MARILYN KNEW

Her biggest fear was that she would be alone. Forever.

Her real fear wasn't that she was unlovable, that wasn't it. She feared that no one would bother. To love her. That after doing the counter-surveillance her mom had taught her, that no one would even notice her.

All those years caring for Henry - those years when she and her brother were growing up and mom and dad had been absent - often for days at a time…. one of Paige's earliest memories was figuring out how to make a milk bottle for him. Her first try, the nipple had come off and the milk had poured out all over his little face.

She felt guilty for that. After all she was (maybe) 3 and knew that she was smart. But not smart enough. She was never smart enough.

She'd always felt stupid, despite what her school teachers had said about her abilities. She'd been reading at a Grade 6 level when she was 8. But she felt stupid, until, that is, she'd confronted her lying parents as a teenager. Then 'stupidity' was replaced by emotional chaos.

So there she was lying in her basement-suite bed in White Rock, Canada, contemplating the key day ahead. A big day, requiring her to be into work early - she'd have to pass through security for her waitressing job. Knowing who she was now really working for, being surrounded by CSIS, RCMP, SVR, as well as US Secret Service was a strange and anxiety-producing experience at the best of times!

Back in Falls Church when she'd gone on 'ops' with her mom, it wasn't mother who scared her. It was mom's workmate, Marilyn. Paige never knew where Marilyn had come from, or how mom had known her. She never called her mom by her real name, Paige knew enough about what Elizabeth Jennings did to not ask why.

Or ask why, right from the start, that her mom called Paige 'Julie' in front of Marilyn. Paige just went with it.

Never in front of her mother, their boss, Marilyn would pry. They'd be sitting together in a car running counter-surveillance for one of mom's missions - which if you've ever done something like that is nearly always long, dark periods of sheer boredom.

If there are two of you sharing that dark, empty, quiet car, it's telling where the sparse conversation goes. Which between Paige and Marilyn was always coloured by the latter's disdain for 'Julie', her obvious lack of experience, but equally obvious the favour she enjoyed from Elizabeth.

'Julie' thought she heard Marilyn once mutter, 'either you're her young lover, or you're related in some way. Otherwise, why would she risk ops with a rookie? You're going to get us killed.'

"Our boss is one of the elite," Marilyn had once said. "Then there's you." Marilyn had only known Paige as 'Julie', someone that to her eyes Elizabeth had taken a shine to. Because Marilyn was being run by Elizabeth, her meetings with anyone else was rare…. Gabriel being perhaps the only one. The reason for mentioning this is that Marilyn constantly griped at Gabriel, the Claudia about this 'Julie-person'.

"(Elizabeth), she is sharp, she's the reason why I believe world-wide collectivism will - and must - triumph. But with that girl, Julie, (Elizabeth) has blinders. I'm just about to tell her I won't work with Julie any more."

Of course, Paige had never been aware of that 'behind the scenes' stuff. That year where she'd balanced George Washington University with doing counter-surveillance with/for her mom, it had just been overwhelming.

At least then she had not been alone. There was always her mom. Or to a lesser extent, Marilyn. Who Paige knew despised her.

NOW? 1993?

After abandoning her lying parents on their flight to Canada, Paige had managed to get back to the D.C. safehouse. She'd spent 4 months there, drinking vodka and throwing up. Rarely going out, because being on the street in early 1988 had been terrifying.

By 1990, the KGB-led The Centre, paid for her to resettle in northern California, into the Santa Clara Valley to the SE of San Francisco.

By the end of 1992, Paige had fled north San Jose, in the centre of the Santa Clara Valley, and the epicentre of the American Tech boom. Paige had been a dorm supervisor since 1990 at one of the prestigious colleges - one that from it the talented computer science students were plucked from, often taken in their sophomore or junior years to make millions in 'the insidutry boom', often making that money before they were 19.

She'd had access to their rooms, and to a lesser extent, their beds. Paige had told herself that sleeping with those guys was not the same as what her mother had done. It wasn't, don't try to accuse her the way she'd eventually accused her mother. Paige was no whore.

She'd never, not once used sex to get some Linux-trade secret from one of those kids, not while she had a husband and kids of her own at home! It was THAT which made someone a whore!

Now in 1993 she was in Vancouver, Canada, being told by this shadowy The Centre to bypass Seattle, another developing tech-centre-of-the-world. Paige had thought that a waste of her amassed and considerable computer talent - gleaned 50% by her own smarts and 50% from rubbing close to San Jose, college nerds - young, naïve men too ripe for the picking.

THE SUMMIT

Today was the big day. She had to take the first bus from White Rock into the city - it left in an hour, at about 5:40 am. As a new waitress at Seasons at Little Mountain where Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton were going to have a lunch, she had been cleared by the Canadian CSIS, the American Secret Service, as well as the Russian SVR, the successor of the old Soviet KGB. As had every staff-person of Seasons who once reporting for work, would find themselves in a tight security bubble for the rest of the day.

All security checks about her had gone without incident. Whew. Even so, the previous week she'd spent extended time at the storage locker, as well as did a full inventory of the bank's safety deposit box. She did all that not out of training, but out of complete paranoia. She had to be sure that everything in those two places was as 'grab and go' as they ever had been.

Up until 1993 in Vancouver, the most diligent she ever had to be was to deal with a mouthy computer science student back in San Jose - a nerdy, virgin boy 5 years younger than her - suddenly bragging that he was having sex with her. (Which she was constantly telling them not to do!)

In San Jose, the worst that would happen was that she'd lose her job. Now, in Canada at Seasons, if caught she would face serious jail time. Time that she had avoided by a whisker in December 1987 when her mother and father had fled the USA for Russia.

When her dad had worked his magic by talking his way past a pistol-toting FBI-friend, Stan Beeman - in Paige's underground garage back in D.C. How had dad managed that?

So it was, in preparing for The Summit, Paige had gone through the storage area and deposit box in a manner she'd never done before. She'd also sent a message to The Centre, a demand actually. She was now getting old enough to now not just take shadowy 'bosses' at their word.

Until that inventory, she'd never once wonder, 'just who brings supplies to me?' Just who outfitted those two operational necessities, and by what means? Were they local to Vancouver? Did they fly in just for this purpose? She'd asked The Centre and they hadn't even acknowledged that they were not answering.

But that day that she'd gone through everything with a fine-tooth comb, she noticed something about the United Kingdom passport within. The little security packet it was in, it had been opened. Then awkwardly and obviously resealed. As in 'RE'sealed. It was not a sloppy reseal, either, just obvious. To Paige's eye, someone had opened the packet, probably to get a look at the passport picture, and then had expertly, but had badly repaired any evidence that it had been opened.

If it had not been for The Summit, Paige would have taken that as a reason to bail on Vancouver all together. She'd made a firm note to herself that 'bailing' from Canada's west coast, that it could wait a week or two. So she pocketed the UK passport to be burned later, and catalogued what else was there.

RUSSIAN VODKA ONLY, PLEASE

The one iron-clad rule of the Summit? A summit to bring a post-communist Russia into the modern, western fueled tech age of the 1990s?

The rule? There was to be no 'foreign vodka served at the Summit lunch at Seasons'. By 'foreign', the Yeltsin entourage had insisted, 'foreign to Russia'. The post communist market there was being bombarded by brands like Findlandia, Absolut, and Smirnoff. No patriotic Russian would allow those 'pretenders' to be consumed…. not when there was actual Russian stuff around.

Vodka connoisseurs also would know the difference between American Smirnoff vs. Boris Smirnoff brands, the latter being the truly Russian one.

At the Russian hosted bar that Paige was tending for the Season's lunch, there was only Boris Smirnoff vodka, which the Russians - including Yeltsin himself - consumed like the Americans drank water.

The only bit of actionable intelligence that Paige was to glean? It came from a conversation that she overheard between two Clinton staffers - they come to her bar, got their drinks, then sought out a private space for a conversation. That 'private space' turned out to be behind the privacy-curtain she was standing in front of to ply her trade…. unbeknownst to them, they'd circled around and were now standing about 3 feet from Paige, separated by only a curtain.

Male POTUS staffer: God, Yeltsin drinks like a fish.

Female POTUS staffer: Tell me about it. He's a Russian. That's how they choose their leaders. POTUS told me to go heavier on the tonic in his gin and tonics so he'd at least have the appearance of keeping up.

Male: And speaking of disasters for presidencies, did you know that it was here in this city that Warren Harding caught pneumonia and died? Best thing to ever happen to Calvin Coolidge. Maybe Gore will get so lucky.

Female: A little cynical, this is not going to be a disaster for Clinton. It's a no lose scenario. We've got leverage on Yeltsin with the laws about communications and technology.

Male: That's not what I mean.

Female: It's so unlike you to gossip. Not! Okay, out with it.

Male: I was with Clinton yesterday down in that Vancouver shopping district, Gastown. At a tourist trap called, The Inuit Gallery. I mean, I thought POTUS didn't carry money, but he had enough Canadian cash on him to buy this Eskimo statuette of a bear. Said, "keep the change".

Female: Don't tell me he groped the clerk, the fucker.

Male: Relax, this isn't Arkansas. But when someone asked if it was for Hillary or his daughter, he said, out loud I might add, "It's for Monica."

Female: Oh fuck. He said that? Out loud? He's buying stuff for her? Publicly? Shit.

Male: I'm telling you, those must be great blow-jobs. Intern specials.

All of which Paige passed to The Centre. She passed it as the last thing she was going to do in the Vancouver area. Because what she saw as she was leaving for the day, shook her to the core.

What she saw just cemented how truly alone she was.

But as for geopolitics, once again, it got cemented in her that she'd made the right choice to work against the US. Not "we the people", "we" were fine. She'd never worked against ordinary Americans. Only its corrupt government. Yeltsin might be a leader in a long line of drinkers, but Reagan had been a warmonger, George Bush had been CIA, and Clinton, it turned out, was too close to the bone with what she had been volunteering for in White Rock, at the Women's Centre.

TO THE CORE

It had been that woman in the restaurant across the street from the bank. The one in what Paige used to call, 'that silly Stefanie wig'. The one her mom had worn when doing home-hospice care for the wife of a nuclear negotiator, way back when.

Controlling herself when she'd stepped from the bank, she'd managed not to spin her head obviously towards the restaurant's windows. Truthfully, she'd only glimpsed the woman in the wig at the window for less than a second.

She knew she couldn't now return to the bank. So she walked as casually as she could manage to the storage locker facility - engaging in the very counter-surveillance her mom had once taught her, never thinking that it would be used like this.

She got the the locker. The chill down her sine accompanied her seeing a replacement passport - one to take the place of the one Paige had just destroyed.

Her report to The Centre about The Summit done, Paige donned her own wig and changed her clothes right there in the locker. She grabbed her laptop, Canadian cash, an array of passports (expect the UK one), and headed out.

No one, not even the woman in the silly wig, was going to find her - not where she was going. Once again, she was turning the page on any sort of stability at all.

ARRIVING BACK IN SEATTLE

Philip held down his Seattle P.I. newspaper when he heard the key in the door. Sure enough, it was Elizabeth, back from Vancouver's Russian/American summit.

"How'd it go," he asked.

Elizabeth closed the door, dropped her keys on the entry side-table, then fell back the inches to lean against the door.

She then slid to her knees. Philip had never seen this before - this was the woman he loved….

….. she started to shake and cry uncontrollably, now bent over, on her knees.

In the strange west coast American city, even with her husband - Elizabeth felt so, so isolated and alone.