by Mark Henshaw
Alden Maines trudged across the rooftop toward her, frustration obvious in his features. He thought about stopping, looked backward over his shoulder, saw the black-suited Russian officer guarding the stairwell, dark glasses on his face despite the overcast sky, and decided to keep up his walk.
Kyra’s heart rate picked up again, for a different reason now. The anxiety was gone, and she felt anger flood into her chest to replace it.
Maines slowed for a second when he saw the woman. He frowned, then continued on. “Who’re you?”
“I think you know,” Kyra told him.
The man’s head turned in surprise at the sound of her voice and his eyes flitted in several directions as his memory tried to match the sound with a person. The answer finally came through and Maines’s shoulders slumped.
“Long way from Caracas. I guess Barron sent you? How is the old man?”
“Ready for a family reunion at your earliest convenience.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” Maines said. “What do you want, Kyra?”
“You’d have to be very, very stupid not to know the answer to that question.”
“You really had the stones to march into the Russian Embassy so you could ask me to come back with you?” he asked
“I thought I would make things simple for you,” Kyra advised. “Come with me and I’ll tell the Bureau you cooperated. You might get a shot at parole after a couple of decades in prison.”
“Your turn to not be stupid.”
She’d thought she was ready for his hostility, but the delta between the man she remembered from three years before and the dark figure here was wide enough to unnerve her, if just a little. Kyra hid the emotion behind a casual shrug. “I just wanted to confirm that you were here. How you end up back in the States in chains and a jumpsuit isn’t really my problem.”
“The Russians aren’t going to hand me over,” Maines said. Kyra had expected a smirk or a smile, but the man’s expression was cold. “I’ll be good PR for them if nothing else once we get to Moscow.”
“And you come cheap, don’t you? I just had a discussion with one of their intel officers,” Kyra told him. “They refused to pay you, didn’t they? You came here looking for a fat paycheck, but the Russians said they’d burned you and now they want you to give them the family jewels just to stay out of jail. In fact, I think that the reason they decided to let me see you was to prove that they really had burned you, to crank up the pressure in case you were thinking they’d lied.”
Maines laughed, rueful. “You really don’t know why I did this, do you?”
“I really don’t care why. There’s a difference,” she told the man. “You can explain your reasons to Barron and the Bureau. I’m sure they’ll be amused.”
Maines grunted. “You should care.” He wished he had a cigarette or something to hold in his shaking hands. “I did this because of you, in a way.” He laughed, pure contempt and derision. “After we all got reassigned from Caracas and Barron sent me over to Russia House, I thought it was a good place to land. I actually kind of liked it, until last year. One of our people got pulled out for a few days to join a task force. It turns out that two analysts got trapped in Venezuela when the revolution started. Did you know about that?”
Kyra dearly wished, for a single instant, that she could tell him exactly what she knew about it. “I heard something about it” was the answer she gave him.
“Can’t wait for that one to get declassified in twenty-five years. Anyway, Kathy Cooke tasked a group with trying to help those analysts figure out how to infiltrate a military base. It was the most insane thing I’d ever heard. Instead of pulling them out and sending in a real team, the CIA director let an analyst execute the op. And then a day later, the president decided to just blow the base up and dropped a Massive Ordnance Penetrator on the place and almost blew those analysts up along with it. How those two got out alive, I’ll never know, but it got me thinking. We’re just one bad leader away from getting killed, and the Agency is full of ’em. One Seventh Floor moron or one selfish politician makes one bad decision, and we’re all cannon fodder. You know that. That idiot of a station chief almost got you killed. You wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t pulled you out of that safe house in Caracas. So when Barron decided not to make me the chief of Russia House, I just decided that I’m going to get mine before somebody like him gets me or somebody on my team shot.”
“So you’re going to sell out our assets—”
“I haven’t told them anything,” Maines said. “Don’t really plan to either.”
“You gave up Strelnikov.”
“Wasn’t counting him. I didn’t know they’d execute him. Just thought he’d wind up in a gulag.”
Nice confession, Kyra thought. She burned the words into her memory so she’d be able to repeat them for a judge. “So you just don’t count the ones who the Russians execute? And you tried so hard to convince me you weren’t a moron. They drowned him, by the way, in case they didn’t share that tidbit. Took him out to the Müggelsee Lake, held him under, and didn’t bother to pull him out when they were done.”
Maines shrugged, though not dismissive. Fatalistic? Or just a psychopath? Kyra wondered. Thinks it wasn’t his fault? Or really doesn’t care?
He interrupted her thoughts. “If I was giving up assets, they would’ve shut the Agency down in Moscow by now.”
“Again, not my problem,” Kyra replied. “I’m going to leave now. I’m going to walk back to our embassy over there, and I’m going to confirm for FBI that you’re here. After that, the Germans will be obligated to arrest and extradite you if you set foot outside. Sooner or later, the Russians will give you up.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You have a lot of faith in your new friends,” Kyra told him.
“No, I have a lot of faith that you’re going to help get me home.”
“I’d be happy to,” Kyra advised. She didn’t try to keep the contempt out of her voice. “You shut your mouth until tomorrow. I’ll call Barron and have him ask the president to promise to commute your sentence to, say, twenty years in prison. You come home, do your time, and you don’t die in prison.” She had no authority to make a deal, but decided it was worth trying.
Maines smirked. “Kyra, you be a good girl and go tell Barron my terms for a deal. He convinces the president to give me a pardon and fifty million in the bank, and I won’t give the Russians another name or tell them about a single operation. I don’t get that and I’ll tell them everything I know.”
“How about I throw you off this roof instead?” Kyra proposed.
“I don’t think my friends would let you.”
“I guess you would need your friends,” Kyra spit back. “You’re a coward.”
Enraged, Maines lunged forward, hands out, reaching for Kyra’s neck. He’d saved this ungrateful woman’s life and she—
Kyra pivoted on her feet and hips, turning sideways, and she swept her right arm across her body in an arc, guiding his arms to the side. She brought her arm over his, holding them down for the second she needed to bring up her left to hold his away. Kyra’s right came back up, fingers turned in, and she clawed his face hard enough to draw blood. The man screeched, his hands coming up to protect his face from another assault. Kyra pivoted again, facing Maines head-on, and she grabbed his shirt, and pulled hard. Her forehead smashed into his nose. His head snapped back, stunned, the blood starting to flow from his nose. She pulled again, Maines stumbled forward, off balance, and she drove her knee into his groin hard enough to lift him onto his toes. The traitor fell back, then dropped onto his knees, the blood rushing out of his face.
The Russian guard by the door moved to run toward them, but saw Kyra make no further move toward her victim and stopped.
Maines cursed . . . and then the real pain hit him, erupting out of his pelvis like a fire burning through his nerves and stealing his breath. He curled up on the ground in a twitching heap, groaning and
gasping for air.
Kyra stepped back, far enough that he couldn’t grasp or kick her. “I’d tell the Bureau to add assault to your indictment, but it’s already a long list.” She squatted down so he could see her face. “I’ll tell Barron about your offer, but you’re not going to get your deal. And even if you do get to Moscow, CIA defectors have a bad habit of falling down long staircases after they’re not useful to their Russian friends anymore. So I wouldn’t plan on a peaceful retirement, back home or in Moscow.”
“Uh-uh,” Maines grunted. “Full . . . full pardon . . . and fifty . . . million.” He sucked in some air, then pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Kyra didn’t move, ready to defend herself again. “I get that,” he wheezed, “I keep my mouth shut. I don’t . . . and I tell the Russians everything . . . take my chances.”
“If you want the president or anyone else to take your offer seriously, you need to give something up first.”
“What’s that?”
“The name of your handler,” Kyra told him.
“I don’t think . . . he’d like that,” Maines said, his chest rising and falling rapidly. The pain between his legs was fading enough to manage. He pushed himself back onto one knee. “If Barron gets me the deal, you stand out front of the embassy tomorrow at noon . . . wear a red jacket. If you’re there, I come out. If you’re not, I take care of myself.” He was catching his breath now, but his legs were still too shaky for him to stand.
“Either way, I’ll be seeing you pretty soon.” Kyra turned around and walked toward the door.
“I should’ve left you in that safe house,” Maines said, his voice still weak from the abuse she’d dealt to his crotch. “I see you again and I’ll kill you.”
Kyra made an obscene gesture without looking back.
U.S. Embassy
Kyra turned to the last page of the photo album and stared at the surveillance photos, giving each a few seconds of her attention. It was wasted time. None of the men in the color pictures was a match for the one in her memory. She closed the book and set it on the stack of four others she’d already reviewed. “He’s not here,” she said. Who are you, old man? She leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and dissected her own thoughts.
“That’s all of the mug books that we’ve got on the Russians stationed here,” Barron replied.
“Then it must be someone who’s not stationed here,” Jon advised. “The books don’t include pictures of short-term visitors.”
There’s your faulty assumption, Kyra realized. Maines’s handler had convinced him to come to Berlin, but that didn’t mean his handler was stationed in Berlin itself. “The Russians might have sold it to Maines as an out-of-country meeting,” she said. “Assume the Russians considered him a high-value asset,” Kyra started. “His case file would be compartmented. Not everyone would know about him. The man I talked to on the roof was older, a graybeard. He had to be a senior officer. Maybe somebody who came from Moscow just to meet with Maines?” The Russian Embassy to Berlin was enormous, large enough to shelter a thousand intelligence officers. So the man from the roof either was new enough to Berlin that the Germans and CIA officers here had no photograph of him yet or he had never been recognized as an intelligence officer at all, she decided. A short-term visitor senior enough to be read into Maines’s compartment . . . at least senior enough to be running him. But which intel service? The Russians had eleven, not so many as her own country, but enough to complicate the problem.
“Maybe,” Barron agreed. “But if he’s an intel officer, he would have to be from one of the Russian services that runs foreign assets abroad,” he said, following her silent line of thinking. “That eliminates most of them.”
“The two largest that qualify would be the SVR and the GRU,” Kyra added. The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki was Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and the one that seemed the most likely. But there was still the GRU, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. Far larger than the SVR and, she’d heard, more ruthless, if that was possible. She suspected it was. The GRU controlled the Spetsnaz, for the most part. Kyra dearly hoped that she would never have to tangle with one of the Kremlin’s Special Forces soldiers. There were few men in the world trained so well in the dark arts of covert military operations. She had been in a few fights during her short career and come out of them well enough. The Agency had trained her in self-defense and she’d studied Krav Maga and some other disciplines on her own time and dime, but she had no illusions how long she would fare in a fight with one of Russia’s most elite soldiers.
“Strelnikov was GRU,” Barron said. “He was Spetsnaz, once upon a time, and the GRU controlled a lot of the Spetsnaz units back in the old days.”
Kyra picked up Maines’s file and looked through the papers twice, but nothing caught her attention. She looked at the dead-drop letter again.
The answer finally broke through her subconscious mind. “Do we know who left Maines’s dead drop in the woods at Banshee Reeks? It’s not in the file.”
“Yes, a GRU officer, Russian military intelligence,” Barron replied. “The Bureau’s going to pick him up the next time he leaves their embassy grounds. He’s probably got diplomatic immunity, so State’s going to declare him persona non grata and send him home. I don’t remember his name . . . those Russian names all sound alike to me. But I can look it up.”
“Actually, it wasn’t his name I needed, just the intel service.”
Jon nodded. “Bring up the files on the GRU leadership,” he suggested. “There are probably hundreds on the list, but might as well start at the top and work down.”
Kyra complied, and after a few minutes of searching, she opened the first file . . .
. . . and fell back in her chair, eyes wide. “That’s him.” Kyra paused and stared at the photograph again, to be certain there was no mistake or trick of the light.
“Unbelievable,” Barron muttered. “Arkady Lavrov. Chairman of the GRU.”
Office of the Deputy Director of the National Intelligence
“What’s the word?” Cooke asked.
“Maines’s here,” Kyra said. The audio quality of STU secure phones had improved in recent years, but the static and noise mixing with Kyra’s voice showed that the Agency’s speakerphones had not. “I met with him.”
“What did you find out?”
“The Russians definitely are trying to screw him over,” Kyra replied. “I think that’s why they let me see him, to ratchet up the pressure on him. But he admitted burning Strelnikov, but claimed that he hasn’t given up anything since, and he’s offering us a deal. He says that he’ll walk out of the embassy and come home if he gets a full pardon from POTUS and fifty million in the bank. We don’t deliver and he’ll burn every operation we have in Moscow to the ground.”
“Amazing,” Cooke muttered. “He thinks he can burn an asset, then blackmail us and walk away?”
“Might be worth it.” Cooke recognized Barron’s voice. “If they bleed him for what he knows and we get shut down in Moscow, it’ll take us a decade and a lot more than fifty million to get things started back up.”
“True, but it’s not our call,” Cooke said. “And it’s extortion. We pay this and it won’t be the last time. Every narcissistic slacker with a security clearance will think he can run a protection racket on us. Make us pay up to keep our assets safe. We can’t do business like that. So I’ll be stunned if the president approves it, but we have to give him the option.”
“Kathy, if I may?” It was Jonathan’s voice now.
“What is it, Jon?”
“I’ve been studying General Strelnikov’s file. I think there’s a bigger problem than just Maines burning our Moscow operations to the ground.”
“As if that wasn’t enough. What’s your theory?” Cooke asked.
Jon’s explanation took ten minutes. Cooke said nothing in response for almost another minute. “Jon, stay by the phone. I want you to explai
n that to the president. Then everyone hold tight until I get back from the White House.”
“Yes, sir,” Barron said. He pressed a button to disconnect the call from his end.
U.S. Embassy
Berlin, Germany
Kyra grinned at her partner. “You going to brief POTUS,” she said.
“At least I don’t have to put on a tie,” Jon replied, deadpan.
She nudged him gently. “You’ll kill it. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to go shopping.”
“For what?” Barron asked, incredulous.
“A jacket,” she said. “Something in red today, I think.”
It took Barron a few seconds to absorb the implications. “You won’t need it. The president isn’t going to go for the deal,” he said, as though explaining it to a child.
“Maines doesn’t know that,” she said.
The Embassy of the Russian Federation
Berlin, Germany
Kyra had expected that the president wouldn’t approve a pardon for Maines, and he had neither surprised nor disappointed her. Jon wasn’t happy about President Rostow’s obstinance, but her partner was a logical man and the refusal wouldn’t bother him for long. Jon was simply doing what he did, deconstructing a problem into the simplest parts to find the most efficient solution. Jon was very nearly a misanthrope and people were just variables to him at such times. If the best solution to a problem allowed one person to profit or suffer unfairly, that was just the price to be paid. He simply wanted the puzzles solved, and when his variables failed to make the decisions that would resolve matters, Jon would curse their stupidity and then look for an alternate pathway. It was a rare thing for him to care about such things on a personal level.
But Jon had never been a case officer, had never felt protective of an asset. Kyra had been responsible for a man’s life. She had run through the streets of a hostile city, trying to fulfill the Agency’s debt of honor and save a person from execution. The case officer unchanged by that didn’t deserve the job. A man who was willing to see them executed for his own gain deserved the electric chair, Kyra thought, so just bruising Maines’s ego and his manhood hadn’t even come close to sating her sense of justice. Hunting traitors was never a business of cold calculation. There was always a layer of passion and hatred underneath it all.