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.
