Heaven, INC: Chapter 71: EDUCATING MONA

From infancy, we are all spies. The shame is not this
but that the secrets are so paltry and few.
—JOHN UPDIKE

126 TERRA DEL NOVA,
CLAIREMONT MESA
4:02 PM PDT

MONA HAD ALWAYS TRIED to practice empathy, because the world is a difficult place and the winds of fate bend each of us as it capriciously will . . . but this was plainly ridiculous. With time running short, it was absolutely, unequivocally dangerous. And for what? What?

A woman . . . Another woman. . . . Number . . . Oh, who cares, you over-gelled kulak? You are a gluttonous pig who cannot satisfy one trollop before he is off to the next . . . Perhaps you would not have this problem if you focused on quality over quantity . . . If you stopped consuming women and vodka like a drunken Cossack!

The thing with Mona was, you’d look at her and you’d never even see it. From the outside, Mona kept her emotions in check, the mask of the perfect chess or poker player revealing nothing they wish to hide. Even with that, her annoyance with Sergei grew . . .

Over-indulgant, under-educated, middle-aged Ukranian pig-farmer!

. . . the longer Sergei remained in the house with Mandy or Brandy, frankly, Mona no
longer gave a damn, she just wanted to leave before it was too late, the X-3's vaunted cloaking device or not. In fact, Sergei’s one intelligent move was taking the keys, because if he hadn’t, you can bet Mona woulda been gone. Boom. Straight out the door. And sure, some would say maybe not the best idea, and certainly not when an the entire alphabet soup of intelligence apparatus is hunting you— FBI, CIA, DNS, MI5, KGB, to name a few—but then you weren’t on Girl #4 and forced to listen to Sade croon about a smooth operator. . .

Which you, Sergei Andreivich Zukov, most assuredly are not.

. . . or any of the three-dozen stations broadcasting the weepy, over-analyzed rise and fall of Bobby Falcône, the newly bared a homosexual to the celebrity-obsessed American culture in a great fit of great shock.

Amazing that these people never knew what was so clearly obvious . . . Such a naive and foolish people . . . Sheep.

Essentially, at the moment, sitting in the cloaked X-3— Mona was unsure of Sergei’s latest incantation of the vehicle, though he tended towards brashly disguising it as a red Ferrari, especially since every one Sergei’s prostitutes begged him for rides and on half the occasions, chased him back to the X-3, which put the illusionary powers of the cloak to its ultimate test, human touch— at that moment, Mona was just extraordinarily angry with Russian men and the American people in general; both were disgustingly over-indulgent, something Mona truly despised, and nothing was more indulgent than unplanned and hence wasted time. For low-born lust.

Plus, Mona was mad at herself . . .

How is it possible you have in that bag . . .

The black bag at her foot, Ducroix’s bag.

. . . the most important state secret since the atomic bomb which you smuggle out under the noses of the most elaborate security net since Stalin and yet you forgot even a single tampon? Sometimes, Mona Alexhovna, you are a foolish woman . . . FOOLISH!

Of course, outside the car looking in you wouldn’t see an angry woman cursing herself, her spy partner and the American people in general, you’d see a composed, dark-haired woman with an assertive bearing and clear violet eyes that could look right through you or call you hither, whichever she pleased. Well, that is, if you could see into the car, which you could not, because it was the X-3 and cloaked and very much not a Ferrari.

At least it had solar-powered air-conditioning. And a top-notch stereo system, even if not leather interior, at least Vladivostok Station had got that part right. The rest of it, beginning with the idea of Mona Alexhovna Romanokova dancing at a topless nightclub, which she found particularly repugnant, was well, simply absurd.

Unfortunately, if you knew the modern Vladivostok Station, you’d understand.


IT STARTED A YEAR AGO, when Mona was called into the office of the university commissar, in fact, called directly from a lecture she had found most intriguing, on stem cell engineering. A second man sat in the corner, smoking British cigarettes and looking mysteriously important in half shadow, not speaking.

“When you graduate, Mona Romanokova, what do you wish to do? What is your dream?”

Mona had been hesitant, since she’d never spoken to the commissar in three years of university work, let alone this man smoking the expensive foreign cigarettes. Dreams are not something told to strangers.

“I wish to teach at university.”

“Where?”

“Moscow. Their genetic engineering department is on the cutting edge.”

“Ah yes,” the university commissar said. “And do you know the department chair?”

“Only by name.”

The commissar smiled. “Well I do. And I can guarantee a teaching position there, at the minimum, if you are successful in a task for Mr. Kolov here. Mr. Kolov works for KosmoGen. In Research and Development. You would intern for him.”

In a pinstripe suit and wreathed by smoke, Kolov did not look one bit R&D. Mona thought he might look better with guns and knives, maybe the odd garrotte. He was dapper, dangerous and relaxed. It was Oskar who would lure— sorry, recruit— Mona into the Service. Her training was a group project.


THEY TRAINED IN AN AREA sequestered away from the Lubyanka’s general population— those housed in grim, first-floor cells— and were shuttled from classroom to classroom within the confines of the prison’s baroque exterior. It was a large, squat building, and though only four stories tall, the old joke held that the Lubyanka was the tallest building in the Soviet Union for, from its basement interrogation rooms, one could see Siberia; on more than one occasion, Mona was haunted by the thought that somewhere within the Lubyanka’s walls, the KGB had tortured her father to confess his ‘crimes’, and that she might, at some point, be trained in one of the very basement rooms where her father had died.

Of course, by the time of Mona’s own indoctrination into the world of spies, the KGB and the Soviet Union itself were long gone, but she was certain, based upon their grizzled looks and cold eyes, more than a few were old hands of the KGB. Whether they were present at her father’s interrogation, Mona would never know, but the intensity of their training in the trade-craft of spying was nothing short of arduous. Course in eavesdropping, clandestine messaging, evasion, weapon skills, disguise, hand-to-hand combat and other such disciplines were standard fare, but Mona was also trained in more esoteric skills like extortion and seduction, of which the latter Mona’s instructor proclaimed her a natural.

The nature of the mission centered on that last skill, and Mona’s own background in bio-engineering. Through some manner she was never made privy to, Moscow Centre learned the revolutionary nature of Dominic Ducroix’s research and the implications of America’s ability to dole out its beneficence to compliant entities, in addition to the sheer lucre the discovery would deliver to the organization that brought the product to market.

For a number of reasons, Dominic Ducroix was generally shielded by a light but effective security bubble, one which Mona often wondered was to protect Ducroix or reign him in. Regardless, the man had an insatiably misogynistic attraction to exotic dancers; strippers in the American parlance and, to Mona’s mind, a throughly disgusting avocation centered on mutual exploitation and pathologically infantile indulgence. It was for this world, Moscow Centre trained Mona to attract the attentions of Ducroix, an eager patron of the ‘gentlemen’s club’— for men who were in no way ‘gentlemen’— Kiss-N-Tails; there, Mona was infiltrated into the club for the purpose of getting inside Ducroix’s security bubble for reasons of seduction and possible extortion. Despite Mona’s remarkable distaste for the man, she was required to treat him as the ‘light of her life’, as Oskar stated it, and to charm him with her beauty and bio-engineering knowledge, as she was simultaneously posing as a university biology student dancing to pay the bills. To the positive, the money was quite good from the dancing alone. Add in what Moscow Centre was paying, and Boris and Lydia got a healthy dose of money every month.

In fact, the entire assignment could have been, grudgingly passable, given Mona’s ability to focus on a task at hand, had she not met her target’s son in the most coincidental of circumstances and had she not, against all logic, reason and sensibility, fallen for this young American with the patient grey eyes.

Perhaps, had she been better at her trade craft or Dominic a little less obsessive, the nature of her relationship with Chris would have remained unknown to both men. Alas, fate had chosen for them a different course.