Esther's Sling

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If war is hell, then covert war is purgatory. Or so thought Amit Margolis as he waited in room 901 of the Ramada Pudong Airport Hotel just outside Shanghai, China. For over a year he had been wheeling and dealing as a businessman based in Moscow, fully embracing the free spending style of connected capitalism that infused life into the capital of the Russian Federation. Brains and knowledge helped, but success was really correlated to the degrees of separation between your circle of friends and the center of power. And the power center around which everyone with aspirations orbited was clear to all: Vladimir Putin.

Margolis was not sure if his nineteen months of investment would have a satisfactory ending. Today he would find out. Success meant that the nation he served would be a little safer tomorrow and he could think about going home. Failure meant that he would have to rethink his approach to his work and maybe, if his managers willed it, start over on a process that could keep him away from home for another year or longer. He picked up the morning’s issue of Shanghai Daily, a business newspaper published in English.

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