"Ever get out of the city? You know, like Boy Scouts do here, that sort of stuff?"
Popov smiled, wondering where this was going, and why they were asking it. But he played along. "One of my happiest memories of childhood. I was in the Young Pioneers. We traveled out to a state farm and worked there for a month, helping with the harvest, living with nature, as you Americans say." And then, at age fourteen, he'd met his first love, Yelena Ivanovna. He wondered where she was now. He succumbed to a brief attack of nostalgia. as he remembered her feel in the darkness, his first conquest…
Brightling noted the distant smile and took it for what he wanted it to be. "You liked that, eh?"
Clearly they didn't want to hear that story. "Oh, yes. I have often wondered what it was like to live out there in a place like that, the sun on your back all the time, working in the soil. My father and I used to walk into the woods, hunting for mushrooms that was a common pastime for Soviet citizens in the sixties, walking in the woods." Unlike most Russians, they'd driven there in his father's official car, but as a boy he'd liked the woods as a place of adventure and romanticism, as all boys do, and enjoyed the time with his father as well.
"Any game in the woods there?" Bill Henriksen asked.
"One would see birds, of course, many kinds, and occasionally elk-you call them moose here, I think-but rarely. State hunters were always killing them. Wolves are their main target. They hunt them from helicopters. We Russians do not like wolves as you do here in America. Too many folk tales of rabid ones killing people, you see. Mostly lies, I expect."
Brightling nodded. "Same thing here. Wolves are just big wild dogs, you can train them as pets if you want. Some people do that."
"Wolves are cool," Bill added. He'd often thought about making one a pet, but you needed a lot of land for that. Maybe when the Project was fulfilled.
What the hell was this all about? Dmitriy wondered, still playing along. "I always wanted to see a bear, but there are none of them left in the Moscow area. I saw them only at the zoo. I loved bears," he added, lying. They'd always frightened the hell out of him. You heard scores of bear stories as a child in Russia, few of them friendly, though not as anti nature as the wolf stories. Large dogs? Wolves killed people in the steppes. The farmer's and peasants hated the damned things and welcomed lie state hunters with their helicopters and machine guns, the better to hunt them down and slaughter them.
"Well, John and I are Nature Lovers," Bill explained, waving to the waiter for another bottle of wine. "Always have been. All the way back to Boy Scouts - like your Young Pioneers, I suppose."
"The state was not kind to nature in the Soviet Union. Much worse than the problems you've had here in America. Americans have come to Russia to survey the damage and suggest ways to fix the problems of pollution and such." Especially in the Caspian Sea, where pollution had killed off most of the sturgeon, and with it the fish eggs known as caviar, which had for so long been a prime means of earning foreign currency for the USSR.
"Yes, that was criminal," Brightling agreed soberly. "But it's a global problem. People don't respect nature the way they should," Brightling went on for several minutes, delivering what had to be a brief canned lecture, to which Dmitriy listened politely.
"That is a great political movement in America, is it not?"
"Not as powerful as many would like," Bill observed. "But it's important to some of us."
"Such a movement would be useful in Russia. It is a pity that so much has been destroyed for no purpose," Popov responded, meaning some of it. The state should conserve resources for proper exploitation, not simply destroy them because the local political hacks didn't know how to use them properly. But then the USSR had been so horridly inefficient in everything it did-well, except espionage, Popov corrected himself. America had done well. he thought. The cities were far cleaner than their Russian counterparts, even here in New York, and you only needed to drive an hour from any city to see green grass and tidy productive farms. But the greater question was: why had a conversation that had begun with the discussion of a terrorist incident drifted into this? Had he done anything to invite it? No, his employer had abruptly steered it in this direction. It had not been an accident. That meant they were sounding him out - but on what?
This nature drivel? He sipped at his wine and stared at his dinner companions. "You know, I've never really had a chance to see America. I would like very much to see the national parks. What is the one with the geysers? Gold stone? Something like that?"
"Yellowstone, it's in Wyoming. Maybe the prettiest place in America," Henriksen told the Russian.
"Nope, Yosemite," Brightling countered. "In California. That's the prettiest valley in the whole world. Overrun with goddamned tourists now, of course, but that'll change."
"Same story at Yellowstone, John, and, yeah, that'll change, too. Someday," Bill Henriksen concluded.
They seemed pretty positive about the things that would change. But the American state parks were run by the federal government for all citizens, weren't they? They had to be, because they were tax-supported. No limited access for the elite here. Equality for all-something he'd been taught in Soviet schools, except here they actually lived it. One more reason, Dmitriy thought, why one country had fallen, and the other had grown stronger. "What do you mean `that'll change'?" Popov asked.
"Oh, the idea is to lessen the impact of people on the areas. It's a good idea, but some other things have to happen first," Brightling replied.
"Yeah, John, just one or two," Henriksen agreed, with a chuckle. Then he decided that this feeling-out process had gone far enough. "Anyway, Dmitriy, how will we know when Grady wants to go forward?"
"I will call him. He left me a mobile-phone number which I can use at certain times of the day."
"Trustful soul."
"For me, yes. We have been friends since the 1980s, back when he was in the Bekaa Valley. And besides, the phone is mobile, probably bought with a false credit card by someone else entirely. These things are very useful to intelligence officers. They are difficult to track unless you have very sophisticated equipment. America has them, and so does England, but other nations, no, not very many of them."
"Well, call him as soon as you think proper. We want this one to run, don't we, John?"
"Yes," Dr. Brightling said definitively. Bill, set up the money for the transfer tomorrow. Dmitriy, go ahead and set up the bank account."
"Yes, John," Popov replied, as the dessert cart approached the table.
Grady, they saw, was excited about this mission. It was approaching two in the Dublin morning. The photos had been developed by a friend of the movement, and six of them blown up. The large ones were pinned to the wall. The small ones lay in appropriate places on a map unfolded on the worktable.
"They will approach from here, right up this road. Only one place for them to park their vehicles, isn't there?"
"Agreed," Rodney Sands said, checking angles.
"Okay, Roddy, then we do this…" Grady outlined the plan.
"How do we communicate?"
"Cellular phones. Every group will have one, and we'll select speed-dial settings so that we can trade information rapidly and efficiently."
"Weapons?" Danny McCorley asked.
"We have plenty of those, lad. They will respond with five men, perhaps as many as ten, but no more than that. They've never deployed more than ten or eleven men to a mission, even in Spain. We've counted them on the TV tapes, haven't we? Fifteen of us, ten of them, and surprise works for us in both phases."
The Barry twins, Peter and Sam, looked skeptical at first, but if the mission was run quickly… if it ran according to the schedule… yes, it was possible.
"What about the women?" Timothy O'Neil asked.
"What about them?" Grady asked. "They are our primary targets."
"A pregnant woman, Sean… it will not look good politically."
"They are Americans, and their husbands are our enemies, and they are bait for getting them close. We will not kill them at once, and if circumstances permit, they might well be left alive to mourn their loss, lad," Grady added, just to assuage the conscience of the younger man. Timmy wasn't a coward, but he did have some lingering bourgeois sentimentality.
O'Neil nodded submission. Grady wasn't a man to cross, and was in any case their leader. "I lead the group into the hospital, then?" Grady nodded. "Yes. Roddy and I will remain outside with the covering group."
"Very well, Sean," Timmy agreed, committing himself to the mission now and forever.