched him compose himself, regain his distance, and look away.  As quickly as it had come, the personal moment was gone and she was grateful. 

 “Many techniques are actually taught to Spetsnaz.  I would think your Army’s Special Forces and Rangers, the Recon elements of the Marines, teach the same or similar techniques.  How much they actually use them…”  He shrugged.  “In Afghanistan, the only mistreatment of prisoners by Soviets that I saw was just hot-blooded anger by men who had lost comrades and very little of that.  The Afghans treated prisoners, Soviet and Afghan alike, with horrible cruelty.  We did not always take prisoners or accept surrenders, but I never saw a prisoner murdered, never heard of it.  Certainly it was done by all kinds of units and I know people who did these things.  But these things were not done in any unit I or my close friends commanded or served in. These were Airborne and Spetsnaz troops, whom I know you were told murdered very casually and with great brutality.”

“And the mines disguised as toys and the machine gunning of women and children and old men from helicopters?”

“Those things happened, yes.  If you want someone to defend them, I am sure Major Kristinich will.”  He paused.  “We studied your tactics in Vietnam very closely.  No, you did not disguise mines as toys, although you turned your ally of South Vietnam into a single immense field of unexploded ordnance.  Ninety percent of all your bombs and nearly all your artillery were used on South Vietnamese soil.  Would you have been so generous with your ordnance if you’d been fighting in California?” 

 “I doubt it.  But that is not the issue here.”

“What is the issue?”

“The issue is Kristinich and those who accept him.  Kristinich’s crime,” Olivia said through the vodka, “is that he tortures not because he needs to but because he likes to.  Your tragedy is that if you believe that if you can limit torture to what you or Major Malinovsky defines as professional methods to a moral end, you see nothing wrong with it.”

“And what do you think of what Major Malinovsky did tonight?”

“I think,” she said, suddenly intense, “that if torture could be measured by the kilo, and tonight you used only ten instead of twenty, there might be some value.  But it’s all tragic.”

Suslov realized that he had been exceptionally foolish not to have a second measure of vodka, hesitated, then poured for himself.  “Tell me, with so many lives at stake, what else would you have me do, Doctor Tolchinskaya?  This is not two knightly armies meeting on an empty field.  This is trying to separate people who want to kill us from people who do not—and who look and speak and dress identically.  The only apparent difference is that the bad Chechens aim weapons at us while the good ones do not.  The good and the not so good, amongst whom the bad ones hide, some of whom are hostages and some of whom are quite willing shields and supporters—how are we to know?  Chechen clan structure is very difficult for Russians to penetrate and exploit, or even sometimes understand.  Sorting this out is not so simple as learning American divisional patches and branch insignia.  Yes, for us torture has been for at least a century just a way of life, a means to control people, enforce compliance, and impose terror.  But I also know of no other tool, professionally used, so effective at producing information within close time constraints if you know what to look for and when you are dealing with tough prisoners who know something and who are motivated not to cooperate.  It works.  Often enough.”

“Comrade Colonel, I am an engineer, not a philosopher.  I did not say you were wrong.  I did not say this is your crime, I said this is your tragedy.  And I know I am disturbing you.”

He inhaled sharply as if he had taken a hard body blow.  “It would take one call to have you on a plane back to Moscow.”

“Probably.  To do my job to the standards of others, I do not have to be here.  Perhaps some of them would even prefer that I not be here.”

“You will certainly not be punished for not doing more than they do.  Not when those who should be here, are not.  The sons and daughters of the generals and the politicians who think this war is a good idea are not here.  They let other people’s children die doing their duty to Mother Russia.  So that leaves the professionals, like myself, the conscripts who refuse to dodge the draft, sadists who expect to be paid for their cruelty, and people who think they can actually do something decent here.  You are one of them.  I would expect you to go running to the human rights activists, except that I see so few of them here.”

“You won’t.  They don’t need to be here.  Their agenda is feeling good about themselves.  I despise them.  If their figures were accurate and their operations practical, it might be different. I cannot abide the ways they twist tragedies and crimes to inflate their own self-righteousness.  I knew human rights activists in America.  Too many remind me of dogs barking furiously from behind the screen door.  Open the door and watch how they refuse to go into the street.  So, what do you want me to do?  Am I enough of an additional duty and a burden that you would prefer I not return?”

“No.”  Spoken as softly and quietly as the word could possibly be pronounced.  He did not know what was showing in his eyes.  Longing, perhaps.  Or something that might be called desire if he hadn’t chosen to dismiss his sexuality as nothing more than the annoyance of a passing erection.   Love, if love between men and women was not hopelessly confused with sex. Friendship, if you were allowed, when you thought of a woman, to remember your brother, not your sister or your own former wife, who had turned away in disgust at things you had found it necessary to do for your country a few years before.

 Suslov turned to look at her again.  Watching his eyes, Olivia realized that he was very remote and detached, and yet also entirely present.  This was the way she lived:  remote and detached, too much of herself buried far down, out of the reach of the weak, the petty, the trivial.  In America, she’d buried herself to protect herself against the smallness.  Now she was returning to life, but in this awful way, in this awful place, on behalf of a country as inured to its own brutality as America was to its own stupidity.  Then Suslov spoke.

“I would rather be blinded than fight in this city without you.  I do not want you hating yourself for coming to terms with what I do and what you will be helping exploit.”  He looked away from her, closed his eyes, listened to her breathe, out of respect for her refusing to want anything from her.

“Then I will go on as I have.”

“Thank you, my friend.”  His eyes still closed, he reached out, meaning to touch her lightly where he had gripped her so hard, then let his hand fall to the cement.  “How long since you have really slept?”

“As long as I have been here.”

“Tell your medic that you have had a hundred grams of vodka—the daily ration for front line troops during the Great Patriotic War, incidentally.  He can adjust sedative dosage so you don’t wake up dead.  If at all possible, you should get about twelve hours’ sleep.  Tomorrow, you move in with the brigade staff.  It was a mistake to separate you like I did.  We have been cruel to expect you to go through this alone, rather than with your brothers.”

“Thank you.”

“One final question, if I might.”

“Please, go on.”

“What do you think of what your boxing instructor did tonight?”

“I think that…I think that he is my brother.”

 

After two days of more-or-less very delicately avoiding each other, Olivia sat down before Suslov in the mess area.  He looked up at her with a startled relief that, he knew, showed clearly in his face.  He watched her acknowledge the fact, then tuck it carefully away inside of her for later examination.  “I will be back in approximately six weeks’ time,” she said.  “I’ll be bringing some of my people into Khankala.”

“I had wondered about that.”

“I’m an American.  I need to prove my work and my worth in the way a Russian wouldn’t.  I couldn’t ask anyone else to risk their lives for something I created until I was certain it would perform well enough and reliably enough under combat conditions to justify initial low-rate production.”

“You understand that you will soon not be allowed that purity?”  There was no scorn in his voice.  “You understand that they may die because of your success.”

“I do.”

“If I can, I will be here.  If I cannot, please regard my brigade not only as your test bed, but also as your military home, even as your work takes you elsewhere.”

“I will do so.  Thank you, my friend.”

He smiled at her, a beautiful man, worn and weary and elegant as a Japanese sword.  “Be safe, my friend.  When you see my sister again, give her my love.  Both of them, please.”

At the other end of the mess area, Simonov was having breakfast with a buddy from back home in Petersburg, a sergeant with a nearby motorized rifle regiment.  He watched his pal break off his conversation with him to stare at Olivia.  “Your colonel could do a lot better.  I mean, she’s not ugly, but she’s not really a woman.”

Simonov found himself getting angry.  “Misha, she’s my principal.  And she’s not like that.”  He wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he didn’t really care.

“Sure, you’re just being a loyal, politically reliable whisperer.”  There was a first time for everything, Simonov thought in amazement, but a whisperer, not much better than a stool pigeon, was not something he’d ever expected to hear himself called.  On the other hand, Misha’s colonel was famous for calling his soldiers dumb pricks and worse.  Clearly, Misha was learning some very bad habits.  Back in Petersburg, he had been a lower class street thug, but not a dumb prick.  Well then, fish rot from the head down.  Simonov remembered his first reaction to Suslov and the simple rules of conduct he ruthlessly enforced, breaking hard on offenders and harder on them the more rank they had.  An idealistic Communist who didn’t understand the world had changed, Simonov had thought at first.  Then:  well, maybe and maybe not.  But Suslov was by far the best officer he’d ever served under and you could see it in how the brigade responded.  It occurred to him that in the way of soldiers who have good officers, he had a father he was proud of, and who was proud of him. 

“She’s an American engineer,” Simonov began cautiously. 

“And we know what they say about American women.”

“Whoever they are, they aren’t here.  The brigade thinks very highly of her.  American television crap doesn’t count.”

  Misha smirked.  Simonov glared.  He had known Misha for years, since he was a kid.  What he wanted to do now was grab his head and acquaint it with the tabletop. 

“Sure, the Brigade thinks highly of her.  For sexual services.  I mean, beggars can’t be choosers.  I certainly wouldn’t say no to her.”

The day this brigade lets an uncultured pig like you say two words to our Doctor is the day you become an American rock poet…

As Olivia began walking towards him to begin their final day, an idea presented itself to Simonov.  He wondered if she could read his mind.  Very likely.  They had, in the way of people who spent a lot of time together in danger, gotten extremely good at picking up on the other’s thoughts with very few, if any, words.  “Her Russian is better than yours.”

“I bet it is.  Hey, Pah Pah Zhe.  I mean, what’s she going to do?”  Simonov grimaced at the invocation, PPZh, was military slang for pokhodno polevye zhenya, or marching field wife.  Still, Misha had given him his chance.  Simonov rose to greet Olivia.  “Do you know what he said about you, Doctor?”

“Please, sit down, Warrant Officer.  Of course.  I couldn’t help but hear.”

She gets it…

“My buddy’s lucky,” said Misha.  “Working for you.  I bet you’re working for him, though.”

Olivia looked down at Misha with mild curiosity, then turned calmly to Simonov.

She gets it!

“Friend of yours, Warrant Officer?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you could suggest to your friend that he stand in the presence of a woman he has taken such an interest in.”

Misha turned and gaped at him.

“Go ahead,” Simonov said cheerfully.  “It could be a new experience for you.”

Misha grinned, then started to rise.  The next thing he felt was Olivia’s right fist slamming into his jaw and the floor coming up hard in his back and his head.  The next thing he saw was the two of them standing over him before Simonov dumped water in his face.

“You didn’t tell me she could hit,” he sputtered.

“She kills, too,” Simonov said quietly.

Olivia bent down, offered Misha her hand.  He looked at it cautiously.  It was her right.  Slowly, he extended his hand.  She took it.  He had an instant to be startled by the strength of her grip before her left fist slammed into his jaw.

“Nice, Doctor.  I hoped you would do that.”

“Didn’t you teach me that if he’s moving, shoot him again?”

“Got any more water?”

“No.  But my tea won’t scald him.”

“Do it.”

Misha sputtered back to consciousness, angry and afraid and humiliated, took in the fact that only Simonov was standing over him.  “What the fuck did you let her do that for?”

“Let her?  It’s not like she needed my permission.  Only my telepathic encouragement.”

“I’m not going to forget this.”

“Hey…I told you she wasn’t like that.”

The Doves, Chapter 1: Recruitment

In this chapter, Olivia is approached by Yuri Getmanov and told that Russia could use her expertise. Getmanov will be a key player later in the book when Olivia is imprisoned on espionage charges.

It had started at an arms show, a military-industrial complex, hyper-globalized, merchants-of-death annual extravaganza, back in DC, in the crisp and crystalline December of 1993.  A megalithic monster of an arms show, taking over both the Woodley Road Sheraton-Park and the Omni Shoreham just down the street, sponsored by a consortium of corporations and trade associations, with just about every arms maker in the Western World, and some from elsewhere, setting up booths.

There were no real weapons at the booths, of course.  There were just glossy brochures and plastic models and posters touting “Freedom Isn’t Free”-type sloganeering gibberish and free tote bags with corporate logos, handed out by young women whose honed and serrated attractiveness seemed weapons unto themselves.  People wandered in and out, some in uniform, some government civilians in the professional attire of their civilian agencies—between the neckwear and shirt collars and degrees of paunch and slouch, you can always tell who works where.  Mainstream media betrayed themselves by notebooks and frenetic scribblings, by micro-cassette recorders, and by arrogance.  Left-wing types exuded earnestness and fastidious distaste, ineptly feigned to cover their fascination.  Contractors seemed indifferently at home.  Subcontractors and vendors seemed earnest.  Others, Olivia among them, came and went nondescriptly.  Some of them, you wouldn’t look at twice until after you’d looked twice.  Some of them mattered.

Those who mattered didn’t spend much time in the exhibition halls or collecting tote bags with their cheap, breaking pens and disintegrating notepads and posters and slick, hypocritical brochures.  The real business occurred in the bars and restaurants, in the hotel hospitality suites and in other rooms rented for other purposes, among people who, sometimes, would not or could not have met anywhere else.  Arms shows specialized in fortuitous encounters, carefully arranged and rehearsed by at least one of the parties involved.

Olivia’s primary field, her professional passion, was battlefield sensors.  Her fascination was with making sensors small and rugged and cheap.  Not just the military applications, although they mattered to her greatly.  She loved as much the pure research and development—basic things intended to lead to military hardware, then beyond.

At least that had been her love until 1988, when she’d been eased out of her job with an Army sensor project at Fort Belvoir, no clear reasons given, although there had been hints of displeasure at the Department of the Army, i.e., the Pentagon level.  The dismissal had come with another hint, one designed to head off potential future ugliness such as lawsuits or going to the media.  There was an opening for her elsewhere, also working with sensors and at a significant salary increase, should she care to apply.  She cared to apply, and for the next four years, she worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a well-groomed, desolate place that had birthed the atomic bomb but now was given to What’s-the-hurry?   Her project, a venerable missile defense affair, legacy of Ronald Reagan’s crafty enthusiasms and of other moribund ventures, some dating back to the 1950s, was always six months from some significant breakthrough or other.  It was, like most of the rest of the lab, a place that was always going to succeed, but never succeeding.  She’d taken it as an interim, as a possible stepping stone to something dynamic.  Her hope was to be left more or less alone to accomplish some sort of technological spin-off, military or civilian, that would lead to serious work elsewhere.  But in the manner of most American missile defense projects, it had turned out to be a place where real accomplishment was neither required nor welcomed.  Young engineers were expected first to accede to and then to develop the bad habits of their elders.  In time, this could make you unemployable anywhere else.  But it hadn’t happened to Olivia yet, and she was determined that it wouldn’t.

Three companies had invited her to attend the arms show, one on the basis of a journal article she’d published, the other two because they knew of her work and had learned that the first had invited her.  She held no great expectations for the trip, but why not?  Washington, DC, all expenses paid.  She’d spent time in the city, but less than she’d hoped for, when she’d been at Belvoir, the Army’s engineering center twenty miles south down Interstate 95.  And nothing was doing at the lab.  She wouldn’t be missed.  Not professionally and not personally.

She’d spent part of the conference in those interviews, coming away unimpressed and wondering if she’d been too open about what she wanted most.  Which was:  a job with the freedom to think and create.  Which was not:  collusion with management to keep unavailing projects alive for the sake of the job security of laboratory zombies and drones who no longer even bothered to pose as colleagues, and for the sake of obese retired colonels flacking out a never-quite-adequate living as marketeers.  She’d seen enough of that world to know that she had no desire to give up the relative placidity of a national lab, which at least never had to worry about quarterly earnings reports, for some slick and slimy defense contractor whose notion of science was confined to Capitol Hill lobbying and whose concept of R&D varied according to the whims of the Pentagon and the fantasies of Wall Street analysts.

Her interviewers had sensed it.  She hadn’t been rejected or turned away overtly, just dismissed with a thin smile and a casual “We’ll be in touch” that reeked of “Smart, but doesn’t understand how these things work.  Not a team player.”  Dismissed three times.  But also, she knew, still under some sort of consideration.  The clowns they sent to do the initial screening had no hiring authority and were not themselves being groomed for higher-level positions.  And those who knew anything at all about where sensor development was going, or should go, knew of her.

Interviews over, she worked at killing time.  The exhibition halls were boorish and banal, the lectures moronic, the male clientele on its ludicrous best behavior regarding women. The officers in uniform, especially.  Tailhook, the notorious 1991 naval aviators’ convention where women by the hundreds had been harassed and assaulted, was still in deadly legal and political aftermath.  The military, summoning its own brand of obtuseness laced with bile, had instructed its men to avoid anything that might lead to anything that might lead to anything that might look like it might be actionable, or give the appearance thereof.  Civilian agencies had done the same.  The men at the arms show, the American men especially, seemed terrified of her.

Their problem.  Not hers. 

Late afternoon of the third and final day.  Olivia was tired and bored.  The touristy things she’d planned, hadn’t happened.  Most notably a trip to the Holocaust Museum—her father had donated money to it, and some unspecified memento, in memory of his family and in some small expiation of the fact that he’d survived.  But Olivia hadn’t gone, if only because the trip might have answered some of the questions she’d never dared ask.  It was also now too late in the day.  She was hungry, but damned if she was going to subject herself to the bars or fight the crowds at the local restaurants for the pleasure of dining alone while being assailed by the conversations of others or the predatory attentions of corporate sales reps who’d removed their wedding rings for the evening.  Room service depressed her even more, as did the occasional waiter who suggested that, if she were looking for company, he knew people who could help.

So she roamed the hospitality suites, not caring whose they were, looking only for a decent glass of wine and something to eat.  She found one suite, half-filled with middle-aged men wearing large stomachs, Rolex watches, and expensive suits that would not have seemed too out of place at a Mafia dons’ meeting.  She helped herself to wine and a plate, picked up a few things from the buffet, then found a corner seat with a tiny table.  The wine she recognized from its scent as a passable Washington State Chardonnay.  Cheese and crackers, she realized somewhat later, while chewing.  It was cheese and crackers.  She was wearier than she thought.  Some kind of cheese and some kind of crackers.    

Olivia let herself stand down, let the wine infuse her with lassitude.  The pain from the airplane crash was still there, would always be there, but she was beginning to realize that it simply was what it was.  Abstractly, she realized for the first time that she could, in fact, be OK with the pain.  It didn’t have to translate to suffering.  It was a pleasant realization, she thought as she watched the contractors, the fat men with the Rolexes or, even worse, preposterously complex watches more useful on a Green Beret mission than at a Beltway sales fest.  Men who always had something stuck in their lapels.  Men who wore shirts with collars and cuffs of different color and material than the body and sleeves.  Rather like clowns, Olivia thought as several new men, younger and taut, wandered purposefully in.  Colonels.  Excess colonels still somehow on active duty after the Cold War’s demise and the Desert Storm arms show and the military downsizing, now looking desperately for jobs in the civilian defense sector.  A shrinking sector, Olivia knew, the shrinkage composed of a hundred thousand companies that had stopped doing business with the government—too much aggravation, too little profit—and some larger ones, acquired and merged out of existence by other giants.  Not good if you’re an excess colonel, still paying child support from the first marriage and wondering how to send the second batch of kids through college.  She smiled inwardly, giving silent thanks for all the problems that she didn’t have.

She was not expecting the harsh, imperious man who sat down beside her, across her tiny table.  He was older, massively built, with a body that should have gone to fat, but hadn’t.  His face was granite, with deep brown eyes that were alive and twinkling with a hint of God, the absurdity of this event.  It was not an American face.  He didn’t have to open his mouth for her to know that.  His eyes weren’t American eyes.  Not smooth, not suave, not vicious or covetous, not looking like every scrap of cheese and crackers consumed in this room and in this world, should have been his.  Nor did he seem interested in wine or lassitude or female companionship.  He was blunt and commanding and he looked at her very, very steadily for a long time, obviously sizing her up, though for what purpose, she could not tell.  She feared neither him nor his purpose, felt only an abstract respect, sensing that, whatever else this man was or turned out to be, he’d earned that respect.

It had been a while since she’d had that response to an American man, or any man, and it was…pleasant. 

Olivia was a tall woman, just under five feet, eight inches, who should have been taller.  She had the lean, muscular build of a life-long weight-lifter and runner and was very angular, especially in her lower back and pelvis, which since the airplane crash were as much steel and titanium as bone.  She wore a man’s navy pinstripe suit, tailored to fit, over a pale grey silk blouse, her lighter-than-platinum blonde hair falling in loose waves to her shoulders.   You might have called her lovely, were it not for the hardness of her face and eyes.  Not bitter, not unkind, not challenging or angry in the style of so many American women, half self-pitying petulance, half sneer.  Just very, very hard.  In her own way, she knew, hers was a face as hard as his.

“Have we met before?” she asked courteously, eliding the sir that she knew he was accustomed to and deserved.  She met and held his gaze with a waiting patience.  She knew what she was doing.  For a man to look another man in the eyes is an act of dominance, even aggression, or of a sincerity that can still be both.  For a woman to do so, is usually taken as a sign of sexual interest, or of unbecoming arrogance 

None of these, the man knew, applied to this woman.  And a strange thought returned, from when first he’d read her dossier and determined that this meeting would come to pass someday.  In a just world, if America were just, she would be loved and respected and loaded with honors.  In her world as it was, she was a reasonably well-paid, utterly marginalized pariah, working for a worn-out national lab on a pointless Defense Department project.  And also, he reminded himself without really having to, because corporate post-capitalists and their shills may fancy themselves as creators of excellence, but mediocrity rules their world.  And they, always fearful, always greedy, wanted it that way.  American mediocrity:  the love that dares not speak its name.  And yet she bore it, one could only say, with nobility.  How she might bear the indignities that his own country might someday force upon her, should he succeed with her, he knew but chose for the moment not to consider.  For he knew that as soon as he opened his mouth, she would be able to place his accent.  And just as clearly, he knew that games, any games, any attempt at Cold War James Bond shaken, not stirred seductive insincerity, would get him a polite smile and a firm dismissal.    

So Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov simply put his business card, English side up, on the table between them.

 

Cultural Attaché

Embassy of the Russian Federation

2650 Wisconsin Avenue, NW 

Washington, DC 20007

Phone 202/298-5700

Fax 202/298-5735

 

She flipped it over.  The same thing in Russian.  She read it aloud in Russian.  He smiled at her American training, awkward accent, and the rhythm that told him she knew the language, but had never really used it in life.   

What the card didn’t say in either language:  Major General, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, the GRU.

Getmanov could see her considering the missing information.  Then he felt her eyes on his face again, eyes the most unfair shade of blue he had ever seen, her mouth all velvety red lipstick, twitching with suppressed laughter before she addressed him.  “You may be the only person here who is man enough to be seen with me in public.  Tailhook seems to have made cowards of them all.”

“But you are being courted.  By companies looking for engineers.  How much are they offering you?”

She paused.  “Nothing at the moment.  The initial interviews were a pain.  I guess they weren’t ready for me.  But I suspect they’ll be back.  The offers may come.”

“Offering how much?”

“A lot more than I’m making now.  Probably.”

“Including autonomy?”

“Heavens, no,” she answered, thinking that this conversation, so utterly unexpected, also seemed so natural.  So honest.  She rarely spoke about herself, but this was somehow different.  This had a quality of dignity, of two serious people speaking to each other with genuine respect.  How different from her usual contacts with Americans.  How attractive to someone starving for seriousness.  Surprised at herself, yet not surprised, she responded, “This isn’t about hiring me to be free to produce.  It’s about buying me out.  It’s about they’re thinking they’ll be able to use me someday to sell to the government for zillions what I could have given the government for a whole lot less, right now.  It’s about having me to sit on.”

“Sit on?”

Olivia smiled a bit.  “Having me in private storage.”

“Are you going to let them buy you out?”

“I’m considering it.  Easier.  More money.  Better labs and staff.  But as I said, the first contacts weren’t exactly according to their script.  We’ll see.”

“And you’re considering selling yourself to the highest bidder.  I know from your published record that you’re well-regarded.  Professionally.”

She nodded at what he didn’t add, then opened a bit more and went on.  “At thirty-six, I have done this work since I first fell in love with sensor science in graduate school, and I have even seen some progress.  Sadly, government contracts are not always awarded to those who want progress, or who want successes that might endanger other projects.  Large, lasting defense contracts these days are regarded as manna from heaven, and about as rare.  There has to be Congressional buy-in.  That means money for Congressional districts.  The big players also have to buy in.  That means some projects hang around forever, just so people in government and industry can say they’re working on them.  Not succeeding too fast can be worth a lot to a Boeing or a Lockheed Martin.”

“Rather like car companies and oil companies buying up all the patents for alternative engines and fuels.”

“Something like that.  While they waste millions on, how would you call them, Potemkin laboratories.”

Getmanov smiled.  “And you would be an excellent ornament in one of those phony labs.”

“I would.”

“So that’s a way of telling me you can almost name your price with any of them.”

“Almost.  Maybe.  Both for what I can do and for how they might advertise me while keeping me from doing it.  Maybe even let me work seriously on something totally unrelated.  Keep me happy so that I stay with the company that hires me.”

“A better life than your current employment?”

“I have been with three projects at Los Alamos, one killed, one stillborn, one that refuses to die.  I say, ‘OK, now what?’  They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve kept the data sets.  Someday, when the contract’s renewed or the administration changes, we’ll get back to it.  Now please return to your current duties, making sure we never develop anything that might force the Pentagon to alter its spending priorities in the direction of serious missile defense.’”

“Do they really say it that bluntly?”

“Almost.  If they don’t, I do.  But only because I like to make them squirm a little.”

“This makes you happy?”

“Tormenting the weak yields no happiness for me.  I just sometimes wish they’d be more honest about it.  I’m primarily an engineer, not a basic researcher or theoretician, although I do that, too.  I want to look at something real and be able to say, I did that, and it mattered.  I can see myself becoming a very hard, bitter woman if this goes on too much longer.  I don’t really care to end up like that.  I don’t want to look in the mirror at myself someday and see someone unreal, and know that I did it to myself and it no longer matters.”

“Hardness and bitterness are not the same things, Dr. Tolchin.  Bitterness is never a virtue.  Hardness, almost always.”

The gaze she fixed upon him was so piercingly intense that he found himself blinking.  By the standards of his craft, of any initial approach, he had been forthcoming.  Too forthcoming.  He’d revealed something of himself too early and they both knew it.  But so had she revealed too much, and they both knew that.  She had told him nothing specific about what she did, only assumed that he had some idea, and then had shown him her morality.  For that, he had offered the essence of the creed that had sustained him through thirty years service to his country during the Cold War and its bewildering aftermath, to which he had so far adjusted.

“I didn’t say that,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“About the difference between hardness and bitterness?  I am afraid you did.  But for the peace of both of our minds, we will forget that you did.”

“Why should we?”

“I could say that we’re both getting a bit too open.  But let me answer a question with a question.  Does your wife know where you are and what you do for a living?”

Getmanov smiled warmly.  “Yes, of course she knows what I do.  As for where I am, before I came, she made me promise not to dally with such American women as I might by chance encounter.”

“This is not a chance encounter.”

“No, but the promise still applies.  I love my wife very much, but I am also afraid of her.  However, I repeat myself, as she is a Russian woman, even if somewhat too taken with the American habit of, I believe you call it, shopping.  But no matter.  She deserves her time at the mall.  As a Russian woman, she is not always given the honor she deserves.  Professional as well as personal.”

“What does she do?”

“Did.  She abandoned a promising career as an aeronautical engineer to follow me into the diplomatic world some years ago.  She was also a pilot, a believer that one must experience for oneself that which one creates.”

“And she still reads Aviation Week.”

“Cover to cover.  What makes you ask that?”

“The magazine is a legendary purveyor of sensitive, sometimes highly classified information.  Does she send you memos about what she reads?”

Getmanov made his decision.  “Not to me personally.  I wouldn’t understand them.  However, her memos do find their way elsewhere.”  He leaned forward.  “One of the great advantages of being married to an engineer is that they speak plainly and expect the same.  I know your work.  You’d be surprised how many people do.  Your reputation, as they say, precedes you.  I also know that you took Russian to fulfill a language requirement, way back in college, because it was a challenge, in a way French and German no longer were.  I know you stayed with it through graduate school and beyond.  I know you started reading our technical literature when you could barely master your own and now are very conversant in that aspect of my language.  I know you were badly hurt in an aviation accident.  A light plane crash, I believe.  I know you were told you weren’t going to walk again, and a year after finishing rehab, you’re not yet running again but you are hiking.  I know you settled out of court for several hundred thousand dollars from the Santa Fe attorney who was your student pilot and who falsified his flight physical by neglecting to mention to you or your Federal Aviation Administration that he was epileptic.  You’ve flown a few times since, just to prove you could, but no more. I also know that your lover of several years left you because of his unwillingness to tolerate the damage caused by the accident.  He was a moral coward and you are well rid of him.”

She offered him the bright, defensive smile you might offer a somewhat dim child who has said something unexpectedly astute.  “So you read the profile on me in Defense Weekly.  Good for you.”

“Also the article from which it was plagiarized.  The inspirational—pardon the cliché, they meant it as such, no doubt—piece in the Los Alamos National Lab’s Connections.  The bit about your boyfriend, we surmised from that nasty notation about your being ‘newly available.’  Tolstoy, I believe, once wrote that every happy family is alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Los Alamos seems uniquely unhappy these days.”

The only thing that bothered her, she thought with some detachment, was that he knew that she had stopped flying.  That hadn’t been printed.  But that no longer mattered.

“Why do you say I’ve stopped flying?”

“Because you have.  Would you also like me to tell you what your present clearances are?”

Olivia arched.  “I’m going to assume that if you know my clearances, you also know that I’m legally and morally obligated to report this conversation.”

 “I also know that, at your level, you’re entitled to exercise a certain discretion in taking this conversation where it may go.  The better to report it later, of course.”  He waved his arm at the room.  “I could probably find out at least as much about any man in this room.”

“If you wanted to.” 

“If I needed to.  But I don’t want to and don’t need to. Why bother?  Look at the officers who clutter this ridiculous little party and this obscenity of an exhibition.  Colonels.  Mostly Pentagon and project-manager and acquisitions colonels, trying to trade their contacts for the kind of sinecure for which they probably came into the service, thinking that was their post-retirement due, right along with the pension.  It’s a wonder they don’t expect dachas.  You know as well as I do, a colonel’s contacts are good for about five years.  Probably three nowadays, with so many getting out.  These men get hired, used up, and thrown away because contacts are all they have to offer.  Your brain is good for the rest of your lifetime.  Most of these colonels know little beyond how to write memos in words carefully chosen to convey no meaning.  You know a great deal.”

“I know that, if I chose to be melodramatic, I would say that continuing this conversation may change my life.  What do you want…General?”

Getmanov nodded slightly.  “How did you surmise?”

“An honest general’s honest distaste for superfluous and venal colonels.  Also, you look like you should be wearing a uniform.”

Getmanov smiled.  “Major General.  By present posting, which shall also be my last before retirement, cultural attaché and, if I may add, graduate of the old Soviet Institute of USA and Canadian Studies.  What do I want?  Something quite simple, really.  The Cold War is over.  We Russians are not going to fight you Americans.  Perhaps we always knew that it would never come to that.  I did.  I sometimes think that we had an agreement.  Only one side could go crazy at a time.  You did in Vietnam.  We did in Afghanistan.  But our countries have never fought and, it is to be hoped, we never do.  However…” he paused, “however secure you may feel yourselves to be, now that we’ve deprived you of your most beloved enemy, we are not secure.   We are far from secure.  We are, indeed, in great and serious trouble.  We need people to help us rebuild the military that we will never use against you or your friends.  We are decades behind you in miniaturization and precision guidance, not to mention sensor capabilities.  Items our military now desperately needs.  That means, we need persons such as yourself.  Desperately.”

“And why?” Olivia asked in a slow, deliberating voice, “should I wish to respond to your desperation?”

“Because we have enemies in common.  We need help.  Help against enemies of ours who are also enemies of yours.  You’ll realize they’re enemies only on the day they force you to it, the day you can no longer pretend.  We haven’t any such luxury.”

Getmanov took out a fountain pen, bulky yet elegant, wrote a number on his card, then pushed it towards her.  “I say again.  We’re no longer enemies.  We’re not yet friends.  I hope to God that someday we are.  That’s my cell number.  I live in Chevy Chase, but I’ve taken a room here for the night.  My wife knows I won’t betray her.  Call me if you want your work to matter.”

Olivia said nothing.  Getmanov nodded courteously to her, stood and walked away.

About as seductive, was her immediate thought, as asking a woman if she’d like to go home with him and fuck while his wife was out shopping.  Then she said to herself, no.  That’s wrong.  That’s cheap.  Whatever this is, or might be, it isn’t… cheap.

The Doves: Personal Preface

There is in the book world a genre known as “comfort food books.”  Tell me what I want to hear the way I want to hear it.  Keep it simple.  Make it predictable.  Let it read easy.  And let it not matter too much.

Whatever else THE DOVES may be, it is not a comfort food book.  It is a complex, improbable, demanding book for a nation that would do well to put the comfort food aside for a while and rediscover the challenges and the pleasures of coming to grips with reality.  This is part of why I wrote it; this is why I offer it now.  Still, serious readers are entitled to a more definitive statement of how this book came to be and what might be its value.

THE DOVES is the story of an American woman in Russia.  And while it is about Russia to some degree, it is really about America:  about what we have allowed ourselves to become, and why.  It is fiction.  But sometimes truth can be better expressed in fiction than via fact.  

In one form or another, I’ve been working on this book since the 1980s.  As a young girl growing up in the American Midwest, daughter of two conventionally liberal college literature professors, I had two great intellectual passions:  military history and Soviet samizdat (dissident) literature.  I was also horse-crazy and I sometimes think my mother preferred my mucking out stables to listening to my adolescent disquisitions on military science and political morality, but that’s another tale. 

I began trying to write this book in December 1981, when I had just turned fifteen and in Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski had declared martial law and suppressed Solidarity.  Solidarity was the first non-Communist trade union in the Warsaw Pact bloc and General Jaruzelski claimed he had imposed martial law to prevent a Soviet invasion.  Evidence supporting his claim, which I regard as fundamentally true, given the history of the old Warsaw Pact, is inconclusive.  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, a taciturn KGB/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 take up residence 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.  No high school student has the knowledge, the wisdom, or the skills to write about people from such a different culture and perspective.  Nor could any high school student portray them sympathetically without either absurdly idealizing them or eliding intensely emotional (to me, at least) issues such as the war in Afghanistan and the possible invasion of Poland.  So I wrote a senior paper on the Soviet abuse of psychiatry, instead. 

I set them aside during my undergraduate years at Indiana University, where I studied Russian, got a degree in history, an Army ROTC reserve commission, a Marine husband, and, in the typical manner of undergraduates, became incredibly wise.  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 time.  I expressed my newfound maturity by conceiving 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:  my ongoing lack of wisdom regarding the world, and especially regarding two people for whom such an act would have been both alien and dishonorable.  Then also, despite a certain amount of feminist activism and volunteering, I was paying insufficient attention to what America was starting to let itself become during a decade that may someday be known to history as “The Wasted Nineties.”  I didn’t want to know, and I knew it.

I struggled so long and hard and failed so utterly to write well about them 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 ANSER, a federally funded national security research corporation, sometimes aka “think tank.” My boss, a retired Air Force fighter pilot with considerable combat experience, described his job to me as “keeping the crap going.”  By crap, he meant, government contracts.  And thus my introduction to the world of defense contracting and all the comfort food 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.  The child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” could have taken some paradigmatic lessons from me.  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 they can’t stop you from thinking or, in this case, fantasizing.  And so it was that Olivia Tolchin, the American defense engineer who illegally emigrates to Russia in search of intellectual and creative freedom, joined the Suslovs in my skull. 

After that, I put THE DOVES 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 THE DOVES. 

One matter remained.  In 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 officer.  Also an 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 of THE DOVES, dark beyond belief, was done by Christmas.  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 the novel in earnest in June 2008.  I finally finished it in October 2009.  The task required hundreds of hours in conversation with Philip, who was writing 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 world of their own.  The story grew complicated and rich 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 year during which I wrote this book was unfunny in the extreme.  The economy crashed.  The American people wandered about in a state of learned helplessness, happy to hissy-fit and pout, unwilling to change.  The 2008 election and subsequent events showed that American conservatism has ceased to be a political idea and become a cult with nothing to offer save hatred and contempt.  So far, President Obama has shown scant inclination to address our core issues.  And many Americans, for reasons of their own, would 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 samizdat, or 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 believe needed to be read.  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.  Not enjoy or entertain themselves with or be educated or inspired by:  consume.  Then I found myself, not always willingly, making other comparisons.  It became impossible for me not to compare the old Soviet Union’s forcible drugging of dissidents and the deliberate use of alcohol to medicate an entire population suffering from severe post-traumatic and chronic stress disorders, to the massive voluntary consumption of psychoactive drugs by Americans and the vast quantities of vodka for sale at liquor stores.  It became impossible not to compare Russian media, both state and independent, to American corporate media.  I found myself reading interviews with people like Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev and 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.  Finally, I compared the passivity of Russians to the passivity of Americans. 

The comparisons weren’t comforting.  Nor are others.  Russia, with its traditions of the Gulag, currently has a lower per capita incarceration rate than the United States.  Such numbers don’t tell the full story, of course.  But the fact that America’s incarceration rate is anywhere close to Russia’s, much less higher, says a lot about us. 

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 write these things because I believe there are things that I and my fellow citizens should be.  Amongst the things they should not be are:  drugged, numbed with food and alcohol past satiation, entertained to stupefaction, dumbed-down, outsourced, or serfs of the “financial industry.”  There are things I believe my country should be.  Amongst the things we should not be:  hopelessly in debt, importing everything from clothes to computers to food, and everyone from day laborers to engineers and doctors, scuttling around the world as the self-proclaimed global benevolent hegemon, attempting to save the world while letting our own civilization slowly rot.  Yes, today America is Number One.  The fattest nation on earth.  The most indebted.  Perhaps the most voluntarily alcohol and drug-addicted.  And increasingly, the most self-deluded.

I have written THE DOVES to provide a different perspective on what we’ve become.  The book that started out as an adolescent fantasy is now a gift—yes, a gift—to my fellow citizens who wish to acquire or reacquire the three fundamental traits of good citizens:  dignity, disciplined intelligence, and seriousness.

You cannot become a citizen of dignity, intelligence, and seriousness, a participant in and thereby a co-creator of a Republic worthy of you, by pretending that you and your nation have not been made into what they are.  We are better than that.  We all are, regardless of nationality. Americans are better than the nation of drugged, fat, ignorant, vulgar, trivialized consumers America has been made into, and chosen to become.  The heroine of THE DOVES is an American woman who can no longer abide what her country is doing to itself.  But THE DOVES is also about honorable, humane Russians who struggle against both anarchy and tyranny, and who want more choices than anarchy, tyranny, or some tawdry Russian version of what America has become.

If that says things 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.

I named THE DOVES for a line in a poem by Anna Akhmatova, Russia’s greatest poet, referring to “the dove” Juliet in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet.  The poem, “To the Londoners,” was written in 1940, when Britain was under Nazi bombardment and the Soviet Union an ally of Germany.  All things change, and it matters to remember that.  But I also chose the title because of its allusion to those who desire peace, though a peace that is more than the absence, the impossible absence, of physical violence.  The kind of peace that is wished for by those who have both endured and perpetrated horrors, who have lost their illusions but deepened their humanity, and who wish to leave the world better than they found it.  This is indeed a “love and war” story that is finally about peace:  the peace that comes from hard and liberating honesty about the past, hard and purposeful action in the present, and hard and complex hope for a world with a bit more civilization and a bit less strife.

It’s a peace and an honesty that both our countries could use.

Selections follow.

The Russia Speech The President Should Have Given

Posting this two weeks after the speech, in an era of instant news, would seem a little OBE, except for articles like John Vinocur’s Central and Eastern European Countries Issue Rare Warning for U.S. on Russian Policy in today’s New York Times.  Mr. Vinocur, who really ought to know better, seems unaware that all the Yalta agreement did was acknowledge the fact of millions of Soviet troops on the ground in Eastern Europe.   Or that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own, and when it withdrew from Eastern Europe, it did so without a shot fired:  compare that to how Europe withdrew from its African and Asian colonies, and the mountains of corpses they piled up, not during colonization, but decolonization alone.  And someone please tell me what on earth America’s interests are with Ukraine and Georgia, Georgia still being proud of having given to the world those two fine human beings Joseph Stalin and Lavrentii Beria.

One reason I voted for President Obama was because I didn’t want to be humilated by John McCain and Sarah Palin dealing with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin.  Try to imagine either of them giving an interview like Medvedev’s with Novaya Gazeta.  Well, Obama has done better by this country with the Russians, but marginally. 

On July 7, he spoke to the graduating class of the New Economic School in Moscow. It was an incoherent speech full of platitudes more appropriate to posturing commencement speakers than affairs of state. It was also the latest example of his refusal to talk to anyone, including his own citizens, like they were adults with a grasp of reality: a failure only exacerbated by his innate articulateness. After this sin of omission, Obama then insulted Russia’s senior leadership by not making himself available to them for informal meetings, choosing instead to spend some private time with his wife. Taking your spouse along on business trips is fine, unless it gets in the way of business.  Especially on a two-day trip.

We can see that Prime Minister Putin (does anyone realize that he and President Medvedev appear to have a very efficient good cop, bad cop routine down?) is considering himself insulted, once again, by stupid Americans.  (The photos Time magazine shot of him when they named him Man of theYear were just unbelievable.)

Having just finished writing a novel (The Doves) about Russia and America, I was exceptionally attuned to his failure, and I took it very seriously. Normally, I have little use for writing of the alternate-history variety, but given what is at stake in our relationship with Russia, I thought it worthwhile to write the speech President Obama should have given, but did not.

There are three reasons he did not give it. The first is that American political elites are brain dead to even speak of “resetting” relations with Russia, an unfortunate word that translates into Russian as “raising the price.” The second is that there are many Americans who do not want improved relations, usually as an excuse to keep defense spending ruinously high, and the President figures he has enough enemies and more immediate problems. The third reason is that what is said herein is true, and contemporary American politics is all about placing the delusional above the real, even when reality offers more.

Since I would have asked to speak to the Duma, the Russian Parliament, I have set this text there.

　

President Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin, ladies and gentlemen of the Duma, thank you for inviting me, and thank you for allowing me to speak before you here. It is a great honor .  This will not be the usual speech given on such occasions. It will be plain speaking, intended for American ears as well as Russian. That an American president should come all the way to Moscow to speak to his own people may seem strange. But I can think of no more appropriate setting to say what I have to say about our two countries and a future we might share, have we but the vision to see it and the will to pursue it.

America’s understanding of Russia has been shaped by two forces, both of them unfortunate. The first was our intense enmity during the Cold War. The second force, in some ways more destructive, has been our attitude toward Russia since the end of the Cold War: an ugly, unavailing combination of condescension and neglect, coupled with patronizing praise every time you did something that made you seem a bit more like us. What America, including too many of our so-called experts, managed to forget was the fundamental fact of Russian history.

For the past thousand years, no nation has accomplished so much while suffering so much, and Russia cannot be understood without giving full due to both. American political culture was shaped by centuries of geographical isolation from mortal enemies. Russia stood open to repeated invasion from East and West. We inherited the Western European Renaissance and Enlightenment. You suffered for centuries under the Tartar yoke. You have been invaded by Sweden and by Poland; you fought the British and the French in the Crimea. Your heroic resistance to Napoleon is legendary, but how many Americans know what Tschaikovy’s 1812 Overture really commemorates? Then there were the two World Wars, vicious climaxes of the centuries-old German Drang nach Osten, or “Push to the East.” Your World War II dead alone, without mentioning the horribly hurt and disturbed, number approximately 26 million men, women and children. By contrast, American dead from that war number only approximately 300,000. Such losses as you endured happened because the Germans, aided by many other nationalities, invaded you for the explicit purpose of exterminating you, wiping you from the face of the earth, with enslavement just a brief, if tormented, station on that Calvary road.

I will not mention here the horrors that the Romanovs and the Soviet Union inflicted upon your own people and others. I only note that the original meaning of the word Slav is Slave, and that Russia for a thousand years has struggled to change the meaning of that word. It is fashionable now to speak of “failed states.” But for much of the 20th century, Europe was a failed civilization and its barbarisms, so many inflicted upon you, occasioned many of your own responses. To understand is not to excuse, nor to forgive. In any case, you do not need my forgiveness. You need to do as you are doing, to come to terms with your own past, with what others have done to you, what you have done to others, what you have done to yourselves. Come to terms for the purpose of taking your rightful place in the world as a great and civilized nation, working with other civilized nations on matters of common urgency and concern.

That is why I am here. To talk a bit about what we might do together. For although our histories are very different, today we share a common failing. Our nations have lost their ways, and for some of the same reasons. If we can understand that much, we may have a foundation on which to build.

Today, having survived twenty difficult and challenging years of transition, you are slowly, painfully learning to reassert yourself as masters in your own home, to establish a vibrant economy and civil society that work for Russia, and secure your near abroad. No nation can tolerate instability on its borders or the domestic domination of thieves and criminals who think the national patrimony and the savings of ordinary people should be looted for private gain. These are the tasks before you.

These are also the challenges facing America.

To build on Prime Minister Putin’s speech at Davos, there is a great deal to be said for capitalism as Adam Smith conceived it: people exchanging value for value, rationally and freely, in trade that leaves both parties better off and benefits society. This is not what we have today, no matter who invokes Smith’s legacy. Smith was enormously concerned for the material dignity of ordinary men and women, farmers and laborers and craftsmen and domestics, and their children: that they have enough good food to eat, that they have clean clothes and sound footwear, that they live in homes, not hovels, that they be able to entertain themselves decently, that they not have to sell themselves into slavery or prostitution, which are virtually one and the same. He thought that capitalism was a means to that end. He certainly did not think that there was neither life nor reality nor value outside the market, or that everything had its market price and if it didn’t, it had no value. He did not believe that everything was either for sale or should be for sale. He did not believe that human beings were for sale.

As an American citizen and a human being, it grieves me terribly to say that Adam Smith’s is not the capitalism most American corporations practice today; they have not for many, many years. Nor is it the capitalism our experts urged upon your nation as it struggled and still struggles to create a market economy. You had enough problems of your own. We did you no favors.

Today, American economic life is dominated by oligarchies and corporations with no loyalty to anything beyond themselves. In their greed for profit and obsession with short-term manipulation over long-term creation, they are destroying my country. And they are taking the world down with us. They forget that, whatever a corporation’s legal responsibility to make money, human beings do not exist for corporations. Not in America and not anywhere else.

Legally, a for-profit corporation has only one purpose: to maximize profits for its shareholders. What would we say of a human being who said, I only want to make money and I don’t care who I hurt or what I harm to do it? How much would we tolerate from such a person? In his 1937 inaugural speech, Franklin Roosevelt, said: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.” Economic morality as Adam Smith intended it, a morality that, in its moral essence, is no monopoly of any system.

And perhaps what we say of corporations we might also say of nations. The age of the glorification of ruthless self-interest is over, not least of all because, in the long run, it doesn’t work.

So, what might we accomplish together? By this, I do not mean, how may we help you? It’s high time America got out of the business of “helping,” high time we got into the business of working together.

Since Russia and America have a great many interests and concerns in common, I propose we take a number of immediate, practical steps together to benefit our two nations.

 We are, for which all America should give thanks, cooperating in the fight against Islamist terrorism and separatism. In many concrete ways, you have been of far more help to us than most of Western Europe has. That cooperation should be deepened and broadened and it should, of course, be very bilateral. We understand that Islamist terrorism, separatism and insurrection present grave dangers to your country and to the millions of Russian Muslims who wish to live in peace. We are ready to do what we can. We are certainly ready, as a government, to stop the self-righteous criticism of your desire to remain a single country, even if it comes to force of arms. Abraham Lincoln, I think, would understand.

Economically, in many ways the Russian Far East and the North American Northwest and Far North constitute a single trading area, rich in natural resources and possibilities for human development. I should like to consider the possibilities of joint exploration, development and marketing, perhaps regional agreements on everything from timber and coal to fish, as well as environmental and other energy issues. Canada would be a logical participant in many of these. So would Japan as a consumer.

As for trade, let me be blunt. I should like to see more goods saying “Made in America” for sale in Russia…and in America. I would also like to see more goods saying, “Made in Russia,” available in America and Russia. I would especially like to see substantial amounts of American manufacturing moved to Russia from other foreign lands, whence they have been “outsourced.”

And perhaps we would do well to consider reinvigorating our respective space programs, which are already linked. In many ways, the space race of the Cold War brought out the best in all of us. Let it be so again. And let it be so in developing the technologies and procedures necessary to safeguard our planet and tend to its health. We have a name for our space shuttle projects that study our planet: Mission to Planet Earth. It is a mission we should share.

Finally, we need to see more of each other as people. This means tourism, educational and other exchanges, visits from our respective cultural institutions: museums, symphonies, ballet, and yes, an occasional swapping of rock poets.

We are not enemies. And so it benefits neither of us, not my country nor yours, nor our world, to allow those who want us hostile, for reasons of their own, to set our agendas. Nor does it benefit either of us to be impoverished because we have squandered the work and intelligence and talents of our peoples.

There has been much talk of “resetting” the American and Russian relationship. The obvious question: reset to what? There is really nothing to go back to. But there is much to look forward to. In their famous “Kitchen Debate” of 1958 (?) then Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued over whether communism or capitalism, the Soviet Union or America, was the true wave of the future. We know now that, in differing ways, neither is. Neither the failed communism of the Soviet era nor the present perverted capitalism of our present. We can do better than that. We should. We must. We will.

Thank you.