Flash Fiction Friday (Cycle 52) A Special Kind of Hell

Flash Fiction Friday Cue: Tell the tale of two people pulling up in a car to a remote lake.
Length: As of 10/14/2011 under massive rewrite sure to exceed the word limit by thousands.
Genre: open

The cold case file that landed on my desk one morning was from the early days of the Cold War. The official investigation had ended back in the late-80's for lack of any leads and had long been assigned to the third-level subbasement of CIA headquarters in Langley,Virginia. A place where dead cases are stored, usually forever, and careers languished under life-sucking fluorescent lights and among a rat-like maze of cubicles. It is where I now find myself confined after a string of unfortunate operational disasters in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In some ways, I should consider myself lucky that I am still an active agent and not euphemistically running CIA operations in northern Greenland. The agency is not a forgiving place, especially when a disaster embarrasses some elected official to the point he, or she, might lose their privileged position of power and influence. Trying to put an even more positive spin on things, at times I find myself thoroughly engrossed in the old cases that the basement mainframe randomly assigns me to review with me praying one would rescue my career.

Just when I was about to give up any hope of finding redemption a very special case was dropped on my desk. Right from the start, I was intrigued because it dealt with a couple, a male and female, of identified Soviet spies extensively trained in the arts of infiltration and sabotage that had disappeared as the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

Reading the file I learned the male, codenamed “Serge”, during that time was the best agent the KGB ever produced. He was fluent in seven different languages and scores of dialects, a master in weapons, explosives, hand-to-hand combat, and if that wasn't enough was a skilled SCUBA diver. From the ancient picture of him taken at some unknown embassy function I was not surprised to find he resembled a young Sean Connery. Reports also suggest he enjoyed a similarly glamorous Bond-like lifestyle with the ability to melt the heart of any woman. Nearly nothing was known about his life before joining the KGB although it was a given he was probably a member of Red Army special forces.

A little more was known about the female, codenamed “Isidora.” She was a beauty who was a combat aviator back when the very mention of female pilots in the United States Air Force would have ruined your career. The picture of Isidora in the file showed her wearing a tight fitting flight suit and posing next a MIG-21 fighter loaded with missiles. After leaving the Red Air Force, she supposedly married a senior Soviet diplomat but it was a safe assumption that was just a cover.

Individually, from the mid-1950’s until they finally fell off the face of the earth they were extremely effective agents successfully counter scores of Western intelligence operations. In fact they had caused so much trouble that both the CIA and MI6 still had active “kill on sight” orders issued for both.

After reading through the file, the crux of the whole affair came from a reliable report from one of our Russian moles back then of a list of KGB operatives chosen for training as sleeper agents with Serge and Isidora’s names at the top. These”sleepers” were to infiltrated a western country and live there quietly for years without drawing any attention to themselves. But, if war ever broke out they had specific orders to assist the Soviet Union by aiding other agents or performing active sabotage on their own.

From corroborated reports inside the Soviet Union Serge and Isidora were given the granddaddy of all sabotage missions. Their training involved the placement of a duffel bag-sized nuclear weapon inside the Washington D.C. area in an attempt to behead as much of the United States government as possible.

My assignment was, of course, to locate and capture if I somehow found them still alive although given the problems they caused the West I am sure my supervisors would reissue the kill on sight order if I asked.

Given the nature of their talents and with the reports that their mission was to nuke Washington the entire spectrum of American intelligence agencies began moving heaven and earth to find them after they disappeared. During those tense and dangerous years rumors surfaces that no less than two assistant directors had heart attacks because of the stress coming down on them from the White House to find and kill those two. After the Cuban Missile Crisis subsided the pressure to locate Serge and Isidora eased to the point that some clever bureaucrat was able to sweep the entire affair under the proverbial rug with the case being suspended until new leads developed. Except that no new leads ever appeared and after the Soviet Union fell the case was mostly forgotten until it fell into my lap. 

At first the situation seemed hopeless, after reviewing seemingly countless reports neither of the two Soviet super spies had ever reappeared, even briefly. I went as far a to contact long retired American and British agent asking their opinions with the consensus being that the two were probably dead. But it was technology that supplied the new lead that made locating them unbelievably easy.

Being sleeper agents trained to act as a “normal” American married couple for however long it took before World War 3 began it was a safe assumption that they had kids. Rightly or wrongly Soviet trainers back then believed that spies working under the cover story of being married had to produce children, otherwise they might be tagged as "odd" drawing unwanted attention which might endanger the mission. 

Finding Serge and Isidora meant running the pictures of Virginia and Maryland high school students of the 1970’s through facial recognition software designed to find characteristics of the two suggesting they did indeed have offspring. It took a couple of weeks but I eventually narrowed it down to a group of siblings whose aging parents still lived fifty miles outside Washington. Which made sense Serge and Isidora would need to live close to Washington to respond in time if orders came down to fulfill their mission. Researching the parents, I knew I had hit pay dirt when under close examination their personal histories fell apart before 1962.

After winning approval to proceed with the investigation from my bosses I located their home in a gentrified subdivision in northern Virginia. Given what I read of their glamorous lives among the powerful before becoming sleeper agents it was quite the shock to see two highly skilled Soviet spies that in their day utterly terrified Western intelligence agencies living a mundane suburban existence.

After bugging their house, I discovered not a nest of cunning spies still await orders from a country that no longer existed but a bickering old couple who hated the sight of each other. Serge, far from the dashing spy of the 1960’s, now looked like a permanently disgruntled old man whose best days had long since passed him by. The beautiful Isidora had become a hypercritical old woman whose grandchildren avoided her at all costs.

How do I know they even remembered their days as glamorous and dangerous spies? The thing I found extremely curious while I had them under surveillance was their habit of driving to a nearby lake and just parking in front of it for hours without saying anything to each other. The look of utter misery that took over their faces was overwhelming. After days of surveillance, I was struck by the thought that the lake represented some sort of escape from their wretched existence.

That caused me to scan the lake with a radiation monitor were I found the nuclear weapon they had smuggled inside the country. A team of Navy SEALs secretly removed the watertight container holding it soon after. As for Serge and Isidora, I thought long and hard on their ultimate fates. It was clear from their recorded conversations that their covert assignment had become its own special kind of Hell. I suppose that if I wanted to be merciful I could terminate them both but some sick side of me realizes letting them live is a far worse punishment.