Nadia Print

Nadia Sokolov The ex-General sat in the chair where they were to interview him. It was not a trial but a commission, but the fact that was a civilian committee instead of a military one, worried him. He wore a navy blue suit that looked tailored and his perfect haircut and shave showed that, although he must have turned 60, he worried about his appearance. The commission was made up of six people seated behind a table who watched impassively as he prepared for the session. The public was not allowed nor, of course, the press. Only two deputies who guarded the doors completed the audience that morning. —Can you tell us your name and the position you held between 1978 and 1995? —asked the president of the Commission.  —Roger McPeterson, I was the Director of the Intelligence Unit at the CIA.   —Espionage?  —Well, among other things, yes. We're talking about the Cold War period.  —Let's go to what concerns us. Do you know this woman? —and he showed the portrait of a smiling woman on one of the screens in the room .  —It's Nadia Sokolov, Russian, 35 years old. She is an important political activist in favor of communism, against Perestroika and the opening of Russia towards capitalist slopes. And very contrary to the United States, by the way —Roger replied. —And that coincidentally has just married the Russian Prime Minister after a romance that has occupied the front pages of the main tabloids around the world... —added the president.  —Yes, now she is also the First Lady, which, without a doubt, will have repercussions on the relationship of the United States with Russia in the coming years.  —And what else can you tell us about her? The ex-General stirred restlessly in his chair and looked at the members of the Commission one by one.  —Mr. McPeterson, I remind you that you have to tell all you know to this committee —the man who sat at the end of the Commission table insisted.  —What I am going to say is top secret and during all my life it has been prohibited me to speak of these subjects with people outside the project "Trojans" —the former General answered, in a timid way for the first time.  —What is the project «Trojans»? —the president asked him.  He hesitated a moment, took a breath and decided to tell everything.  —During the cold war we trained spies to be sent to Russia and thus obtain the information we needed to protect ourselves and to be aware of possible future attacks. There were projects to recruit Russian spies and also to turn defectors into important political and scientific figures in exchange of information. But we never had enough closeness and they did not take long to discover them —Roger began to narrate. —This is how the "Trojans" project came about. We needed to have undetectable people really inside, who could send us reliable information. So we used children mostly born in the United States, with Russian or Eastern descent and we sent them to Russia to be raised there and, if necessary, to transmit information to us. —Wait, wait, did you send American children to spy? —interrupted the president.  —Normally they were orphans and we looked for a good family with potential in Russia to raise them...  —But if they were raised in Russia they would feel like Russians, what would make those children want to transmit information to us?  —Well, before sending them to Russia, we would treat them... They did not know they were our agents, there was the charm of the operation, nobody could detect them if they did not know they were spies themselves.  —They treated them? How?  —A serum. Something chemical, in their bones. They would behave normally but, when the time came, they could be activated to send us information.  —But, what information were children going to send?  —It was a long-term bet: we moved all the necessary threads so that they went to wealthy families within the Party so that, when they grew up, they had the possibility of being in an important position within the organizations of power.  —How many «Trojans» did you send to Russia?  —Ten. It was a complicated project and it was not easy to find the right candidates and place them in families with potential. In addition, the program started late and stopped with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  —Did they activate a "Trojan"? —Only one.  —And what happened?  —He exploded. —How did he explode?  —The "Trojans" had a security mechanism that allowed them to be exploded remotely. The goal was not to create human bombs, there are much quicker and cheaper ways to achieve that. But this would allow us to explode them in case they were discovered to prevent them from understanding how we had done it or in case of extreme need.  The room was silent for a moment and the man sitting at the end of the table spoke.  —What does the "Trojans" project have to do with Nadia Sokolov? —he asked.  —Nadia was born in Missouri in 1982 as Martha Flanigan. His mother was Polish and died during childbirth. His father was an American who crashed his truck while driving drunk when Martha was two years old. She spent a year in an orphanage and we recruited her. She had the features of her mother which made her fit perfectly as Slavic. We treated her and got her adopted into the Sokolov family, which undoubtedly gave her access to a privileged education and a place in Russian political society. She grew up on a farm as a happy girl and moved to Moscow when she began her studies. She lives there since then.  —Are you telling us that the anti-American activist and the new Russian First Lady is actually a latent agent of ours and, at the same time, a bomb? —Yes. —Does she know anything? Does anyone know?  —No, she does not know anything. And now you know.  —But are you aware that, in the current state of cooling of political relations between our countries, if someone discovered that we have put something in the bones to control and explode the Russian president's new wife, it would probably unleash Third World war?  —Very likely. That's why I did not want to tell you. Now you know. I would recommend to treat this information as highly confidential.  The different members of the Commission began to talk to each other. The information far exceeded what they expected from that session and they did not know how to act. They decided to meet in private to deliberate and postponed the continuation of the interrogation to the next day. They left the room and the deputies accompanied the ex-General to his hotel. One of them remained watching at his room door. He was not exactly arrested, in fact, in theory, it was for his safety. The other deputy got into his car and turned off the recorder. Of course, that information was going to make him gold. --- The paintings comes signed on the front and dated on the back. Includes authorship certificate.