Brad Thor - State Of The Union

And so had been the measure of her defiance. She had stood by as her father’s most formidable defender right until the end. This was one of the greatest reasons his ranting had hurt her so deeply. After years of her defending him, he died admitting that the state had been right all along. He drew a large measure of satisfaction from the fact that though they had known what he was up to, they could never prove it. He had outsmarted them. He had outplayed them at their own game.

The daughter had followed in his footsteps, choosing the same career, and by all accounts had exceeded her father. She had been one of the best Russia had ever seen, and the state never bore her any overt ill will for her father’s failings. They did, however, whisper and talk behind her back, but this made her want to succeed all the more. She wasn’t only doing it for herself and the advancement of her career, she was also doing it for him. And through it all, her father had reminded her never to confuse the state with the country. Governments, as well as political ideologies, would come and go like the tides. What mattered most was her country and the people who dwelled within it and relied upon it. “Never forget that you are a Russian first,” he always told her. And she never did.

It took her several emotional days to sort through her father’s belongings and close up his small house. She saved the photos, some of his favorite books and classical records, and the few mementos he had retained of her mother. The items she didn’t want, but which she thought might be useful to the old woman next door who had been so kind to her father over the years, especially as his illness progressed, she placed in a box and left in the center of the room.

The last thing she had to do, she almost relegated to a phone call, but her emotions got the better of her. She drove her aging Lada hatchback the three miles to the small garden plot her father rented. Here he proudly grew crops of beets, onions, radishes, potatoes, cabbage, and watermelon and even nourished a prodigious apple tree.

She unlocked the tool shed and opened its double doors, the musty, earthen smell reminding her of the long days in summer she used to spend here with her father, toiling in his beloved garden. After losing her mother at such a young age, she had made her father the center of her universe, the sun around which everything else revolved. As she selected the few clay pots that the windowsills of her tiny apartment would accommodate, she suddenly felt very much alone in the world.

In the corner of the shed was the bright yellow bucket and gardening tools she had used as a little girl. She had often asked her father why he never threw them away and he always responded that they reminded him of a simpler time-a time before she had begun to question his every decision. But such, he would sigh, was the natural progression of life.

She placed the yellow bucket and its tools along with the clay pots in the back of her Lada. The remaining gardening equipment would go to the renters of the neighboring plots who in the summertime had relaxed with her father after a long day’s work in their gardens and drank kvass, the beerlike beverage made from fermented black bread. She smiled as she remembered how her father would constantly tease her for turning her nose up at it. Thankfully, there were always wives present at these gatherings of the men, which meant delicious cups of cold Russian tea. She never lost her appreciation of the time she had spent in that garden. Even after she grew up and moved into the city, she still came back on weekends just to be there with her father. Often they went for long stretches not saying a thing, just working in the soil, the simple act of being close to one another saying all that needed to be said.

It being winter, and the middle of the week, none of the neighboring plot renters were anywhere to be seen. From the bag on the front seat of her car, she removed a tattered rag doll. It had been a gift from her father when she was four years old. The doll was dressed in the typical clothes of a peasant farm girl. It had been her constant companion for years and she had always brought it on their trips to the garden plot. She looked down at the doll and smiled. It had been many things for her throughout its life-a playmate, confidant, even the embodiment of her departed mother, and for it now to aid her in deceit was something she never would have imagined. Such, though, was the nature of her training. A believable falsehood must always be in place before conducting a clandestine operation.

The ground was frozen, so she chose the pointed shovel from the shed and walked to the rear of the plot. She felt somewhat embarrassed, like a naïve child searching for pirate treasure as she counted off the prescribed paces from the apple tree. She remembered her father telling her how he had planted it the year she was born. He loved to say that it had grown tall and beautiful, just like his daughter.

She set the doll down and began to dig. Had anyone come along and asked what she was doing, she could present the doll and explain that she was laying it to rest at the base of her father’s favorite tree. If any of the neighboring plot renters had happened by, they would not only have known the significance the tree held for her father, but they would also recognize the little peasant doll. It would have made sense for her to close a chapter of her life by burying part of her past.

The work was slow going and the raw winter wind bit at her cheeks. She was beginning again to consider her father’s words as nothing more than the ravings of a sick and dying man when the shovel hit something that gave forth a resoundingthud. She brought the point of the shovel down again and felt something splinter beneath it. Quickly, she shoveled more dirt from the hole until she could trace around the edges of a small wooden crate about two feet square.

She dusted the earth from the top of the box and saw that the wood had begun to rot. Using the point of the shovel, she pried the top loose. Sealed in a clear plastic bag inside was her father’s old battered leather briefcase-the same one she had watched him leave for work with every day and return home again with at night. It had looked like any briefcase any ordinary father would carry to his office. Staring at it now and realizing that her father and his job had been anything but ordinary, the briefcase now seemed ominous. The fact that he had chosen to bury it in the relative anonymity of his garden plot perhaps meant that his almost unbelievable story might have been more than the mere ranting of a drugged man on his deathbed.

As she held the old leather case in her hands, she began to think that maybe the reason the story had seemed so unbelievable was because it was so frightening. She hoped that the contents of the case could tell her more, but she couldn’t examine it, not there. For a brief moment, she held the doll close against her cheek and stroked its hair. With a final kiss goodbye, she laid it within the rotting wooden box, replaced the lid, refilled the hole, and then returned with a heavy heart to her tiny Moscow apartment.

What she read that night filled her with swells of emotion. There was awe at the extreme ambition her father had uncovered and fear of what that ambition might still unleash. She also felt pride as she realized why her father had done what he had done. There was no shame in his failure. His motives were above all else those of a true patriot. He had put Russia first, and in its future he had seen his daughter and a chance still to unmask a terrible evil before it had the opportunity to strike.

It was the dossier her father had compiled that had put her on the generals’ trail. The contents of that briefcase had led her to be in the woods beyond the hunting lodge in Zvenigorod, risking not only her career, but also her life. What her father had started, she would see finished, but she needed her patient to break through the haze of his fever and give her some sort of clue as to how to proceed.