The Restoration Game Read Free Page B

before that, and he's confessed. He gave the Agency a list of the people he exposed.”
    “And your name's on the list?”
    Amanda nodded. “Uh-uh. None of this is public, OK?”
    “So why are you telling me?” I demanded. “Am I on it? Are you in danger?”
    “No,” she said. “People I worked with, yeah…” She chewed her lip, looking up to a corner of the ceiling, and sighed. “Some of them have been arrested already.”
    “But Krassnia broke away, didn't it? Why should they care about anyone's spying on the Soviet Union?”
    “Hah!” said Amanda. “It broke away, sure, but it huddled close to Russia. And the local secret police are still the old Soviet secret police, just with new initials.”
    “Why do I have to know this?” I was really pissed with my mom for laying this on me.
    “Because,” she said, “you might get approached, sometime. Leaned on, I don't know, pressured in some way. Maybe asked to do something a little bit illegal, then blackmailed into doing something really bad, and then…”
    She waved her hands about, frowning.
    This all struck me as suspiciously vague.
    “This isn't just a way to stop me smoking blow, is it?”
    “No, Lucy, it's not!” She looked thoughtful. “But that would help. Anyway, tell me if anything unusual happens in your life—anything at all.”
    How was I supposed to know what was unusual? I glowered for a bit, then a line of attack came to mind.
    “Why did you work for the CIA anyway?” I asked. “They were killing and torturing people back then, in Salvador and shit. I've read all about it.”
    “I'm sure you have,” she said. “The Russians were doing worse, in Afghanistan and shit.”
    “I've read about that too,” I said. “It's no excuse.”
    “Look, Lucy,” Amanda said. “I'm—I was just doing what any good American would—should—have done. I was letting my government know about important developments, matters they really needed to know about to keep America safe. And, I might add, to help people in Krassnia who were suffering under the Soviets, and who might have suffered even more in the aftermath if we hadn't—if our government hadn't had a good idea of what was going on, among the mountain peoples, the ethnics, and so forth. You can see what's going on in Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, and places like that. None of that's happening in Krassnia, and I think the work I did had something to do with that. What the Agency may or may not have done or condoned in other parts of the world has nothing to do with me. So my conscience is clear.”
    She didn't quite add, “young lady!” but I could hear it in her tone. With the result that I argued right back, and we both ended up yelling at each other. This was fairly typical of how we got along then.
    So after the inevitable door-slam I got on the phone to vent my annoyance into my favourite sympathetic—if slightly deaf—adult ear, that of my great-grandmother, Eugenie. (My grandmother, Gillian, was and is the most conventional whitebread housewife I've ever met. Totally different from her daughter and from her mother. You'd almost think there's some kind of generational rebellion thing going on.)
    “Mom just told me—”
    “Stop!” Great-Grandma Eugenie cried.
    “What?” I said. “I just wanted to—”
    Great-Grandma Eugenie said: “I know what you want to talk about, Lucy dear. Please don't! It's not really a suitable subject for you and I to discuss. Now, tell me how you're doing at school.”
    I did, with ill grace. After clicking her tongue at my grades and chuckling sympathetically at my surly remarks about certain girls who were, like, totally making my life a misery, Eugenie said quite casually: “Oh, Lucy dear, wouldn't you just love to come up to see me? Just name a day and I'll pay for your Greyhound tickets.”
    A couple of weekends later I made that trip. Up Saturday, back Sunday.
    Eugenie told me some things about her visit to Krassnia, back in the 1930s, along with