Michael
Hello, I'm Michael Stuart. I used to live in Washington, DC, in the suburb of Georgetown. I work (or rather worked) for a three-letter federal government agency. My official title is that of 'Policy Administrator,' that's just a way of saying that I do whatever task I'm given to do. Normally, I'm a fixer. I fix problems. Complex problems that this particular three-letter agency would rather see go away. And go away quietly and not come back. Now don't go thinking I'm a James Bond or Jack Ryan type, I'm not. Those fictional characters are excellent creations to feed the imagination of the public. They're really good creations, and I've seen every Bond movie and Jack Ryan movie and the Amazon series and enjoyed them all. No, I do more mundane things, but all the same, it means that I travel a lot. A lot.
I'm 35 and used to be an Army officer. I got out of the Army a couple of years ago, about a year after I got promoted to Major. I was working in the Pentagon when the three-letter agency came to the Army looking for people with the right qualifications and made several candidates very good offers. I took the offer because I wanted a new challenge.
I was an infantry officer, and the deployments were getting repetitious, and all too often involved dodging IEDs and snipers. Asymmetric warfare is a challenge, but it's pretty much all I've ever known. The battle against our enemies now is very different than it used to be when our fathers and grandfathers served. Now we operate in an environment where we are constantly surrounded by the threat. It makes you paranoid after a while and you start to see an enemy around every corner, even when you're not in your uniform. It was time for me to move on to do something else. I had two choices: either leave the Army or stay and became a lifer; I chose to leave.
My education was in political science. Yes, the social sciences; please don't mock me too much. I wasn't a technician. But I was trained to read, understand, analyze, and think through complex problems and find solutions, communicate the answers, make plans and then to put those plans into action. The army was good at teaching me to use my own innate common sense to find practical solutions, so I always looked for the simplest way to fix something. That was usually the best way.
My education included an undergraduate degree in political science and a master's degree in international relations. Political science is about understanding power and people and the relationship between them. There are many forms of power: political, social, religious, cultural, economic, military, and more. Most of the plays for control involve a mixture of these, but the desire for control, or power, usually is the overarching string that binds it all together. It's what makes us humans as a species so unique and a challenge. Throw in some ego, personal ambition and frequently greed, you sometimes get a war.
I come from a good family that have been successful in the business world. My heritage is Scottish and goes back hundreds of years to the time of the Battle of Culloden where my forefathers fought the British in 1746. My forefathers lost that battle and eventually emigrated to Ireland and then the United States; but the Scottish are still fighting today for independence from the British. They're winning now.
My father, Edward Stuart, is well off, he's a commercial banker, and my older brother, Charles Stuart, is a Wall Street investment banker that is making money, so fast that even he can't keep track of it; or so he says. I know for a fact that he knows where every nickel is all the time. So, I've given my brother part of my military salary to invest for me and without knowing how much I had in my account when I left the army, I was floored when he handed me a financial statement. Holy cripes!
I lived frugally, when I was in the Army, so had put about 20% of my salary into my investment account, so by my simple math, I had put away about $200,000 over the ten-year period. Well, my dear brother had invested well and my meagre nest-egg had become just over $4 million. What the hell? I accused him of all manner of illegal hokey-pokey but at the end of the day was gob-smacked that I was, what I considered to be, rich. Now, my brother was mega-rich, by comparison, but that was another issue and none of my business. It was all obtained legally, so, as the realization of my financial situation settled into my mind, I was very happy. It meant that my wife would be happy when we could buy a nice place to live. Oh yeah, I have a wife.
My wife is Amanda Windsor. She, as you might surmise from her name is of British heritage. I met her at Columbia University when I was attending a summer course there, three years ago, while I was on leave. I was working on my master's degree and there was a visiting professor there teaching a course that I wanted to take. The course was going to be useful to me in the writing of my thesis. So, I took a month off and stayed at the university residence and crammed the course in as quickly as I could.
I met Amanda, who at the time was a third law student, at the library coffee shop. We struck up a friendship and then actually went on a couple of dates for food and barhopping before I had to go back to work at Fort Lewis. We lived at opposite ends of the country so I figured that when I left NYC, I wouldn't likely see her again. I was wrong.
Amanda is tall, about 5'10", slender, long dark brown hair, very good looking and comes from a New York family with a long tradition of creating lawyers and money. My relationship to her was fleeting and from what little she told me, her family would not likely be terribly impressed with a soldier as a mate for her. So, I managed my expectations and at the conclusion of the course, we exchanged e-mail and cellphone numbers, said my goodbyes and got back to work.
Amanda wasn't a prude by any stretch of the imagination, and we had sex a few times during the month. It was intense, sheet tangling, sweaty, and really, really, fantastic. Trying to squeeze in sex with a hot woman, all the while trying not to waste my time and a lot of my own money with the course; well, you can see that I hadn't planned on forming any lasting relationships. My plan was, as we say on operations, 'get in, get out, and don't muck about.'
Amanda was studying environmental law. It was a growing field, what with global warming about to doom our planet, and many governments ignoring the effects of our collective stupidity. If the people of planet earth didn't wake up soon, there wasn't going to be a place to live. We needed to make big changes to the way that we lived, but that was costly, and as we all know, it's about the money. It's about power; money is power on planet earth.
When Amanda graduated, she went to work for a firm in NYC, Woodward-Johnson-Goldstein, or something like that. Her brother, Emmett, was a lawyer at the same firm, but in a different city. She worked for one of the senior lawyers for the year after she graduated so that she could get through the Bar Exam and be licensed to practice law in New York State. It was the normal path for new lawyers.
Let's go back in time for a few minutes as I explain some pertinent detail. What I hadn't planned after my short summer course, in NYC at Columbia, was for Amanda to call me.
It was early October, after I was back at work, I was getting ready for a short deployment out of Fort Lewis to Australia. I was part of the group that was planning a series of military training exercises that would train the military staffs of other partner nations to work with the US. It was as boring as dog shit but had to be done if the US Army were to operate in a multi-national setting. Our allies that had professional military training, like Australia, Canada, and the UK were a pleasure to operate with, but there were lots of challenges when it came to working with some of the military forces of other nations that were formerly led by regimes that worked to suppress the people, not defend them. Go figure.
So, it came as a big surprise when my cell phone chirped one night and when I looked at it, I didn't recognize the number. I figured that it was just a scammer calling to tell me that my computer was giving off errors and if I would turn over control of it to them, and pay them $200, they would be happy to fix it. Hmmm. I let it go to voicemail. Later when I checked my messages, I was very surprised to hear Amanda's voice.
"Michael, it's Amanda. I wanted to call to talk to you. How are you? I might be in Seattle in two weeks, so I wanted to see if you had time to get together. You likely are busy and have some young thing in your bed so if you can't that's okay. Give me a call when you get a chance. You have my number. Bye."
I was really surprised to hear from her. I wasn't expecting that our time together at Columbia would result in anything other than a nice memory. I had nothing to lose by returning her call. I didn't have a new woman in my bed, no real time for that just now. So, I called her back.
"Hi, it's Michael. Your message said that you might be coming to Seattle in a while. What's the occasion?"
"Hey Michael, the firm that I'm interning for is sending me there to meet with some of the bigger companies in Washington state to talk about pollution laws and ways that industry can reduce the shit they put in the environment. The big plane manufacturers are trying to be leaders in the push for fewer emissions coming out the exhausts of their airplanes, so it makes sense to get them to influence other big emitters in the northwest. If you have time would you like to get together? "
