That was the grand scheme and vision of the military and intelligence officials who’d first conceived of the town, and in accord with this design they built Warwick to look and feel and behave exactly as a typical Russian village might. Its citizens were fully American, but they were indistinguishable from any Russian man or woman on the street. They lived in Russian houses, and they slept in Russian beds. When they went to withdraw money from the bank, they walked into Sberbank and drew out crisp rubles, and when they looked at their wrists to tell the time, they saw a Poljot. These were American citizens, but they were Russians, by culture, habit of mind, and force of personality.
The obvious complications of developing such a people on American soil and giving them the tools of espionage as second nature became problematic once the cold war was believed to have ended.
Some intelligence wonks whose opinions mattered believed that Warwick had become a buggy-whip industry. Not that espionage itself was unnecessary, mind you. Whips still had their place. It was simply that those in the places of power began to question whether it was wise to devote whole factories to their production.
Throughout their history, all of these unique humans, raised and trained in Warwick, had been used as tools of war, in one way or another, amidst the great battles of ideology fought between men of opposing nations. They had been humans treated as a set of assets. They were pawns, played in a global chess game of power. But, when the game had suddenly turned, or seemed to have, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were not simply decommissioned or re-commissioned. They were sacrificed, as pawns will be, to the interests of those who had formed them in secret. Billionaire capitalists privatized the place and kept it under wraps in waiting for… what? Maybe they hoped and prayed for a return to cold war profiteering. (One could go hungry trying to live off of micro-wars.) Whatever the case, a decision was made to fund in private what was no longer feasible to fund from the public trough.
Warwick, though she was as authentically Russian as possible, and though she had been erected on a foundation of duplicity, was no Potemkin Village. In the fifty years since it had come into existence, life had taken its natural course there, as it had in other places, and as it inevitably will wherever people are gathered in groups.
People in Warwick, for the most part, grew up in loving families, raised children who loved, dated, ice-skated on Nizhny Pond, watched Russian movies at Pushkinsky-Cine, worshipped and wed one another in St. Olaf’s Church, and were buried in the cemetery behind it.
Although Warwick was a town built to train spies, it had been obvious from the first that only a certain percentage of its citizens would ever be put into action. Like any people anywhere, there were sorting mechanisms put in place, devised around talent, intelligence, character, and other factors, and only a few select individuals were ultimately found suited to the task of espionage.
There had been two primary “routes” (for lack of a better word) for the lives traversed by the people of Warwick. At age ten, each citizen was tested and re-tested by the powers-that-be in order to determine which of the routes they would ultimately follow.
One route led to deployment, eventually, to Russia to live and work as a spy for America. Thousands of these Warwickians already lived and thrived in Mother Russia, smuggled in by whatever means necessary over the decades from then until now.
The second route was reserved for those citizens who failed the testing for some reason or another—or for those who possessed some other requisite talent or skill that gave value to the town and its mission. This route meant that, for those who did not make it as spies, they would remain to live and work and serve their country in Warwick for the entirety of a lifetime.
There was no getting out.
Being released into the general American population was out of the question, given the possibilities raised by divided loyalties and the particular kind of expert training that was the lifeblood of the community. Besides, Warwickians would never fit in to modern America anyway. They didn’t know American food or cigarettes or beer. They would have been utterly lost in a Wal-Mart. They’d not been raised on The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days or The Cosby Show or Saved by the Bell or Lost or Glee or any of the other television programs that had defined any particular generation.
They had received as much American culture as any normal Russian would have, but they knew America only by reputation and by propaganda and not in any real and experiential way. They read Pravda and Izvestiya and Novaya Gazeta and had never, or almost never, seen or read a USA Today or New York Times. It is possible that they might be accepted in a small, agrarian community where their more formal way of speaking and their cultural illiteracy might be considered closer to ‘normal,’ but otherwise, and anywhere else, they would be immediately suspect. And to be honest (if such a thing as honesty is acceptable in any examination of the mechanisms of espionage and other forms of professional lying), most of the citizens of Warwick—those that had lived and loved and died there since its inception—never really wanted anything more out of life. Historically, this is true of the bulk of humanity since, of course, we are now being honest.
In respect to the kind of life lived—the actual makeup of the society and culture—most people throughout history have believed that what they have is good and right, and they believe this because they’ve been told to. They love their system because they find it sufficient, even if they want more out of it like anyone else. This is a particular trait of the spirit.
But there are also traits of the flesh. Upward mobility and the desire for anything or anywhere else other than home is a particularly western phenomenon, most specifically identifiable in Americans of the last couple of centuries. Warwickians, insulated from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, had been spared this most American of characteristics.
A few people had escaped Warwick, as noted, during the “confusion” of 1992, and an occasional intrepid soul had abandoned the cause while living as a spy in his adopted country, disappearing into the maw of Mother Russia for some reason known only to time. However, for the most part, and for most citizens, life in Warwick was a closed loop. One was born there and lived there and died there, with only the occasional glimpse into the wider world being permitted. Such a glimpse was only allowed when it served the purposes of those chess masters who administered the pawns, and when it advanced the designs of the nation. Life in Warwick was pleasant enough, but that was mainly because, even if discontent arose, such a life was the only game in town.
Friday
Winter. Late fall by the calendar, but winter in almost every way that counts. The valley, with its dormant flowers and evergreen seedlings, was blanketed in snow, and throughout the surrounding countryside, the very air was crackling with frigidity.
Standing on a high ridge overlooking the valley in the cold of the afternoon, two men, and a pretty Warwick girl of twenty named Natasha, looked down from a tree line about three-hundred yards to the northwest of Warwick, and they had trouble assimilating what they were seeing. Warwick—the whole town and everything in it, and everyone from it that they have ever known—had become a burned-out corpse. Novgorod of America was dead.