EMPLOYMENT DRAMA

Jason, he'd been at DuPont Travel longer than anyone. Maybe twice as long as me, not that we talked a lot.

He was a quiet sort, barely competent at the work. He'd not once won 'Employee of the Month', and never registered in the 'Top Two' sales awards that the boss conferred each half-year.

Me, I was by far a better capitalist than Jason ever was. He'd never mastered the art of the 'up-sell'. Me, I had had customers call me out for doing it, but the vast majority of the time they'd thank me. Especially putting the Disney-set into more expensive, Disney hotels - once on-site they'd become aware of the cheaper, off-site motels. Yet by paying more, they'd be in the park more quickly and without the long walk.

And…. there were a million other travel tweaks that Jason just never seemed to master.

Me, at work I tried to pay him no mind - Dupont Travel was my rest-time, where my mind could go into neutral. It was the time I could get away from the sordid demands of my other job. Besides, just that month I'd been named Employee of the half-year, and the boss had closed the agency early that day, had brought in a cake.

So there I was, getting off the bus near our apartment - Elizabeth away on an operation. She had said that there was a chance she would be home that evening, so I wanted to prepare dinner - but also I knew there was not much point in waiting up.

Getting off the same bus from work all that time, I realized I had got sloppy. It had been a while since I'd gone into the cafe across the street and up the road, get a paper and coffee at a window seat - and scan the area to see if we were catching surveillance. So with nothing else to do, instead of going in to prepare dinner for Elizabeth (which would probably spoil anyway!), I bought a paper and went into the cafe.

It didn't take long for me to see from my vista, Lord above….. we had caught surveillance! But it was not what you'd think. On a bench in the park across from the apartment, there he was.

Jason. With a heavy coat on for the cold, but sitting there on that bench, obviously checking out our apartment. He stretched his neck every time the front door opened, and the lobby was within his sight.

You could just tell, the man was not FBI. Somewhat a relief, but amateurs, they were the ones who could really ruin your day. For one thing, by all I'd been trained to spot, he was alone. He'd obviously had no training, because if you knew what to look for, he stood out. Badly.

So, abandoning the cafe where it was warm, I finished the coffee, put on my coat, and walked over to join him in the park.

He looked horrified when he saw me coming, but just sat there, frozen to the bench.

WELL, THAT WAS AWKWARD

"Hey, Jason," I called out, approaching him. "Fancy seeing you - I didn't know you lived around here?" I sat at the other end of the bench. So far he had not said anything, and by the look on his face, I wasn't sure he ever would.

Finally he spoke, speaking not to me but straight ahead. "Philip, I need that job." He then looked down at the ground, said, "you do it so effortlessly."

Trying to diffuse whatever it was that was going on, I assured him, "Hey, Jason! You're a good agent. I bet with a little effort, it'll be your name on the cake next time."

Jason finally lifted his head and turned to me. "I don't know how you do it, I really don't. What with your other job."

Now it was me sitting there stuck for words. Yet I said, "other job?"

"Yah, your other job. At least that's what the boss says. Me, I think you're playing around on your wife… you know, the one you never bring around to work, not even to staff parties." He then rattled off from memory dates from the previous two months, dates which corresponded to operations I had done. Dates where I'd shown up at work less than fully awake.

"I need you to back up, Jason. What's this all about? Why are you outside my apartment?"

He then got somewhat angry. "The boss, he cuts you so much slack. You're the travel 'wunderkind'. But you're not who people think you are. You're a fraud." He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a city-bus transfer, one dated at the same time as a NASA operation I'd done two weeks previous.

"I thought I'd lost you," he said, pocketing the bus-transfer. "I got off the bus, and just by luck who should emerge from a little warehouse on the other side of the city, but you. In a car, a fancy one. One you obviously should not be able to afford." He halted, but added sharply, "and you were wearing a beard."

I told Jason that he had quite the imagination, knowing that this evening, he could not leave my sight. This was something that both Elizabeth and I would need to see to, and I did not know when she'd be home!

Were we going to be recalled once I reported this?

He broke my thoughts by saying, "that's what the boss said, that I have an imagination." I asked him what else he and the boss have talked about. "He thinks you have another job, and rather than resenting it, he says that that makes him like you all the more."

COMMAND AND CONTROL

The numbers station, it had sent to me - personally and in my own personal code - that I was to meet a man in Lafayette Park in a few days. That I was not to bring Elizabeth, and I was not to tell either of the Connors.

It got me again wondering - was I being recalled? Were the rest of them to be left in place? Was that their solution to my alarm with my day-job at Dupont Circle Travel? My gaffe about Jason being able to stalk me?

Fuck. The Centre had not yet signaled anything in relation to Jason or my boss. They simply had no idea what it was to be in the field. Now I was being summoned to yet another park bench in the middle of the day.

So…. to get to it, there he was on one of Lafayette Parks' benches, a man I had never seen before. He couldn't have been a new Directorate S illegal. The men, at least, who I'd trained with looked an awful lot like me and Emmett…. not this guy. He was maybe in his fifties.

I sat down beside him, and put the newspaper I was holding between us. I put it masthead down, left it a second, then turned it over so that the masthead was up.

As if it was an innocent summer's day, which it was not, he introduced himself, in Russian, "Я Гавриил Петрович Белостоксий."

I said, in English, "well, you've just failed tradecraft 101 - back in training, we'd be beaten if we'd spoken Russian."

"Still," he went on, "that doesn't change that I am Gabriel Petrovich Beloszoksy, and I'm here as The Centre's eyes and ears - on you two, you and Elizabeth - as well as other assets on the eastern seaboard. For the foreseeable future."

Skeptical, I said, "and I'm to feel all safe and cozy meeting you? You seem to know all about us, not even the Rezidentura knows about us, not really." I paused, then added, "you're not FBI are you?"

Gabriel laughed, "no, I'm not. I'm more loyal than that! I didn't see most of my friends die at Leningrad to suddenly start cooperating with fascists." He then said sardonically, "you complain about my Russian, yet The Centre often doubts you're able to copy your instructions - The Centre also doubts that it is actually receiving half of your own reports."

He picked up the newspaper I had brought. "Three things," he began, "yes, you can tell Elizabeth this. The Centre is not thrilled about the baby. You may not know, but Leanne and Emmett, they were almost recalled after their second."

"Second, within the year, maybe two, shortwave radio will be a thing of the past - at best a back up. My main job for the time being is to set up a call-centre for Directorate S work, independent of the Rezidentura, indeed a firewall between it and the official Soviet delegation."

It seemed that The Centre had been listening to our complaints after all. We needed our command and control right here, on the ground. We needed our orders processed through something other than the unreliable radio waves they floated on, or by people with no operational idea.

"What's the third?" I asked.

DUPONT CIRCLE TRAVEL

"Well," said Gabriel. "You're to take the next year, both you and Elizabeth - you're to take a sabbatical from illegals work. A breather. Get used to your family. Become man and wife. Now that I'm here, your 'time away' can be supervised better. Besides, I cannot handle operations, as well as set-up a call centre at the same time, I'm just one person."

"Really, 'Gabriel'?" I said exasperatedly! "A new baby, and no work - except for clerking at Dupont Travel? I'll go blind with boredom!"

"By this time next year, Philip? You'll own the place. There's already a $10,000 down payment in your box, which you'll make when it becomes available."

I looked at him as if he were nuts. "Gabriel, I work there. No one is talking about it as being for sale."

Gabriel returned the 'nuts' look. "The message from you has got through loud and clear. Your boss already thinks you have a second job. What you don't know, is that he has a cousin, a private detective - his cousin is being tasked with finding out what that job is."

Startled I said, "you mean Jason?"

"No," Gabriel said, "please give me credit for being thorough. I'm confident that the contagion stops with those three." He sighed, then said, "all three of them, your boss, his cousin, and Jason - they will have accidental deaths - events you're not to have anything to do with. When your boss's family is settling his estate, that's when you make them an offer - $10,000 down payment, as well as personal financing we've already secured from the bank."

"Jesus," I exclaimed, "you really are our handler, aren't you? After years of flying without a net, it looks like you're going to be part of our lives. I'm beginning to like it better the way it was…."

"It's me who is without a net, Philip. You, you have Elizabeth. Me, I'm an old man who'll make his own borscht. It's me who's on my own. Look at me, if caught I cannot flee. At least you can." He looked at me and added, "One last thing," he paused, "any more kids and you have to get out of that apartment."

1971

With the hire of Stavos, Lacey and Steve, I thought it time to take down the memorial pictures of the old boss, and of Jason - the original agent at Dupont Travel. The new people, they had no idea who it was we were mourning.

It was time for the business, my business to move into the 1970s with new energy.

We were supposed to be back in Moscow by then. Instead, we were embedded deeper in American life.

Despite being pregnant with our second, Elizabeth was finishing her Masters of Business Administration at GWU. Man oh man, could that woman multitask. Of course it meant that often little Paige was at the Agency with me, where we'd set up her toys in my back-office. Rather than a child's presence at work being a handicap, Stavos, Lacey and Steve would use the time while young customers coo'ed over the toddler, to up-sell them. 'Up-sell' in the manner that I had taught, where they ended up thanking you for getting them to spend more money.

Me, I had long-since got the hang of this capitalism business. It was Elizabeth who would gripe after her MBA classes. "Capitalism is evil," was what she'd say. One night, she coming to bed heavy with child, she felt a sharp pain. When I asked if she'd been all right, she said, "Soviet women, they were always the true heroes of the Revolution."

I told her that I had not been asking about 'Soviet women,' I'd been asking about her with her pains.

"You like it here, Philip, way way, too much." Next morning she'd complained that she'd not had more than ten minutes sleep - between a crying Paige in our small apartment, and the baby in her womb - "I got more sleep during operations!"

Operations. By 1971 they had been few and far between. Gabriel had been true to his word, if our tour as Directorate S illegals was now going to stretch into the 1970s, then we were simply to have more support.

Last year, Elizabeth had gone to Ohio for an extended time to the City of Kent, to observe (and perhaps participate in) their anti-War rallies. Get to know the people on the ground. Given that that had been Elizabeth's only operation all that year, almost getting killed by National Guard soldiers on campus, caused Gabriel to pull us from all activity for the rest of 1970.

GABRIEL DELIVERS

So, in 1971, I was to pick up a dead drop from Gabriel, 'dead drops' being a new level of communication we'd been unused to in our six years in America. I mean, we couldn't always meet on park benches.

This one? Once decoded, there were two things. One - there was to be $20,000 in our operational safety deposit box.

Two - a reference to an ad for new houses in a middle-class, new subdivision of Falls Church, Virginia - a twenty minute drive west through Arlington from the Metro Area proper - and away from the social problems associated with the streets of the nation's capital. The money, it was another down payment. We were to get a mortgage based on the business - and join millions of middle-class people in our debt.

In our 'second job' as illegals, we were to spend the next year training our own support staff - recruit them ourselves, to help as spotters in operations. Indeed, the local 'call centre', as Gabriel called it, was going to be open by 1972. The Centre back home, it was finally delivering on our gripes. Our first recruit, he was a young man named 'Robert McKenzie', who we eventually went on operations with. He was a white guy from Philadelphia….. he'd never heard of Gregory Thomas.

Later, Gabriel had told me - "in Falls Church, you're to raise your children as Americans. You're to join the PTA and Boyscouts. Little league baseball."

Elizabeth, she was going to hate that.