TEENAGERS, THE DEATH OF US ALL

I remember first hearing that Paige had met a girl, a girl named Kelli - on a bus during Paige's clandestine trip to Cresson, Pennsylvania. All of it, not General Zhukov, not The Centre, not the leadership of the KGB….. no one prepared us for this.

….. most certainly not perhaps the most effective Directorate S illegals in America - meaning, us - we were simply not prepared for a smart, American teenager. A teenager who knew how to access directory-assistance to find the telephone number for Aunt Helen Leavis - the Aunt who Elizabeth had had to 'care for', as a cover for convalescing following being shot.

What webs we weave.

Looking back on it, of course Paige was going to go looking for Aunt Helen - a 'relative' we'd always talked about but whom the kids never met. We'd even invented how the name 'Leavis' had got associated with us…. then that one time we messed up and called her something else, Paige had said, 'I thought her name was Leavis'?

Trained to lie on the fly, I said, 'oh, that was her maiden name.' Russian teenagers, I remember them being more obedient and less inquisitive.

There was a reason why neither of our kids had ever met any of the people in our sole family photo-album we kept, perhaps because none of those people actually existed.

The point? We had choices. Between a stimulus and a response is always 'choice'. Isn't that what EST had said?

Paige was making her choices. However at her age, she'd had no idea of what 'stimuli' had been bombarding her. All there had been were Elizabeth and my crazy lives - lives not exactly designed for raising teenagers in 1980s suburbia. In America.

EMJ: What happened to Emmett and Leanne, I always knew that was a risk. - pause - Knowing it and seeing it are two different things. - pause - All I can think of now are of Paige and Henry.

PMJ: - me, I was without words, I was consumed with guilt -

EMJ: But it was seeing Amelia. I mean, how are we going to live like this?

PMJ: - I didn't mean it hopefully - We'll get used to it.

I then contemplated the grievous sin of getting Henry involved in a brush-pass at the fair. Elizabeth, she tried to comfort me on that one, saying that I'd had no choice. Elizabeth - comforting someone. Wow. (That was definitely post-Timoshev!)

But with Henry at the fair, I'd had a choice. We, Elizabeth and I, we'd got used to everything else, some pretty ugly stuff, one by one. The next one was always worse. So we sat there on our bed, contemplating the things to come, worse things we'd never imagined where we were going to have to 'get used to it', too.

Until it broke.

Meanwhile, Paige was traipsing around eastern States trying to find something, anything to anchor her in our family. A family that as a teenager, she was primed to view as a fraud anyway.

Paige, meet Aunt Helen. Paige, meet Kelli.

Paige, meet Pastor Tim.

Fuck.

WHAT DID WE EXPECT?

I thought that I was going to write about Pastor Tim, he of Reed Street Church, an unaffiliated, liberal-progressive church. His 'ministry' was to swim against the tide of American evangelicals who turned out to be the political base to Ronald Reagan, now the reactionary US President.

Yet his church was still so American, not evangelical but liberal.

Why did Pastor Tim and his church, then, fill me with such anger?

Nothing exposed my own shortcomings as a father than when Paige found Reed Street Church. Found Jesus, as you do. I mean, what had we expected? What had General Zhukov envisioned? How was The Centre going to leverage this to promote our underground work as Directorate S illegals? I don't think they'd thought that through, they certainly hadn't with Emmett and Leanne.

My anger, it was more basic than that. I think I scared even Elizabeth with my outbursts, I know that I both scared AND traumatized Paige. (The outbursts aimed Henry's way, that was for later. Crap.)

Unknown to me at the time, but obvious for me these days, was that with Reed Street Church, with Paige's search for other family - other than her bizarre parents - was that Paige was looking for her 'parenting' elsewhere. The whole religion thing, it was her search to replace me!

I'm not claiming that my reaction to her was logical, sane, much less something that contributed to a healthy illegals' cover-story. Between the stimulus of Paige being her own actor in the world, and my ugly response to that - was choice.

Elizabeth, she had claimed that I had had no choice, not that day at the fair with Henry. But I did have one. Wasn't that what I was telling Elizabeth in early 1981 before the whole Timoshev thing blew up? That we had choices? That 'following orders' was not the only possible response? That we could actually decide to get out of this shitty life?

I don't want to go all 'EST' on you, but….. Paige, she was now actively searching out the solid ground of new parents, people other than us, not that she would ever have put it that way. What had she said? "In Jesus, I don't find an end to suffering, in Jesus one's suffering can be used for good. I never knew that. It's hopeful. It's the first time I've ever been hopeful."

What!? We aren't? I'm not? I'm her fucking father! I'm the jolly parent who can balance-off Elizabeth's no-nonsense, lecture-oriented mothering style. I playfully dab your nose with ice-cream! (Elizabeth, ever mindful of the real sacrifices of post-Great Patriotic War Smolensk, being raised by a single-mother, she hated Paige talking about Jesus's 'sacrifice'. Don't lecture Elizabeth about sacrifice! Apparently, Elizabeth too had her moments of yelling at Paige about all of that.)

What had we expected?

Me, I'd not expected to grab her Bible and rip pages from it. I'd not expected to scream at her, that she had had the gall to try to replace me…. with Jesus. An American Jesus to boot.

ARE YOU GOING TO BEAT ME UP?

I thought I knew what I was doing, going to visit Pastor Tim that night. I thought it was to retrieve the $600 that Paige had foolishly donated to the church for their missions. Churches: even the liberal-progressive ones bilked teenagers out of their money.

But that late evening, when he spied me in his doorway, it occurred to me that I'd not taken even the most basic of counter-surveillance measures - that night I would have flunked out of Directorate S training. The church could have been ringed with FBI, I didn't care, I went in anyway. If General Zhukov knew, I'd have been assigned somewhere else as a factory manager instead.

The worse part? It was then clear that I couldn't kill him, not that night. Even though I probably could have, I probably would have. The killing would not have been clean.

None of that, none of it had I been aware of until the good Pastor said, "are you going to beat me up?" I'd lost complete situational awareness. Me, I was part of it - which one cannot be for a clinical kill.

Also, not that I would ever make a good counselor, or even an EST leader, even I knew that you don't tell an angry person that they have anger issues.

That's what Pastor Tim told me that night. Me, an angry man - he told me that, right there with nothing to protect him from my wrath. As he was returning Paige's money to me, he said that the real issue that night was my anger.

I almost finished him on the spot.

What prevented that? Ultimately it was my training - our training. That module back with General Zhukov where we'd been pushed, pushed hard - to consider a personal vendetta against someone else at the school. Both Elizabeth and I had resisted, back then we'd kept to our discipline. We'd escaped the punishment that most other trainees had had to endure - to drive home the point that being long-term, embedded illegals - we were not to pursue our own agendas.

We were to keep to orders and honour. Ignore our needs to see to Mother Russia's.

I left that night from Pastor Tim's office with refund cheque in hand. I resisted the urge to rip it up, and return to his office, to finish what I'd actually come to do.

Which I didn't.

As I wrote elsewhere, it was a good thing, too. Eventually both Elizabeth and I were in that same office seeking his counsel about returning to Moscow.

Yes, he was eventually to know. Not everything, but enough. Enough for him to tell us that if we took the kids back to Moscow, then in 1984, that it would be hard for both Paige and Henry, Henry himself not knowing a thing about anything, nothing at all.

His most chilling counsel? He'd said, "soon it will not be up to you. Soon, both Paige and Henry will make their own choices."

No wonder I was so angry.

OUT OF CONTROL

Technically it was Paige's fault, not that I would ever accuse her out loud.

She'd told Pastor Tim, "they're Russians, and they're trying to make me one two."

How out of control had Elizabeth and I got? We'd bugged Pastor Tim's office, we heard his fondness for 'Central American liberation theology'. So we paid a Latino guy to be 'Father Rivas', to come with us to see Pastor Tim and his wife Alice, a night at the church office when we could be alone, just the five of us.

That's how out of control this got.

We schooled the Latino guy on both Father Rutilio Grande of El Salvador, as well as the venerated Bishop Oscar Romero. The homeless, Latino guy - on his own he had gone to school on those two clerics, he said it made him yearn for his home back in Chiapas, Mexico. Elizabeth sat back in awe as the homeless guy had wow'ed Pastor Tim with tales of 'Latin America struggle, against the Great Satan of America.'

But it was not enough. Between Gabriel and The Centre, they picked a date for when both the good pastor as well as his wife would meet with an automobile accident.

We were ordered to take the kids to Epcot in Florida, to be as far away from the 'accident' as possible, to mitigate the obvious damage that that would do to Paige. Even with that it was 50-50 if Paige would blow it back at us. How could she not?

After all, Pastor Tim and Alice were fast becoming her 'parents' in absentia.

Then. William Crandall. Lassa virus. Us infected, Gabriel in critical condition, Elizabeth vomiting profusely. Me, I got a better understanding of how critical our situation was when after Elizabeth had phoned the kids with the disappointing news about Epcot, then had got a recording at our on-site Call Centre to beg them to call off 'the hit'…..

…... that Crandall proceeded to cut off the telephone handset from the payphone, and wrap it in plastic. That's what gave away the critical nature of what we were dealing with. Not to mention that we could have lost both Elizabeth as well as Gabriel.

Imagine this. There was the very real possibility that the 'hit' had not been called off, they'd not got the message up the chain fast enough. How would we know in quarantine? Imagine that Elizabeth had died. That I'd eventually gone home a widower, facing the accusations from my elder teenager that I'd just murdered her pastor…..

We were out of control.

DINNER FOR SEVEN

We'd not gone to Epcot. We'd gone bowling. Strangely, that had worked for the kids, for both Paige as well as Henry. There we were, just the four of us, having an evening of fun.

You could see it in Paige's face, her smile at having a laugh with her mother. And there was Elizabeth, having a smile and a giggle in return. We were ever briefly an American family.

We highly trained illegals, even we needed to let down our hair once in a while, something that Elizabeth had avoided in the previous 18 years of work, work, work, work.

Then our doorbell rang. Henry, he didn't even bother to excuse himself from our dinner guests, Pastor Tim and his wife Alice. (Keep your security people close, but keep your security risks closer!)

Me and Elizabeth, we owed Pastor Tim and his heavily pregnant wife for Tim's disappearance in Soviet backed Ethiopia. That had been totally coincidental, but Alice had left a sealed letter with a lawyer, a letter about us as illegals, to be given to the FBI if anything had happened to Tim.

Although not of our creation, that was the world that we occupied, the world that Paige had thrust us into. So on Tim's safe return, we had our security risks over for dinner - just to keep on top of things. As we'd been trained, oh so long ago.

"Hey Dad, Mom," Henry yelled from the door. "It's Stan, he says he's hungry! Can he stay!"

A dinner for six, became a dinner for seven. Hell, may as well have BOTH our security risks as close to us as you can imagine.

Me, I was scared. Frightened to death, like a little boy.

STAN BEEMAN

So it is I turn in the next chapter to what I've been avoiding all this time.

Writing about Stan. Arguably my best friend, my most successful penetration into the FBI world of counterintelligence.

Stan Beeman.