by Jan Fedarcyk
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For my mom, who instilled a love of books, and for my dad, a source of encouragement
For my husband, Mike, for your love and support—none of this would have happened without you by my side
PART 1
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do . . .
—T. S. ELIOT
PROLOGUE
SHE WOULD be waiting at the airport with a “go bag,” Dmitri was certain—a false passport, a few thousand in U.S. currency, a change of clothes and dummy luggage. She had always come through for him in the past—never missed a meeting, never blown a drop. Responsible, prudent, cautious. If there was such a thing as an ideal handler, then she was it. For years now, the two had worked in perfect tandem, conveying his information back to the U.S. and the shadowy bureaucrats in the ranks above her. He was as valuable a double agent as the U.S. had ever enjoyed, at least so far as Dmitri, a man not given to undue humility, was concerned.
So of course she would be at the airport. The taxi made good time down Kashira Highway. Dmitri’s watch read three fifteen. His flask of vodka was almost full.
What made a man spy on his country? Dmitri wondered idly. In his case it had been money: that was the sole reason; Dmitri was comfortable in admitting it. They had been right about that much, at least, the old gray-clad comrades with their five-year plans and their steely eyes, right that money corrupts, that capitalism reduces all relationships to mere greed, as his own behavior was evidence. They had simply underestimated the strength of it, the sheer rolling force, so much vastly more powerful than Marxism that, looking back, it was hard to believe the contest had ever seemed even, like a man going twelve rounds with a child. But it had lost, utterly lost, as you could tell walking down Tverskaya Street, old women selling cheap geegaws, pretty girls from the interior winking from open windows, offering their own wares with an equal lack of decorum. The ruble was the Lenin of modern Russia, as the dollar was the Washington of America. Dmitri was confident that he would fit comfortably into his soon-to-be homeland.
Three twenty-three. His flask of vodka was less full than it had been. He put it back in his pocket, visions of vomiting at check-in swirling through his mind. He was the only one who could ruin it now; as long as he held it together he’d be home free. Hadn’t he been careful, as careful as he always had been, and wasn’t that careful enough to have spent the better part of twelve years selling the innermost secrets of the SVR, the KGB’s successor, to their most hated enemies? Could an idiot spend twelve years selling Mother Russia’s secrets to Uncle Sam? No, an idiot could not, and thus, by the process of induction, Dmitri was not an idiot. And therefore, as the final step in the equation, she would be waiting at the airport. There was simply no other way around the matter.
Especially with what he had. Six months prior, they had met in a crowded mall in downtown Moscow, walking and talking quietly, the same as usual except of course that it wasn’t at all. A spy is to falsehood as a shark is to water, and a conversation between two of them is as dark as a spoon of beluga caviar. But the gist of it was clear enough. Dmitri’s bosses had someone in the CIA, someone important, someone who had been rolling up the CIA’s own network. She needed a name. She needed a name, and now he had one, and she knew it, and so she would be waiting at the airport.
Of course, if she was not there—if she was not there—then he was dead and worse than dead. If there was one thing to be said about Mother Russia, beyond that she had the best writers, liquor and women, it was that she was not a nation that had ever been shy about killing its own citizens. And in his case, at least, such retribution would be far from unjustified. Even in less bloodthirsty countries, treason is a crime taken very seriously, very seriously indeed.
Dmitri’s watch read three thirty, and his flask of vodka was not full, not full at all. He had not been certain until a few days earlier, when a stray folder came across his desk. It was pure good fortune—it was information he shouldn’t have access to, a random mix-up, the sort of thing that might happen in any very large bureaucratic system, even a covert one. He had looked at it, put it back in its folder, eaten a long lunch at a nearby restaurant: cold borscht and a chewy pork cutlet, and enough alcohol to keep the thing from sprinting off once it was safely settled in his stomach. On the way back to the office he had stopped off at a pay phone and called a wrong number, the first step in the elaborate process that would let her know that he needed to see her immediately, as in right now, because the file he had looked at had lit a fuse underneath him, and he knew it didn’t have long to run. At a parking garage in the Arbat district that evening he had told her simply, “I have the name you’ve been looking for,” and “It will not come cheaply.”
She had looked him over and told him that she’d need to talk to her people. He had known she would say that; written in bold lettering on the heart of every intelligence officer from MI6 to the Chinese MSS was “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” but still it infuriated him to see how cautious they were, here in the moment when celerity was called for.
But all he could do was go back home and then to work the next morning, to avoid anything that would arouse suspicion, to putter about his job with his usual middling competence, to sit with his back against the wall and keep one eye over his shoulder. Three days he had been doing this, each evening getting more desperate—feeling, with that easy paranoia of a professional spy, the web getting closer, ineffably and inescapably. When word came through that morning—a potted plant placed almost conspicuously in the front window of an apartment a few blocks from his house—the fear became almost overwhelming. It took everything he had to sit quietly at his desk for a few hours, to continue giving his impression of normalcy. But he was free now, or good as. She would be at the airport, and soon he would be out of the reach of the SVR, and all of this would seem nothing more than an unpleasant dream, albeit one that had gone on for the better part of his adult life.
The taxi pulled into Domodedovo International Airport. Dmitri reached into his pocket, took out a thousand rubles, thought it over a moment and took out a thousand more. Why not, right? He could afford it. She would be waiting for him inside, and she would have everything he needed to start a new life in New York. Swimming pools and palm trees and movie stars—wait, that was L.A., wasn’t it? Dmitri laughed to himself. He’d have time to figure it out, plenty of time, because she would be there.
Except then the door opened, and a group of hard-looking men in bad suits stood on the sidewalk, none of them smiling, and behind them were several men in uniform carrying assault rifles, and they were not smiling, either, not even a tiny bit.
“Dmitri Ulyanov,” one said evenly. “You will come with us, please.”
Three thirty-eight. The flask of vodka was empty. Dmitri stepped out of the vehicle and into the waiting arms of his executioners.
1
KAY MALLOY sat hunched down in the driver’s seat of her old Buick, back aching, eyes strained. Outside, the winter sun was shining and birds were chirping and little black boys in single digits waited sharp-eyed to erupt in Baltimore city’s common call of warning—“Po-lice, Po-lice”—the word stretched out to fill a sentence. Kay had turned the engine off after rolling slowly into the back alley across from the subject’s house, and February leaked in through the windows. She shivered but she didn’t button up her coat, no
r the suit jacket beneath it, and uncomfortable as it was to sit motionless with a .40-caliber Glock on her hip, she didn’t move that, either.
“Your car can become your coffin,” they had told her at the Academy. Better cold than dead.
On the seat next to her she had set the subject’s picture, although she didn’t need to look at it anymore. Months on the case had imprinted his face into her memory like an old lover—light-skinned and dead-eyed, a furrowed brow and lips that didn’t smile. James Rashid Williams, age twenty-two. Where Kay had grown up, twenty-two was the cusp of adulthood, a college diploma beneath your belt and the world open and bright ahead of you. Here on the east side of Baltimore, twenty-two years was enough to make you a drug dealer, a corrupter of children, a parasite and a killer. Twenty-two years was enough to earn you an FBI file a half inch thick, enough to get a squad of federal Agents to hunt you down and stick you in a cell.
Kay had spent the last two weeks doing just that, following Williams across the city, trying to figure out his daily routine, who he met with and where he slept. Two weeks of lukewarm coffee and stale bagels; two weeks trailing one of Baltimore’s most dangerous criminals across the length and breadth of the fading urban metropolis. They’d be moving on him soon, the end result of a case the Bureau had spent the better part of a year building.
Outside, the sun dimmed and the temperature dropped. Inside, Kay stayed motionless or nearly so, binoculars trained on the front door. It hadn’t been easy to find a spot that offered her a decent view of the subject’s house without marking her out to everyone else on the block. A white woman sitting alone in her car for hours on end, in this neighborhood? You didn’t need to have graduated Quantico to figure out that she didn’t belong there. Although it was only her training that helped her stay focused for long hours on surveillance, bleary-eyed and bored beyond reason. And still, when the door finally opened, she felt herself somehow unprepared; had an absurd moment of . . . well, not quite fright, exactly—Kay was an FBI Agent, trained not to feel those sorts of things—but perhaps some distant cousin to it.
There was something about Williams in person that didn’t quite carry through in the picture, a sense of menace like a foul smell. Even in her few short years with the FBI, she had met hundreds of boys and young men overlaid with a facade of toughness, a lifetime of pop culture criminality to live up to. Most of them folded quickly enough once you got them alone in an interview room and set them to staring at a few dozen years in prison. But Williams was the real deal; she could have told that even if she hadn’t had a thick dossier detailing the usual list of crimes: drug dealing and money laundering and the not-at-all-infrequent murder so as to continue on with the first two; could have told that from the way he sauntered out into the late-afternoon light like he owned the block and the neighborhood and the city out beyond that.
His gang of lurking children greeted him respectfully, even reverently, but he didn’t answer, didn’t seem even to acknowledge them, just trained his eyes slowly back and forth across the streetscape, searching for anything out of place. You didn’t make it to where Williams was by being careless, not with half the city looking to put him in the ground, take his place as neighborhood kingpin. A man like Williams had spent years of his life dodging rival dealers and law enforcement; caution was second nature.
Kay found herself reaching instinctively down towards her service weapon, had to fight to bring her hand back up to the steering wheel. The rest of the Agents assigned to the case were all veterans, and going after Williams was just another day at the office. But Kay had only been in the Bureau two years, and as much as she tried to feign the casual hardness of her colleagues, the truth was that something about Williams had gotten to her. Watching the gang of children vie for his attention, eyes bright with hero worship, left a bitter taste in her mouth and her Glock weighing heavy on her hip. For weeks now she had been putting in extra time on the case, hoping her diligence would earn a spot on the entry team. The thought of coming through the door with a dozen other Agents, wiping that grim line off Williams’s face, frog-marching him to a lifetime behind bars—it was something that Kay had seized on, the reward for a job that promised long hours and hard work and not a great deal in the way of pay.
But that would never happen if she slipped up at this last moment, gave Williams a hint they were on to him. Kay sank lower into her seat. There was no way he could see her from where he was, but all the same Kay found herself turning the engine on and removing the safety brake. Williams continued his slow, silent gaze, staring out over his domain. After a long moment he leaped down off his stoop and cantered down the block, ready to begin the night’s ugly business.
She gave it a little while, then shifted into drive and nosed slowly back out onto the street. “You to yours,” Kay found herself thinking grimly, “and me to mine.”
2
THEY DID not have public tours of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office in Woodlawn, which was just as well, not only for basic notions of operational security but also because it was quite tremendously ugly, and all things considered it would likely kill off some of the Bureau’s mystique if the citizens whom Kay had sworn to protect ever got a look at it. Functional, you might have called it. Utilitarian, if you were being very kind. Kay had been ready for the long hours, the work that alternated between deathly dull and eye-achingly sad, the strange looks she got when she told people what she did for a living. Ready for all of it. But at the very least she had imagined the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world would be capable of providing her with a decent computer.
Kay dropped her coat over the chair and herself down into it.
“Our boy in attendance?” Torres asked her from across the desk.
“He’s still there,” Kay confirmed.
Torres had been her partner for eighteen months now, and it had taken much of that period for them to get to liking each other. If he had seen, at first glance, a callow, overeducated greenhorn, she had taken one look at his never-polished shoes and his ill-fitting suit and written him off as past his expiration date. But first impressions aren’t everything, and it spoke praise for both of them that they’d been able to get past theirs. Torres had been chasing criminals for nearly as long as Kay had been alive, and he was clever enough to have learned a few things along the way, which not everyone else could claim. He was utterly unflappable: the building next to him could explode while he was shaving and he’d come out of the bathroom without a nick. He knew everything there was to know about Baltimore—which Kay had taken several months to learn was pronounced Bawl-moor, swallowing the t and mangling the middle portion. He knew where to get the best crab cakes, and which bars you could still smoke at, and who Little Melvin’s top lieutenant had been back when he had sold ninety percent of the heroin in the city.
Also, Torres was about as big as a Mack truck, and when you were a five-foot-seven woman with less than thirty years to your credit, it was an asset being able to walk up to a suspect with him standing behind you, a mountain of Pig Town gristle that hadn’t taken shit from anyone in so long, he had trouble remembering the smell. “Not for very much longer,” Torres said happily. “Cold enough for you out there, Ivy?”
In a bit of foolishness that she had spent a year and a half kicking herself over, Kay had come in the first day with a Princeton coffee mug and immediately caught a raft of mockery for it. In fact, it had been Kay’s only coffee mug, and she had actually been using it to drink coffee, and she hadn’t even liked Princeton particularly—certainly did not take any excessive pride in having matriculated from there; but of course none of these truths had been enough to stop the office from heaving “Ivy” on as her tag. This long into it she didn’t even mind. Everyone got made fun of for something. Maybe the women got it a little worse, and certainly the newer Agents did; but to Kay’s thinking, anyone who let that sort of thing bother her was no better than a child. At least Torres meant it
endearingly, which was more than could be said for some of her other colleagues.
“I’m an FBI Agent,” Kay said, leaning back and stretching out her legs. You wouldn’t think sitting in a car and staring at a stoop would be so damn exhausting, but then again you’d be wrong. “I’m trained not to feel cold.”
“I must have missed that day in Quantico,” Torres said, standing and gesturing for Kay to do the same. “We’re getting the rundown in the conference room in about two minutes.”
Kay sighed, stood, followed Torres into the conference room. Most of the rest of the team was already inside: fifteen or so Agents, all more experienced than Kay, some even more competent. The Williams bust would be one of the year’s largest, a joint effort between the FBI, the DEA and local police, and in honor of which they were graced with the presence not only of the Assistant Special Agent in Charge but of the Special Agent in Charge as well, neither of whom generally had much involvement in the day-to-day running of the case. This was primarily handled by Supervisory Special Agent James Dickson, who, on any given morning, would be handing out assignments and coordinating tasks.
Dickson wasted little time in getting the meeting started, projecting a PowerPoint presentation onto the back wall. “This is James Rashid Williams,” he said, nodding towards the picture that had long become ingrained in Kay’s memory. “Born Baltimore City. Had a couple of busts as a juvenile, but nothing since. Which means?”
“That he’s an altar boy?” Torres joked.
“That he’s smart,” Kay muttered.
“Indeed he is,” Dickson continued, shooting Torres a nasty look. SSA Dickson did not find Torres amusing. It was Kay’s sense that Dickson, generally speaking, found very little amusing. He would have been a very bad audience member at a comedy club, but he was thoroughly competent to oversee a criminal investigation. “Two years ago he came up on our radar as an East Baltimore up-and-comer. Since then he’s well and truly arrived. So far as we can tell, he’s the man at the top of the pyramid for all the corners running from Patterson Park to Broadway. A man doesn’t get that much real estate without dropping a few corpses,” Dickson said, then clicked ahead to display a number of these: corpses on front stoops, corpses in bullet-ridden cars, corpses on the floors of crack houses, and finally the corpses of two adolescents lying prone on good old-fashioned Baltimore asphalt.