It started when I was paged, although I didn't know it at the time. I probably should have. I'd been trained, and besides, who gets paged anymore? Just call my cell! But I jumped up from breakfast and ran over to the front desk, and all I got was a dial tone.
****
I was up early for the first tracks. Skiing's the best when you have the clean snow all to yourself, and this was going to be a classic day in the Rockies -- cold, crisp, and clear, with a nice thick layer of overnight powder. It was windless this early, unless you count the biting headwind from skiing really fast. I'd grown up near here, and if there's one thing I can do competently, it's slide down a hill. I was used to leaving most other skiers behind, but apparently, today was going to be different. A blond in an electric blue racing suit had appeared from nowhere and was hanging with me.
It's fairly common, when you're skiing with guys, to get into little unacknowledged competitions. You go a little faster, find some tougher terrain, see who wobbles first. I'd never had a girl chase me down like this one. I'm sure plenty of them could, but typically not the ones you find skiing casually on a weekend morning at a big resort. So I turned it on and tried to shake her. It didn't work; the trail was too easy. I finally found a steep, bumpy part and carved some good turns. She hung with me for a minute but then went across the trail, so I tried to put some distance between us before we met again. Then I glanced across the trail just in time to see her launch herself off a crest and sail thirty yards through the air in a perfect tuck, landing slightly ahead of me with an annoying 'thwack!'
Message received.
We traded positions a few times, totally ignoring each other of course, and arrived at the lift line together. We fetched up side by side. Out of breath, I just said "Hey!"
"Good morning! Still waking up?" Big grin. She was hardly breathing at all.
****
Her name was Jana. She had a charming little accent, enormous blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a perfect athlete's body with highly-developed skiing muscles. She had a perma-grin. Implausibly, she seemed interested in me, which was surprising because she was way too cute. But she must have put a hand on my forearm five times as we laughed our way up the lift.
At the top she hopped off and skied right up to me, stopping face to face with her skis outside mine, grinning mischievously. It was unusual. Normally, you talk side-by-side so it's easy to push off again. This position seemed oddly sexual. She was close, straddling my skis, with the crotch of her skin-tight suit right over my upturned ski tips. She had to be aware.
"Ready? Let's do Death Spiral!" She bolted off. "I'll wait at the bottom!" she called over her shoulder.
We were off.
****
Of course we had lunch together.
We introduced and filled in our bios. She was the daughter of immigrant parents who had moved to the States when she was fifteen. Before that she'd lived in Czechia and skied in Austria, sort of like living in New York and skiing in Vermont, but with actual mountains. Now she lived and worked near D.C. and was pursuing an advanced degree at night. She was Miss Enthusiasm, one of those people who seem happy about everything.
I asked who she worked for.
".... I'm in government," she said. "DHS."
"Really? You're a fed too? Doing what?"
"... Nothing important. It's my first year. I'm one step above a summer intern." She smiled so ruefully I couldn't pursue it. "How about you? You're in government too?"
Something about meeting cute girls brings out the worst in me. I tried to impress her. "Yup. I'm with the Diplomatic branch of the State Department. My first rotation was two years in Islamabad, and next week I'm headed for Prague."
"Really? You'll love Prague!... How was Pakistan, though?"
"Not great. You can only go out in groups, with guards, and curfew starts right after work. We never send any women there anyway, of course. You do get a free handgun and self-defense lessons. But it was a good post, career-wise."
"It must be competitive! How'd you get it?"
"I have an uncle in the Department," I admitted. "He got me into a hot-spot embassy so I wouldn't be stamping visas for a living."
"Mr. Bond, James Bond? How nice to meet you!" We shook. She giggled. "What's your portfolio?"
"Non-proliferation, actually." That was the sexy part, anyway.
"You mean like, back-pack bombs?"
An uneasy feeling started to creep into in the back of my mind. Everyone knows that in Pakistan, the usual non-proliferation issues are urgent. The Pakistani military has plenty of nukes on hair trigger, mostly aimed at India. But I had done some work in a slightly different area: miniature atomic devices. Mini-nukes are a major concern in the third world. Small enough bombs would be deliverable anonymously, by car or home-brewed missile. Non-attributable weapons, like ex-pat assassinations or hacking attacks, are a problem when the only defense is the threat of retaliation.
So I'd been trained to watch for questions about my work. Part of State Department rookie induction, even for diplomats, is a quick course on intelligence and counter-intelligence -- how to extract information, but also how to tell if you're a target. It might seem farfetched for a youngster like me to be targeted. I didn't have that much to spill. Yet. But I was inexperienced and single, and I had a diplomatically sensitive career ahead of me, so I'd been told I was a prospect. And as a recruiter, Jana seemed custom-tailored for me.
Of course she might have figured out that miniaturized nukes were a hot issue all by herself. It's logical, once you think about it. But that would be pretty perceptive for a civilian. So after lunch I told her I had to make some calls, and she went back on the slopes while I had a precautionary talk with Uncle Mike.
****
Mike had always been my guardian angel. The help with my career was just one example. He said he was glad I called.
"I realize it's probably nothing," I said. "I just want to be careful and -- you know, show I'm paying attention."
He seemed slightly amused, but interested, too. "No, no,.... good for you, Dave. You can't be too careful. Your career could be stunted if you associate with the wrong people, especially without reporting. But this is interesting. Let me think for a minute..... Actually, you know, you should talk to my buddy Ralph. He's FBI, in domestic counter-intel. He'll know what to do."
"What if it's nothing, though? Won't I seem alarmist?"
"I'll tell him you're just a new guy being cautious. He'll understand. I've known him for years and we've worked on a bunch of stuff together. He's good. He'll give you a call on your Department phone after I've talked to him. Just do exactly what he says, OK?"
That was the second step on my trip down the hall of mirrors.
****
Ralph called a few minutes later. I told him my suspicions. "She's at least an 8, which seems way too cute for her to be pursuing me, frankly. Her parents are Czechs. And then there was the page call." I described the breakfast hang-up. "That could have been how she identified me, and after that she must have followed me up the lift and down the slope. She came up from behind me even though I was going pretty fast, we got into a little race, and by lunch I was fielding questions about mini-nukes, which just happens to be the most sensitive area I've worked in."
Ralph seemed like a classic spook, rough-edged, smart and guarded, but he was surprisingly receptive to my concerns. "I'll look at her Homeland Security file, but an 8 sounds about right. No one sends 10s anymore; they're too easy to make. The call, the meeting, the questions... they're innocuous taken separately, but together, they're pretty coincidental. And it's interesting that she deflected your question about her position. The fact that she may have a DHS security clearance means that if she's a problem, she could be a big one. I think we should follow up. Let's check her out."
"I'm just a desk jockey. What should I do?"
"If she's Russian, her tradecraft will be excellent. Frankly, an untrained guy like you won't be able to sniff her out, and I don't want you scaring her off. So we'll stick to the basics. First, stay in contact. Keep talking. Pal around. Second, try to get her contact information, especially her cell and email. Third, don't under any circumstances make her suspicious! In fact, feel free to feed her some tidbits. If you seem like a potential source it will keep her interested. Mike doesn't think you know enough to be dangerous anyway, and information often flows both ways in these situations; the trick is to contain the outbound amounts and let us help you sneak in some disinformation down the road."
"The fact that she got onto nukes with me so quickly actually seemed kind of amateurish."
"Maybe. But didn't you tell her you were leaving in a week?"
"Oh.... you mean maybe she thought she had to work fast."
"So we need to know more. You should try to reconnect and keep engaging with her while we check her out at his end. And keep me posted! That's an order."
****
The slopes were pretty crowded now, and I had no idea how to find her. But I wasn't that worried. She'd found me once, and if she was on a mission, I was willing to bet she could do it again. So I just went skiing.
I did the steeps at the top, and then stopped at my favorite lift, a slow little double that goes all the way back up. In the lift line I got to talking with an old guy who spent summers skiing in Chile. I remember remarking on his extremely savage tan when I suddenly found myself looking up at clear blue sky. A knot of people was gathered around, looking down at me with worried expressions.
"What happened?" asked someone a long way off who sounded vaguely like me.
Savage Tan was crouching next to me. "That girl came in hot. She looked like she was trying to bury you, but she lost her edge."
I looked sideways. My neck hurt. My head hurt. There was Jana, on the ground too, still smiling, but sheepishly. "Sorry, Dave.... "
****
There are lots of ways to meet people, but injuring them turns out to be particularly effective. You can accompany them to the clinic, acting remorseful and caring, and wait around for the concussion assessment, and then you can follow them back to their room and say you owe them a drink. Then you change into something cute and bring some non-alcoholic, concussion-friendly drinks to their room, and then you offer to buy them dinner, during which you can ask them about all kinds of things, coincidentally including their politics and their next assignment. Then you can walk back to your rooms together and say you're really sorry but in a way you're glad because you had a nice time getting to know each other, and you stand a little close, rest your fingertips lightly on the side of their hip, and wait. Pretty good tradecraft.
I said I'd had a nice time too, concussion aside, and spent a moment at my door with her wondering what to do. Then I kissed her on the cheek and closed the door, because I was still mad. It was impossible that such a fucking awesome skier would try such a juvenile stunt, much less screw it up. Trying to spray snow on people in a lift line with a last-minute hockey stop is the clichéd stupid beginner trick, something you would never, ever do after years of skiing. Plus, just happening to find me again so fast, on a mountain packed with skiers?
It had been intentional.
