The same was true, rather more distantly, of Dmitriy Popov, who stayed in his room to watch the Olympics on TV. He found the games a distraction from the questions that were running their own laps inside his brain. The Russian national team, naturally enough his favorite, was doing well, though the Australians were making a fine showing as hosts, especially in swimming, which seemed to be their national passion. The problem was in the vastly different time zones. When Popov was watching events live, it was necessarily an ungodly hour in Kansas, which made him somewhat bleary-eyed for his morning horseback rides with Maclean and Killgore – those had become a very pleasant morning diversion.
This morning was like the previous ten, with a cool westerly breeze, the rising orange sun casting strange but lovely light on the waving fields of grass and wheat. Buttermilk now recognized him, and awarded the Russian with oddly endearing signs of affection, which he in turn rewarded with sugar cubes or, as today, an apple taken from the morning breakfast buffet, which the mare crunched down rapidly from his hand. He had learned to saddle his own horse, which he now did quickly, leading Buttermilk outside to join the others and mounting up in the corral.
“Morning, Dmitriy,” Maclean said.
“Good morning, Kirk,” Popov replied pleasantly. In another few minutes, they were riding off, to the south this time, toward one of the wheat fields, at a rather more rapid pace than his first such ride.
“So, what’s it like to be an intelligence agent?” Killgore asked, half a mile from the barn.
“We are called intelligence officers, actually,” Popov said to correct the first Hollywood-generated misimpression. “Truthfully, it is mainly boring work. You spend much of your time waiting for a meeting, or filling out forms for submission to your headquarters, or the rezidentura. There is some danger-but only of being arrested, not shot. It has become a civilized business. Captured intelligence officers are exchanged, usually after a brief period of imprisonment. That never happened to me, of course. I was well trained.” And lucky, he didn’t add.
“So, no James Bond stuff, you never killed anybody, nothing like that?” Kirk Maclean asked.
“Good heavens, no,” Popov replied, with a laugh. “You have others do that sort of thing for you, surrogates, when you need it done. And that is quite rare.”
“How rare?”
“Today? Almost never I should think. At KGB, our job was to get information and pass it upwards to our government-more like reporters, like your Associated Press, than anything else. And much of the information we gathered was from open sources, newspapers, magazines, television. Your CNN is perhaps the best, most used source of information in the world.”
“But what sort of information did you gather?”
“Mainly diplomatic or political intelligence, trying to discern intentions. Others went after technical intelligence-how fast an airplane flies or how far a cannon shoots–but that was never my specialty area, you see. I was what you call here a people person. I met with various people and delivered messages and such, then brought the answers back to my station.”
“What kind of people?”
Popov wondered about how he should answer, and decided on the truth: “Terrorists, that was what you would call them.”
“Oh? Like which ones?”
“Mainly European, but some in the Middle East as well. I have language skills, and I can speak easily with people from various lands.”
“Was it hard?” Dr. Killgore asked.
“Not really. We had similar political beliefs, and my country provided them with weapons, training, access to some facilities in the Eastern Bloc. I was as much a travel agent as anything else, and occasionally I would suggest targets for them to attack-as payment for our assistance. you see.”
“Did you give them money?” Maclean this time.
“Yes, but not much money. The Soviet Union had only limited hard-currency reserves, and we never paid our agents very much. At least I did not,” Popov said.
“So, you sent terrorists out on missions to kill people?” This was from Killgore.
Popov nodded. “Yes. That was often my job. That was,” he added. “why Dr. Brightling hired me.”
“Oh?” Maclean asked.
Dmitriy wondered how far he could take this one. “Yes. he asked me to do similar things for Horizon Corporation.”
“You’re the guy who ramrodded the stuff in Europe?”
“I contacted various people and made suggestions which they carried out, yes, and so, yes, I do have some blood on my second hands, I suppose, but one cannot take such matters too seriously, can one? It is business, and it has been my business for some time.”
“Well, that’s a good thing for you,Dmitriy. That’s why you’re here,” Maclean told him. “John is pretty loyal to his people. You must have done okay.”
Popov shrugged. “Perhaps so. He never told me why he wanted these things done, but I gather it was to help his friend Henriksen get the consulting contract for the Sydney- Olympics that I’ve been watching on TV.”
“That’s right,” Killgore confirmed. “That was very important to us.” Might as well watch, the epidemiologist thought, they’ll be the last ones.
“But why?”
They hesitated at the direct question. The physician and the engineer looked at each other. Then Killgore spoke.
“Dmitriy, what do you think of the environment?”
“What do you mean? Out here? It is beautiful. You’ve taught me much with these morning rides, my friends,” the Russian answered, choosing his words carefully. “The sky and the air, and the beautiful fields of grass and wheat. I have never appreciated how beautiful the world can be. I suppose that’s because I grew up in Moscow.” Which had been a hideously filthy city, but they didn’t know that.
“Yeah, well, it’s not all this way.”
“I know that, John. In Russia-well, the State didn’t care as you Americans do. They nearly killed all life in the Caspian Sea-where caviar comes from-from chemical poisoning. And there is a place just east of the Urals where our original atomic-bomb research created a wasteland. I haven’t seen it, but I have heard of it. The highway signs there tell you to drive very fast to be through the zone of dangerous radiation as quickly as possible.”
“Yeah, well, if we’re not careful, we might just kill the whole planet,” Maclean observed next.
“That would be a crime, like the Hitlerites,” Popov said next. “It is nekulturny, the work of uncivilized barbarians. In my room, the tapes and the magazines make this clear.”
“What do you think of killing people, Dmitriy?” Killgore asked then.
“That depends on who they are. There are many people who deserve to die for one reason or another. But Western culture has this strange notion that taking life is almost always wrong-you Americans cannot even kill your criminals, murderers and such, without jumping through hoops, as you say here. I find that very curious.”
“What about crimes against Nature?” Killgore said, staring off into the distance.
“I do not understand.”
“Well, things that hurt the whole planet, killing off whole living species, polluting the land and the sea. What about that?”
“Kirk, that is also a barbaric act, and it should be punished severely. But how do you identify the criminals? Is it the industrialist who gives the order and makes the profit from it? Or is it the worker who takes his wages and does what he is told?”
“What did they say at Nuremberg?” Killgore said next.
“The war-crimes trial, you mean? It was decided that following orders is not a defense.” Not a concept he’d been taught to consider in the KGB Academy, where he’d learned that the State Was Always Right.
“Right,” the epidemiologist agreed. “But you know. nobody ever went after Harry Truman for bombing Hiroshima.”
Because he won, you fool, Popov didn’t reply. “Do you ask if this was a crime? No, it was not, because he ended a greater evil, and the sacrifice of those people was necessary to restore the peace.”
“What about saving the planet?”
“I do not understand.”
“If the planet was dying, what would one have to do–what would be right to do, to save it?”
This discussion had all the ideological and philosophical purity of a classroom discussion of the Marxist dialectic at Moscow State University-and about as much relevance to the real world. Kill the whole planet? That was not possible. A full-blown nuclear war, yes, maybe that could have such an effect, but that was no longer possible. The world had changed, and America was the nation that had made it happen. Didn’t these two druids see the wonder of that? More than once, the world had been close to loosing nuclear weapons, but today that was a thing of the past.
“I have never considered that question, my friends.”
“We have,” Maclean responded. “Dmitriy, there are people and forces at work today that could easily kill off everything here. Somebody has to stop that from happening, but how do you do it?”