Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

left. Voluntary population exchange, hah.’
    Myra squatted in the sunlight, swigged Evian, sucked Marlboro.
‘Worse things have happened since.’ The dry, ancient
ribs and femurs in the ossuary hadn’t disturbed her as much
as the fresh bodies she’d seen the evening she arrived.
    ‘No doubt.’ Jason shrugged. ‘But you know,
this place, it makes me feel like I’m a Greek, for the
first time in my life. Even a goddamn Christian.’ He
glanced at the hawkers a few tens of metres away, hunkered down
beside her and spoke in a low, earnest voice. ‘As in, you
know, Western. It’s a different culture. They don’t
like us.’
    Myra stared at him, shocked. Karmilassos, or Kaya, or Kayakoi,
or whatever it was called (the Turks shamelessly called it
‘the Greek ghost village’) oppressed her too, but the
CIA agent seemed to be drawing entirely the wrong moral from
it.
    This is what nationalism does,’ she said. ‘And
what that kind of thinking does. No, thank you. I don’t buy
it.’
    Jason looked somewhat hurt. He tilted his hat back and started
skinning up a joint. His age – he claimed, and she
believed, though who could now be sure? – was twenty-four.
The last time she’d been seriously hassled by the CIA had
been just over sixty years earlier. There was something awesome
about a man following up a file so much older than he was.
     
    (Last time: the man from the Agency had talked to her over
lattes in a Starbuck’s off Harvard Square, in July 1998
when she was touting for medical aid to Kazakhstan’s
fall-out victims; the campaign’s poster child had a cleft
palate. A surgeon she’d met had set up the contact; someone
who’d worked at the consulate in Almaty, he’d said,
but she wasn’t fooled. She brought a tape-recorder,
discreet in the pocket of her blouse. She expected someone who
looked like a Mormon, a Man In Black. He wasyoung, dark, bright;
blueberry T-shirt, baggy camos. Called himself Mike.
    They chatted about Britain. Mike was interested in Ulster. The
Orangemen were marching at Drum-cree. Myra told him nothing he
didn’t know; he knew more about her than she did, casually
name-dropping demos she’d been on in the seventies as he
idly turned the foreign news pages of the Boston Globe. They took their coffees outside, sat on a low wall while Myra had
a smoke.
    Mike nodded at the clenched black fist of a faded black power
mural high on a wall on the other side of the street, above the
map shop on the corner. ‘All that’s over,’ he
said. ‘No more arguments about the politics, Myra. All of
the line-ups are new, now. We aren’t asking you to betray
anyone, or anything. Just share information. We have mutual
interests. You’re going to a dangerous place, after
all.’ (Ah, there it was, the threat.) ‘You never know
when the right contacts might be crucial.’
    ‘Indeed,’ she said. She was staring abstractedly
at a teenage girl with pink hair, sure she’d seen her
before. She shook her head. ‘I’ll bear it in
mind,’ she said. ‘Here’s my mobile
number.’
    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