FEBRUARY-MARCH, 1981
Timoshev - he changed everything.
At the time, I was not aware that everything had changed. Operationally, I mean. I was too fixated on this new woman in my life….. Elizabeth Mary (Korman) Jennings, of Chicago, Illinois. I'd not met her before, not until February 1981.
Finally, after almost 16 years - Elizabeth Korman admitted to being Nadezhda Borisovna Popova of Smolensk, Soviet Union.
She also became my wife. (Well, almost, I shouldn't get ahead.)
The night of our arrival back in 1965 - checking into that room, the one with working air conditioning - Elizabeth simply froze at my, then, husbandly advance. I mean, we'd just arrived and did not have much else to do for the next little while, while we acclimatized to the culture surrounding us.
That marital rebuff - on her part over the years, it turned into American-snarkiness, and a sour attitude - not that it ever migrated into her professional life as an illegal.
Add into all that changed, add in Granny. Add in Ronald Reagan. Add in Stan Beeman. Add in Martha Hanson. Add in our teenagers, kids of the American variety.
Add in US Presidential Executive Order 2579, which forced America's counterintelligence agencies to declare war - on me and my family! On Elizabeth, on Emmett and Leanne who we had not seen for years. On Granny. Yes, even on Paige and Henry.
Apparently, the official party line of FBI counterintel, was that we illegals, we did not exist. It was seen as simply too difficult for us Soviets to hide that long, generationally, all while still being operational.
What with Reagan's new covert war, though, our operations would become more deadly, more intricate, more risky - new exposure just as our kids were coming of age. It wasn't fair.
Add on the complete 'moral exhaustion' (that's what it was) of actually doing the job. Reagan's new offensive, right there on American soil - necessitated us doing horrible things - necessitated us obeying horrible orders from The Centre back home, a Directorate S command centre with little sense of what it was like to operationalize such things on foreign, enemy soil.
Add in Stan Beeman. More on him later.
TIMOSHEV'S LEGACY
Directorate S defector, Nikolai Timoshev - he was our last, best chance for ourselves to escape this. We could have taken his advice and called it a day after 16 years - Lord knows that we'd already given the best we'd had for the motherland. We could have taken $6M in 1981 dollars, gone into US Marshals Witness Protection, used the last of our own skills to seal the inevitable, trailing bread crumbs that the Americans would leave so that the KGB could find us…..
….. and live normal, albeit comfortable American lives, raising American teenagers - them unaware, me looking forward to the day when I'd walk Paige down the aisle.
That future? I was there in the garage, when Elizabeth opened up the trunk to our gold, '77 Oldsmobile - an otherwise nondescript car that just happened to have been spotted when we'd grabbed the man.
She opened the trunk, stared at the bound-man inside, and said, "Привет, капитан, помнишь меня?"
Elizabeth didn't see me, she was so focused - almost afraid - of what was in that trunk. Yes, I said it - Elizabeth in debilitating fear, as if facing a demon. Timoshev, he was the only one tied up in that trunk.
Robert McKenzie had once told me about the trainers back in the Directorate S program, about his own partner and faux-wife committing suicide on the eve of their deployment. It had forced him into a rare, solo illegals assignment in Philadelphia and Boston.
Spying her in the garage staring at the trunk, I had never seen Elizabeth like that. Shaken. Unsure. To the point of broken. Then she became the Elizabeth I'd known, respected and had depended upon, she looked down, and said in her trademark strong voice….
…. "Hello Captain, remember me?"
OUR RETIRMENT PLAN
Timoshev, he was no good to us dead, especially if we were to trade him for a permanent new life in America. Not to mention $6 million.
Later, I watched as Elizabeth attacked the now untied man, she was like an animal. He'd been the one who'd once bested four Japanese judo Olympians - Timoshev was no match for her fury. Me, I was going to take him to our new FBI neighbour for a trade - for our future in America. What she was going to do to him, she wanted him fully able to respond in kind. No weapons, just her bare hands. For many years I had seen her kill coldly and dispassionately. Not that night, not in our suburban garage in Falls Church.
She wanted him alive as long as possible. She wanted him to remember every one of her blows.
That night after renewing her oath to our country, she took me out - with one elbow. This wasn't cold, clinical Elizabeth. She was wild - he gave a good accounting of himself, but it was not nearly enough against her rage.
I was petrified that the noise would wake the kids - or worse, alert our new neighbours.
Mainly to stop the melee, I got up and came up behind him - to snap Timoshev's neck before the ruckus itself gave us away.
Elizabeth yelled to me, "Philip, don't" An apodictic command if I ever heard one. Startled at Elizabeth's verbal force, by instinct I obeyed, I stopped.
With equal force, she taunted Timoshev, "come on!" She wanted this death match to be up close and personal. I had never, not once, seen that in her.
She was careful not to kill him outright.
When she picked-up the tire iron to finish him, Timoshev said as pitifully as a defecting KGB officer could, he apologized. To Elizabeth. "I am sorry, I never meant to hurt you. We were allowed to have our way with cadets, it was a perk."
What the fuck did he mean by that?
For the first time in forever, I became enraged, I demanded of Elizabeth, "how did he hurt you?" Of course, me asking that, I became part of the problem. I was denying Elizabeth herself from her own agency to finish this.
She dropped the tire-iron, and while still staring him down said, "do what you want with him. Take him to the Americans if that's what you want. Get your money. Disappear if you want."
Everything changed with Timoshev. When I lifted him and snapped his neck in front of Elizabeth - it was perhaps at that moment when it happened. Lord knows if Elizabeth saw it like I did, but my anger had chosen Elizabeth, and hence the motherland, over a comfortable future in America.
Later, at the harbor in the middle of the night after dumping the body, right there in our gold '77 Oldsmobile, Elizabeth consummated our marriage - with me, with a passion I'd never seen in her. After 16 years.
ADD IN STAN BEEMAN
Our bedroom window had a great view of the boulevard out front, even as the stretch between us and the new Beeman house was unlit - a dark space between streetlights, between houses.
Purely by chance, now a little worn out by Elizabeth's advances (!), I saw our FBI counterintel neighbour crossing the dark street, and coming up our equally dark drive. I made it to the garage just as the quiet noise of the locked garage-door was being fiddled with. I set myself in the shadows, pistol cocked and held in up-ready, heard the garage door lifted a little, and watched him roll in.
I watched him check the screws on our Virginia license plates, the ones we'd changed back from D.C. plates on the night of Rob's stabbing. I saw him pick the trunk lock, where Timoshev had been held, where Elizabeth had thoroughly cleaned. Then had soiled it so that it was returned to it's trunk-like state.
When he left under the ajar garage door and closed it from outside, only then did I uncock the pistol. I then went up to Elizabeth - fearing that our 'defection' offer was now ancient history, that our only remaining option was to run. With the kids. Henry, he was young enough that by the time he became an adult, he would be fully Russian.
Paige, maybe not. That's what goes though one's mind in such circumstances.
AN INSANE TIMELINE, A JEALOUS WIFE, MY SHITTY SOUL
Obviously, I'd never seen it before in Elizabeth. Honeytraps, honeypots, our stock in trade - I'd had Annelise affix a pinhole camera to her bra, and photograph US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger's home study. Those photos accomplished three things.
One - photos of a clock on one of his shelves, perfect to have a listening device placed inside. The woods behind the Weinberger's would be a perfect place to place the receiver - all it would need was the recording tape be within radio range, and be swapped out frequently.
Yet, The Centre, they put us on an insane timeline. What was our way-in to the Weinberger's home?
Two - when she saw the photo of Annelise standing in her bra and panties, camera in her cleavage - I felt something in Elizabeth which was totally new - a hint of jealousy. Really? After what we did? I thought that that emotion would be for me, when I'd listened to her climax with David Sepsill.
But The Centre, it was adamant.
Three - I became aware of my shitty soul. Truly, the only way in was through the Weinberger's maid, Viola Johnson. By poisoning then offering an antidote to her son, Grayson. By blackmailing a mom about her boy. Who does that, but a monster.
Yes, our timeline was that short - the British were coming to Weinberger's home study to discuss Reagan's strategic defence initiative. We were ordered in ASAP.
What we did to that woman was unconscionable. What we did to her son, more so. (That I broke Viola's brother's arm, that was self-defence….. that I didn't kill him, that was sloppy.)
But it was the look of horror on her face. We'd made an ordinary American choose between her son and her country. By the worst means possible. Did I say I felt shitty, now that Reagan's world was on us?
That was what changed in me - I'd always felt that way, but with Mrs. Johnson, I couldn't ignore it, it bubbled to the surface. The woman, she balked again at placing the clock back - I almost strangled her boy right there in front of her, she begging me to stop. I did stop, but threatened that next time I wouldn't. I can never forget the look on her face as she scanned the monster in front of her.
I felt like shit. I was a shitty soul. Just a few days before, I'd had a way out - where I could take my whole family. With millions of dollars and an even newer identity.
Now I was once again destroying lives, and I was becoming increasingly aware how. Again. And for what?
GREGORY
Elizabeth and I continued hand in glove as KGB illegals, that had been our stock in trade since the academy. Elizabeth back then, she had been wise to reject her first pairing. Until 1981, despite my marital frustrations - now *fully* resolved! - our operational pairing was solid. Unknown to us, we had been gathering quite the reputation back at The Centre.
Then as part of the exponential change Reagan's world ushered in - two more additions to the stress we were to absorb - including a third of which we were totally unaware.
Granny. Robert McKenzie's ad (from the grave?) in the Classifieds. And finally, Elizabeth and I being 'taken in' for torture.
Why'd it have to be Philadelphia? Why'd it have to be Gregory? Robert McKenzie's classified ad was clear - he was in trouble and needed immediate exfiltration.
The problem? Robert McZenzie, he was dead. Had bled out the night of his stabbing - and it had been me who'd delivered his body to the hospital, no doubt to FBI counterintel when nothing about his ficticious background added up.
Possessing Rob's body, the FBI now could not deny the reality of generational illegals, like us. That one, it was on me. Elizabeth had been right - Rob's life was not worth compromising the mission. I had blown it. We were also fresh out of live KGB personnel to trade for our safety.
So, who had placed the ad? Was it an FBI 'dangle'?
The only place to find out was Philadelphia.
Fuck. Philadelphia meant Gregory Thomas. Elizabeth and I had just found each other, had just consummated our faux-marriage.
And I was to have Gregory thrown into my face. Timoshev's legacy, it continued. And he was dead, too.