"Russian girls, You're all tough, huh?" Gregory had said to Elizabeth, the night before he'd died. His last night with Elizabeth at his side in bed, she and Philip 'having hit the pause button' on their marriage.

"I guess we had to be tough," Elizabeth reflected.

Gregory paused, then added softly, "that's why I fell for you."

Equally softly, she added, "because I'm a tough girl?"

Gregory picked her up from the floor and laid her beside himself. As he caressed her he said, "no, because you're committed. Uncompromising . Stubborn."

As if she was hearing that stuff for the first time, she asked, "you like all that?"

Gregory already knew that this would be his last night, so he got to the point with the woman looking into his eyes.

He said, "don't take Philip back. Find someone else."

All of that came as a surprise to her that he'd say that. When it came to the men in her life, she was quite muddled. Not strong at all. She'd waited until her 40s, she'd had to wait particularly until Nicolas Timoshev was in the rear-view mirror. (Not that one ever got over that.) She looked into Gregory's eyes because no one, not anyone, had given her romantic advice before.

Why would they? She was a hard-bitten KGB illegal, trained to kill. Her marriage was a job. She didn't seem to need anything in marriage, other than what it appeared to be.

She listened when Gregory added, "he's going to soften you all up."

Trying to stop him, she could find only one word to say, "Gregory…."

Wanting her not just to live, but to thrive, he finished with, "find someone who loves you for being so strong. He knows you're strong in being his partner-operative, he just can't handle that as part of who you are."

They kissed, looked at each other, and Elizabeth started to unbutton her blouse.

Gregory's last night.

The next day, over spaghetti with Paige and Henry at dinner, they heard on TV, "suspect in FBI killing himself gunned down in downtown battle."

MARRIAGE FAULT LINES

Who was I kidding, Elizabeth was not strong. Not when it came to me and the kids, not now - probably she'd never been. What did I know?

I mean, it was her - it had been she who'd told me (after Timoshev) that she was now 'feeling it', for me. Philip. Her husband.

Don't get me wrong. With 'work' she was rock solid. It had only been recently that she said she doubted herself when it came to this impossible job.

The stuff with Martha Hanson, at first I'd thought that Elizabeth had found it amusing. Well, not at first - we'd been on the outs with each other the first time I asked Elizabeth for one of her pieces of jewelry, so that I could take it to Martha as a peace offering.

The look Elizabeth gave me when she handed it over….. that was not 'strong' Elizabeth. That was Elizabeth ruing the implications of telling me that she now 'felt things'.

The look on Elizabeth's face when she handed it over. A few hours previous to that we'd been fully husband and wife - she'd confessed to me that she was feeling things in her 40s that she'd not felt before. Things in relation to me…. and our marriage. (Or at least things that were now at top of mind for her….. probably best repressed.)

Then Claudia, that Grannie-bitch fresh from torturing us, she had told Elizabeth about me and Irina in New York. Claudia had told Elizabeth, "if you start thinking of your marriage as real, then it doesn't work." That's what Zhukov had always said, too.

Elizabeth didn't even get that upset about Irina - all it meant for her was that our marriage was back to square one, meaning 'square zero'. Elizabeth wasn't supposed to care, therefore she tried to hide that she did. Hidden, where it had been ever since we'd been paired in Moscow in the 60s. She started to stow her newfound feelings, tried to be stoic about it.

We'd finally stopped that German, hired assassin. That impossible mission we'd been given, it was us who were going to have to do The Centre's clean-up for it. First, they had sent him to kill American scientists, then like doofuses, had rescinded the order…. well after he was already in America.

Elizabeth and I had been exceptional as operatives - both in quickly identifying him, locating and neutralizing him. We were the best we could be, reminiscent of our top marks back in training.

Was that good enough for Elizabeth? No. For her, it had revealed something to her about 'us', about our marriage and why it must remain a sham. She said she was losing it.

She had just told me that the German guy had got to one of the American scientists - threatening that this covert war we were fighting would go hot. The KGB killing Americans on US soil, that was a bridge too far - as it was when the CIA was to kill General Zhukov!

YELLING

"The Centre wants to know what happened," she'd yelled.

I told her what had happened! We'd got a shit mission with no preparation time, with lousy information, against a trained assassin in his own right. That's what happened. It was a miracle that the German had got only one. A miracle that we had survived.

"We didn't stop him in time," she barked, "you know which way this is headed. We needed to have done our jobs!" She paused, said angrily, "this was our worst failure in fifteen years!"

"Ours?" I gaffawed. Elizabeth, she was not thinking clearly - about our job, about us. It wasn't me making her soft, or emotional.

I continued, "they hired an assassin then changed their minds! Then they left it to us to fix. And we did!"

Elizabeth pronounced every word, "This. Is. Our. Job. Philip. It's not The Centre, it is us." She lowered her head, then parroted our training, "Zhukov and Granny are right, we cannot do our jobs if we're emotional."

I said, "what happened tonight had nothing to do with emotions."

She sighed, then said slowly, "it did for me. My head was somewhere else."

She then gave her verdict, "Us. Philip, we have to stop this."

The rest happened quickly. I said that I would move out, that in those modern times - 1981 America - no one would notice, and that The Centre probably wouldn't even care.

Which they didn't. Except for maybe drawing a sigh of relief that two of their premier illegals on the ground in America had returned to business, business as usual.

MARTHA HANSON

"It is the means by which we humans tell each other, 'I'm in this for the long haul'."

Martha Anne Hanson, do you take this man, Clark Herbert Westerfeld…..

EMJ: The pastor had said, 'to be your husband and partner, in good times and in bad, till death do you part'. Take out the 'husband' part, and that sounds like our last 16 years in the work we do. - pause - We've had our good operations, some have gone all to shit. We've also always known that in death we might part….

PMJ: Elizabeth, is this really you? You, you're waxing philosophical? Is that my doing? Is it me who prevents you from being clinical and strong?

EMJ: I just wanted to say, 'Congratulations', Philip. That's all. It was touching. - silence - No, I'm serious, I can see why people do this - get married. I didn't expect to be touched.

I just looked at Elizabeth, truly I did not know what she was getting at. I also did not know if she was picking at me.

EMJ: You and I were never really married, Philip, that's the point. - silence - I know they're just words people say…. do you think things would have been different for us if we'd said them?

PMJ: I don't know.

Why was Elizabeth waxing like this? Today was supposed to be about 'Clark and Martha'. Even Granny had dressed up, Claudia was now my mother!

But with Elizabeth in the narthex of the Lutheran chapel, all I could do was to turn my back on her. This was the 'weak' Elizabeth, the unfocussed one, the one who she said had screwed up the German assassin mission, her saying she'd had an unfocussed mind.

That when she thought of me as her husband, she was all muddled.

Elizabeth - she needed to pick a lane.

MARTHA WESTERFELD

I was once asked, did I ever have any feelings for my wife? Any sense of affection?

No, not Elizabeth - my 'real' wife. 'Real' in the sense that the Commonwealth of Virginia had sent me and Martha a marriage certificate. Had I ever developed 'feelings' for Martha Hanson, now Martha 'Westerfeld'?

Of course I hadn't. Geez. I'm telling you, that when Martha had first brought out her copy of 'The Joy of Sex', I almost called off the whole mission. Sure, the intel that Martha inadvertently handed to me was gold - all of it - but I'd never gone that far with any of my marks. Martha's bed may as well have been a gymnasium.

Given that the last two sub-chapters have been titled after 'Martha', you can reasonably guess, that they really are about Elizabeth.

I'd got waylaid from Martha on another mission. Wisely, Elizabeth picked up on it - she'd gone over to Martha's (as my sister 'Jennifer') and over a bottle of wine, talked Martha out of revealing her marriage on an FBI application form.

The upshot of that? Elizabeth wanted to know what me and Martha were about - in the bedroom. Elizabeth asked me, to do those things to her that Martha and I do. Things I hated.

Granny and Zhukov had been right. Making the marriage real was trouble. Dangerous.

Иди домой

Anyone who thought of Elizabeth Mary Jennings as 'strong' did not know her.

Look what my partner hid behind. She was committed. She was uncompromising. She was stubborn. All that was true.

But strong? Never emotional?

We had two missions simultaneously, one was to collect the tape from the car, the recording of the meeting in the Secretary of Defence's home office, with White House Chief of Staff James Baker. The Centre was worried that Reagan was planning a strike against a Spetsnaz detachment in Nicaragua. We needed that tape.

Yet simultaneously, the guy Elizabeth had been running, Sandford Prince, had been arrested. His contact with Colonel Rennhull, from Missile Defence, was now at risk - if Elizabeth went there with Prince in custody, the odds were that it was a trap set by the FBI.

Odds were that by the end of the next day, one of us would be in prison - the other had to flee to the Ottawa Rezidentura - with the kids. Elizabeth, she said that it had to be me who fled with them.

EMJ: Did you pick a hotel?

PMJ: Yeah, Melton Inn. Tuscarora State Forest.

EMJ: I already packed the kids bags. They're in the garage if you have time to put them in the car. Tell them it's a surprise trip, that we all need a little spontaneity in our lives. - pause - If I make it out of the meeting with the Colonel, I'll be there by nightfall. We'll be back Monday morning.

PMJ: There's one other choice we can make, all The Centre cares about is that BOTH missions get done. - pause - I will take the Colonel, you pick up the tape. - pause - Paige and Henry, they need you, you're their mother! - pause - They love you Elizabeth, and I get it, you see us together and you think it's easy. We'll it's not. - silence - You're their mother.

EMJ: I know that. - pause - We have to follow orders.

PMJ: No, we don't.

EMJ: Don't fight me on this.

PMJ: Fine, I won't fight you.

I didn't fight her. I switched it up at the last minute. I went for the Colonel, Elizabeth had no choice but to go for the tape.

THE WAREHOUSE FIELD HOSPITAL

You see, Elizabeth - Nadezhda - she was not strong. Not as a mother. Nor should she have been. She was not her own mother, her own mother had always been strong and focused, even with her daughter. Elizabeth had been the one who'd first said that I had to take the kids. That if one of the missions had been a trap, it had to be me escaping. Thinking ahead, that as soon as Stan Beeman got a look at her, that me and the kids had to already be in Canada.

She'd said, "if one of us is going down and one of us is staying with the kids…. Philip, after everything… it should be you."

I told her that that was not true.

She then pulled back on her façade a bit, dropped her shield of feigned strength and said, "I want it to be you. You're the one they want. The one they understand, don't argue. Just say yes. It's for all of us."

After a moment of un-Elizabeth-like vulnerability and doubt, the old Elizabeth resurfaced.

"The Colonel is my mission, it's what the Centre ordered."

Of course, you know what happened. The Colonel, he'd not been the set-up. The car and the Weinberger tape in the trunk had been.

Three hours after narrowly escaping in a high speed chase, it was me being weak. In a hastily assembled warehouse 'field hospital' in a single bed, me staring down at Elizabeth's body, she shot - I disobeyed another order.

This one from Claudia, a direct order. I was NOT going to go home to take care of the kids. I was staying, staying to beg Elizabeth to pull through.

She wandered in and out of consciousness, perhaps not aware of how either of the missions had turned out.

Strong Elizabeth? Weak Elizabeth? Her family made her weak - that's what I'd tried to protect her from - and I'd chosen wrong.

It was the weak Elizabeth who looked up at me and said in weak Russian, 'Иди домой'.

'Come home'.

OUR KIDS

All the years we'd been in America - all the years with Paige and Henry with us - neither of us ever thought that the kids would be in danger.

Us? Of course we were. That was our job. But the kids?

I'd said to Elizabeth, that I'd made a bad choice bringing my kids into our work.

Elizabeth the strong? Not so. She'd retorted, no longer restraining her emotions about the kids, "how are we going to live like this?"

I didn't need to soften up Elizabeth. She was already there.

As always, my answer made me feel even more like shit. I told Elizabeth the equally emotional, "we'll get used to it."

Would we? The trouble with normal? It always gets worse.

(to be continued)