Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  Other American towns either provided a boon for encroaching modernity, enticing new and bigger businesses to come and build and supply the needs and dreams and lusts of modern life, or they suffered a drain of the young and dull or best and brightest. Because of the centuries-long culture war against the traditional home and multi-generational families, modern American small town life had become a fleeting thing for all but the old-timers, and this reality—outside Warwick—meant that the market forces that feed or starve a town were usually pretty evident to anyone who cared to look. By contrast, somehow Warwick lived and breathed and regenerated itself almost invisibly.

  There had been rumors once of an underground passage, something like a Moscow Metro-2, but these rumors (like those about the very existence of Warwick) had never been confirmed by anyone who had ever been there and made it out alive. Sure, trucks delivered goods and supplies, just like in any other town. This isn’t, after all, a fairy tale; the shelves are not stocked by elves at night. But the trucks that carried the lifeblood of urban life to Warwick came from warehouses within town, and where those warehouses got their goods and supplies, very few people actually knew.

  The town was a closed loop, but it had not always remained completely hermetically sealed. Alumni existed… somewhere. There had been such people, for example, a rare and storied few souls who had escaped the town during what was known as the Great Confusion in 1992 – when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the town’s nominal reason for existence had come into question. Later however, with guards and dogs patrolling its surrounding forest, and that forest extending out to a distance of five football fields and sometimes more, crisscrossed with listening and heat detection devices, the town’s topographical subterfuge had served its purpose well in keeping the residents in, and hikers or other curious onlookers who might stumble onto the place out.

  Before the twin storms, even airlines didn’t fly over the area. Instead, they followed the dictates of the jet stream and the regulations for air traffic set down by military and intelligence planners. Like other strategically cloaked areas—one thinks of Area 51 or RAF Menwith Hill—the town of Warwick had been established and maintained in absolute secrecy, with every effort made to ensure that prying eyes were kept out. Any eyes that had crept in, and there had been a very few, were pried out, which is to say that any intruders that actually saw the town, and were caught, usually disappeared or met with some unfortunate accident in the forest. Electronic prying was equally difficult. Satellite photos and maps showed only an endless expanse of trees.

  There was, in fact, in the same region of New York State, another Warwick – another village by the same name. However, even this was a diversion. That other Warwick, around since the beginning of American Independence, served as a convenient placeholder for anyone who ever had a question about rumors, or who made an inquiry concerning whereabouts.

  This Warwick, this hamlet built during a war that was always expected but, like Godot, never seemed to arrive, was an anachronism. It was a wick, the archaic name for community, built for a war that was never a war.

  War-Wick.

  Like its sister village, its twin, it was an American city built in a year of freedom, but following the blurring of its purpose—as the conflict which threatened that freedom seemed to disappear—this Warwick had become an inscrutable enigma. It was a camouflage for a freedom, a force seeking purpose in shadows.

  Contrary to the age-old wisdom, those who were responsible for the place had decided that this was good and proper enough. Therefore, despite its long-lost mission, Warwick had become, it seemed, a light kept discreetly under a bushel.

  To be clear, and to remove any poetic obfuscation, Warwick had been, for many decades, a Cold War era spy school, or, as it was referred to by those who lived there, a charm school. This was its raison d’être, its reason for being. And while its purpose as a school was in some ways sinister, the town itself had maintained much of its charm.

  Thousands of individual Americans had been born, raised, and trained in Warwick, all with the explicit purpose of eventually being sent to the Soviet Union to fit seamlessly into that society and, once there, to work to bring about its downfall.

  On the surface, the project made sense. It was easier and safer to raise Russians from birth to spy in Russia than to recruit and turn (and then trust) a natural-born Russian.

  A Warwickian spy turned loose in Russia was really a clean slate—a tabula rasa. His cover story might be that he was an orphan, or that he had transferred there from somewhere else in the country. He knew nothing of the overall program of which he was but a small part, so he was not such a tremendous risk. He knew no one else, other than his immediate superior, and he knew next to nothing about that superior except very general details of when and where he was to deliver his regular reports. If arrested, he could talk in vague terms of some spy school in America, but as to any specifics, he was ignorant, he was isolated, and his knowledge could not and would not destroy the whole system.

  So, while it is admitted that the Warwick system was certainly not cheaper in a strictly economic sense than traditional forms of espionage, it was much less expensive in terms of risk. Turning natural-born Russians against their country, by definition, put the existing spy rings in that country at risk. Years and years of work could be overthrown with one bad bet. On whom would you gamble such expense and value? On someone who had already proved to be a traitor to his own country?

  There was a joke that was quite common in Warwick: Are we men or mice? The question was usually asked as if to say, “Who are we to ask questions?” or “What are we in the grand scheme of things?” The punchline was: Who can tell the difference? The humor in the joke lay in an understanding of international spycraft. M.I.C.E. is an acronym that defines the main ways used in the traditional recruitment of foreign intelligence assets. The components include:

  Money

  Ideology

  Coercion or Compromise

  Ego or Excitement

  For millennia, whether through ancient palace intrigue, medieval religious chicanery, backwards third-world coups, or intricate and advanced intelligence operations, spy handlers and controllers have used many means to turn assets against their own people. All one has to do is to find a target who has access to the information, or people, or materials that one wants. Then you find out what drives them. Can they be bought with money? (Most can.) Can they be swayed by love of country? (Most can’t.) Are they pliable due to some particular ideology they hold that might be considered deviant to their overlords? Perhaps they can be put into some compromising position (honeypots are older than Winnie the Pooh). Or maybe they are just looking for the excitement involved with being a traitor and a spy? Whatever the case, espionage takes and receives all kinds. But… all of this entails great risks to the organization that recruits the spies. One missed call or false turn and the whole system can be in danger of being exposed. Double-agents are as famous as the singular kind.

  So why not raise your own spies? That was the thinking that birthed Warwick.

  In traditional espionage, any single one of the elements in this M.I.C.E. list could be the motive played upon in the recruitment of a particular human intelligence asset. But in Warwick, the people themselves had been bred to become assets. They were raised and trained to spy as a part of their culture and identity, rather than as a reaction to some perceived personal benefit. When money is the motive for a man to spy against his country, then more money can be used to turn him back against his new masters. The same can be said of most of the M.I.C.E motivations, and a traditional asset, once turned, could be caught out, especially by the sophisticated machinery of modern intelligence. In fact, another joke that was told in Warwick had to do with the notion that the trick was not to build a better mousetrap but, rather, to breed smarter mice. Warwick had been set up as a kind of maze for training better mice. In the process, the line between men and assets had become increasingly blurred.

>   That was the grand scheme and vision of the military and intelligence officials who’d first conceived of the town, and in accord with this design they built Warwick to look and feel and behave exactly as a typical Russian village might. Its citizens were fully American, but they were indistinguishable from any Russian man or woman on the street. They lived in Russian houses, and they slept in Russian beds. When they went to withdraw money from the bank, they walked into Sberbank and drew out crisp rubles, and when they looked at their wrists to tell the time, they saw a Poljot. These were American citizens, but they were Russians, by culture, habit of mind, and force of personality.

  The obvious complications of developing such a people on American soil and giving them the tools of espionage as second nature became problematic once the cold war was believed to have ended.

  Some intelligence wonks whose opinions mattered believed that Warwick had become a buggy-whip industry. Not that espionage itself was unnecessary, mind you. Whips still had their place. It was simply that those in the places of power began to question whether it was wise to devote whole factories to their production.

  Throughout their history, all of these unique humans, raised and trained in Warwick, had been used as tools of war, in one way or another, amidst the great battles of ideology fought between men of opposing nations. They had been humans treated as a set of assets. They were pawns, played in a global chess game of power. But, when the game had suddenly turned, or seemed to have, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were not simply decommissioned or re-commissioned. They were sacrificed, as pawns will be, to the interests of those who had formed them in secret. Billionaire capitalists privatized the place and kept it under wraps in waiting for… what? Maybe they hoped and prayed for a return to cold war profiteering. (One could go hungry trying to live off of micro-wars.) Whatever the case, a decision was made to fund in private what was no longer feasible to fund from the public trough.

  Warwick, though she was as authentically Russian as possible, and though she had been erected on a foundation of duplicity, was no Potemkin Village. In the fifty years since it had come into existence, life had taken its natural course there, as it had in other places, and as it inevitably will wherever people are gathered in groups.

  People in Warwick, for the most part, grew up in loving families, raised children who loved, dated, ice-skated on Nizhny Pond, watched Russian movies at Pushkinsky-Cine, worshipped and wed one another in St. Olaf’s Church, and were buried in the cemetery behind it.

  Although Warwick was a town built to train spies, it had been obvious from the first that only a certain percentage of its citizens would ever be put into action. Like any people anywhere, there were sorting mechanisms put in place, devised around talent, intelligence, character, and other factors, and only a few select individuals were ultimately found suited to the task of espionage.

  There had been two primary “routes” (for lack of a better word) for the lives traversed by the people of Warwick. At age ten, each citizen was tested and re-tested by the powers-that-be in order to determine which of the routes they would ultimately follow.

  One route led to deployment, eventually, to Russia to live and work as a spy for America. Thousands of these Warwickians already lived and thrived in Mother Russia, smuggled in by whatever means necessary over the decades from then until now.

  The second route was reserved for those citizens who failed the testing for some reason or another—or for those who possessed some other requisite talent or skill that gave value to the town and its mission. This route meant that, for those who did not make it as spies, they would remain to live and work and serve their country in Warwick for the entirety of a lifetime.

  There was no getting out.

  Being released into the general American population was out of the question, given the possibilities raised by divided loyalties and the particular kind of expert training that was the lifeblood of the community. Besides, Warwickians would never fit in to modern America anyway. They didn’t know American food or cigarettes or beer. They would have been utterly lost in a Wal-Mart. They’d not been raised on The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days or The Cosby Show or Saved by the Bell or Lost or Glee or any of the other television programs that had defined any particular generation.

  They had received as much American culture as any normal Russian would have, but they knew America only by reputation and by propaganda and not in any real and experiential way. They read Pravda and Izvestiya and Novaya Gazeta and had never, or almost never, seen or read a USA Today or New York Times. It is possible that they might be accepted in a small, agrarian community where their more formal way of speaking and their cultural illiteracy might be considered closer to ‘normal,’ but otherwise, and anywhere else, they would be immediately suspect. And to be honest (if such a thing as honesty is acceptable in any examination of the mechanisms of espionage and other forms of professional lying), most of the citizens of Warwick

  —those that had lived and loved and died there since its inception—never really wanted anything more out of life. Historically, this is true of the bulk of humanity since, of course, we are now being honest.

  In respect to the kind of life lived—the actual makeup of the society and culture—most people throughout history have believed that what they have is good and right, and they believe this because they’ve been told to. They love their system because they find it sufficient, even if they want more out of it like anyone else. This is a particular trait of the spirit.

  But there are also traits of the flesh. Upward mobility and the desire for anything or anywhere else other than home is a particularly western phenomenon, most specifically identifiable in Americans of the last couple of centuries. Warwickians, insulated from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, had been spared this most American of characteristics.

  A few people had escaped Warwick, as noted, during the “confusion” of 1992, and an occasional intrepid soul had abandoned the cause while living as a spy in his adopted country, disappearing into the maw of Mother Russia for some reason known only to time. However, for the most part, and for most citizens, life in Warwick was a closed loop. One was born there and lived there and died there, with only the occasional glimpse into the wider world being permitted. Such a glimpse was only allowed when it served the purposes of those chess masters who administered the pawns, and when it advanced the designs of the nation. Life in Warwick was pleasant enough, but that was mainly because, even if discontent arose, such a life was the only game in town.

  ****

  Friday

  Winter. Late fall by the calendar, but winter in almost every way that counts. The valley, with its dormant flowers and evergreen seedlings, was blanketed in snow, and throughout the surrounding countryside, the very air was crackling with frigidity.

  Standing on a high ridge overlooking the valley in the cold of the afternoon, two men, and a pretty Warwick girl of twenty named Natasha, looked down from a tree line about three-hundred yards to the northwest of Warwick, and they had trouble assimilating what they were seeing. Warwick—the whole town and everything in it, and everyone from it that they have ever known—had become a burned-out corpse. Novgorod of America was dead.

  The homes and church and school and fields, the memories they had of moving about and within each… all of it had become a long black scar on the terrain of the Catskill Forest Preserve. The streets and buildings of their memories were gone, replaced by the refuse and boulders and charcoal of annihilation. Even the snow had melted entirely from the heat, and the water and mud and debris remained in steaming piles of scattered destruction under the skeletons of charred trees.

  What about the people?

  Neither of the men—one very young, and the other middle-aged—could seem to imagine any hope that there would be anyone they knew still alive in the ghastly scene before them. The girl brushed away a tear and emitted an almost imperceptible sob.

  How could the destruction be so complete?


  How could anyone have made it out of there alive?

  Where is my brother? Natasha wondered.

  None of the three gave voice to those particular words—or any words at all—but the silence among them amplified the questions. They all knew that life as they once had known it, like the town they had grown up in and called home, would never be the same again. The girl grimaced again in pain and bowed down in silent grief. Unspoken emotion, though voiceless, swirled loudly in the air between them like the wind.

  The young one called Lang was the first to speak. It should be noted before going further that this was not his real name. It was merely the identity he had assumed as he stood atop the ridge. In the world of espionage in which he’d been raised, a name was as easy to change as a passport. Easier even. There is a place inside a man where he knows who he really is, but when he searches that place he often finds it nameless, and maybe swept clean to the very corners. What, after all, is in a name? It was merely something he calls himself. The man decided to call himself Lang.

  “It must have been the drones,” Lang said. “Exactly what we figured.”

  The pilotless, remote-controlled militarized aircraft, five of them, somehow still operative after the EMP attack, had buzzed past the treatment plant like bees early that morning, low to the ground and in formation. Both Lang and the older gentleman at his side, a heavy-set man, 42 years old, who now called himself Peter, had seen them swoop overhead.

  They’d heard the buzzing first and took cover in the shed, only to step outside as the drones passed by, to watch their trajectory as they rose smoothly up and over the mountain. Without even speaking, the two men had figured that the appearance of the drones certainly had something to do with the charm school.