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Paige needed to time this very accurately: she hadn’t spent several days setting it up only to screw it all up in ten seconds.
It had taken considerable effort to ensure that Arkady Zotov would be the one to meet her, and part of setting all that up involved setting up an unimportant, boring routine during the week-long field trip of going to the Lafayette Square for evening jogging before sundown. The Grand Hyatt was only a few blocks away, so it made perfect sense for a teenage girl, interested in physical fitness, to jog in a well-known area of Washington, DC. She’d also made sure not to go to Dupont Circle – she wanted no chance of anyone connecting her and her parents while she was in Washington proper.
She had made the last call a couple of days before from yet another pay telephone, careful to cover the microphone (taking care to alter the pitch and cadence of her voice, and using different materials each time, since their sound-masking properties were different). All she’d relayed to Arkady was a number sequence which, she knew in the Soviet ciphers of the time, converted to a predefined grid indicating a public meeting spot plus a check digit indicating how many days ahead to meet.
The early April spring still brought on cool nights. Paige rubbed her arms, then checked her windbreaker’s pocket. Good; the folded-up note was still there, painstakingly and carefully handwritten while in the library in Falls Church, Virginia.
Around the oval she went, her steady pace eating up the roughly half-mile distance as she darted her eyes this way and that, checking to see who was to either side of her.
And then, a few hundred feet ahead just as the evening sun turned to twilight—
Her eyes caught the familiar features of the man ambling along off to her right, on an angle to her direction. It was Arkady! Younger, to be sure, but it was him all right: same nose, same slightly portly appearance that made people underestimate his sharp mind. Her heart beat faster even as she continued her steady pace.
How to make it look like an accident…
Her mind raced, and she realized she had no good alternative. It was time to stumble: just as she got within about twenty feet of him, she caught her foot on the brick pathway and yelped “Ah!” as she threw her hands out to protect herself.
Even so, it hurt! Paige wheezed, and (slightly theatrically) held her stomach as she rolled over, moaning, “Help me, please!” She hoped nobody had noticed her hand dipping rapidly into her pocket for the note.
Arkady Zotov held out his hand, the picture of a perfect gentleman passerby as he said, “Here, let me get you to your feet.”
Paige wasted no time slipping the note into his hand as she grabbed his, letting his strength haul her back to her feet. His eyes betrayed only the barest surprise at the realization that a girl so young had been the one who he’d been communicating with for some time now.
Paige groaned, “Thanks. Ugh, stupid walkway.”
“You should probably see a doctor,” said another woman now approaching.
Paige winced and waved that off. “I’m just gonna go home. Thanks.”
Arkady’s hand slipped into his jacket pocket as he nodded. “Very well. Please be more careful next time.”
Paige gave him a pained grin. “You don’t need to tell me that!”
As she limped back to the hotel, she mentally smirked. Mission accomplished.
Arkady Ivanovich Zotov waited until he was in the Rezidentura bathroom before daring to open up the folded pieces of paper.
The woman – who he now knew to be a teenage girl – had been carefully calling the proper internal phone line for KGB assets in the USA, and had used all the right codes.
She had refused to reveal who she was, simply leaving coded phrases that were specifically marked as for his attention only as Head of Security. While he didn’t quite have the freedom of movement around Washington, DC as his superior, the Rezident Vasili, did, he could still establish routines that looked perfectly normal to his FBI followers and thus lull them into a sense of normalcy.
Over the past couple of weeks, he had openly taken to walking around Lafayette Square in afternoons or evenings, which wasn’t far from the Rezidentura; one of the early coded messages had indicated a meeting point there, date and time to be established later.
So that night had been like any other night, with him ambling around the grassy area, the Washington Monument almost always in his vision as he did so. Somewhat ironic that the prospective agent should choose such a meeting site, but he couldn’t argue the relative anonymity such a place offered; there were almost always people there, and he was just another man wandering about.
Even his FBI followers seemed to have grown bored with the duty. The first few times, he’d spotted a pair of suited men practically dogging his steps thirty meters away. Since then, at least one of them would sit on a bench to light up a cigarette while the other one would hang around for a bit then sneak off to a nearby street vendor for a hot dog.
When the teenage girl had stumbled and fallen near him, he hadn’t thought anything of it – his first instinct being to see if she was OK and get her back on her feet. He knew from past experience any fall while exercising was never a fun time (and he really ought to get back to his own routine, now that he thought about it).
When she’d held her stomach, he’d worried she might have broken a rib, but her relatively free breathing told him she was probably all right. So he’d held out a hand, offering to help her up; he hadn’t even seen her palm her note, but when the piece of paper hit his hand, it had taken all his effort not to gasp in shock at his realization.
This girl had mastered the best tradecraft he’d seen yet in an agent?! How?
There had been no time to ponder that. He needed to make sure the FBI never connected this incident to anything he might do in the future, so he shoved his hands in his pockets against the growing chill in the air, and wished the girl safety as she left the park.
After that incident, he managed to crush every instinct he had to rush out of the park, unfold the papers, find out who this teenager was – he let another forty-five minutes of more aimless, soporific-inducing ambling go by before he judged it safe enough, in the gathering evening night, to head back to the Rezidentura.
And so here he was, ensconced in the bathroom and sitting on the toilet as he read the handwritten note:
Dear Arkady Ivanovich,
I hope you don’t mind the familiar tone of this letter, but I have, in fact, known you for several years.
The mystery of this will be solved as soon as you read this phrase you said your father always told you: Boltun; nakhodka dlya shpiona. (and which you don’t really talk much about as a rule)
Arkady sat bolt upright, his heart pounding.
How could an American girl know that his father had laid such emphasis on that aspect of spycraft?
I know it’s a common enough Russian aphorism, but you specifically told me your father would use it when he’d explain why keeping your mouth shut and your ears open was a good idea if you were serious about joining the KGB.
By now, you’re wondering: how can I know things about you when we’ve never met?
My name is Paige Jennings, and I am 80 years old. You were my employer in Russia after I got out of jail; you were on the verge of retirement, but when I arrived in Moscow and found you, you called in some favors at the FSB and got me a job pretending to be an interpreter at state functions. I’ll talk more about that later.
For now, yes, Arkady: time travel is real.
I was 77 or 78 or 79 – the years blur together, sometimes – when I fell into contact with some researchers out of Dubna and Novosibirsk: their fathers, and they, were long-time members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (I will explain in a moment; please bear with me), and regretted bitterly what had happened since the 1990s.
Arkady stopped.
Was what this girl implying true?
Had the USSR fallen? His insides froze at the possibility. The Soviet Union was eternal, changeless—
Or so he’d thought.
But if it had changed, it clearly hadn’t been through nuclear war.
He read on, his heart beginning to race:
Well, they needed a guinea pig: someone who’d take the fantastic risk of essentially having their entire essence disintegrated and temporally reconstituted somewhere and somewhen else.
Don’t ask me to explain it to you: all I know is they said that they could set up a “quantum superposition of a person’s eigenstates”, whatever that meant, and it would somehow connect me with my past self. The machine I was in began to give off smoke, and the last I remember from that experiment was someone frantically yelling to shut it down.
Well, it worked anyway!
I woke up in my bed, and I was thirteen years old again!
I am aware that my parents are part of the Directorate S Illegals Program, and that for my entire life and more they have been secretly spying for the Soviet Union.
Now, to explain more about me, and the future:
I was fifteen years old when I found out my parents weren’t who I thought they were. For the next three or four years I got sucked in more and more into my mother’s idea of how I should be a good little Soviet copy of her. She taught me a lot, as did Claudia and Gabriel, her handlers.
But they never really gave me the honest-to-God, real, truth about what being a spy is actually like.
I refused to believe the nagging sense in the back of my head until the horrible truth smacked me in the face: that my parents lied, cheated, stole, killed – they would do anything and everything in service to their motherland. Even their bodies weren’t their own.
I was a naïve, stupid, arrogant fucking kid.
Harsh, right?
It’s the truth. I thought I was so badass, but in the end I was just a nineteen-year-old kid with no actual sense of how things really worked. That got punched into me in prison and later.
FBI Agent Stan Beeman busted us red-handed as we were about to flee the country. Somehow, my dad talked him down and we got out of there. But on the way out to Canada, I realized… I couldn’t go to Russia. Not then. I just wasn’t prepared for the awful truth of being yanked out of the only place I’d ever known and transplanted somewhere else.
And I paid for that.
Stan found me later. I must’ve slipped up going back to the safe house; it doesn’t really matter, because he was so angry. He and his buddy Aderholt.
I’m not ashamed to admit I folded like a cheap card table. I babbled everything, desperately hoping that if I told the truth I might not get thrown in a hole somewhere or, even worse, shot in the back of the head.
It didn’t help.
Stan wanted his pound of flesh and if my parents weren’t there and Henry wasn’t an option, I was the best choice.
They wanted to hang an actual treason charge on me, which could’ve carried the death penalty, but the only reason they couldn’t make it stick is I’d never gotten a security clearance and had never been in a government job. So whatever stuff my parents stole, that was them and not me.
But I got nailed on just about anything else they could throw at me: after all, I’d confessed to a lot of stuff and I’d pretty much signed my rights away.
So I got twenty-five years. In the toughest women’s military prison in the USA.
When I got out, it was 2012, and the whole world had changed. I’d spent twenty-five years with only newspapers and Russian-language books (I suppose the prison guards thought it was hilarious to let the wannabe Soviet spy learn a language they thought she’d never use), so the technology and just everything was … well, it took getting used to.
The Soviet Union had been dead for over twenty years: formally, it went out of existence on December 25, 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev had to resign his office, after which the Supreme Soviet voted to end itself.
Boris Yeltsin had become President of Russia then, and it was like the Wild West of capitalism. Even after Vladimir Putin took office, there was still a loose coalition of “oligarchs” – business executives who’d cultivated ties to the government – who became horrendously wealthy while millions of ordinary Russians were left out of the transition.
You were still in the FSB (or SVR; the terminology depends on the exact nature of operations) in 2012 and you were about to retire. It was a stroke of good luck I managed to meet you, but I’d basically pinned everything on deciding to try and go to Russia.
I was forty-four years old and I had no skills and no options. All I had was my prison money (I was paid a pittance to work in the prison laundry), and some cash Henry had reluctantly given me when I got out. I guess he felt sorry for me.
One walk-in to the Russian embassy later, speaking in flawless Russian (albeit with an archaic-sounding accent, I was told) and being able to prove who my parents were, I got a temporary diplomatic passport and citizenship papers (!) along with plane tickets on the next flight out of Dulles International.
You met me, just as you told me you met my parents all those years ago, and got me a job working with the FSB as a fake attache to something-or-other. My real job was to pretend I only knew Russian, and keep my ears open any time English-speakers of importance showed up at diplomatic functions. Probably because of my parents, you told me things about yourself you said you rarely told other people, like how you got into the KGB and that phrase your father always used. Or maybe you just knew I needed a friend in a world where I had none.
You lived another decade, and died peacefully in your sleep at 76. I went to your funeral. It was sad, but lovely in its own way.
Did I ever go to meet my parents in 2012 or later?
I actually did.
But they were like … ghosts.
Mom was a pensioner in a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, bitter and angry at the way the Soviet Union – the great motherland – had just dried up and blown away only five years after she got back. All the work she’d done had been for nothing in the end.
And Dad was – well, he’d adjusted. Oh, he and Mom were technically still married, but he spent all his time as a security boss for some obscenely rich Russian with more money than good sense. And he was 70!
I’m looking at these papers now and Holy God, I’ve rambled.
Okay, so you know I lived to be 80, and in those final years I, too, became a pensioner in my Mom’s dacha. You’d at least managed to fix it so I got paid partly in hard currency (the Russian ruble was never very stable) and as long as I kept my head down and made my reports, I managed to eke out a decent enough living.
So I had obviously had nothing to lose, as you know, and I’m here in 1981, with a lifetime’s worth of memories and regrets.
Only now, I can fix them.
I promise not to turn in my parents to the authorities. I still love them and care about them and I know in their own way they love me, too.
But I also want to make life easier for them – give them a better chance to retire in good odor to the country they still call home.
What I need from you is your help. I have to trust that if I could prove who I was and what I was, your younger self would do what he could in his power to help me.
We need to exchange information on an ongoing basis, because there are things you need to do if you want to save your country. And there are things I need to do if I want to keep my family together.
We may never be able to talk face to face. But know that any instructions you give me, I will trust that they are with your wisdom, experience, and knowledge, and I will carry them out as faithfully as I possibly can. I realize that in doing this I am in essence pledging myself once again to become a traitor to the USA, but humanity as a whole will hopefully benefit.
I ask only that you reciprocate and trust that what I tell you about the future of your great, terrible, beloved, and wounded country is the whole truth, and that I tell you these things so you can use your power and your connections to help set your country on a better path.
Yours in time,
Paige Jennings
Paige needed to time this very accurately: she hadn’t spent several days setting it up only to screw it all up in ten seconds.
It had taken considerable effort to ensure that Arkady Zotov would be the one to meet her, and part of setting all that up involved setting up an unimportant, boring routine during the week-long field trip of going to the Lafayette Square for evening jogging before sundown. The Grand Hyatt was only a few blocks away, so it made perfect sense for a teenage girl, interested in physical fitness, to jog in a well-known area of Washington, DC. She’d also made sure not to go to Dupont Circle – she wanted no chance of anyone connecting her and her parents while she was in Washington proper.
She had made the last call a couple of days before from yet another pay telephone, careful to cover the microphone (taking care to alter the pitch and cadence of her voice, and using different materials each time, since their sound-masking properties were different). All she’d relayed to Arkady was a number sequence which, she knew in the Soviet ciphers of the time, converted to a predefined grid indicating a public meeting spot plus a check digit indicating how many days ahead to meet.
The early April spring still brought on cool nights. Paige rubbed her arms, then checked her windbreaker’s pocket. Good; the folded-up note was still there, painstakingly and carefully handwritten while in the library in Falls Church, Virginia.
Around the oval she went, her steady pace eating up the roughly half-mile distance as she darted her eyes this way and that, checking to see who was to either side of her.
And then, a few hundred feet ahead just as the evening sun turned to twilight—
Her eyes caught the familiar features of the man ambling along off to her right, on an angle to her direction. It was Arkady! Younger, to be sure, but it was him all right: same nose, same slightly portly appearance that made people underestimate his sharp mind. Her heart beat faster even as she continued her steady pace.
How to make it look like an accident…
Her mind raced, and she realized she had no good alternative. It was time to stumble: just as she got within about twenty feet of him, she caught her foot on the brick pathway and yelped “Ah!” as she threw her hands out to protect herself.
Even so, it hurt! Paige wheezed, and (slightly theatrically) held her stomach as she rolled over, moaning, “Help me, please!” She hoped nobody had noticed her hand dipping rapidly into her pocket for the note.
Arkady Zotov held out his hand, the picture of a perfect gentleman passerby as he said, “Here, let me get you to your feet.”
Paige wasted no time slipping the note into his hand as she grabbed his, letting his strength haul her back to her feet. His eyes betrayed only the barest surprise at the realization that a girl so young had been the one who he’d been communicating with for some time now.
Paige groaned, “Thanks. Ugh, stupid walkway.”
“You should probably see a doctor,” said another woman now approaching.
Paige winced and waved that off. “I’m just gonna go home. Thanks.”
Arkady’s hand slipped into his jacket pocket as he nodded. “Very well. Please be more careful next time.”
Paige gave him a pained grin. “You don’t need to tell me that!”
As she limped back to the hotel, she mentally smirked. Mission accomplished.
Arkady Ivanovich Zotov waited until he was in the Rezidentura bathroom before daring to open up the folded pieces of paper.
The woman – who he now knew to be a teenage girl – had been carefully calling the proper internal phone line for KGB assets in the USA, and had used all the right codes.
She had refused to reveal who she was, simply leaving coded phrases that were specifically marked as for his attention only as Head of Security. While he didn’t quite have the freedom of movement around Washington, DC as his superior, the Rezident Vasili, did, he could still establish routines that looked perfectly normal to his FBI followers and thus lull them into a sense of normalcy.
Over the past couple of weeks, he had openly taken to walking around Lafayette Square in afternoons or evenings, which wasn’t far from the Rezidentura; one of the early coded messages had indicated a meeting point there, date and time to be established later.
So that night had been like any other night, with him ambling around the grassy area, the Washington Monument almost always in his vision as he did so. Somewhat ironic that the prospective agent should choose such a meeting site, but he couldn’t argue the relative anonymity such a place offered; there were almost always people there, and he was just another man wandering about.
Even his FBI followers seemed to have grown bored with the duty. The first few times, he’d spotted a pair of suited men practically dogging his steps thirty meters away. Since then, at least one of them would sit on a bench to light up a cigarette while the other one would hang around for a bit then sneak off to a nearby street vendor for a hot dog.
When the teenage girl had stumbled and fallen near him, he hadn’t thought anything of it – his first instinct being to see if she was OK and get her back on her feet. He knew from past experience any fall while exercising was never a fun time (and he really ought to get back to his own routine, now that he thought about it).
When she’d held her stomach, he’d worried she might have broken a rib, but her relatively free breathing told him she was probably all right. So he’d held out a hand, offering to help her up; he hadn’t even seen her palm her note, but when the piece of paper hit his hand, it had taken all his effort not to gasp in shock at his realization.
This girl had mastered the best tradecraft he’d seen yet in an agent?! How?
There had been no time to ponder that. He needed to make sure the FBI never connected this incident to anything he might do in the future, so he shoved his hands in his pockets against the growing chill in the air, and wished the girl safety as she left the park.
After that incident, he managed to crush every instinct he had to rush out of the park, unfold the papers, find out who this teenager was – he let another forty-five minutes of more aimless, soporific-inducing ambling go by before he judged it safe enough, in the gathering evening night, to head back to the Rezidentura.
And so here he was, ensconced in the bathroom and sitting on the toilet as he read the handwritten note:
Dear Arkady Ivanovich,
I hope you don’t mind the familiar tone of this letter, but I have, in fact, known you for several years.
The mystery of this will be solved as soon as you read this phrase you said your father always told you: Boltun; nakhodka dlya shpiona. (and which you don’t really talk much about as a rule)
Arkady sat bolt upright, his heart pounding.
How could an American girl know that his father had laid such emphasis on that aspect of spycraft?
I know it’s a common enough Russian aphorism, but you specifically told me your father would use it when he’d explain why keeping your mouth shut and your ears open was a good idea if you were serious about joining the KGB.
By now, you’re wondering: how can I know things about you when we’ve never met?
My name is Paige Jennings, and I am 80 years old. You were my employer in Russia after I got out of jail; you were on the verge of retirement, but when I arrived in Moscow and found you, you called in some favors at the FSB and got me a job pretending to be an interpreter at state functions. I’ll talk more about that later.
For now, yes, Arkady: time travel is real.
I was 77 or 78 or 79 – the years blur together, sometimes – when I fell into contact with some researchers out of Dubna and Novosibirsk: their fathers, and they, were long-time members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (I will explain in a moment; please bear with me), and regretted bitterly what had happened since the 1990s.
Arkady stopped.
Was what this girl implying true?
Had the USSR fallen? His insides froze at the possibility. The Soviet Union was eternal, changeless—
Or so he’d thought.
But if it had changed, it clearly hadn’t been through nuclear war.
He read on, his heart beginning to race:
Well, they needed a guinea pig: someone who’d take the fantastic risk of essentially having their entire essence disintegrated and temporally reconstituted somewhere and somewhen else.
Don’t ask me to explain it to you: all I know is they said that they could set up a “quantum superposition of a person’s eigenstates”, whatever that meant, and it would somehow connect me with my past self. The machine I was in began to give off smoke, and the last I remember from that experiment was someone frantically yelling to shut it down.
Well, it worked anyway!
I woke up in my bed, and I was thirteen years old again!
I am aware that my parents are part of the Directorate S Illegals Program, and that for my entire life and more they have been secretly spying for the Soviet Union.
Now, to explain more about me, and the future:
I was fifteen years old when I found out my parents weren’t who I thought they were. For the next three or four years I got sucked in more and more into my mother’s idea of how I should be a good little Soviet copy of her. She taught me a lot, as did Claudia and Gabriel, her handlers.
But they never really gave me the honest-to-God, real, truth about what being a spy is actually like.
I refused to believe the nagging sense in the back of my head until the horrible truth smacked me in the face: that my parents lied, cheated, stole, killed – they would do anything and everything in service to their motherland. Even their bodies weren’t their own.
I was a naïve, stupid, arrogant fucking kid.
Harsh, right?
It’s the truth. I thought I was so badass, but in the end I was just a nineteen-year-old kid with no actual sense of how things really worked. That got punched into me in prison and later.
FBI Agent Stan Beeman busted us red-handed as we were about to flee the country. Somehow, my dad talked him down and we got out of there. But on the way out to Canada, I realized… I couldn’t go to Russia. Not then. I just wasn’t prepared for the awful truth of being yanked out of the only place I’d ever known and transplanted somewhere else.
And I paid for that.
Stan found me later. I must’ve slipped up going back to the safe house; it doesn’t really matter, because he was so angry. He and his buddy Aderholt.
I’m not ashamed to admit I folded like a cheap card table. I babbled everything, desperately hoping that if I told the truth I might not get thrown in a hole somewhere or, even worse, shot in the back of the head.
It didn’t help.
Stan wanted his pound of flesh and if my parents weren’t there and Henry wasn’t an option, I was the best choice.
They wanted to hang an actual treason charge on me, which could’ve carried the death penalty, but the only reason they couldn’t make it stick is I’d never gotten a security clearance and had never been in a government job. So whatever stuff my parents stole, that was them and not me.
But I got nailed on just about anything else they could throw at me: after all, I’d confessed to a lot of stuff and I’d pretty much signed my rights away.
So I got twenty-five years. In the toughest women’s military prison in the USA.
When I got out, it was 2012, and the whole world had changed. I’d spent twenty-five years with only newspapers and Russian-language books (I suppose the prison guards thought it was hilarious to let the wannabe Soviet spy learn a language they thought she’d never use), so the technology and just everything was … well, it took getting used to.
The Soviet Union had been dead for over twenty years: formally, it went out of existence on December 25, 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev had to resign his office, after which the Supreme Soviet voted to end itself.
Boris Yeltsin had become President of Russia then, and it was like the Wild West of capitalism. Even after Vladimir Putin took office, there was still a loose coalition of “oligarchs” – business executives who’d cultivated ties to the government – who became horrendously wealthy while millions of ordinary Russians were left out of the transition.
You were still in the FSB (or SVR; the terminology depends on the exact nature of operations) in 2012 and you were about to retire. It was a stroke of good luck I managed to meet you, but I’d basically pinned everything on deciding to try and go to Russia.
I was forty-four years old and I had no skills and no options. All I had was my prison money (I was paid a pittance to work in the prison laundry), and some cash Henry had reluctantly given me when I got out. I guess he felt sorry for me.
One walk-in to the Russian embassy later, speaking in flawless Russian (albeit with an archaic-sounding accent, I was told) and being able to prove who my parents were, I got a temporary diplomatic passport and citizenship papers (!) along with plane tickets on the next flight out of Dulles International.
You met me, just as you told me you met my parents all those years ago, and got me a job working with the FSB as a fake attache to something-or-other. My real job was to pretend I only knew Russian, and keep my ears open any time English-speakers of importance showed up at diplomatic functions. Probably because of my parents, you told me things about yourself you said you rarely told other people, like how you got into the KGB and that phrase your father always used. Or maybe you just knew I needed a friend in a world where I had none.
You lived another decade, and died peacefully in your sleep at 76. I went to your funeral. It was sad, but lovely in its own way.
Did I ever go to meet my parents in 2012 or later?
I actually did.
But they were like … ghosts.
Mom was a pensioner in a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, bitter and angry at the way the Soviet Union – the great motherland – had just dried up and blown away only five years after she got back. All the work she’d done had been for nothing in the end.
And Dad was – well, he’d adjusted. Oh, he and Mom were technically still married, but he spent all his time as a security boss for some obscenely rich Russian with more money than good sense. And he was 70!
I’m looking at these papers now and Holy God, I’ve rambled.
Okay, so you know I lived to be 80, and in those final years I, too, became a pensioner in my Mom’s dacha. You’d at least managed to fix it so I got paid partly in hard currency (the Russian ruble was never very stable) and as long as I kept my head down and made my reports, I managed to eke out a decent enough living.
So I had obviously had nothing to lose, as you know, and I’m here in 1981, with a lifetime’s worth of memories and regrets.
Only now, I can fix them.
I promise not to turn in my parents to the authorities. I still love them and care about them and I know in their own way they love me, too.
But I also want to make life easier for them – give them a better chance to retire in good odor to the country they still call home.
What I need from you is your help. I have to trust that if I could prove who I was and what I was, your younger self would do what he could in his power to help me.
We need to exchange information on an ongoing basis, because there are things you need to do if you want to save your country. And there are things I need to do if I want to keep my family together.
We may never be able to talk face to face. But know that any instructions you give me, I will trust that they are with your wisdom, experience, and knowledge, and I will carry them out as faithfully as I possibly can. I realize that in doing this I am in essence pledging myself once again to become a traitor to the USA, but humanity as a whole will hopefully benefit.
I ask only that you reciprocate and trust that what I tell you about the future of your great, terrible, beloved, and wounded country is the whole truth, and that I tell you these things so you can use your power and your connections to help set your country on a better path.
Yours in time,
Paige Jennings
no subject
Date: 2024-01-07 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 02:27 am (UTC)I was quite thrilled to see someone has read this so many years after I originally posted it :D
I've also got an idea for an Agent Gaad time travel story as well, if you're interested :)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-12 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-16 04:50 am (UTC)He did indeed die, but it was due to a sheer confluence of the lousiest luck imaginable.