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She heard him. She saw him for who he was. She cared. Or at least it was her job to appear that way.
It was well known within the agency that more GRU agents were killed in the US by their own side than by the CIA.
“Lie to them,” her grandmother told her. “Lie to your husband, to your boss, to the government. All of them. But never lie to yourself.”
If America was a mighty bison, Russia and China were the wolves nipping at its heels, letting it tire under its own lumbering weight until it faltered and they could get it by the throat.
The force that really made the world go round was the delicate, tender, all-too-easily-wounded snowflake that was the male ego. That was what brought nations to war, what brought soldiers to the battlefield, and what brought men to women’s beds.
That at their core, Westerners were not equipped for war. They could never truly be warriors because, in their hearts, they still clung to the promise of peace. They lived their lives as if those Memorial Day barbecues, those Thanksgiving turkeys, those Christmas presents under the tree meant something. As if they were real and would go on forever. As if all those quaint, familiar comforts somehow protected them from the reality of the world. They were slaves to their delusions as much as any Soviet apparatchik.
Russia knew it couldn’t win in the skies. It couldn’t win on the oceans. It couldn’t win in space. So it won in the bedroom, in the toilet, in the brothel.
“We don’t have to win,” Timokhin said. “We only have to prove our loyalty.” “And how do we do that?” Igor said. “By sacrificing our souls, Igor. By sacrificing our souls.”
He’d read something once. ‘The tree that bears no fruit is fit for the fire’. That was how he felt about his own life.
