Someone Else's War: A Novel of Russia and America Read online

CHAPTER TWO, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: A NIGHT WALK

  Later that night, toward eleven, Getmanov lay on his hotel bed, talking on the room phone to his wife. The cell phone on the bed beside him rang. A woman’s voice. “I am sleepless. Come walk and talk with me. Perhaps we can get a glass of wine somewhere.”

  “I will. Give me a moment to ring off with my wife. I am learning about her purchases of the day and that can be a time-consuming affair. Are you here at the Sheraton?”

  “I am.”

  “Go out to Connecticut Avenue, turn right and walk down to the traffic signal at the first intersection. Turn left onto Calvert Street. In about a hundred meters, you’ll come to a bridge. Cross it. Immediately on the left you’ll see a restaurant, the Mount of Olives Café. Walk past it. You will then pass a short row of town homes, new construction, and reach a large access driveway to parking behind the houses. Step into the driveway. I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

  She followed his instructions, walking purposefully, noting the four cars with diplomatic license plates parked around the restaurant, including one on the sidewalk. The drivers, dark men with darting eyes and folded arms, lounged by their cars, smoked, and assessed her. She did not feel the need to walk more quickly. As she turned into the driveway, she saw a fenced-in playground, heard noises of basketballs and gangs, and slipped a hand into the pocket of her overcoat. She saw Getmanov peek about from the rear of the house, his onyx eyes glittering as he walked towards her.

  “Games,” he said happily. “Games for children and for American fans of bad spy cinema. But sometimes with adult consequences. I took a taxi to beat you here, just in case anyone might have been following you. Or me. Not to mention that little group outside the restaurant.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Occasionally. More often, enemies. Or to borrow and adapt an Arab proverb, sometimes they’re the friends of my country’s enemies. Shall we keep walking? It’s a pleasant neighborhood, this Adams-Morgan. Busy at night. Many excellent restaurants. Multi-ethnic, as they say. Diversity is celebrated here. Not so much during the day, when it’s the retail struggle of all-against-all. But at night when the—how do you call them?—Yuppies arrive to disport themselves, sneer at each other, and hope to encounter the diverse. Especially those of the opposite sex. Perhaps. What you Americans call singles life, it has sometimes seemed to me that the purpose is to humiliate others, not seduce them, and that the risk of humiliation is part of the price of admission to the scene. Or perhaps I am thinking of the discos of the 1970s.”

  “You are a superb cultural attaché. You know us too well.”

  “Perhaps. But enough sociological insight. Let us consider us. First, visibility. If you’re going to hide, it’s best to do so out in the open. So let us hide.”

  They continued along Calvert Street toward Columbia Road.

  “A good neighborhood for walking,” Getmanov observed. “So long as you stay with the crowds and avoid places like that playground. Safe even for women. Provided, of course, they don’t stay out too late.”

  Olivia offered him a cold sidelong glance. “It was said of the Mongol Empire in the time of Genghis Khan that a virgin could walk from one end to the other alone with a bag of gold, and arrive with both her gold and her virginity. America’s empire is not that civilized. However, General, I am.”

  “How so?”

  “In my pocket. A .45 automatic.”

  “Illegal to carry in your nation’s capital. Or even possess.”

  “I know. I used to live in Virginia and came here often enough to make carrying a habit. If I’m ever arrested, I’ll explain to them that the Second Amendment establishes, constitutionally, the unorganized or universal militia. The Founders considered every free white male between eighteen and forty-five, not in the active forces or a member of an organized militia unit, a member of that unorganized militia. The descendant of that law, minus the free and the white, is still on the books, incidentally, although few Americans know it. The District of Columbia cannot lawfully disarm me. It’s an unconstitutional violation of the Founders’ original intent, as codified in the Bill of Rights.”

  “But you’re not male.”

  “Agreed. But the Fourteenth Amendment means that I and all other women are the legal peers of men, whether lesser laws say we are or not.”

  “What precisely does this Fourteenth Amendment of yours offer you?”

  “Equality. In a way nothing else in our Constitution does.”

  “I will tell my wife about it. She’s something of a, how do you say it, a free spirit. She also carries, from time to time.”

  “If she’s arrested, tell her to get a good lawyer and don’t count on diplomatic immunity. Your country might waive it.”

  They came to a garish intersection. Knots and waves of people, not all of them well dressed or sober, some ostentatious in their ugliness, buffeted them as they waited for the light to change.

  “We might well waive it. We no longer invoke immunity the way we used to. In truth, she’s been arrested before.”

  “In the United States?”

  “And elsewhere. She also has a magnificent collection of unpaid parking tickets.”

  “Perhaps an unwise choice of wife for a senior officer of the FSB.”

  Getmanov looked at her calmly. “Perhaps. GRU, by the way. Military intelligence. Major general, as I believe I’ve mentioned. As for my wife,” he said quietly, uncomfortably, “she is the wife of my youth and as our homeland has changed...” deep pain in his voice, “so has she. But she is still young and comely, and better than so many of my countrymen, who now seem to care for nothing but money, money, money, and all the cheap and vulgar things it buys.”

  “Does she still love you?” Olivia asked. No need to ask whether he still loved her.

  “Oh, yes,” Getmanov answered as the “Walk” sign came on and they moved forward with the rest. “I am worth it. But we were born into one world and now find ourselves living in another.” Then, to change the subject: “You know, all through the Cold War, in countries where there was blood war, whether you Americans won or lost or just watched it on TV, you always took in refugees afterwards. Your cuisine has benefited immeasurably. Many fine restaurants in this area, you would not have had otherwise. Korean. Cuban. Vietnamese. Ethiopian...”

  “Afghan,” Olivia interrupted. “Also Russian. I’m sorry, but you were beginning to sound bitter and I think we agree about the vulgarity of bitterness. So which of these establishments shall we visit?”

  “None,” he replied, recovering. Then he went on equably, “For my refusal, there are three reasons.”

  “Go on.”

  “The first. If you are wearing a wire, listening and recording devices work less well outdoors, in crowds, in the noisy street, and as we’re moving. The second. Neither of us should wish to be seen with the other sitting together, not in this block of many different restaurants patronized by persons of many different loyalties and professions. Too obvious. As I said, if you wish to hide something, keep it out in the open. Unless someone is following us, we’re hardly noticeable. And if someone notices, he would have to follow us very closely to learn anything.”

  “And you do not think your cell phone is tapped?”

  “I doubt it. We’re just not that important anymore. And even if some recording device is listening in, nobody will ever review it. Your FBI, CIA, and NSA people are, one hopes, deploying their limited resources against the terrorists.”

  “I see. The third reason?”

  He shook his head. “My expense allowance is not what it was. And I fear that soon enough I may have to pay a lot of parking tickets, if I wish to keep my wife out of jail. In this city, such infractions are a significant source of revenue and are priced accordingly, and my embassy no longer claims diplomatic immunity for its personnel in that regard. Something of a New Good Neighbor Policy.” Then he smiled, bitterly and openly. “You know, Doctor Tolchin, for me, it was never
about...what was to be obtained. It was never about, as you Americans put it, getting and spending. For me, it was never about shopping and hard currency and the other privileges...”

  “I know that, Yuri Mikhailovich,” she said quietly, wondering why she’d suddenly chosen to address him by his first name and patronymic, not wondering how he judged her indiscretion. His eyes, as they closed upon hers, told her of pained and taut acceptance. They walked in silence down Columbia Road. She wanted to take his arm, not erotically, but out of a strange sense of sudden kinship. He turned his head slightly to look at her, and it seemed that he wanted to offer her his arm. As a gentleman would.

  “You are of great interest to us,” he said finally.

  “Why?”

  “We know of your work. Especially your Army work when you were at Belvoir. It is elegant. It is never more complex than it has to be. We also know that the real challenge in military sensor technology today is not Star Wars buffoonery. It is in tactical sensors, which your country has been developing and using since Vietnam but seems in no great rush to perfect. We know that Army project you were on. It had such potential, except that it didn’t cost nearly enough to make it worth anybody’s while to protect it. You were eased out because, to say it frankly, you were enthralled with developing an acoustic/infrared ground sensor, an item so simple that even a Russian conscript could use it. Throw it around the corner or into a building or a room, listen and look on your little hand-held terminal for what might be there, waiting for you. The sensor could give you a yes or no, and that could make all the difference. Invaluable in urban combat. Street fighting. House-to-house. But your project superiors did not want such a device because it conflicted with the desires and priorities of their superiors. Nor did any commercial vendors see the potential. Not complex or expensive enough, even though, if you’d completed your work, they could have been manufactured by the tens of thousands and the contractors grown rich from low mark-up but high-volume production. Nor did the Army project manager, a colonel close to retirement, much care for your design philosophy. Nor did he care to have you constantly begging for field time with the troops to test this, that, and the other.”

  “To do this kind of work, one needs to understand the client’s needs and see how it works under field conditions. See with one’s own eyes.”

  “That’s why you failed. The troops were not your clients. Two bureaucracies were. The governmental and the corporate. You failed and you paid for your failure with...” an ironic smile crossed his lips briefly, “a kind of internal exile. You were too serious and you paid for that, too.”

  Olivia showed her teeth once again. “Yes, I’m serious. I’m an engineer who loves sensor design, and the military was where the action was supposed to be. I’ve never been a soldier, never wanted to be one. But I’m an American. To me, this was about war. This was about body bags. American body bags that we wouldn’t have to fill.”

  “Now you know why we never approached you during the Cold War.”

  They stopped. Getmanov took her elbow and guided her to a small space by a shuttered shop window. The flow of pedestrians guaranteed that no one could linger close to them without being noticed.

  “Yes. I do,” said Olivia, realizing with a sense of violation that she had been of interest to him, to them, longer than he had admitted. Then the sense faded into an eerie wonder, the frightened yet calm acceptance of what she was about to hear, of knowing what he was going to say and knowing he meant it.

  “You are a patriot, Doctor, in a country that reduces patriotism to bumper stickers, mutilating your impossible national anthem at sporting events, and proclaiming to the world...” he raised a mocking finger, “‘We’re Number One.’ You’re a silent patriot who takes your citizenship seriously and your country at her word when your country proclaims her deepest values. Even five years ago, had I said what I’m going to say, you probably would have brought out your pistol. But that was then. This is about the fact that your nation and mine have enemies in common.”

  “Go on.”

  “Our present enemies are not to the West. Our enemies are no longer the West at all. Nor are our present enemies to the East, no matter how irritating our Chinese comrades can become. Our current enemies are within, and to the South. They do not threaten us with their armies. They threaten us with their religion and their ideology and their willingness to resort to terror to advance them. They cannot defeat us openly. But they can cause us to disintegrate.”

  “They are attempting to disintegrate you in Chechnya.”

  “So they are. The question is, can they defeat us enough to cause us to disintegrate?”

  “Go on.”

  Getmanov looked toward the street. “You Americans,” he mused, “still have no idea what your Civil War was really about. Not even your President Lincoln could say it openly. The purists among you, the abolitionists so-called, their slogan back then was, if I recall, Erring brethren, go in peace. But Lincoln couldn’t let them go. To save the Union, he had to keep them in. Otherwise...”

  “Otherwise,” Olivia interrupted, “anyone who wanted to could leave.”

  “That is correct,” Getmanov nodded, still looking away. “Of course, no one else was interested in leaving, so the argument leaves something out. Namely—the West. The South would never have been content, harvesting cotton and tobacco year after year and keeping down the slaves, while the North grew ever larger and more powerful, admitting all those Western territories to the Union as states. The South had to extend slavery and compete for all those lands. If the South had survived, it would have meant constant insurrection, terrorism, war. Bleeding Kansas would have become the Bleeding West. We have our own Bleeding Kansas, you know.”

  “Chechnya.”

  He turned to face her. “Indeed. If we let Chechnya, our Bleeding Kansas, go, our Caucasus and Central Asian lands become our Bleeding West. And those who would do this to us, and those who would help them, mean you evil as well.”

  Olivia nodded. Getmanov went on in the manner of a marksman, knowing his bullets were striking where and as intended. “Were America not so obsessed with sex and scandals, scandals and sex, SUVs and football, you would notice that some of those whom you trained and armed against us in Afghanistan are now using that training and those arms against you. Not on your homeland. Not yet. But that day will come. So I ask you, Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin...” He faced her directly. “What do you want to do with your life?”

  “I’m missing the connection.” Her voice was glacial and yearning.

  “We—the Russian Federation—want to rip the hearts out of our mutual enemies, the Islamists or mujahidin or jihadi or whatever you care to call them, while minimizing our casualties and those of the innocent as well. That includes our own Muslims, many millions of whom do not share such insane desires. Not so long ago, our motherland was invaded by Germany. We received your aid and became allies for a time. Once before, we carried the burden of resistance until you had no choice but to join us. We bought you time to get ready. Bought it with our blood. So it is again today. And so I ask you again. What do you want to do with your life?"

  “I want,” she said, feeling no further need to evade, “what I said I wanted. To do one thing in my life that really, really matters.”

  “Then do it for us. With us. You would not be the first, you know. In the 1930s, an American helped us. He too was an engineer. His name was Walter Christie. You Americans no longer remember him. We do. He had brilliant ideas for the development of tanks. He’d been having them since the First World War. But his own government—your government—cast him aside, over and over again. So he gave his ideas to us and his ideas became the basis of our T-34 tank that ran the Nazis out of our country and gave us an empire in Central Europe.”

  “For a while.”

  “Yes, for a while. Frankly, my dear—a cinema cliché, you will forgive me—we’re better off without it. The point is, your Mr. Christie, by saving us, helped save his ow
n country and the world. Unintentionally, perhaps. But it still happened that way. We remember. Now we worry about other enemies. But the same principle applies. So I ask you again, Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin, would you consider becoming our new American engineer who brings us gifts that, someday, perhaps, all the civilized world will acknowledge and value? If you wish to do one great thing, I can give you that chance.”

  They stood a few moments in silence while the crowds, some in fashion, some in rags, swirled and staggered by. Olivia listened to their conversations, the things that mattered to them, looked at them, guessed at their lives and what they wanted of each other, that night and beyond. The revulsion grew unbearable, and she said to Getmanov, “I am a citizen of a country that does not wish me to serve her. These are people with whom I no longer have much in common. Nor do I wish to be around them.”

  “Or serve them?”

  “Or serve them.”

  “What is your desire?”

  Olivia heard her words as from a distance, but knew that they were hers. The most surprising she’d ever uttered. And, in her world as it was, the most logical.

  “To do my one great thing to benefit us all. But not here. That would make me a criminal and a spy, to use American facilities in such a manner. I would also get caught and have no desire to spend the rest of my life in prison. I’ll do it in Russia. In a properly equipped and funded laboratory, with no interference and a minimal staff, I can give you in a quarter, two at most, a working prototype of a cheap, disposable acoustic/infrared tactical ground sensor. There will be no need for years and years of phony tests and artificial benchmarks. There will be a need for me to test it under realistic conditions as soon as possible and make necessary modifications in the field. That means we skip the intermediate stages and go directly to use in combat. That means Chechnya.”

  Feeling himself grow faint, Getmanov abandoned all pretense of tradecraft to speak directly to her as a human being. “Do you understand what you are asking, Olivia Lathrop? Beyond leaving your country, probably forever. If your government finds out, they would welcome you home only in chains. Do you understand?”

  “I am understanding. And I expect to find myself in Chechnya for operational testing and field development. Within the next year.”

  Getmanov’s gaze now rested upon the passers-by, and he felt about them as Olivia had. He was standing so close to her that he could embrace her, were not physical propriety at that moment of total importance. He felt her eyes lock onto his. He could see the myriad small scars, now that she had washed her face clean of makeup. The mint and salt of her breath, the cedar and violet of her perfume, were also clean. The scent, and the scars that she had a right to wear with more pride than even the most magnificent jewelry, tore through him. He’d spent years, too many years, recruiting foreign nationals to spy on their own countries. Americans, most recently. He’d felt contaminated always, but especially by the current crop of Americans, who cared for nothing but money yet demanded obscenely little of it. Until now, all he’d wanted was information. Stay at your job. Give us what we want. Get caught whenever. We don’t care. Never before, never even in his imagination, not even in planning this night, had he ever invited or wanted to invite any traitor to his country. But it was happening now. And he realized that it was happening precisely because she was not a traitor.

  Then the thought assailed him. This is too easy. Perhaps he was the one now entrapped. If I ever discover that you’re playing me false...

  Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov, declared cultural attaché of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, Major General of the GRU, calmly took her strong, scarred hands in his.

  “On behalf of my government and people, I invite you and welcome you to a Russia that needs you.” He paused. “So listen carefully, because no one will guide you through the next few weeks.

  “Your first step, upon return to Los Alamos, will be for you to resign your position. Tell them you’re tired and that, with your present state of health and with the money you’ve received from your recent lawsuit settlement, you wish to spend some time pondering your future. Given your clearances, your debriefing will take several days, perhaps more. Co-operate fully. Put your affairs in order, though not as someone preparing a permanent departure from her country. Any large bank withdrawals can be done from Vienna. You make, what, $90,000 a year as an exempt civil servant?”

  “Eighty-five.”

  “We will pay you $100,000 a year—in dollars, not rubles, although once the ruble becomes a hard currency, you will be paid the equivalent in rubles. You will be provided with a reasonable flat. You will also be given, in time and as circumstances permit, a house of your own. Retirement pension will be pegged accordingly. The bulk of your savings here you will take out in the following manner. Go shopping, but only as you leave this country, perhaps at Tiffany or Cartier, and keep the receipts. These items you may sell at your discretion when you arrive. Russia is awash in money from organized crime, so you are going to make very happy the mistresses of some Russian Mafiosi while reducing their liquidity to some minor degree.

  “Now, the Cold War is over, but because of your background you will still need permission to travel abroad. There will be an aerospace conference in the spring in Vienna. My wife plans to attend. Please arrange to attend as an independent researcher and acquire all necessary permissions and documents. I’ll meet you there.”

  Olivia Tolchin nodded somberly, then withdrew her hands from his. “I’ll look forward to meeting her.”

  “You two will enjoy each other’s company. With your common interest in aviation and similar outlooks, I’m sure you’ll become good friends.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Then…“Is that all there is to it?”

  “What more would you like? A ceremony here in this street?”

  Olivia paused, then said, “Yes.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Olivia straightened and reached into her pocket. Getmanov flinched, then steadied. “General Getmanov. I am going to Russia as an American, to work against our common enemies. It will not be possible for me to travel armed. Therefore,” she drew out her pistol and offered it, “I am surrendering my lawful weapon to you. I ask that you return it to me in Russia.”

  No one on the street seemed to notice the weapon. Or perhaps no one was surprised to see one appear in such a place. Getmanov accepted the pistol, looked at it briefly, then put it into a pocket of his overcoat.

  “Agreed. As you Americans say…done deal.”