“Of course.” She disappeared through a door.
DeVere drifted over to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer. The paper clip he had carefully positioned atop the middle of the sheaf of papers was now slightly to the right. He smiled to himself and softly closed the drawer.
Natasha returned and announced that the cyclotron was warming up and would be ready in 10 minutes.
“Thank you, Miss Nikitin.”
“By all means. Please call me Natasha.”
“Thank you, Miss Nikitin. That will be all.”
“Yes, Professor.”
Natasha was tall and attractive, with angular features, bright blue eyes, and long brown hair that hung straight down her back. Those hairstyles were discouraged by the Central Agency but she apparently wasn’t interested in impressing the powers that be. Either that or she was too well connected to care.
She said she was from Central Asia, although she looked much more European than Asian. He hadn’t interviewed her himself—that had been Nigel’s prerogative—but Nigel mentioned that her parents had been killed in the Soviet Union’s Second Great War with China around the turn of the century when she was still an infant. That would make her 27 or so. The fact that her parents were martyrs of the Soviets’ Second Great War made him uncomfortable. After being raised in a Soviet political orphanage it was easy to see how a loyal spy could be created. And that she was a spy, Paul had no doubt. He, Lewis and Natasha were the only ones with access to the filing cabinet. He made a mental note to discuss her presence in greater detail with Lewis.
On his way home Paul shook his head at how complicated kids’ school projects had become since he was a kid. Ah, but Grace was doing well in school and seemed motivated. These days too many kids, even in the Northeast District, were looking to just get by and get a job, he thought as he turned and headed toward the Kennedy Library. Not that there was anything wrong with getting a job, but there should be… more to it than that, some sort of passion about what you did, finding something you loved and pursuing it.
Thankfully, Grace had an active mind. Her goal was to go to Africa and study wildlife
He pulled into the parking lot at the Kennedy Library, walked in and paused in the austere marble foyer. Disk, he was here for a disk. He headed in that direction when he saw a sign for a new exhibit, “America Since 1960: Sixty-six Years Of Progress Toward A Peaceful Workers’ Paradise.”
He’d heard about that. It was Soviet propaganda sludge, of course, and Boston had voted against allowing it in until Vodkaville had promised to fund an additional six months of work on the Big Dig. The chief engineer said they would finish the project some time in the next couple of years.
He strode past the exhibit room on his way to burn the disk for Grace in the bookstore.
“Sir?”
He paused, and glanced around. The place was oddly empty for this hour—the boycott, that’s right, he’d read that Boston was unofficially boycotting the Library until the exhibit closed. He saw three people in the room that normally buzzed with activity. The librarian read a newspaper.
“Sir?”
He looked at the exhibit room and saw a young, petite woman smiling at him.
“Have you seen the exhibit?” she asked.
“Um, no, sorry, I… have to go to the bookstore, you see…”
“I can give you a personal tour,” she said, beaming. Obviously a Soviet girl, Paul guessed she also was from Central Asia somewhere. Why so many Central Asians in Boston? he wondered.
“Yes, well, thank you, but the bookstore is about to close, so I’d better—”
“The bookstore is open until ten tonight.”
Paul tried to think up another excuse, but she clearly wanted to give him a tour. No matter how many tours she gave, her pay wouldn’t change. She could sit in the corner and read, but she really wanted Paul to see the exhibit.
She cared about something.
This cheerful, beaming guide reminded him of Grace, who really wanted visitors to the deVere house to sit down and look through her books of African wildlife. The guide was now giving Paul that same look Grace gave people when she asked them to look at her pictures of lions and elephants and hear what amazing, incredible animals they were.
“Oh, all right,” Paul said. “It doesn’t take too long, does it?”
“It can take as long as you’d like, sir,” she said, nearly giddy with delight at finally getting to show someone around her beloved exhibit.
The tour began with John Kennedy’s defeat of Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. In 1961, the guide—Raisa—said, the good President Kennedy was unfortunately influenced by the military adventurists of the previous administration, and decided to attack the peace-loving Cuban workers.
“Previous administration? The previous administration was Republican, there weren’t any holdovers,” Paul said.
Raisa lowered her eyes. “President Kennedy wouldn’t do that on his own,” she said softly. “He loved the working class, he fought for the advancement of the proletariat. It was the previous administration.”
DeVere opened his mouth to disagree, then realized all he would do was hurt this girl’s feelings.
“Yes, I see.”
Raisa perked up. “Then in 1962 the Cuban Missile Partnership paved the way for good relations and trust between America and Cuba.” She moved on to the next panel, celebrating Kennedy’s 1964 narrow re-election over the evil Barry Goldwater, his 1965 Civil Rights legislation ensuring the complete equality inherent at the center of Communism—“already we can see his longing to join the Soviet Union”—his ability to keep the U.S. from meddling in South and Central America during the successful Ché Guevara revolution in the late 1960s, his wise statesmanlike policy to allow Southeast Asian workers and revolutionaries to throw off the imperialist French shackles binding those societies, and the election of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Raisa looked at the picture of Robert F. Kennedy the way Grace looked at pictures of cheetahs in full stride.
Robert F. Kennedy, that was the disk Grace needed, deVere remembered. Her class was studying the Robert F. Kennedy administration. “Robert F. Kennedy,” he said to etch it in his mind.
“Oh yes,” Raisa said, looking up. “Most historians prefer John Kennedy, but I like Bobby. He had more insight, I think, and he didn’t have the other Kennedy’s, ah… problems.”
DeVere nodded as Raisa prattled on about Robert F. Kennedy’s brilliant War on Poverty and ability to focus the attention of the U.S. on social injustice at home and not get involved, as some misguided reactionary elements in the government were advocating, when the Malay Peninsula adopted Communism in the late 1960s.
“Unfortunately, after the Kennedys left office, President John Lindsay committed America to stopping the advancement of Communism in Western Europe, but his reactionary Euro-Centrism only allowed the forces of progress, under the brilliant leadership of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara, to liberate Central and most of South America. Naturally, we hope to be able to liberate the rest of Western Europe some day as well.”
The pictures showed a smiling Castro in Nicaragua, and a determined Ché in Mexico City standing next to a pinch-faced frowning soldier with a general’s insignia. Paul recognized him as the American defector who had helped Ché’s campaigns.
She moved in front of the largest panel, which depicted America’s capitulation. DeVere knew the story. In the late 1970s, Ché and Castro assembled an army of a million foot soldiers on America’s southern border. The Soviet Union and China fought the first of their two Great Wars. In an effort to oppose Soviet expansion, the United States supported China, which was then devastated by Russian nuclear and biological weapons. Millions, including over 315,000 American soldiers, died like ants. Then chemical weapons were detonated in Phoenix, Houston, and New Orleans, and a dirty bomb in St. Louis. In order to prevent America from suffering the same holocaust that the Soviet Union and China had just experienced, the United States signed an appeasement deal in the early 1980s, ceding the central and southern states to Soviet control and agreeing on what was then called “Hong Kong status” for the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes states. As part of the deal, and to prevent any East-West holocaust, the United States had surrendered all of their own weapons of mass destruction, which had been quickly seized by international arms inspectors.