Mike gave her his, and went away. That night Myra phoned her tape of the whole conversation through to the office of one of the local sections of the FI, and to a reporter on Mother Jones. The journalist was dubious, the local cadres—after a quick, panicky consultation—told her to play along.
Two weeks later she was in New York, and met Mike again, leaning on the rail of the Staten Island ferry. The last round trip of a day which had been humid, and was now hazy. Commuters dozed on the benches, tourists posed for pictures of themselves with the Statue of Liberty or the towers of Manhattan, the apparat of capital, looming in the background. She agreed to liaise with the consulate when she got back; and in the years that followed, she did, now and then, as she and Georgi clawed their way up the structures of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, through revolutions and counter-revolutions. Mainly she reported on people who were as much her enemies as they were the CIA’s; smugglers of drugs and people and arms, dealers in corruption and mineral concessions and resource looting. She told the FI about every such encounter, and nothing came of it, and it all faded out. After the Fall Revolution a lot of files were opened. Myra had idly run searches on her own name and code-names in them, and found that most of the individuals and companies she’d shopped to the CIA were working for the CIA.
But they still had her down as an asset, the bastards, after all those years and changes.
And the girl with pink hair had been on the Staten Island ferry, too. She never did figure that out, and in the end put it down to coincidence.)
Jason passed her the joint, and they smoked it together as they ambled down the steep, rocky path through neglected olive-trees to the foot of the hill, where they’d left their hired jeep. The dingy little settlement there had consisted of newly built concrete houses, and a few of the stolen stone houses in the first street of the long-emptied Greek town. All of them had been gutted years ago, the Turkish families living there slaughtered by Greek partisans in the last war. The blue-and-white ceramic eyes—for good luck, against the evil eye—above the doors were cracked, the timbers blackened. Myra ground the roach into charcoal ashes that still lay inches deep. She didn’t feel high, just focused, her sight enhanced as if by a VR overlay. She could see why this land was worth fighting over.
Jason got into the driver’s seat as Myra climbed in the other side. He looked at her sympathetically, as though half-sorry for having brought her here.
“Sometimes God is just,” he said.
“Yeah. In a very Old Testament way.”
Jason started up the engine and swung the jeep around on to the narrow road to Hisaronu. The road climbed, scraping trees, edging precipices. Pine and rock and dry gullies—it was like a hot day in Scodand. Myra remembered a day with David Reid, by a river between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, that had felt just like this. He had talked about depopulation and forced migration in biblical terms as well, she recalled.
“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” she heard herself say.
“What?”
“That thing from the Bible. You know, about the king of Babylon? ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting.’ ”
“I’m aware of the source,’Jason said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’s the relevance that kind of escapes me.”
“It’s the way I feel,” Myra said. She stuck her hand in the air above the windscreen, feeling the cool rush between her fingers.
“That’s how you feel about yourself? That’s bad.”
“No,” she told him. “About the fucking world.”
“That’s worse.”
She laughed, her spirits lifting.
“Anyway,” Jason went on, “it’s just the rejuve talking. People get like that.”
“You would know, huh?”
“Not personally. With me, it’s just stabilising, right? With you—” he smirked sidelong at her “—it’s got a lot of work to do.”
“Thanks.”
“It makes you feel strange. Euphoric and judgemental.”
“Yeah, that’s me all right!”
It was the fifth day since she’d swallowed the surgery. The nanomachines had differentiated and proliferated inside her, spreading out through her circulation like an army of sappers, tearing down and rebuilding. She felt their waste heat like a fever, burning her up. Her moods swung from normal to high, she didn’t have depressions any more, it was like a biological Keynesianism, except that in the long run she was not going to be dead. She was not immortal, not really—who could tell? The best guess was centuries and in that time something else would come along—but she felt immortal, she felt like people did in their twenties before their cells started running down and their neurons began to die, no wonder she could remember the seventies so vividly, no wonder she was getting so arrogant!
Sex with Jason had been a foregone conclusion, from about the second she saw him. He was an imperialist agent, a strategic enemy even if a tactical ally, and she didn’t care, she wanted to seduce him and subvert him herself, turn tricks learned in a lifetime that would curl his toes and grey his dark-copper hair. If he had any inhibitions or revulsion from her still-aged body they had been dissolved in the first evening’s first bottle of raki. She’d sucked him rigid, fucked him raw, taught him much and told him little.
The little she told him was about Georgi, and the circumstances of Georgi’s death. For reasons which Jason didn’t spell out, but which Myra suspected had “Agency asset—poss future use?” scribbled in their margins, the CIA was conducting its own investigation into that death which had been so deniably convenient for somebody.
In the early hours of the mornings, when he thought she was asleep, he would go out to her room’s tiny balcony and talk for a long time on the phone. She pretended not to notice and didn’t object, instead using these times in murmured pillow-talk on her own, using the eyeband to consult Parvus and to listen to v-mail from her Sovnarkom colleagues about the situation back home. It wasn’t good.
Denis Gubanov, in particular, was glum. His summaries of popular attitudes—derived from agents’ reports and readers’ letters to Kapitsa Pravda—indicated what to Myra was a surprising groundswell of opposition to the whole deal with Kazakhstan. All unnoticed, a thick scrub of patriotism had grown up over the years on her tiny republic’s thin, infertile soil. Its independence had come to matter to its citizens, far more than it ever had to her. Each night she looked at shots of the growing daily picket outside the government building: red flags, yellow-and-black trefoil flags, pictures of Trotsky. She’d sigh, turn over and pretend to be asleep when Jason came back.
At Hisaronu, a pleasant small town scattered across a hilltop surrounded by higher, distant mountains, they stopped at a pavement cafe on the main street. They drank Amstel and ate Iskander kebabs, under a striped plastic awning. When they were smoking, and sipping muddy coffee, Myra leaned forward across the table and clasped Jason’s hand, letting their fingers intertwine.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
He clasped back.
“Apart from what I’ve got?”
“Yeah.”
He disentangled his fingers from hers and pulled from his pocket and unfolded a Mercator projection world-map, furred at the creases. He elbowed aside his drink and a plastic ketchup bottle and spread the map out on the metal table.
She pointed. “We’re here.” She dusted off her hands and made as if to rise. “Glad to be of help.”
“Sit,” he said, laughing. “Look.”