This week The New York Times revealed the details of a state-run doping program operated under the direction of Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia's antidoping laboratory. According to Dr. Rodchenkov, during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russian agents ran a Byzantine pee-snatching operation, years in the making. Working late into the night, in dark, secret rooms, they would switch out out performance-enhancing-drug-contaminated urine samples from Russian athletes – and refill the bottle with untainted, pre-Games urine from the same athlete, stored at a separate facility.
Dr. Rodchenkov has fled Russia for Los Angeles, where he is co-operating in the making of a documentary film about the failures of drug-testing in international sport, but the man I kept thinking about, after reading the story, wasn't him anyway; I wondered about the man Dr. Rodchenkov believes is a Russian agent, the man in charge of all the pee logistics – logistics that included, according to Dr. Rodchenkov, a signal that "the urines were ready."
What was that like for him, I asked myself, being the pee mule for the Russian Olympic team? And naturally, I assumed I'd never know, and so I was surprised to be greeted by a shadowy figure – well, he was doing his best to be shadowy in my very sunny office, this Tuesday morning.
"For this I joined Russian intelligence?" the man said to me in a thick Russian accent, spinning around in my own desk chair to face me. "Victor … Victor get ricin-tipped umbrella. Me? I get pee."
"I'm sorry," I said, setting down the teacup I had come in with. "And you are … ?"
"It is I. Man who opens little bottles of pee for Russian government," he said, trying, I think, to sound ominous.
"Oh," I said politely. "I won't shake hands," I added as he rose. "No, really. Let's not.
"Yes, I've read about you. So, tell me, what would happen was, during the Sochi Games, a bottleful of urine, someone else's urine, would be passed through a small hole in the wall, near the ground? It would be passed to a hidden room, to you, a man crouching down to receive another man's urine, and you'd take that Swiss-designed, supposedly tamper-proof bottle away, open it … somehow … and bring it back to the room?"
"Not one bottle – teams' worth of bottles. And then I would bring new urine …"
"Months-and-months-old new urine, though, right?"
"Yes," he nodded – somewhat defensively. "I bring old, but clean …"
"Clean for urine, you mean?" I asked. "But still, you know, urine. Someone else's urine?"
"Yes, I bring relatively clean urine back to room – I bring urine back in various vessels. Sometimes I bring urine back in soda cans. Sometimes in jars and, as I do this, I think: Victor, Victor is wearing a nice suit and chasing double agent through the streets of Prague, carrying a deadly umbrella. Me? I am wandering the streets of Sochi in an I Heart Team Russia hoodie with a baby bottle full of luger's urine in my hands. This is what I do for Mother Russia."
"And that was your job? Is that right, Mr. …"
"My code name is The Whiz. They try to tell me is short for The Wizard. But it is not short for The Wizard. Every time I call my handler at headquarters and I say, "Whiz, over" at the end of my report, some clown always say: "Did you shake it?" and the whole room bursts out laughing, and then I know handler have me on speakerphone the whole time, again."
"I'm sorry, Whiz," I said, picking up my teacup and holding it over my mouth to hide my smile.
"You know what Victor's code name is?" said Whiz. "Victor gets to be called The Poker!"
"Yeah," I said. "That's not really a good code name, either. Sounds like you guys need to work on your code-naming process a little harder. Maybe take some time off the whole amateur-sport-doping thing and just work on your secret-agent names for a while. You see where I'm going with this, Whiz? How did you come to choose this line of work, anyway, Whiz?"
"My father was sinister agent of the state. His father before him was sinister agent of the state. I just grew up dreaming that one day I would burst out of the shadows and garrote James Bond. For this reason, I learn to ski. I not even like winter sports – especially the luge – but I see what job requires; I watch movies. Always, what I see is, you hatch sinister plot in Nairobi, it gets discovered during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but everyone involved will eventually drop everything, and catch a transcontinental flight so that you can try and kill each other at a ski resort in Switzerland …"
"Yes, my impression has always been that over 70 per cent of tourism to Switzerland is assassination-related," I said sympathetically. "Did you also imagine yourself being seduced by beautiful women over forcefully ordered drinks?" I asked.
"No. Beautiful seductresses always Russian agents also. Office romance, no good. No one ever ask me to be diabolical in any of the six languages I learned, either. It's just pee, pee, pee with these people all the time. No danger! No excitement! No Bond! I open to compromise but I never even got to push a bottle of athlete's pee out of a plane without a parachute. Just collect pee bottle, open pee bottle, give pee bottle to pee doctor …" he sighed.
"Those Swiss urine-sample bottles sound very tricky," I said to him, "like little bottle-safes almost. Tell me, to crack those little urine-filled safes, did you have to hold the bottle of another human being's pee up really close to your ear and turn the lid a little one way and then a tiny bit the other way and listen for tiny little clicks?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Did the swishing sound make the clicks harder to hear?"
"Pee-bottle-opening method is state secret," he said.
"Because I totally see it as happening like that," I said.
"I want to push you out of a plane," he answered quietly.
"You think you can take me, Bottle Boy?" I said.
"I, Russian secret agent, you journalist; you really want go down this road?" he answered. "You fall from plane so fast …"
"You want to check and see if I have a bladder infection first?" I offered. "I could just …" and I held up my now-empty little teacup delicately, raised my eyebrows suggestively, and tilted my head toward the bathroom down the hall, and he began to cry.
It's been three days and he's still here. I'm not complaining. He's offered to garrote the mailman, but I told him no and it was fine, and sometimes he'll burst out of the shadows and open a particularly tricky salsa jar for me or something, and I think he just needs a little time.