Elliott Strong walked the line, never crossing over directly. He was always careful with the way he put things. He talked about the Jews, but he asked, “What are those people thinking?” It was always those people. Subtle, but effective. Most of all, he vigorously fanned political fires only to get out of the way of the flames.
“Well, well, well, what do we have? A sort of new president in the White House. You never know what you’ll find when you wake up. So now it’s a Republican again. Correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t America vote this guy out last year? Is this some sort of Twilight Zone mockery of the Constitution?”
In reality, it was the Constitution that legally gave Morgan Taylor the reins of government. However, Strong ignored the law of the land when it was convenient — like today. He twisted the meaning of the laws and lied to turn millions of Americans toward his way of thinking.
“So Taylor’s back. The old commander landed again at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Quite frankly, I’m stumped.” He wasn’t really. Strong stretched his jaw, watching himself in his mirror. He was just getting loosened up.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m telling you, it’s arrogance of power. What we have here is a supreme arrogance of absolute power, spying from those people and cover-ups. Taylor—” he dropped his voice as if to cast suspicion “—somehow back in office? Just watch, in the coming days, you’ll start seeing changes. A little here, a little there. Taylor will put his cronies back in — the old Taylor team reunited: an imperial presidency that won’t care about you. Trust me. That’s what we’ll be seeing, and only you can get them out!
“I suppose we can only blame ourselves.” Strong let himself sound defeated, only to raise his voice after a dramatic pause. “But I’ll tell you right now, it’s not too late. No way! There’s time for more calls, more e-mails, and more faxes to Congress and the White House. Now more than ever. My friends, this is a battle we must win. We need a Constitutional Amendment that will fix this once and for all!”
He cleared his throat on the air. “So you wrote before. You wrote your own congressman. Your own senator. Well, pick five more now. It’s your job, ladies and gentlemen of America. Take one hour each day, every day, and do it.”
He went to a caller and took a forkful of mushroom pasta.
Chapter 34
How ironic, the old mushroomer thought. Pravda — the principal Soviet newspaper. Pravda meant truth in Russian. There was hardly a word of truth in it. Maybe the weather forecasts and the soccer scores, but never the news. Now, decades after the fall of the Soviet regime, the concept of truth was finally meaning something to a former Politburo member.
He came to this newfound opinion because of lies perpetrated on the Internet by people who described his role in the Soviet government.
Former KGB operatives had cashed in, selling their stories and speculating about things they knew little about. Some colleagues relocated to the United States, others ended up in England. Too many told things that should have remained secret. A few wrote about Dubroff’s role in the intelligence agency and the programs he had supervised. They separated themselves from heinous crimes, but willingly attached Dubroff’s name.
He slammed his fist down on his old oak desk, nearly tipping over his 14-inch computer screen. “Traitors!” he screamed. “Lies. They rewrite history and wash their own hands of blood at my expense!” He read on, thinking to himself, we had to protect the country. Defend the Motherland from the Capitalists. What did the poet Nikolai Nekrassov plead? “You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia.”
It was my duty. My responsibility. My job. He read on. More hits. More revelations. More lies. The Internet was the new Pravda.
Aleksandr Dubroff’s English was spotty. It took him time to comprehend the things he read on the web. Learning as he went, he entered his name on the Google search engine. A few lines of text came up under the sub-heading Author’s Inquiry:
Information sought on the life of Aleksandr Dubroff. Member of Soviet Politburo. 1979–1985. Master spy KGB 1964–1979. Chief Interrogator for First Directorate 1964–1973. Allegedly responsible for the deaths of more than 400 prisoners. Operations director, Andropov Institute, 1973–1979. Former Russian Army Colonel. Local magistrate. Widower. No children. Status unknown. Presumed deceased. First-person interviews with survivors’ families, former Soviet officials sought.
The extract was posted by a British writer soliciting information for a new book. A biography. Dubroff was tempted to e-mail back an emphatic, “Fuck you!” But he did not. Instead, he stared at the screen for nearly thirty minutes, re-reading the inquiry, seeing how his life was reduced to a handful of words, cold words, including the one word — widower. His whole time with Mishka reduced to one word.
At 0330, Dubroff pushed his chair away from the computer. He rubbed his eyes and went to his lonely bed. He still reached for his beloved, wanting her warmth beside him, but he had only her pillow. He spoke softly into it, as he did every night. But this time, he asked for forgiveness. She had never known what he had done in the name of the Motherland. Now his crimes would be published by someone who would never understand, never know what it was like to faithfully serve.
As soon as he fell asleep, Dubroff became absorbed in a vivid dream. He was at the head of a classroom. A blackboard was behind him. A TV patched into a three-quarters-inch videotape machine played an episode of an American police show. He listened to it through his sleep. Something called Starsky & Hutch. Students, some very young, some older, sat on chairs, spread out in two rows of a semicircle in front of him. He spoke to them in perfect English. They listened, but they wrote nothing down.
“You will learn to think as an American,“ he told them in his dream. “You will become an American. You will take your place in American society. Marry. Have a family. But you will remain a citizen of the Soviet Union, one day being summoned to duty, forsaking all you have acquired. All who are near to you. You will feel your Russian blood course through your veins again. You will fulfill your mission.”
He saw the faces of his students. Attractive young men and women. They were being trained to head businesses, to become lawyers, to rise in government as judges, mayors, and congressmen. He could see them all so clearly. While he wasn’t aware of their exact assignments, he knew them all by name — their new American names. He went around the room, one by one, saying hello to the old students in his dream.
Simonson, Curtis, Maxwell, Greer, Luber, Hale, Blair, Chantler, Gerstad, Ford, Gillis, in the first row. Twelve others sat behind them.
One young man, no older than 15, peered over someone in front of him and smiled. It was a friendly, winning, engaging smile. He nodded. Dubroff remembered that he was a remarkable student, maybe even his prize pupil. This boy was going to do great things, he dreamed.
Dubroff smiled back. Suddenly, the lights in the classroom darkened. Everyone disappeared except for the young student and Dubroff. Without warning, the boy’s face disengaged from his body and floated up in front of him. The smile morphed into a horrifying grin. “You were such a good teacher, Sasha. You nearly brought the Capitalists to their knees. Did you even know it?”
Dubroff was now outside of his body, watching himself in his own dream. “No. What do you mean?”
“We got so close.”
“Close to what?”
“Our dream.”
In the next instant the entire class was visible again. The boy slowly moved back into place.
“Close to what?” Dubroff asked again in his sleep. “Close to what?” he was now mumbling aloud.